MakeUseOf.com: “Cool Websites and Tools [March 10th]” plus 11 more |  |
- Cool Websites and Tools [March 10th]
- Become A MakeUseOf Fan On Facebook!
- How To Turn Your Nintendo DS Into An iPod
- 6 Tips For A Social Media Friendly Logo Design
- Top 5 Internet Fraud & Scams Of All Time
- Manage External Drives’ Trash With Curb [Mac]
- Test Your Writing Quality With These 8 Readability Web Tools
- MakeUseOf Must-Have Mac Apps Giveaway Day #9 – OmniFocus
- Use Screencast To Manage & Share Your Media Files
- Mac Giveaway Tweetie Winners!
- How To Turn Boxee Into The Ultimate ROM And Game Launcher
- 6 Cool Widgets For Myspace
| Cool Websites and Tools [March 10th] Posted: 10 Mar 2010 07:31 PM PST
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. em>Got Tech Questions? Ask Them on MakeUseOf Answers! Related posts
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| Become A MakeUseOf Fan On Facebook! Posted: 10 Mar 2010 06:30 PM PST If you enjoy reading MakeUseOf and have a Facebook account, become a MakeUseOf fan on Facebook and join in on the fun! Simply click on the “Become a Fan” button on the left to get started! You’ll be rewarded with exclusive previews of future publications, what we refer to as “Sneak Peeks”; and the best posts from the day before, “Yesterday’s Bests”. We also use our fan page to inform you about premium software giveaways and discounts that are not announced on the website. We get a lot of those from software developers and distribute them mainly on Facebook. In addition to that, you’ll have the chance to participate in polls and ask our MakeUseOf writers questions or just tell everyone how much you love reading our site!
So grab some friends and become our fans today! Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!
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| How To Turn Your Nintendo DS Into An iPod Posted: 10 Mar 2010 05:30 PM PST
Meanwhile the Sony PSP, a direct competitor to the DS, has the ability to not only play games, but watch movies, play music, and more. This has left some Nintendo DS owners feeling a little left out. This article will explain basically how to turn your DS into an iPod so that you can add music playing functionality to your beloved dual-screened handheld console, so you may not need to buy that shiny new iPod.
Buy a Flash Card
There are many different brands of DS flash cards and all of them have their own set of features and quality. Notable brands include the CycloDS, the M3, and Acekard. In this tutorial, we will use the Acekard 2i, which is known for being an inexpensive quality card. Acekard’s official web site has a list of recommended distributors to buy from. Unless you already have a MicroSD card to use, I suggest you purchase a package that contains both the MicroSD card and the Acekard. I bought my whole kit for less than $35, which is around the price of one game. The kit will include simple instructions to prepare the card for the DS, which is basically just downloading and copying some files onto the card using the included USB stick. Download & Install MoonshellNow that you’ve got the flash card, you need an application to play the music. This is where Moonshell comes in. Moonshell is an unofficial multimedia player for the Nintendo DS. It can be used to play music, watch videos, view photos, read text, and some other things. To install Moonshell, follow these instructions:
Was this tutorial easy to follow? Have you used your Nintendo DS to play music? Do you have any tips to improve the experience? If so, please leave us a comment below! Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!
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| 6 Tips For A Social Media Friendly Logo Design Posted: 10 Mar 2010 03:31 PM PST
These days your logo needs to be adaptable to a variety of uses throughout social media. It should look sharp and noticeable in many different forms including a Twitter icon, Facebook thumbnail, and Flickr buddy icon. Whatever your level of design experience, here are some tips to help you make your creation the most usable and effective for online marketing:
Watch Your Aspect RatioMost marketing folks will tell you that your logo design shouldn’t be too short and wide or too tall and skinny because it isn’t pleasing to the eye. The social web gives you another reason to keep your width and height in harmony. Most social media sites put your logo into icons and thumbnails that are square (or close to it). While your logo design doesn’t need to be a perfect square, it should conform to one nicely with little fuss. If you have ever watched a widescreen movie on a boxy 4:3 television, you will understand that the further from a square an image is, the more it will have to be reduced, clipped, or compressed in order to fit into one. In whatever icon or thumbnail your logo is used, you’d like it to be as large as possible – using as much of the available real estate as you can.
