MakeUseOf.com: “Cool Websites and Tools [December 23rd]” plus 7 more |  |
- Cool Websites and Tools [December 23rd]
- 10 Psychology Websites To Help Educate Yourself
- Game Classroom – Put the Fun Back In Learning With Educational Games
- Easily Encrypt Your USB Drive With Rohos Mini Drive 1.7
- How To Use The Amazon Kindle Reader For The iPhone & iPod Touch
- Pocket Lint – A Money Management App For Paupers [Mac]
- 2 Great Browser Addons for Utilizing Twitter Comments
- Technology Explained: What Is A Dynamic IP Address & How Do I Get One?
| Cool Websites and Tools [December 23rd] Posted: 23 Dec 2009 07:31 PM PST
(1) Formspring – Formspring is a social networking app that allows you to create customized, embeddable boxes where your friends can ask questions anonymously. Read more: Formspring: Ask Questions To Friends Anonymously
(2) SporkNYC – With all the restaraunts in New York City it can be hard to keep up. If you suspect one of your friend's favorite Chinese places has a little trouble staying within the city's health codes, SporkNYC can tell you the past two years of health code violations of any New York City eatery. Read more: SporkNYC – Discover Recent Health Violations Of Any NYC Restaurant (3) FFiles – FFiles is an online repository for free flash files. Backed by a large online community of flash designers, you can view and download flash files as well as upload your own creations and share them with other users for free. Read more: FFiles: Browse Through A Large Collection Of Flash Files (4) TalkingPhoto – If you want to express a sentiment, a photo is often not enough. Adding a voice to that photo creates a much more personal and human affect for the recipient. TalkingPhoto is a fun little tool that lets you create talking characters. Read more: TalkingPhoto: Convert Photos Into Talking Characters (5) TwitVid – Twitter is a way of life for many. A lot of people want to share their videos on Twitter but hesitate to go through the lengthy process of uploading it on a video site like YouTube and then posting the link on their Twitter account. TwitVid is a great tool that can help in such situations. TwitVid lets you share videos on Twitter by either uploading them from your computer or recording a video from your webcam directly. Read more: TwitVid: Easily & Quickly Record & Share Videos On Twitter
These are just half of the websites that we discovered in the last couple of days. If you want us to send you daily round-ups of all cool websites we come across, leave your email here. Or follow us via RSS feed. Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!
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| 10 Psychology Websites To Help Educate Yourself Posted: 23 Dec 2009 05:31 PM PST
Whatever the nature of your interest, it doesn't help to start on the wrong foot. It is often necessary to separate the wheat from the chaff on the web, so here is a guide to get you started with 10 websites to educate yourself about psychology. You might also want to check out 8 Websites With Cool Free Personality Traits Tests. #1: PsychCentral
Key sections on the psychology website are:
#2: American Psychological AssociationWith over 150,000 members, the APA is the world's largest association of psychologists. APA has recently launched a newly redesigned psychology website that is attractive and easy to navigate.
Whether you are interested in psychology as a layperson, student, researcher, or practitioner, this is a must-bookmark website. #3: National Institute of Mental HealthNIMH is a Federal agency that conducts and supports research on mental illnesses.
The NIMH website features:
#4: WikipediaWikipedia, the largest, free, multi-lingual encyclopedia on the web has great informative articles on a variety of subjects in psychology. From the history of psychology and methods of psychological research to its numerous sub-fields of study, Wikipedia is a continuously updated treasure trove of knowledge. Each page you navigate to has a wealth of resources from people to publications, all organized in a structured fashion unique to Wikipedia.
Also check out Psychology at Wikiversity, which has its own School of Psychology. #5: Articles, Research, & Resources in PsychologyThis is a psychology website managed by Ken Pope, Ph.D., offering free full-text articles from a variety of medical journals and a variety of other resources related to psychology. While there are many useful sections for laypersons, the information is invaluable for psychology professionals. The site covers a broad range of subjects including licensing laws, regulation, ethics, medication, military related issues, suicide and sexual issues, etc. A unique feature that deserves mention is that the website is designed for people with disabilities in accordance with W3C Accessibility Guidelines. While the sites above offer comprehensive resources for anyone even remotely interested in psychology, the following websites are useful especially for non-professionals interested in learning about psychology. #6: WebMD Mental HealthWebMD's Mental Health section has exhaustive information on disorders and treatment. It features Guide sections for specific disorders, with informative slideshows, latest news, and articles. All this is backed by the popular community section featuring blogs and message boards. #7: About.com PsychologyThis website is part of the About.com network, and offers easy-to-read articles on psychology. Many different topics are covered from theories and sub-fields to career and education. #8: Psychology TodayPsychology Today is the website of the bi-monthly magazine. The site focuses on mental well-being and is geared towards therapy and treatment for mental illnesses. The content is easy-to-read and focused on non-professional laypersons. #9: PsyBlogMaintained by a researcher Jeremy Dean, this blog is based on scientific psychology and is one of the best individual psychology blogs. Articles focus on understanding how our minds work and why we think and act the way we do. #10: BBC Science & Nature: The MindThe Mind section in BBC's Science & Nature psychology website is fun and informative to explore.
It has facts, surveys, and interactive features that teach you about different things like the brain, emotions & instincts, intelligence & memory, mental disorders, etc. The world of psychology is very vast indeed. Will these websites help to educate yourself about psychology? Are there any of your favorite sites we missed? Share your thoughts with us in the comments! Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too. Related posts
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| Game Classroom – Put the Fun Back In Learning With Educational Games Posted: 23 Dec 2009 03:31 PM PST
Thankfully, they have something which most of us didn't have when we were growing up – the World Wide Web. Kids develop an early IQ for technology these days and computers aren't any different. Take computer games for example; a kid's inner chip seems to know its way around the levels that games throw up. Putting online games and education together is an idea that's coming up. Call it edutainment or plain fun, it takes the labor out and puts in the play. Thankfully, there's a growing legion of such web services with educational games which are helping to turn the concept of education on its head. One among this legion is Games Classroom.
According to the website, all content has been designed by professional and experienced educators. Care has been taken to understand the needs of both parents and their wards while designing the educational games.
Learning & Kids Play – A Bit Of BothHere's how I took my little niece through the first courses. The un-cramped layout made it easy to get a hang of all that's there on Game Classroom. The site is centered on math's games and language arts games. There are lots of ways to approach the learning you want to impart, but the easiest way is to select the grade level at the top first. The levels of the games are obviously designed keeping the grades in mind.
All educational games are neatly arranged in two sections (Math and Language Arts) and then on by skills (lessons) which have the games listed under them. Click on any of the icons to advance to the page where you can play the game.
The page gives a short description and a click on Play Game starts off the Flash games on the host website. If you like the game, you can also check out the related games given at the bottom. Each game has been collected and placed on the site to teach one specific skill. Cartoon animals are used to teach uppercase and lowercase letters to kindergarteners, in the next grade – kids can use chicken stacks to learn words by sound. The games are gradually progressed upwards and one can easily follow it to master the basics. Serious Parenting With Homework Help
You can leave the kid alone to work out the games on their own. But to reinforce the concepts, try out the Homework Help section. This section gives a lot of pointers to parents on how to carry on the teaching with interesting assignments and learning tips. A link to an external resource is also added. The site's appeal lies in its simplicity. The games don't overwhelm the parent or the kid. Also, the content seems to pretty much cover the basics that need the buttress. Yes, there are a lot of educational games out there. Take a look at some we have covered before – Top Educational Websites For Children That Are Fun Game Classroom has a place there for sure. Let us know if you think that it has a place in your curriculum too. Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!
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| Easily Encrypt Your USB Drive With Rohos Mini Drive 1.7 Posted: 23 Dec 2009 01:31 PM PST
Last year, I covered another encryption possibility – Truecrypt. But to me, that’s a bit messy. If the host computer doesn’t give you administrator rights then you would be totally screwed. You would have a USB encryption system that even keeps you out! Not quite what I am looking for. So off I went searching for an alternative and I think I may have found one in the form of Rohos Mini Drive 1.7. It’s both simple and effective – the two watchwords I live by when searching for software. To initially install it onto your USB drive, you need to install the Rohos program onto your computer – but once the encrypted drive has been made, you can uninstall Rohos on the computer if you want. There’s absolutely no need to keep it on your computer once the initial USB installation has been done. Once you have installed it on your computer, it’s time to quickly set up your drive. Just open the program and this is what you will see :
When the encryption has been set up, you will then see a new file sitting on your USB stick. This is the program needed to launch the secret partition which now exists.
To open the secret encrypted partition, just double-click on the exe file and you will be prompted for your password which you specified when you set up the partition.
After entering your password, a window will open in your Windows taskbar which shows you that the partition has been opened. You will also see the drive letter which your partition is attached to as well as the amount of free space on your stick.
