MakeUseOf.com: “Cool Websites and Tools [March 13th]” plus 5 more |  |
- Cool Websites and Tools [March 13th]
- 2 Resourceful Sites To Download MP3 Ringtones For Cellphones
- How To Back Up Your Wordpress Blog Online
- 5 Fun Free Card Game Sites For When You Are Bored
- Mac Giveaway Paragon NTFS Winners!
- A Quick Tutorial To Tables In Microsoft Access 2007
| Cool Websites and Tools [March 13th] Posted: 13 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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| 2 Resourceful Sites To Download MP3 Ringtones For Cellphones Posted: 13 Mar 2010 05:31 PM PST
I will be showing you some cool resources to download mp3 ringtones for cell phones for FREE! Different people want different kinds of ringtones and we will try to cover something for everyone. Our first stop will be to a website whose motto is: The Most Ringtones, Wallpapers, Videos and more for your phone. No subscriptions or hidden fees EVER! Sounds right up our alley! So let's check it out.
The top 15 ringtones are right there on the homepage which you can grab. You can also click on ringtones at the top of the screen. Click on see all ringtones above the top 15 ringtones. When you find something that you like, all you have to do is click on it. For instance i clicked on the PICK UP YOUR PHONE!! ringtone and saw this:
From this screen you can grab the ringtone in MP3 format, customize the ringtone, send it to a friend or download to your iPhone. They have really amazing features where you can text them to receive a ringtone over the air. They have a eclectic collection of ringtones from music, movies and just some really wacky stuff like the one above! The next site I found has a huge collection of music MP3's, old classic songs, new songs…everything! But the site has a lot of popup ads. So make sure your popup blocker is on or you are using IE 8 or FF 3.5. The site is Mobiles24 and that link will take you directly to the portion of the site where you can download mp3 ringtones for cell phones. You will also need to sign up or use BugMeNot to download them. I used BugMeNot and here is the link (hint: the first one does not work). When you get there you will see a place to sort and search the ringtones. You can press the play button next to the ringtone to play it on your computer. Go ahead and select one that you like and click on its title.
I chose Mrs Robinson by Simon and Garfunkel – man, I used to love this track! It gave young boys hope for getting with older woman when I was growing up. It will take you to a screen with the download link like so:
Once you log in (upper left hand corner) you will see the screen change to allow you to download like this:
Go ahead and download to your hearts content or 30 credits worth (whichever comes first!). After downloading your track, transfer it over to your device or you can download the ringtone directly from your phone by following the WAP instructions. Do you have another website that has free ringtones for mobile phones? If so leave them in the comments so we can all benefit. If you find some great ringtones on these sites or any other leave them in the comments as well! In the meantime, why not check out two ringtones-related articles that we did in the past – one by Saikat and one by Mark. Thanks for listening and enjoy! Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!
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| How To Back Up Your Wordpress Blog Online Posted: 13 Mar 2010 02:31 PM PST
That being said, this is the Internet we are talking about here. Hacking and cracking attempts on popular blogs is common. We have had our share of not so pleasant experiences as well. Imagine losing control of your site and/or its contents. So much hard work, so much time you put into it, all put at risk. No one would like to lose such an asset. Surely there has to be something that can be done to safeguard one’s content and hard work against such attempts.
There are a number of plugins available to back up your Wordpress blog. One that is particularly interesting and feature rich is called “Online Backup for WordPress“. First lets see how you can install and configure it. The installation is simple as is the case with most WordPress plugins. You can download the plugin here and then upload to your WordPress installation or you can search for the plugin from within the plugins area.
Once installed you should take some time to configure the various options that it has to offer and create a schedule for backups as well. To do so, click on “View Status” for Online Backup for WordPress, listed on the Manage Plugins page.
There you can choose which tables need to be backed up and specify credentials for your free online backup account that you can create to use with the plugin. The account gives you 50MB of storage, which doesn’t sound much at first. However, considering that the backup is highly compressed and the fact that the system is capable of deleting the oldest backup when you reach the 50MB limit, you can rest assured that you will have enough necessary backups in case you need them.
Next, go ahead and create a schedule for the backup. The plugin will backup the required tables automatically while adhering to the said schedule. In addition to the usual features like compression and encryption, Online Backup for WordPress offers a number of other features as well.