Detach Text & GraphicsBecause you can’t foresee all the ways you might use your logo design in the future, you want it to be versatile. You may need to rearrange or use only a portion of your logo if it doesn’t fit well into a particular size and shape. For some very small icons, it is usually impossible to include your entire logo. As a result, many companies use a single letter or graphical element from their logo for social media purposes. If your text and graphics are tightly intertwined, it will be difficult to divide your logo design into separate pieces.
Keep It SimpleAvoid thin lines, too many words, and overly detailed graphical elements in your design. Anything too intricate may not be recognizable when the image is resized. If you’re a real estate broker that would like to include an image of a house in your logo, don’t try to include the front door, windows, and the family sitting around the dining room table. Simple geometric shapes will communicate your idea more efficiently. So don’t spend time browsing clip art galleries; they generally aren’t helpful for logo design. You also want to limit the number of colors and shades that you use. If your logo is too noisy, it can get lost in the backdrop of a busy social media webpage. An uncomplicated logo with two or three colors will stand out better. Not to mention it will be easier and more economical to put it on stuff in the real world – like t-shirts and golf balls. You can have fun with gradients, shadows, and your favorite Photoshop filters when designing your website, but when it comes to your logo, stick with the principle “less is more”.
Be ConsistentIt strengthens your brand when people see the same image everywhere for your business or organization, so try not to have too many different forms in use. Many successful brands create one simplified variation of their logo design that they use for every social media outlet. For example, Woot! uses only the exclamation point as its all-purpose social media icon … including everything from its large 200px Facebook image to its tiny 16px favicon. This strategy is smart also because you can’t always control how your image will be used by social media sites. They generally allow you to upload one image that is automatically cropped and resized for different uses. Facebook is nice enough to let you specify how your thumbnail is captured from your main image, but Twitter simply resizes your original image to, at last count, as many as 4 different versions. You want a logo that is likely to look the same no matter how it is altered.
Don’t Try To Tell A StoryTake a look around and you’ll notice that many great logos are simply made up of the business name (or abbreviation) in a unique font and color, with sometimes an adjacent graphical element. Don’t obsess over trying to communicate everything about what you do through your logo. While you want the style to be appropriate and complementary to your business, your logo doesn’t have to explicitly tell people what it is. Your logo doesn’t need a house if you’re a real estate broker or a book if you’re a bookstore. Even if your name doesn’t clearly convey the type of business you are (i.e. “Bill’s Photography”), your marketing activities and messages will associate your logo with your brand in peoples’ minds. Besides, people typically won’t see your logo in isolation without any context. Once you free yourself of the burden of trying to say too much with your logo, you are more likely to create one that is cleaner and more effective.
Take It For A SpinYou want to avoid having to change your logo once it is well established. So you should feel comfortable that it can be easily utilized for any purpose. Be sure to sample your logo in a range of different sizes, but also try it out in all the various social media venues that you may join. You don’t have to create a profile to test your logo in each site. Simply copy and paste a sample icon from the site into your graphics program, then transform your logo to the same size to see how it will look. Although most of the major sites represent you as a square (geometrically, not personally), there are many, such as shopping comparison sites, that use very specific dimensions. It’s worth taking the time to make sure your logo will work easily everywhere that you want to be.
ConclusionA good logo design won’t necessarily adhere strictly to all of these guidelines or fit perfectly into every situation. But by taking social media usage into consideration when designing your logo, you’re more likely to create one that will be easy to deploy and have a distinctive online presence. How well do social media sites handle your logos and images? How do you make sure they look the way you would like? Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!
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| Top 5 Internet Fraud & Scams Of All Time Posted: 10 Mar 2010 01:31 PM PST
Beyond just basic email scams, there are other methods that scammers use to defraud people of their money through the Internet. Today, I would like to examine five additional Internet scams that are very commonplace, but unfortunately not quite as many people are aware of them. These are scams that trip up the most people every year and lead to a substantial financial loss. Take the time to read through and understand these scams so that you never find yourself a victim of them.
Nigerian Scams RevisitedI remember watching a documentary a few years ago that detailed how scammers, usually located in third world countries, set up computer clusters connected to the Internet and send out thousands of Nigerian scam emails every day. The name of the scam comes from the original form of this scam, which consisted of emails outlining a situation in Nigeria that required a massive transfer of money from that country into the United States for safety. For assisting with the money transfer, the recipient of the email is promised a percentage of the transfer amount, usually totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars to a few million. Once this came became widely known, it immediately evolved and continues to evolve even today. It now takes a very wide variety of forms including the elderly sick person looking to transfer their entire estate into your bank account.
Then there is one of my personal favorites, the young woman in danger who is seeking a savior to help her – and of course she has a very large sum of money to offer as a reward. Here is an email from “Miss Diana” of West Africa, who has a DC worth $5.9 million, and is seeking to escape her country and live in the United States.
The scammers put together storylines and plots that appeal to the basic human emotions of greed, goodwill and love. In some cases they almost always reference God in some way – in an effort to appeal to western Christian values. In the end, the many variations of the Nigerian scam end in only one place if you offer up any of your contact information or, even worse, your bank account information – an empty bank account. Scammed By A Counterfeit WebsiteThe second most common Internet scam is email phishing. Dean mentioned this in his article (fake links in emails to banks or Paypal), and MUO covered SonicWALL, which can detect phishing emails. However, did you know that even if you don’t click on a fake link and you follow the advice to type in your bank or Paypal’s URL directly into the browser, that the site could still be counterfeit? It’s true. If you visit the wrong website or download the wrong file from an infected email attachment, you could end up with malware on your PC that specifically targets a browser security flaw. Internet Explorer seems to be the most vulnerable to these. The Malware basically re-routes your browser URL query to a different page than the domain that you typed in.
Because the scammer has altered the DNS settings for a specific website or hijacks your browser, it’s very hard to realize that you’re actually visiting a counterfeit version of the site you intended to visit. How do you prevent such a scenario from happening to you? First, run MalwareBytes religiously. Second, keep your browser fully patched and updated. And finally, be vigilant about anything on the website that seems a bit odd. Thankfully, most major banks are catching on to this problem and are starting to incorporate a unique image of your choosing into the login process. Each time you log in, the website asks you to confirm the image. If the website doesn’t ask you to confirm, or it’s the wrong image, then you know you may be visiting a counterfeit site. Three Major eBay ScamsWhile the Nigerian scams and phishing emails with fake links are the two most common Internet scams, the popularity of eBay over the past decade has led to another whole family of Internet scams. There are three significant scams that you should be aware of if you’re an eBay user. The first is a scam that targets eBay sellers, and it involves the scam artist obtaining a matching broken item that’s identical to the item that you’re selling. Often, such scam artists will actually purchase one right off eBay that’s in need of repairs or otherwise has some damage to it at a fraction of the cost of a new one.
Then they will purchase your identical item, which is in perfect condition. They’ll make payment to you, receive your item, and then email you to say that the item was damaged in shipment. Often, they’ll threaten to give you negative feedback (a hard thing to deal with as an eBay seller). Many sellers simply cave and send a full refund, and the scammer returns the damaged item, keeping the working item for themselves. Protect yourself from this scam by either requiring your buyers to purchase shipping insurance, or doing what the seller in the above example did and put in writing that all sales are final, and no returns are accepted.
The insurance option is the best approach because it removes all liability from you as the seller. If the buyer claims that the device was damaged in shipment, it’s up to them to prove it to the postal service, and face fraud charges if they are found lying. The second common eBay scam is the Auto Scam. The Motors section of eBay is a bustling auto marketplace where huge volumes of sales take place every day. Unfortunately, because these are big ticket items, and because the financial transactions on eBay are not very secure for buyers, the marketplace is very attractive to con artists. The con is very simple. First, they list a very popular big-ticket auto that they actually don’t even have. Sometimes they’ll even just steal photos from other listings.
Now, I don’t know if the listing above is authentic or not, but I offer the listing as an example of how much money is at stake. If you really want this car and you don’t live near enough to inspect it, you might be willing to cough up payment, or even a partial payment, at the end of the sale. Don’t do it. There are far too many examples where people have sent in a significant chunk of change, and the seller simply disappeared without a trace. Never bid on an auto on eBay Motors unless an on-site inspection by you or a third party on your behalf is agreed upon.
The last eBay scam is shown above. As a seller, you’ll get used to notifications from eBay, and sometimes it’s easy to assume they’re all authentic. Scammers will scour completed eBay sales and then send these fraudulent emails to the seller, as though it’s from eBay’s automated system. The goal of the email is to get you to click on the link and log into your eBay account. The moment you do – your eBay account and all financial information contained therein, is compromised. Have you ever been “taken in” by an Internet scam? Do you know of any other popular Internet fraud or scams that are floating around out there? Let readers know in the comments section below. 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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| Manage External Drives’ Trash With Curb [Mac] Posted: 10 Mar 2010 11:30 AM PST
If we apply today’s computer and internet age into the context, the main character of the story would be digital bits and bytes, and the settings would be the real world and the virtual world. While transferring data through the internet requires only a few clicks, we’ll need extra help to copy/move files in the real world.
Tale of the thumbs and the trash binI think it’s safe to say that external storage is and inseparable part of a computer user’s life today. Aside form optical disks, USB thumb drives might be the most popular external storage used today. While small and light enough to be carried around, the capacity is generally spacious enough to keep large amounts of data. And unlike its thin-circular counterpart, the contents inside the thumbs are easily erased and re-written.
And even though deleting files is only a “Delete” keypress away, there are more behind this trashing things than meets the eye. That action doesn’t really delete the files. They are just moved to Trash, a concept invented by OS makers after learning from the not-so-amusing past experiences. To get rid of your garbage completely, you have to empty the bin.
Playing With GarbageAs advanced as it might be, Mac OS X trash management system still leaves several questions unanswered. If your deleted files are from both computer’s hard drive and external storage, what will happen to them if you unplug the external device before emptying out the Trash? Where will those files stay? In the computer’s Trash or in the thumb drive?
What should you do if you want to empty the Mac external drive’s Trash but leave the computer’s Trash intact? You could plug the drive to a non OS X computer and delete the hidden “.Trashes” file, but that breaks the simplicity rule.
The simpler way would be to use Curb. This app is, as the developers says, “A Good Place to bring your Trash.” What Curb does is clear everything out from inside your removable media’s Trash.
All you’ve got to do is drag and drop the external volume(s) into Curb’s window, and Curb will take care of all the housekeeping process.
You will be notified if the external drive has no garbage inside it.
You can customize everything that will happen by opening the Preferences window (Command + Comma).
Some of the options are:
To some people, Curb might mean nothing. But for those who use external drives a lot, this little app will make life a whole lot easier. Have you tried Curb? Do you know other alternatives? Share your thoughts, opinions, and experiences using the comment below. Image credit: Gadget_Guru Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!
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| Test Your Writing Quality With These 8 Readability Web Tools Posted: 10 Mar 2010 10:30 AM PST
You can click on a URL and reach a webpage that's designed for a 10 year old. You can click on another link which takes you straight to Stephen Hawking's last paper. Information is useful only if we can make sense out of it. This is where readability web tools for web pages comes in.
A tool that's close by for readability analysis is in MS Word itself. MS Word uses two measuring scales like the Flesch Reading Ease and the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level. That's handy but it makes checking of webpages a bit difficult. Here's where a few readability web tools can help out. Also, most of these tools give a few more readability scores to tally your work against. The Wikipedia article on readability has another little tidbit of information – nearly all of today’s blockbuster writers write at the 7th-grade level, including John Grisham, Stephen King, J. K. Rowling, and Dan Brown. Where does your writing measure up against this piece of fact? Take your writing and put it through these eight online tools to get a few readability scores. The Readability Test ToolGive the Readability Test Tool your webpage address and it analyzes the text using the common readability indicators like Flesch Kincaid Reading Ease, Flesch Kincaid Grade Level, Gunning Fog Score, Coleman Liau Index, and Automated Readability Index (ARI).
There are three flexible options to carry out the tests – using an URL, by directly pasting the text, or by adding a referral link to the source page. There's a fourth option in the form of a browser bookmarklet. For a first timer, the tests are easy to understand because an explanation of the scores is also given. Juicy Studio's Readability TestTest the readability of a website by adding the page link to the field box given on the site. The service gives an explanation of what the Flesch Kincaid Reading Ease, Flesch Kincaid Grade Level, and the Gunning Fog Score scores are supposed to mean.
As it is a test based on an URL rather than direct copy, the results can go slightly awry if the webpage is graphic heavy. It is a bit cumbersome to interpret the scores because unlike the last test tool it doesn't match the readability ease with a particular age group. But as the explanations for the scores are given right below, we can make an assessment. Online-utility.orgOnline-utility.org is a collection of free tools, one of which happens to be a readability calculator. The tool covers four measures – Coleman Liau index, Flesh Kincaid Grade Level, ARI (Automated Readability Index) and SMOG.
Copy-paste the text and get the scores. The results also display a list of sentences which can be structured better to improve overall readability. Readability.infoReadability.info can analyze text from an URL and a MS Word Document. You have measures like Coleman Liau index, Flesh Kincaid Grade Level, ARI (Automated Readability Index), SMOG, Fog Index and Lix formula. Word usage counts are also given which can help identify excessive use of particular parts of speech.
Also follow the link given right at the bottom which brings up readability scores for some well known websites. Text Content Analysis ToolThis readability web tool gives out stats relating to word count, unique words, number of sentences, average words per sentence, lexical density, and the Gunning Fog readability index.
With a free registration you can access the Advanced Text Analyzer tool. With the free registration, you can submit texts longer than 10000 words and can also use a Graded Text Analysis Tool plus a sortable word frequency list. Even in the standard service, a word frequency cloud is quite handy to display your most used words by relative size. Lexicool TextalyserPaste your content in the simple form field and click on Go to get the readability statistics. You can also enter an URL for webpage analysis.
The tool analyses word groups in more detail especially with regards to density of certain words. You can set it to examine the text for specific words or expressions. This makes it useful as a basic keyword measurement tool. The site lacks explanation aids, but it says that it's coming up. WordsCountYou get a simple text field and a submit button. WordsCount also has three more measuring indices which we haven't seen in the above services – Spache Index, Dale-Chall Index and Dale-Chall Grade.
The site also has a syllable counter which uses a dictionary at the backend to look up the lengths and thus claims to be more accurate. SMOG Readability CalculatorThis calculator is based on a single measurement index called Simple Measure of Gobbledygook. Yes, this actually is the name and it measures the years of education needed to completely understand a piece of writing. The calculator is provided by the developed the test – G. Harry McLaughlin.
The web form has a word limit of 2000 words and it is simple without a URL checker. It seems just an interface as the Calculate button redirects the analysis to the WordsCount website. These free web services can not only help us improve our web writing but also improve the search engine ranking score because readability has a direct relation to the SEO of a website too. Readers will stay on an article or site if they can effortlessly understand it. Do you make the effort to nitpick at your writing? Are they worth an analysis or would you go by your gut feel? Image credit: Luis De Bethencourt Related posts
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| MakeUseOf Must-Have Mac Apps Giveaway Day #9 – OmniFocus Posted: 10 Mar 2010 10:00 AM PST
It caters to a different kind of productivity user than the previous GTD giveaway app, Midnight Inbox. OmniFocus uses a slightly simpler approach, but is just as capable of getting, and keeping, you organized. We’ve managed to snag 5 licenses worth $400 to give away to five lucky MakeUseOf readers.
The second mode displays your actions grouped by Contexts.
You can also view actions according to when they are due, as well as viewing flagged actions only. You can customize the way in which information appears on OmniFocus – from displaying Projects based on certain criteria, to the order in which items and actions appear.
Actions are colour coded depending on whether or not they have a due date, and whether or not they’re overdue. Adding a due date can be done by clicking on an action, and hitting the ‘Inspect’ button.
While you can manually add actions through the application, one of OmniFocus’ strongest features is the ability to automatically create actions through your Mac Mail app, by creating rules on how the emails are received.
The app is also capable of synchronizing with iCal.
OmniFocus makes sure that you won’t lose any of your information, by automatically backing up your tasks to a folder on your Mac, either once or twice a day, as well as whenever you quit the program. Not only does OmniFocus perform automatic backups, it can also be synced using MobileMe, Bonjour, an external disk, a WebDAV server, and of course it syncs with the iPhone version of the app.
If you’re looking for an easy-to-use GTD application, OminFocus possesses all the important elements that David Allen outlines. Paired together with its iPhone app, and iCal synchronization, OmniFocus is one of the most well rounded GTD options for Mac users today. Try it out now. Download the unrestricted 14-day trial and get productive. How do I win a copy?It’s simple. Just follow the steps.
This giveaway ends tomorrow, just the final one starts. You may participate in as many giveaways as you want, even if you’ve previously won! Let the giveaway begin! Have fun! Want to know what else we gave away? Check out this post 15 Must-Have Free Apps For Your Mac & Giveaway. MakeUseOf would like to thank The Omni Group for their generosity while participating in this giveaway. Interesting in sponsoring? We’d love to hear from you. Get in touch with us via email. Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!
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| Use Screencast To Manage & Share Your Media Files Posted: 10 Mar 2010 09:31 AM PST
But when I recently started using the program, I realized that none of the articles about Jing had explored its connected web-based image management service, Screencast. Screencast, hosted and powered by TechSmith, has both a free and pro option, just like Jing does.
After you've got some content uploaded to your library (using Jing or by uploading files on your computer), all your files are by default available for public viewing, so you can share media files with anyone. You can, however, restrict access to your files, which I will explain below. Just as you do on your computer, you can upload any image and video files to your library. You're not limited to screen captures you take with Jing. If you find yourself using your Screencast account on a regular basis, you might consider downloading the free Screencast Uploader, which is great for uploading large files or batches of media files. While you can of course upload files directly from Jing (see other MUO articles about this), it might be a good idea to first save them on your hard drive and then upload files to your account so that you have them stored in two places.
Folder ManagementCreating folders in your Screencast library to share media files is not that different from creating folders on your computer. You simply click the Create Folder button and provide the name and other information you want associated with it.
You have options for changing who can and cannot access your folders. This is useful for private, non-public folders, or if you want folders that only your clients, co-workers, or organizational members can access. So when you're setting up your folder, simply click on the Change button, and you will be given four options for changing the access privileges for selected folders.
After you save a folder, you have options of course for re-opening it, editing its name, and its privacy level. Each folder also gets assigned a unique URL that you can share over the Internet. Just click on the three-arrows icon that pops up when place your cursor over a folder.
With the resulting URL links, you have the option to email and post links directly to the content of your selected folders. This means you can organize the files in the folder and present them as a basic image gallery. Moving files from one folder to the next is also very similar to how it's done on your computer. You click the Move Content button and you are presented with a list of all your content in which you can move files and folders around.
Jing PlaylistAnother useful option for quickly creating and managing folders is to use the Playlist option. Simply click on the Create Playlist button on the home page of your library, and you are again presented with a list of all your content. From there, check the items that you want to make up a playlist.
When you share the playlist, viewers are presented with a basic image gallery display of your content. The name of the playlist is in the upper left-hand corner of the page. Unfortunately, however, there's no way to customize your page so that titles of playlists can be larger or centered in the middle top of the page.
Lastly, each file and folder includes details about not only their size and modification date, but you can get information about how many times a designated file or folder was viewed. On your library homepage, click the list view button in the upper-right of the page to access this information.
While the Screencast Pro account (which cost $99/year) has lots more storage and bandwidth, as well as the ability to customize the design of your library page, the free account is very generous and practical especially for sharing screen captures and videos beyond say YouTube or Flickr. The Jing application makes it easy to quickly capture screen captures and upload them to your account. Although there are a few features I would like to see added to the service, Jing and Screencast are quickly replacing some of the screen capturing solutions I have been using over the past few years. And seeing how the Jing project has evolved over time, I think we're going to see some exciting new features in future updates. Let us know what screen capturing applications and services you use. Have you tried Jing, and if so how is it working out for you? Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!
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| Posted: 10 Mar 2010 09:00 AM PST
License information will be sent via email. Thank you for participating. Catch out next giveaway in an hour’s time! MakeUseOf would like to thank Loren from atebits for his generosity while participating in this giveaway. Interesting in sponsoring? We’d love to hear from you. Get in touch with us via email. Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!
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| How To Turn Boxee Into The Ultimate ROM And Game Launcher Posted: 10 Mar 2010 08:30 AM PST
With some regularity Boxee’s enthusiastic users will ask about the possibility of a game launcher for their favorite games , including ROMs and native applications. This is now possible. Sort of. There are a few glitches, and it’s not an instant process, but if you’re willing to work at it you can turn Boxee into a ROM and game launcher right now.
Install the Game Launcher AppThe first step toward setting up Boxee to launch your ROMs and games is to install FuzzTheD’s excellent Launcher App. This dandy little Boxee App allows you to execute any external program from within Boxee. The developer gives the example of Chrome and Filezilla, but you can launch any program using this App–including all of your games. To install this app, you’re going to need to add Fuzz The D’s repository to Boxee. If you’ve never added a repository on Boxee, don’t worry: it’s painless. Just open the App section of Boxee, then bring up the left-side menu. At the bottom of this menu is a “Repositories” button; click this. You’ll be given the option to add a new repository: click this and type “dir.fuzzthed.com”. You’ll now see a new repository to your right, called “Boxee Repo.” Browse this repo and you’ll see tons of Apps not offered in Boxee’s standard library (some work better than others.) Explore this as you will, but for the purposes of this tutorial the one you’re looking for is called “Launcher.” Click it, then click the “Add to My Apps” button to make sure you have this application in your Apps menu. I also highly recommend hitting the “Add Shortcut” button for easy access. Setting Up The Game LauncherNow that you have Launcher set up, you can create shortcuts to your favorite games. Open the Launcher App and scroll the the left-menu to bring up your options. Click “Add Application” and you’ll be presented with the opportunity to fill in a name for the application, a link to the application and the URL of a thumbnail. To get started, type the name of the program in the top field. Now add a link to the game you want to launch, either by typing the location of the program or by using the built-in file browser. Windows users will need to point to the game’s executable, while Linux users need only type the command that brings up the game. Finally, pick an icon for the application. You can type the location of a local image you want to use, or press button beside this field to automatically search Google for images related to the title you selected previously.
This feature makes finding relevant icons for your games a snap. Launching ROMsAnd now the part you’ve been looking for: using Boxee to launch ROMs. How to this varies depending on your operating system, but it’s not that hard.
Windows users looking to launch ROMs using this method need only to make sure their emulator is set as the default program for opening ROM files. For example, if you want to open Nintendo games with the excellent multi-system emulator Mednafen, make sure Windows is set to open .nes files with Mednafen (and that all your NES ROMs end with the file extension .nes). Now, using the instructions above, add a new application to Launcher, pointing directly to the ROM when asked for a link to the application. Linux users will find the above method doesn’t work, and that writing the full command (for example, “mednafen /home/me/roms/mario.nes”) also doesn’t yield a good result. No problem: simply create a script that can launch the game using Mednafen. Open your text document and create a document similar to this:
Save this document and make it executable, and you’ve got a single file to point Boxee towards to open your ROM using your favorite emulator. You’ll need to make one of these for every ROM you want to launch, but it’s not a terribly time consumer endeavor. Not being among the elite ranks of computer users who own a Mac, I cannot verify a method of accomplishing this on OS X. I’m quite sure, however, that some industrious MakeUseOf user will explain how to do this in the comments below. After all, our readers are awesome. Full Screen to Full ScreenUnfortunately, using this method to launch programs full-screen while Boxee is running full-screen can crash your system on both Windows and Linux. There’s an obvious solution to this: don’t use the method to launch your games full-screen. Alternatively, you can run Boxee outside of full-screen when you intend to launch a ROM: just press "\" to enter windowed mode. My Boxee box runs Linux, so I worked around this problem by always running Boxee in windowed mode while using a program called devilspie to make Boxee appear to be full-screen whilst in windows mode. I simply installed devilspie from the repositories, then saved this script in a sub-directory of my Home Folder called “.devilspie.”
Save this script with a “.ds” extension, and devilspie will automatically make Boxee appear fullscreen when it operates in windowed mode, meaning Set devilspie to start automatically on boot and you’re ready to launch full-screen games from within Boxee without crashing. There must be similar workarounds for Windows and Mac, but I don’t know what they are. Again, chime in in the comments below if you work out a solution. ConclusionPerhaps someday Boxee will arrange deals with the companies that own the rights to our favorite retro-games, giving us the option to legally purchase games for Boxee. I’d be more than willing to pay for such integration. For now, however, I’ve managed to turn Boxee into a ROM launcher perfect for my needs. That’s not to say there isn’t room for improvement here. A Boxee developer wanting an enthusiastic user base should consider creating a dedicated ROM game launcher; perhaps one that integrates the programs launched into Boxee itself, but even a launcher built specifically to launch external programs without crashing Boxee would be greatly appreciated. For now, however, users looking for similar functionality can work toward this functionality right now–and they have FuzzTheD to thank. What do you use Boxee for? em>Got Tech Questions? Ask Them on MakeUseOf Answers! Related posts
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| Posted: 10 Mar 2010 07:30 AM PST
But I do recognize that a huge part of the younger population are into Myspace and that is why I will be running down 6 really cool Widgets for your MySpace page. Aibek covered a huge amount of additions, widgets and more for your MySpace page back in 2006 here.
To install the widget on MySpace your best bet is to grab the embed code and insert it where you want it like so:
The next widget is called My Flash Fetish and is a MySpace comment widget as you can see below:
There are lots of customizations to color and styling so you can make it fit your page. Click the get code button below the widget and choose “other” then copy the embed code and you are on your way to pasting it into your page. Want more cool widgets for Myspace? Next, we have another MyFlashFetish widget that allows you to show how long you have been sober from drugs, alcohol or what have you. Visit this site and follow the directions and grab the embed code when you are done to post it on your MySpace page.
Alright now how about a count down widget to show how much time is left until your birthday? Check out this widget from Magic Widgets.
Fill in the data on top, change the colors and the background image. Your preview will appear above it. The message can also be dragged around to place it where you would like in the widget on this screen. Then you click get HTML code to get and insert your embed code. I particularly thought this one was very cute and appropriately titled Stick Figure Family. You can set up yours from FreeFlashToys.
After editing mine looked like this:
Here is a good prank for your page. It is called Tic Tac Prank and in the author's own words:
Here is the URL to grab the code and below that is a YouTube video of a mom pranking her children with it! Bad mom! So all in all, there are an infinite amount of widgets out there for whatever social network you use no matter if it is MySpace, a blog, or anywhere they will let you enter code! Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!
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