If you now go to your Windows Explorer, you will see that a new drive has been opened up. This is the secret part of your USB stick which now exists and you can now put all secret/personal/confidential files into this partition. When you are finished, just go back to the above window and click on “disconnect“. This then closes the partition and removes it from the Windows Explorer drive. I wouldn’t use Rohos Mini Drive 1.7 to hide state secrets but it is enough to keep casual snoopers at bay from rummaging through your files. Keep things in here such as your password list and other personal information and then, if you happen to lose your USB stick, you won’t have to worry too much about your information being compromised. What other encryption methods do you rely on to safeguard the information on your USB stick? Are you a Truecrypt fan or do you have another favourite alternative? Let us know all about it in the comments. Related posts
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| How To Use The Amazon Kindle Reader For The iPhone & iPod Touch Posted: 23 Dec 2009 11:31 AM PST
The biggest advantage in my view in using the Kindle reader is that you can download sample chapters of a books from the site for free. Being able to preview the first few chapters of a downloaded e-book will helps with making decisions about possible purchases. It’s like sampling songs on iTunes or other music sites. Kindle App vs. KindleDownloading sample copies of course requires that you set up a free account on Amazon. After downloading the Kindle Reader for iPhone from the iTunes Store you will find that the free e-reader does pretty much everything the the $259.00 Kindle version does. In fact, there are a few advantages of using the free Kindle app over the hardware Kindle. First off, the Kindle app is more portable, because it is on your iPhone or Touch (I’m pretty sure there will soon be a Kindle for the Android.) The Kindle app is illuminated by the well lit screen of the iPhone, which makes it perfect for reading in low light settings. Lastly, I would say that the Kindle app is a little easier and faster to navigate. Its only shortcoming is that the screen size of the iPhone may be too small for reading at long stretches of time.
Downloading Free SamplesTo get access to e-books on Amazon.com, you can visit the site’s Kindle Store, which of course is categorized by book genre and other other media, such as newspapers, magazines, and blogs. With your account set up , you click the “Send sample now” button to have your selected e-book sent to your registered mobile device. Books typically download in less than a minute.
Downloaded E-booksDownloaded e-books to the Kindle app can be listed and viewed in three ways: by author, by title or by recently read or opened. If you’re an avid reader, the list can get pretty long, but you can always put e-books on your Amazon wishlist, for later review. You can click the Edit button to delete any books from your list. However, when you “delete” purchased e-books from from the reader, they get archived on a second page of the reader. All your books are maintained and can be re-downloaded from your Amazon account. So basically all your purchased books remain “in the cloud,” on Amazon’s server, which means you can re-download them anytime.
Reading E-books On The Kindle AppClicking on an e-book in the list opens it up. You tap on the right side of the iPhone screen to move to the next page, and tap the left side to move to the previous page. “Page turning” on the iPhone Kindle is much smoother than the hardware Kindle. You can set the font type and size of the text by clicking the bottom of the screen. The font settings are a part of a menu of three other items. The plus icon is used for bookmarking a page. When it’s clicked, the page will be dog-eared on the upper-right of the page. The book icon in the menu presents links to the book’s cover, table of content, the first page, and a tab for locating a particular page of a book. You will also find in this area a list of the bookmarks, highlights and notes that you made while reading. The fourth item of the menu is a button that uses Whispersync technology for syncing data (last page read and annotations) to the hardware Kindle 2, if you use one. This feature will also be available for desktop versions of the Kindle e-reader.
If you read books for information rather than just for pleasure, the Kindle app provides a fairly easy to use highlighting and note-taking tools. In fact, because of the touch screen technology of the iPhone and touch, I find these annotations of the application more efficient to use than with the hardware Kindle. Pressing down and holding your finger on a word in a page will give you two options, either to highlight a passage or make a note. You drag the blue pointers over the content that you want to highlight. If you drag the pointers too far, simply click outside of the blue area and start over. When you click the resulting highlight button, it will highlight your passage in yellow. Adding a note is done the same way as highlighting, except that when you click the note button, you will be presented with a text window for typing in your notes. Both your notes and your highlights can reviewed by clicking and bringing up the small menu described above.
Finally, with the last update of the Kindle app, you can now lock pages of your book into portrait or landscape position, which helps makes for reading e-books from different angles. While there are some drawbacks to purchasing e-books, such as not being able to share your books with others, building an e-book library is more environmentally efficient than traditional paper books. The Kindle app can hold several hundred books, which makes archiving and accessing them a hundred times easier than managing bookshelves of hardback and paperbacks. Are you a Kindle reader for iPhone user? What’s been your experience? Do you think e-books will eventually replace paper books? Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!
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| Pocket Lint – A Money Management App For Paupers [Mac] Posted: 23 Dec 2009 09:31 AM PST
From the makers of MotivationLOL comes an application which can help (or mock) you by tracking your cash flow and improve your (non-existent) money management. Yes, as you would have guessed — the app was developed as a joke. Even Bravobug (the developer) admitted it. But wait, don’t look away just yet. Ignore the Joe Pesci remarks or disable the mockery altogether; Pocket Lint can actually be a pretty useful application especially for poor folks. When I say poor, I don’t mean it in a bad way. In all honesty, who really uses those fancy calculation tools in other money management apps? Come on, who can actually be committed enough to track each and every expenditure? Pocket Lint breaks it all down to the fundamental elements — monthly expenditure and income. And it works.
Then you’ll be staring at the main interface. Ignore the mockery like the Joe Pesci Proximity Alert, don’t press on “Win The Lottery” no matter how strong the urge, and forget about the Graph button. Yes, the output Graph is a joke too. Hey, I told you not to press it!
The rest of the stuff is legit. To add a monthly expenditure, click on the Expense button and fill in the details, click OK then watch the Monthly Total refresh to indicate how much money you will eventually spend. Go on listing every one of your darn monthly expenditures and try not to get too frustrated at the amount of cash that’s slipping through your fingers.
Make yourself feel better by adding any sources of income you have. Go ahead and click on the Income button. The amount earned can either be calculated as a monthly or hourly wage. There’s even a field for tax deduction (yeah, like I need a reminder for that).
OK, so I’ll admit — being a student and a poor person, things do look pretty bleak after listing it all down. I’ll add a fake source of income just for more “green-coloured” entries.
Here’s hoping that your Monthly Total is now in the clear. If not, well, that’s why this app is a joke. Want to win the lottery?
Or perhaps you are willing to sell your kidney? There’s a quick entry for that, believe it or not. Again, Pocket Lint wasn’t developed for the hardcore finance geeks who are obsessed with how much cash there is in their wallet (including coins) or in the bank at this very moment (plus interest). No, Pocket Lint was intended to help the light-hearted students in pauperdom manage our monthly spendings quickly and easily.
Who cares if we dip into our savings this month? So what if we only can afford to buy groceries when they’re on sale? We’re students and we’re living the student life. This is probably the one time you’re missing out if you’re a rich kid. Pocket Lint works great as a pick-me-up and a basic money management tool. It’s fully compatible with Snow Leopard. But if you’re too poor to upgrade, it works fine on OS X 10.4+. Phew. Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too. Related posts
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| 2 Great Browser Addons for Utilizing Twitter Comments Posted: 23 Dec 2009 08:31 AM PST
But what if you want to access all of those tweets days later? The more Twitter followers you have the more quickly these tweets get lost in the shuffle, and unless you're looking for them specifically they are unlikely to ever find you. Luckily there are web apps for just that. In this article, we will be discussing two of the best options for Twitter commenting that are available right now in the form of Twitter addons for your browser, as well as how they allow you to add to the conversation and create your own Twitter comments. KutanoKutano is one of the better Twitter addons for "weaving" Twitter discussions into your browsing. We mentioned Kutano briefly in our article 10 Firefox Add-ons To Find Friends On Social Networks. It is available as a browser extension for Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Google Chrome (Beta builds) and works on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
By switching to the 'website' tab, you can see what other pages are being tweeted about on the website you are viewing. This is a good way to find other articles you might be interested in from the same website.
While viewing the tweets of a particular page, the Kutano Twitter addon allows you to view the person's Twitter profile, follow them, reply to their tweet, and re-tweet their tweet, all from within the application. Need more than 140 characters to comment on a webpage? No problem. Kutano has a 'discussions' tab where you can write your comments and engage multiple people simultaneously in a discussion about the webpage. If you sign up for a Kutano account you can login with your Twitter credentials and see your timeline, along with your @mentions, direct messages, and followers. If you don't want to keep the sidebar visible you can minimize it and view tweet and discussion counts down in your browser's status bar.
AddATweetAddATweet is another good Twitter addon for viewing/creating Twitter comments on a page. Although it is strictly featured as an extension for Firefox at the moment, its simplicity and integration with Twitter is what sets it apart from other commenting and web annotation apps.
Like Kutano, AddATweet is a sidebar that allows you to see all of the tweets that were made about a specific webpage. There is a box at the top that allows you to add comments and tweet them out to your followers. Clicking the 'tweet this' box adds your comments to the webpage as well as your public timeline on Twitter. You can reply to tweets, re-tweet them, @ mention the person, and even mark them as spam. When you re-tweet or reply from within AddATweet, your comments are posted right under those that you were responding to, making it a threaded conversation. You can sort comments by 'everyone', those who you are 'following', and those based on 'authority'. Authority means that only comments made by people who have the most followers will be seen first. This sorting ability is useful if a page has a lot of comments and you want to see those made by popular Twitterers or if you simply want to see what your followers have written. Like Leaving Comments Yet?Reading and leaving comments directly on the pages you find interesting is yet another great way to utilize the power of Twitter. Even those that don't understand Twitter all that well can find Twitter addons like Kutano and AddATweet useful because they allow you to find like-minded people and converse with them about popular topics on the web. If you're in the commenting mood, why not leave a comment on this page? Let's start a discussion! Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!
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| Technology Explained: What Is A Dynamic IP Address & How Do I Get One? Posted: 23 Dec 2009 07:31 AM PST
But it gets a little more complicated when we throw dynamic IP addresses into the mix. Most of the time when you sign up for Internet service you are give a single “external IP” address. This external IP address can be split up so multiple computers or devices can get online. You have probably see an IP address on this screen before:
When you take a external IP address and divide it up, you will use dynamic or Natted IP addresses. NAT stands for Network Address translation – translating one external address into multiple internal addresses. You can use a service called DHCP to assign computers dynamic IP addresses automatically when they start up. Below you can see a basic diagram showing how a network is set up and operates. You will see the cable modem gets a Internet Address and the router assigns internal addresses, yet all the equipment on this home network can connect to the Internet. If you open up a browser and go to WhatIsMyIP all the machines will tell you they have the same external IP address.
In most homes we have a router connected to our internet modems. Some Internet Service Providers will give you a modem with a built in router. If this is your case you can imagine that the modem and the router is one unit. We will still refer to it as a router or as a modem. Just know that we are talking about the same thing in your situation. Here is an example of what a modem looks like:
This router is what does your Network address translation and assigns your computer or computer’s dynamic IP addresses. Without the router in place you would not be able to use your Dynamic IP address on the Internet. That is because these groups of dynamic IP addresses like 192.168.0.1 are reserved for internal networks. You can see an example of what a router looks like here:
Chances are if you are reading this post you are not getting your dynamic IP address assigned to you. The first thing to do is make sure all your network equipment is turned on. This includes your Internet modem provided by your ISP, your router and if you are using a laptop and a built in Network Interface Adapter you will need to have your power cord connected as well. If everything is plugged in the next thing to do would be to check your status lights on your modem. Are they all green? Do they say you are connected? They should look like the example of the modem two pictures up. If they do, this part is good and you can continue on to the next piece of your network. That is probably going to be your router. Are the lights blinking? Is there a connected or internet Led? Does it say you are connected? If not or you cannot determine this, you should reboot it. Simply pull the power cord and wait 5 seconds and then re-plug it in. If this fixed the issue, your computer will tell you that it is obtaining an IP address and then it will tell you that it is connected. We can think about an internal IP address as a extension on a company phone network. If you just dialed that number from your home you would not get connected. But if you dial the main company number and then the extension you will get connected. Just as a dynamic IP address could only be referred to on that network. We have done quite a few router articles in the past including the following : How To Secure Your D-Link Wireless Router – Susan I would love to field questions so if you have any please feel free to leave them in the comments! Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too. Related posts
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The Internet is a great place to satisfy your curiosity about anything under the sun. There are tons of resources to learn about anything that may catch your fancy, whether it is for a casual look, a serious hobby, or a lifelong pursuit of knowledge in a specific field.
This site is one of the largest independent psychology websites launched in 1995, providing information, resources, & hosting over 150 support groups. It was named one of 50 Best Websites of 2008 by Time Magazine and has been recognized in many noteworthy publications.
When you have an eight year old niece, there are certain familial duties which fall upon one's shoulder. One of them goes by the onerous name of 'homework help'. Most of us will not be able to escape the dreaded H-word throughout our lives. The first part was spent in evading it for ourselves; the latter seems to have been taken over by our relatives.
I am steadily carrying more and more information on USB drives these days including the excellent 
If you’re an avid reader of books and an iPhone and iPod touch user, you owe it to yourself to download Amazon’s free Kindle reader for your iPhone.
I’m sure everyone will agree with me when I say that students are literally, amazingly and unbelievably close to living like paupers. Any students in the house? How many of you barely get by, working the late shift in the library or crunching odd hours as the uni’s technical assistant? I hear you. We bottom-feeders should stick together.
People spend a LOT of time on social media sites like Twitter, chatting with fellow friends and colleagues, reading the latest trending topics, and sharing links to popular blog posts and news articles. Likewise, these same individuals also spend a lot of time surfing the web for interesting content, often sharing their thoughts, ideas, and links on Twitter.
Before we get into what a dynamic IP address is, let me give you a little background on the topic. First off an IP address is an Internet Protocol address. For more information on what an IP address is you can check out this page on 
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