Overall, Online Backup for WordPress is an excellent solution to back up your Wordpress blog. With loads of features and automated online backups you can easily restore your blog back in case things go wrong. Do you back up your blog or website regularly? What software tools do you prefer? em>Got Tech Questions? Ask Them on MakeUseOf Answers! Related posts
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| 5 Fun Free Card Game Sites For When You Are Bored Posted: 13 Mar 2010 11:31 AM PST
The absolute best place to find free games is on Facebook. You have access to many different card games from a variety of game distributors, and you can strike up some healthy competition amongst your Facebook pals. Plus, you can bookmark all of these free card game sites and have easy access to them whenever you are bored.
In this ubertastic Facebook version, you play real live people OR you can start a game with some Facebook friends by meeting them in a virtual lobby. The graphics are really bright, and you can earn tokens and send gifts to other players at the table.
On Facebook, Mindjolt has the best variety of card games. One fantabulous game is their version of Three Tower Solitaire. While the graphics are a little chintzy, the game is quick to load and easy to play. If you need a quick fix, it is definitely worth the real estate in your bookmark bar.
Another slightly simplistic game, MindJolt’s Pyramid Solitaire, is a lot of fun. It gives you all sorts of stats on how you rank against your friends, and you can choose whether or not to notify them if you have kicked their score to the curb. GameArena is another Facebook distributor and offers up the popular Scarab Solitaire game. The graphics aren’t too bad for a simple game. The online (non-Facebook) site is called DiceArena and requires registration, so I prefer to stick with the Facebook version.
So what about our non-Facebooking fans? Never fear, there are free card game sites out there for you, too! I am weary of ones that require registration, so this is a round up of games that you can play without having to sign up and get bombarded with daily spam. For non-Facebook games, MindJolt takes the prize. All of the beloved Facebook card games are also available on their website. What is most wonderful is that you can play without having to create an account. They have scored and non-scored games, too. Really, it is my number one hotspot for entertainment. You might never leave MindJolt, but if you do, head over to GameHouse. They, too, offer the same games on their site as they do on Facebook. They also offer some other games that I truly love. Games.com has an excellent selection of games, but the best, by far, is Jewel Quest Solitaire. I love the graphics, but it is also a refreshing twist on a very common game.
First, you play and win a round of Solitaire, and then you play a small version of Jewel Quest. It is different than other Solitaire games because you are really playing two great games at once. Shockwave also has a terrific assortments of games. One favorite is the addictive Card Quest game. It is both a card game and a brain teaser, and it really makes good use of idle time! Like Jewel Quest, this game offers a spin from the ho-hum life of Solitaire. You work on different quests as you progress through the game.
Shockwave also offers up one of my all time favorite games: Fashion Solitaire. It is like Barbies for grown-ups. You dress up models according to goals and then they go off to star on the catwalk. Since I have no fashion sense, it makes me happy to inflict this pain on virtual models. It is a great game for kids, too. It helps them match patterns and colors.
Playing at free card game sites can be a hoot. What are your favorite card game sites? Please share them in the comments below!! Related posts
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| Mac Giveaway Paragon NTFS Winners! Posted: 13 Mar 2010 10:08 AM PST
License information will be sent via email. Thank you for participating. That’s it folks, our Mac giveaway has come to an end! We hope you enjoyed yourselves! Check back on Monday for our next giveaway. MakeUseOf would like to thank Koka and the Paragon Software 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. em>Got Tech Questions? Ask Them on MakeUseOf Answers! Related posts
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| A Quick Tutorial To Tables In Microsoft Access 2007 Posted: 13 Mar 2010 09:31 AM PST
This is the place to get the cure. I'm going to provide a Microsoft Access tutorial on how to create and use tables. I'll be following that up with posts on queries, forms, reports and automation. We need to make some assumptions in order for this to be short enough to fit in a single post. First off, you already know how to use a spreadsheet. probably Excel, but it really doesn't matter. Secondly, you can relax a little even if you have a different version of Access. You might need to hunt around for a few things, but mostly it's all the same.
That's a pretty typical list of items in Excel. Imagine for a moment that this list had a few thousand rows instead of just the ones you can view here, and you might see that this isn't necessarily the most practical way to deal with this sort of data. Hopefully you'll have some data of your own that you can experiment with. A practical example is always easier. In Access, this same information would be stored in tables, but before we can do that, we need to make sure that things are thoroughly consistent. That's one of the things about databases. It's much harder to deal with inconsistencies than it is in a spreadsheet. There are a couple of examples of things in here that you would need to fix. For starters, you really ought to read some of these books, but that won't help. Every column in Access needs to be consistent. You can't start putting dates, like we have here in the Finished column, and then put the word 'Never' in one of the cells. Same problem with the 'x' in the Rating column. Fix it first. Note that in most cases having the cells blank is just fine.
First, choose to create a blank database rather than using any of the pre-built templates. Come back and check those out later for more examples.
So click on Blank Database, give the file a name, and click on Create. Access tries to help out as much as possible by creating a default table, and setting it up ready to use. In our case though, we don't want to do that. We want to design the table properly.
Here's the thing to remember. You need to know what you want to do first, design the table to do that, and then add the data. It's cumbersome to change your mind afterwards. Our main job here is to decide on the fields we want to store in the table, and what sorts of information we want to store in each one. If you're using my example, fill things out so they look like this.
Before we can move on from here, there's one thing that can be a little complex, but you need to understand. Access is a relational database. The relational part means that you can deal with multiple tables at once, and the relationships between them. One of the aims of relational databases is to minimise both repetition and wasted space. I'm not going to go into the theory, but this is called normalisation. There are many other places to research the topic. I'm just going to be practical and show you an example. Notice that each of the classic sci-fi authors is mentioned a number of times in the spreadsheet. To achieve the same thing in Access, we create another table especially for the authors, and then relate the new table. That way each author only exists once, and the opportunity for errors is greatly reduced. For the moment, accept my request that you create the author field as a Number. Save the table. The quickest way is to click on the Save button in the toolbar. That might not be the easiest thing to find.
But… before Access will let you save the table, there's another thing you need to do. Just take my word for this one. In almost every case, a table in Access needs to have a field somewhere in it that is guaranteed to have a different value on every row. I mean every row, so you couldn't make use of the Pages field for instance, because eventually you'd be bound to end up with two books with the same number of pages. The easiest way to do this is to add another field just for the job. That's normally referred to as the ID field. So, click Yes on the crazy dialog box which is too wide to show effectively in the post…
Now go ahead and save the table again, and close it. When you've done that, run through the process again to create an Author table that looks like this. Same deal with the ID field. Just let it be created.
Click on the Database Tools tab, and then click the Relationships button. Add both of the tables using the Show Tables dialog.
Close the dialog when you've finished, and take a break for a moment. Let me explain. Tables in Access generally relate in special ways. The most common of these is what is called a many to one relationship. In our case, for each author there can be many books. To create this relationship, click on ID in the Author table, and drag it to the Author field in the Book table.
Access asks you for some details for the relationship. The only change you need to make is to tick the Enforce Referential Integrity box. Then click on Create.
Close the relationships window, and save the changes.
Another thing that helps make it easier to use the Book table. What actually gets saved in the Author field is the ID of the author from the Author table, but that's a bit difficult to make use of, because you'd have to go and look up the other table to check on the correct value. So we're going to set things up so that it looks up the author name all by itself. Sensibly enough, this is called a lookup. First, open the Author table and add some information.
Fill out the fields as noted. You're going to need a more in-depth tutorial to explore the reasons for the settings, but this will suffice for now. Close the table, save it, and reopen it in the Datasheet view again. Move to the Author field, and you'll see a combo box appear. Click the arrow, and you'll see a list of authors. Click the correct one, and move on. Go ahead and fill out the rest of the records.
And that's it. You've successfully replicated the spreadsheet you had at the start, and now you can use it to build queries, forms and reports which are much more comprehensive than anything Excel can manage. More on that in the next few posts. So, how did it go? Let me know how much fun you had with this Microsoft Access tutorial. Oh, and have you read any of the books? Let me know in the comments. Related posts
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So you went out and got yourself a new mobile phone or maybe you just want to spruce up your existing device. Either way most new mobile communication devices accept MP3's as ringtones.
Blogging and blogs have been on the forefront for quite some time now. With millions of blogs out there, covering a variety of topics, you can most likely find one that appeals to your tastes. No wonder, weblogs are assets to the readers and owners alike.
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Okay, let's start Access, and start making decisions. Two specific things before you can get started with tables.
Secondly, you need to choose a name for your Access project at the beginning. You can't go ahead and do things like you can with the other Office products.
The best way to get there is to click on the X at the top right to close the table, click the Create tab in the ribbon, and then click on Table Design. If you get lost, close Access down without saving anything, and then try again.
You'll be asked for a name for the table. Book might be a simple option. Another note. The table names are not file names. They are just components in the database called Classic Sci-fi. Think of multiple sheets in an Excel workbook.
….and a new field is added to the table. The field type is Autonumber, which means that a new value is automatically added for each row that you add to the table. Don't worry about it. It just happens.
Before we can start using the tables, we need to relate them to each other.
Open the Book table again by double-clicking on its name. Click the Design button. Click on the Author field, and then on the Lookup tab down below the field list.
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