MakeUseOf.com: “Cool Websites and Tools [September 7th]” plus 8 more |  |
- Cool Websites and Tools [September 7th]
- Check Out MakeUseOf’s New T-Shirt!
- Convert Any File To PDF Format Using Nitro Reader [Windows]
- How To Tweak Your Facebook Places Security Settings
- Hot Tech Deals [Sep 7th]
- Document Your Life & Improve Your Photography Skills With Shuttercal
- 3 Great Websites To Learn About Art And Its History
- Manage Your Fonts With The Fonts Panel & Font Book [Mac]
- 5 Extensions To Add Calendar & Task Manager To Thunderbird 3
| Cool Websites and Tools [September 7th] Posted: 07 Sep 2010 08:31 PM PDT
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. Hey Facebookers, make sure to check out MakeUseOf page on Facebook. Over 24,000 fans already!
    
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| Check Out MakeUseOf’s New T-Shirt! Posted: 07 Sep 2010 06:30 PM PDT
The “Tux Pad” shirt shows the Linux penguin holding an Apple iPad. The shirt is a very nice dark grey colour with the MakeUseOf logo on the arm. And for the first time, this T-shirt is also available in “Baby Tee” size for all the discerning ladies out there. Check them out below!
Each T-shirt is only $16.95 and shipping. If Linux and Apple are not your thing, then check out the T-shirt store for our other bestselling designs! Hey Facebookers, make sure to check out MakeUseOf page on Facebook. Over 24,000 fans already!
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| Convert Any File To PDF Format Using Nitro Reader [Windows] Posted: 07 Sep 2010 04:31 PM PDT
Today we have a number of free and open source solutions to create PDF files. Better yet, these tools allow us to create the document in our familiar software environment, say Microsoft Word, and convert them to PDF format. One such great app is Nitro Reader, which is free to use and is loaded with a lot of great features. OverviewNitro Reader supports both Windows 32 bit and 64 bit platforms. On the download page, there is a field to enter your email address to get email updates about Nitro Reader. Submitting the email address is a not a mandatory requirement and you can download the file straight away. Once the download is complete, the installation is very quick and does not include any other bundled toolbars or trialware. After installation, Nitro Reader set itself as the default PDF reader of choice without giving a choice, which I found a bit annoying. You can revert this back by going into the Preferences section. Reading PDF Files
Nitro Reader has a clean, familiar ribbon interface just like Microsoft Office and a light footprint running smoothly without hogging system resources. It comes with the standard features we have come to expect from a standard PDF reader. Tasks and tools are separated appropriately for easy access.
The Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) is extremely customizable and you can pick & choose the shortcuts you use often to create an easily accessible group. Nitro Reader's panes are context specific ie. they are displayed or hidden depending on the content on display. An option to notify special features in the PDF file like security restrictions, digital certificates, or form fields is also available in Nitro Reader.
Accessing multiple PDF files is such a delight with a browser-like tabbed interface. While reading multiple documents, it is possible with Nitro Reader to set different page view settings for each of the documents that are open. Creating PDF files
Nitro Reader can create PDF files from a whopping three hundred different file formats. PDF creation process is extremely simple. Select a file from the disk, choose the file optimization level (to reduce the file size), assign a location to save the created file and you are all done. Nitro Reader creates the PDF file keeping the layout and style of the original document completely intact. Content Extraction
Often we find the content formatting in the file to be too distracting to read or to save the images embedded in the file. Nitro Reader does a very fine job in extracting both text and images from the PDF file. The text extracted even the index without much damage to the original formatting & alignment. Final ThoughtsFor a free app, Nitro Reader is loaded with an unbelievable set of features. Nitro Reader also can save the data entered in a PDF form even after closing it until you reset it. To add a digital signature, all you have to do is upload an image and just start signing documents away. Transparency is automatically added to the images to give a watermark-like look and you can add multiple signatures featuring multiple users as well. If you are interested in other Acrobat Reader alternatives check out our coverage here. While you’re at it, you might also want to learn to use AnyBizSoft PDF to Word Converter and to turn all your PDF files into flash movies! What are your thoughts on Nitro Reader? I consider this app to be the best and would love to hear from you if there are better alternatives to convert files to PDF format.
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| How To Tweak Your Facebook Places Security Settings Posted: 07 Sep 2010 02:31 PM PDT
It’s cool because you can tell your friends where you happen to be in case they want to join you. You can also see where your friends are. It’s Facebook’s way of integrating your online life with your “real” life.
There have been some rumors going around about it though. People saw it appear and began to think that their locations were automatically being broadcasted to the whole world. Think about the security implications a move like that would have made! Let me be the one to tell you that it is certainly not the case. Another problem I have begun to see several users run into is not understanding the privacy features of Places. We’ve been trying to figure those things out for a long time and it seems every time we finally do work it out, they change everything again. Go figure. Check out some MakeUseOf articles that will help – links are at the end of this article. Facebook did however, come out and share with us the ins and outs of Places’ privacy settings. Let me quickly share some tips and links that should put you on the right road. Decide What You Want To Share & How It Is SharedThere are various aspects of Places you have privacy control over. Check-InsA check-in is when you tell friends in a post where you are. For instance, if you’re hanging at a coffee shop, you can check in there to tell friends you’re there. You can control who sees your checkins in the privacy settings area.
You’ll see the check-in setting on the overview.
Notice that you can also customize the setting by clicking on Customize settings. Scroll down until you see Places I check into. Realize that you can go beyond limiting your privacy to just sharing your location to friends and limit it to either a contact group or even just an individual.
TaggingWe should be familiar with tagging by now. We know we can tag people in photos and even tag people via the @ symbol within updates. You may have also experienced being tagged in a note where someone either mentioned you or wants you to read it. With Places, people can tag you if they know you are in the same location as they are. This can be cool. People can use it to get together and connect with friends and colleagues. Some people may be a bit squeamish about it though. If I wanted to check in this place, I would have myself! OK, so you don’t want to be tagged in a place. There are several things you can do. You can remove the tag just the same way you would any other tag, or you can disable the ability for your friends to tag you altogether (a bit draconian, don’t you think?). Just hit up the same Customize settings and go to the Things others share section.
Here NowWhen and if you do decide to check in some place, you’ll notice an area showing who else of your friends are there.
You actually have control over whether or not you show up in this section when someone checks in. Go to things I share –> Include me in “People Here Now” after I check in and you can chose to enable or disable the option. There are even more options when it comes to your Places privacy settings. Check out this video Facebook put together to learn more: Get More Help & Give Feedback/SuggestionsSince there has been some confusion about Places, what it is, what it does, and the privacy settings, Facebook went ahead and put together a whole help section that should help some. Go to Help Center –> Places and you’ll find all kinds of helpful information, Facebook style. If you want to give some constructive suggestions, Facebook has posted a form just for you. Here’s some MakeUseOf articles that will help out with your Facebook security settings : 10 Solid Tips To Safeguard Your Facebook Privacy – Mahendra I hope some of these tips will aid you in your future Facebook Places endeavors. Tell me, have you begun using Places? Did you find the original proposition a little creepy like a lot of other people did?
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| Posted: 07 Sep 2010 01:15 PM PDT
For more fresh hot deals, visit our Hot Tech Deals page, which is constantly updated. Keep reading to find out today’s Hot Tech Deals.
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| Document Your Life & Improve Your Photography Skills With Shuttercal Posted: 07 Sep 2010 12:31 PM PDT
The concept of sharing daily photos is nothing new. Nancy wrote an article a few months back featuring 4 great photo websites, and we’ve covered sites like DailyBooth in our directory. However, if you are into taking daily photos and think the idea of calendar-based photography is pretty cool, you are going to love Shuttercal.
Introducing ShuttercalI should point out that in Nancy’s article I alluded to earlier, Shuttercal had several favorable mentions in the comments. This tells me that a lot of people are already using the service and it is doing quite well. In fact, Shuttercal’s website states that they are “the world’s leading dedicated daily-photo website.” Whether this is true or not is still unseen, but I’ll let you be the judge. Shuttercal’s website also covers the ‘what’, ‘why’, and ‘how’ associated with using the service, which I will attempt to expand upon here. What Is Shuttercal?In its simplest form, Shuttercal is a calendar.
Upon first signing up for the service, you are taken to your MyCal page, which is your personal calendar where you can begin taking on your photography project.
To get started, you just click on a day and you are taken to the Add Photo screen. There you can upload your photo for that day and write a small caption for it. You can do this for any day you want, so you don’t have to worry about starting in the middle of a month or anything like that. Explore The CommunityIf you get bored or don’t know exactly how to proceed with your calendar project, you can take a look at what others in the community are doing with their calendars.
Click on the Explore tab to see thousands of new photos added by the community. New Photos is the default view, but you can also see New Comments, New Users, Top Faves, photos by date added, and a random calendar with Random Cal.
Click on any photo you want to see an enlarged version of it. Once you do that you can add it to your favorites, share the URL or embed the image, leave a comment, or share the photo on Facebook, Digg, or StumbleUpon. Discuss Projects With Others
One feature of Shuttercal that peaked my interest was the forum. This is where you can discuss projects and learn new things with the rest of the community. Discussions cover everything from general topics to Photo Talk, Projects & Meet-ups, Cameras & Equipment, Life, and Shuttercal-related topics like new features and tips & tricks. ConclusionIf you’re interested up to this point you might want to check out some of Shuttercal’s premium features like the ability to print your project and produce shoe boxes, postcards, and such. There is also a premium iPhone app as well. Will you be using Shuttercal to document your life with daily photos and improve your photography skills? Is there another service you’ve been using to accomplish this? Leave your thoughts, ideas, and comments below, and if you found this article useful, share it with your friends/followers! Follow MakeUseOf on Twitter. