MakeUseOf.com: “Cool Websites and Tools [December 29th]” plus 7 more |  |
- Cool Websites and Tools [December 29th]
- How To Sync Your iTunes Library With Your Music Folders
- 5 Online Tools To Help You Keep Your New Year Resolutions
- WebReview – Browse Smarter With This Firefox Add-on
- 3 Tools To Write Your Own Sheet Music Online
- Androkkid – Make Your Windows Mobile Look Like Android
- 3 Great Online Resources To Learn How To Cook Well
- 30Boxes – A Free Online Calendar With Offline Integration
| Cool Websites and Tools [December 29th] Posted: 29 Dec 2009 07:31 PM PST
(1) Things You Saw In A Movie – Been wondering what car model Robert Downey Jr. rode in the film Iron Man? ThingsYouSawInAMovie is a website that lists various blockbuster movies and provides a list of products that were featured in these films and instructions on how you can find them. Read more: ThingsYouSawInAMovie: Find Products Used In Movies
(2) Backupify – We leave it up to the cloud to take care of our data without ever worrying about losing them. However, there will be times where you could lose all of it when your account gets hacked, deleted or when a web service goes down permanently. Backupify is a web service that helps prevent such problems by backing up your online accounts automatically. Read more: Backupify: Backup Your Online Accounts Easily (3) FuelCharts – is a handy app that lets you monitor your energy usage online and helps you find out just how much energy does a house use. It lets you track, chart, and set up reminders for all of your home energy needs. Having this information will allow you to understand where your energy budget is being spent. Read more: FuelCharts: Track & analyze how much energy your house uses (4) SubscriberWars – Internet celebrity stardom has never been more possible with the advent of new social media websites. Subscriber Wars is a neat web list that lets you follow and discover the most subscribed YouTube, Twitter and Facebook users. You can see a link to the accounts of these so-called social media leaders so you can easily follow them. Read more: SubscriberWars: Lists most subscribed YouTube, Twitter & Facebook accounts (5) Tixsux – If you are tired of paying endless collection of parking tickets because you always forget to move your car on time, check out Tixsux. It is a Twitter-based web service that helps you to avoid parking fines via reminder calls. Read more: Tixsux: Avoid Parking Fines Through 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! New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too. Related posts
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| How To Sync Your iTunes Library With Your Music Folders Posted: 29 Dec 2009 05:31 PM PST
One of the improvements you can make is to have iTunes synchronize its library with your music folders. This can be done in two ways. You can let iTunes do it for you when you have it managing your music automatically already or, alternatively, you can have a program called iTunes Folder Watch (Windows only) do it. After years of waiting for it and criticism from users, Apple has finally added the feature of auto adding music to your library in iTunes 9. One condition however is that you have to let iTunes manage your music. This means that you can’t have your own music folder structure but instead you have to add any music to iTunes and let it do its thing. This is fine for most people except when you want to keep using your own folders or file formats iTunes doesn’t support (which are more than you’d think).
Here’s more information from the Apple website.
This way iTunes handles everything for you. If you prefer to have more control yourself you can use an application like iTunes Folder Watch. I normally prefer freeware, but this does most of what we need in the free version. It allows you to pick a folder to synchronize with your iTunes library. The paid version does this automatically, but with the free version you have to do it yourself.
You point the program to a folder on your computer with music and it will compare the files in there with your iTunes library. When you add some music to the folder you can have it update your iTunes library automatically.
An alternative to iTunes Folder Watch is iWatchSyncer. It does more or less the same but has a few less options, but it’s good to have alternatives. My favorite alternative by the way is to ditch iTunes altogether and start using MediaMonkey. This program has all you need from a media player and even more in the gold version. We have written in the past about it and has all the folder syncing you need. It has just released a major update in version 3.2 and is compatible with many MP3 players and phones, but in the past Apple has slammed the door on any software that synchronizes with the iPods and iPhone with their next software update. What software do you use for managing your music and filling your iPod or iPhone? Are you using iTunes and had you already discovered the auto adding feature? 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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| 5 Online Tools To Help You Keep Your New Year Resolutions Posted: 29 Dec 2009 03:31 PM PST
Not so this year, however. This year, one of my most important New Years Resolutions is to actually KEEP my resolutions, but in order to do that, I'll need a few tools to keep me reminded of my goals. Perhaps you need a bit of inspiration to start your resolution-making for next year too? If so, read on for 5 great tools to help you do just that! 43Things
43 Things is a site meant for keeping track of life goals, although it does have a section specifically for resolutions. Honestly, I found the site to be a bit confusing to navigate at first. When you sign up, you can immediately start to add goals for yourself, but keep in mind, you have a maximum of 43 goals. You can also browse and add goals that others have created. Each specific goal has a page of its own, complete with the average time to completion, the number of people who are trying to accomplish the same thing, tips from users who successfully completed the goal, and more. After a goal is added to your list, you can set a reminder and the interval you would like it to be emailed to you. You can also write journal entries for each goal to document your progress. 43Things For The iPhone43Things for the iPhone [iTunes Store link] is great as both a complement to the website and as a standalone service, though you’ll still need an account to use it. It has the same basic functionality as the website, allowing you to track the percentage completion of your goals, write entries detailing your progress, and mark goals you’ve completed. While the app has a few less features than the website (most noticeably, it is missing the community that the website has), I prefer the app over the website because the interface is much more straightforward. Habitforge
Habitforge is a bit like 43Things, but the premise is that it takes only 21 consecutive days to form a habit. Thus, this site works particularly well for resolutions where repetition is the key to success. Examples would be “run for 30 minutes every day” or “read 10 pages of a top 100 classics book every day”. Once you add a habit, Habitforge emails you daily to ask about your progress. You can specify what your motivation for having the goal is, and Habitforge will insert this into its daily email every three days, to remind you why exactly it is so important for you to keep working at your goal. From the website, you can see how many days are left, and the percentage of days that you completed your task. This website is pretty new, so plenty of features (like specifying which days of the week a goal applies to) are still in the works, but as it stands Habitforge is already a very solid webapp. Joe’s Goals
If you don’t mind a plain interface, Joe’s Goals is also a great online habit tracker, which allows you to assign point values to each goal to denote its importance. You can denote whether a goal is positive or negative (for example, ‘wasting time at work’ might be negative while ‘keep desk clean’ would be positive), and for each day, Joe’s Goals will add your point totals depending on which tasks you completed. You can then view a graph of your point totals over time. This graph can also be embedded in a variety of places, including iGoogle as a gadget. OneNoteFor those who don’t want to sign up for yet another service, OneNote, or any other notebook software is a great way to track goals. Dedicate an entire notebook to your resolutions, and make a separate section for each of your resolutions. Then, you can either fill the pages of each section with entries on how far you’ve progressed (akin to 43Things), with your grandoise plans on how to accomplish your goals, or even pictures / screenshots / other types of media to document your work. Google Calendar
Another way to track your resolutions using the tools you most likely already have is Google Calendar. Simply make a new calendar specifically for your resolutions, and create repeating events for each resolution, on the days you want them to be observed. Then you can set GCal to remind you by email (or by SMS if you have that set up) when you need to complete a task in order to keep your resolution. Now that I have detailed five tools to help you keep your New Year Resolutions, you have no excuse to break your resolutions this year. Give some of these methods a test, and let us know how they work for you! Or, if you have your own method to keep track of resolutions, let the rest of us in on your secret to success! Happy New Year and good luck keeping those resolutions! 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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| WebReview – Browse Smarter With This Firefox Add-on Posted: 29 Dec 2009 01:31 PM PST
Browsers these days are making it easier to get off the starting blocks with enhancements under the hood or startup page add-ons. The updated Google Chrome browser has some nifty features that make it easy to visualize what you have been visiting. The history thumbnails can be rearranged and hidden or neatly turned into a browser homepage. It's not often Firefox looks towards Chrome for inspiration, but the add-on called WebReview does exactly that and takes it further up the path. The WebReview extension takes the history of Firefox and puts in several enhancements that make browsing and going back in time via the links in History, more intuitive.
The meta-data gleaned from your browsing history is generated by the program when it first starts up. It can also be manually generated later. This is what you will see when the add-on is installed.
Four Types of Information Which Makes For Smarter BrowsingUse it as a start page (WebReview MyStart) or bring it up manually, WebReview gives a four sided perspective on your browsing habits. The screenshot below explains it at a glance –
All browsing activity gets bunched up into these four groups. Thumbnails and data-like frequency of visits further helps to sort it out visually. Beyond the visual data is a smart bit of technology which sees action in the Proposal for today section. WebReview tracks and sorts which sites you visit on which days. This bit of information helps it to bring up the very same websites as suggestions, on those corresponding days. WebReview recognizes your increase or decrease in visits and changes in tune with it. Two More Tools Up WebReview's SleeveTwo additional tools in the WebReview menu help to give you more control over your browsing history. WebReview Chronicle
It's behaves like an indexer and filter for all the URLs you visit. A set of filters help you get to any page you visited, if it's recorded in the browser's History. Website addresses are also grouped by domain/host and subdomain respectively. So you can dive down into a specific page of a website by selecting the domain and then the particular page. WebReview Graph
Browsers have a peculiar problem called the 'back-forward problem'. As explained in the add-on's documentation, If you click on a link on page A, you get to page B. If you then use the Back button of the browser to get back to page A, and from there click on another link that brings you to page C, page B is lost. You can’t reach it anymore through the Back and Forward buttons of the browser. WebReview Graph is a tool which solves this by displaying all pages you have visited in each browsing session. WebReview does this through a visual of connected nodes making it useful for getting to the 'lost' pages in between two link clicks. If you like details, you can also generate a HTML report from here. WebReview isn't so useful if you have a habit of cleaning your browsing history after every session. As a tracker, the Firefox add-on needs all the help it can get to understand your browsing habits. We all have our browsing habits and sometimes we follow a pattern. WebReview helps to uncover that and makes our browsing more efficient using the three tools. Even if you disregard the tech chatter, WebReview does one thing very simply – it speeds up the search for an already visited page. Do you think WebReview makes for a value added Firefox add-on? Download it from the Firefox add-ons page and let us know. Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!
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| 3 Tools To Write Your Own Sheet Music Online Posted: 29 Dec 2009 11:31 AM PST
After jamming, we reach the theoretical side of this coin: jotting it down. For yourself, and, if it’s good enough, to share with fellow musicians. Have you got a piece of paper ready? Please, put it back in the printer, where it belongs. We’ll do it right the first time around – digitally. Not because it’s faster, because it isn’t, but because it’s easier to read. And, quite frankly, with the tools that are available, it doesn’t hurt to make it look half-decent. The following online tools are ranked according to difficulty – and that doesn’t just mean the interface, but also what you can achieve with them. Of course, if you intend to compose your life’s masterpiece, you don’t do it on the online napkin.
Printing – BlankSheetMusicSo you really like the idea of pen and paper, do you? Fine, but at least don’t take out a ruler to draw the bars. This website allows you to create a piece of blank sheet music. Before you print, you can choose the clefs and time signature.
With BlankSheetMusic, you can print the right kind of sheets – piano, or guitar – but that’s pretty much all there is. Drag ‘n Drop – SheetMusicEditorSheetMusicEditor is one step up in musical notation tools. This time, you can drag and drop your clefs, time signatures and notes onto the sheet. Very simple, and very intuitive.
Of course, because you have to manually drag everything into the right place, with no ‘magnet’ mechanism, your sheets won’t have that top-notch look. The alignment of your notes will be slightly off, and some of your other notations might look sloppy. This is a great tool to jot down simple tunes and put them up to printing standards, fast. It is not advised to use with very complicated compositions. Online Editor – NoteflightNoteflight is the online cherry on the musical notation pie. It’s the very best you’ll be able to find online. Quite frankly, it even tops most offline applications, save one – but that’s for another article. Noteflight allows you to compose the most complicated songs. A proper demonstration being above my musical abilities – the screenshot below shows the Turkish March by Mozart.
Noteflight uses a very simple notation system, albeit rather slow. Just click on the music sheet, and drop a note in the right spot. You can highlight dropped notes, add additional notations and change timing, or even drag and drop to correct. Spacing between notes is adjusted automatically, and you are spared from musical paradoxes with automatic corrections and the appending of rests. With different instruments and MIDI playback, there is very little you can’t do with Noteflight.
Your compositions, stored on your account, can be made public. This leads us to the other side of Noteflight. You can browse literally thousands of public musical scores. Try, rate and comment on new compositions, or find sheet music for songs you already know. There are a lot of reasons why you shouldn’t bother with offline applications anymore. The reason you should is because they offer yet another spin on musical notation – and can be faster. Continue checking MakeUseOf for our review of the best, fastest and cross-platform musical notation application! In the meantime, if you have any favourite tools of your own, be sure to let us know about 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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| Androkkid – Make Your Windows Mobile Look Like Android Posted: 29 Dec 2009 09:31 AM PST
This year, my budget restrains me from getting one of these Google gadgets. So, while waiting for a better financial condition, I wanted to try Android on my Windows Mobile phone. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any Android build available for my old O2 phone. But my searching brought me something else: an alternative (Android-like) interface for Windows Mobile called Androkkid. Not Just Another Cheap ImitationIf you are looking for a way to port your Windows Mobile into Android, prepare yourself to be disappointed. Androkkid is NOT it. Even though this .NET application isn’t the real deal, this isn’t just a cheap imitation of Android either.
To get a glimpse of it, you could watch this video: If you would like to try, you could download the latest version (v.1.2.1 at the time of writing) from the developer’s site. There are two kinds of file available: the CAB file and the Zip file; and there are also two ways to install:
Getting Around The InterfaceRunning it is as simple as opening the app from the Programs directory.
You’ll see the splash screen for a few seconds and…
The default empty blissful background will appear before your eyes, along with three buttons below.
The middle tab can be pulled up to show the list of applications. And similar to basic Windows Mobile folders, you could slide to scroll the icons up and down.
Any of the icons can be dragged out from the container to the desktop so it will always be available there.
To delete an icon from the desktop, drag it to the bottom of the screen, and a delete tab will appear.
Drop the icon to the “X” tab and it will be deleted after you answer “Yes” to the confirmation.
By default, there are three “desktops“. You always start in the middle screen, and can easily scroll left and right by sliding your finger on the screen to the opposite direction. There are dots just above the application tab to indicate your position.
These desktops could serve as places to categorize your apps. For example, the left screen is for games, the middle is for office applications, and the right is for internet-related activities. You can add more desktops should you need them. Press and hold the screen, and choose “Add > Page” from the pop up menu. To remove a page, repeat the above process, but choose “Remove last page” instead. Click “Yes” in the confirmation window and the page will disappear.
Pages are not the only thing that you can add. Other alternatives are icons, shortcuts, contacts, links, widgets and folders. Using a combination of those elements, you could create (almost) any interface that you want. It’s also possible to make Androkkid start automatically every time you restart your Windows Mobile. Press and hold the screen, and choose “< >Settings” from the pop up menu. Go to the “General” tab and check the “Start with Windows” box. Don’t forget to click the “Save” button below.
To close Androkkid, press and hold the screen and choose “Exit” from the pop up menu.
More Time To MatureIn my personal opinion, Androkkid is not as slick as other Windows Mobile “interface changers” such as the commercial HTC’s Touch-flo or SPB Mobile Shell. But they can’t beat Androkkid’s price: free. Androkkid also has tons of user-made themes and widgets available. That’s another thing which commercial products can’t compete with. Given more time to mature, I’m pretty sure that Androkkid will go to the level of its paid competitor. Have you tried Androkkid? Do you know of any other alternatives? Please share using the comments below. Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!
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| 3 Great Online Resources To Learn How To Cook Well Posted: 29 Dec 2009 08:31 AM PST
Within this article, I will show you three online resources that will help you learn how to cook and become good at it.
Imagine you could cook healthy and tasty meals, bake delicious cakes and fresh bread. You would save money cooking for yourself rather than buying expensive meals, friends and family would love to be your guest, and you would never be short of ideas for yummy gifts or much desired vouchers. Chef2Chef Online Cooking Class
This online cooking class will serve any skill level. Whether you have never even cooked tea or whether you’ve routinely been cooking simple meals and know kitchen tools and routines inside out, you can start here. There are ten different courses, which contain five lessons each. You can read through as many lessons as you like, but if you have little time, you can manage at least one lesson each day, i.e. one course per week. The articles are pure theory and will work well with recipes that match the respective skill level. Each lesson features two “recipes for success”. You can practice your skills browsing the site’s thorough recipe collection. It is neatly categorized into courses, types of foods (e.g. meat, vegetarian, fish), cuisine (e.g. Cuban, German, Thai) or methods (e.g. grilled, steamed, barbecued). Learn To Cook 101
This site is best suited for people who have a basic understanding of cooking. If you can already cook simple recipes, i.e. read recipes and pick the right ingredients and tools, this is the right place to start. Learn to Cook 101 provides instructions on how to equip your kitchen, general articles on cooking, diet, health & fitness, and of course you’ll find several recipes. Click through to the articles to strategically look up the information you need to improve your skills. Passionate About Food
As you become more and more skilled and passionate about cooking, head over to this site. You’ll find an alphabetically sorted Guide to Cooking Techniques, Kitchen & Cooking Tips that will save you time, information about Herbs & Spices, and lots more. Once you know the basics of how to cook, you may find the following MakeUseOf articles interesting: Simon eyed Great Cooking Websites from a Different Perspective On MakeUseOf we have previously showed you things you can learn online: Mark presented The Best Online Sources To Play & Learn Chess Before you pick a skill, make sure you have an idea how to start. About.com has a great article on How to Learn a New Skill. What did you learn in 2009 and what do you want to learn in 2010? Image credits: svilen001, nkzs 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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| 30Boxes – A Free Online Calendar With Offline Integration Posted: 29 Dec 2009 07:31 AM PST
But the best part of the story is that there is another free application called Calgoo that allows you to sync your cloud calendar program such as 30boxes or Google Calendar with this offline application making this a great tool for presentations or meetings where you are not online. I will show you how 30boxes works and how Calgoo can synchronize it with your desktop. Let's start with 30boxes. Visit their website and sign up for a free account. You will have to give them your email address and verify an email but not to worry, they have never bothered me with any spam. After you are logged into the 30boxes website you will see your calendar. Mine looks like this:
To add an event you can go the old school way of double-clicking on a date. That will bring up that date on your screen.
Now to enter data, simply type in that box at the top like so:
Once you hit add, it will schedule it with your default settings. You will probably want to edit these but for now let's see how to edit the event you just created. Hover your mouse next to the event and two icons will appear – one for trash (a trash can) and one for edit.
Click on the edit key and we will see our advanced calendaring options like so:
You will see everything you are familiar with in all other calendaring programs like start and end times, reoccurrences, invites (for emails), tags (which is very powerful) and of course a notes field and a way to mark it private. Modify your event, click update event and it will create it for you. You can create tags by simply tagging an event. It will be automatically created for you and we will show you next how to change it's color of appearance on the calendar. I created a tag called test here:
Then I can choose the color for the tag by hovering over the find button that you see below and clicking the colored square next to the tag like so:
Choose your color, save it and then you will see your event with a color like so:
This application is chock full of features as I mentioned before. It can share your calendar, it can email attendees reminders and so much more. What more could you want? Being able to use it offline. So that is where Calgoo Calendar comes in. It is also a free download available here. You will have to sign up for this as well. Donwload and install it. When you have it up you will see a screen that looks like this:
You will easily be able to set it up to sync with your 30Boxes calendar – even your tags! And have it all offline! Very very nice. Anyone have another on and offline solution? We would love to hear about it in the comments! Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!
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iTunes is a widely used music library program, mainly because you need it when you’re using an iPod or iPhone. I use it myself, but mainly because I have to in order to get some music on my iPod Touch. We have written about 
Now that Christmas is over, it's time to start thinking about 
The television has one slight edge over the browser. With the TV, we can directly switch on the channel you want. With the browser, we have to type in the URL or click on a bookmark. But that's just an analogy.
When you’ve been playing an instrument long enough, there comes a time when you will want to compose a theme of your own. Be it a personal twist on Flight of the Bumblebee, a groovy adaptation of Mary Had a Little Lamb, or just that soundbite that’s been in your head for the past twenty years.
It’s still a few days away until the countdown begins, but I’ve already begun writing down my New Year resolutions. There’s a section called “To Buy” with the list of everything that I wish I could buy next year, and an Android phone is one of them.
The new year is an excellent time to start something new. Rather than making resolutions that won’t last beyond January, why not try something different? Set yourself up to learn a new skill, something that will stay with you for the rest of your life.
Here at MakeUseOf we are always looking for the latest and greatest free applications and websites. I thought I would share with you today how much I love the free calendar site called 30boxes. It is available for you to check out 
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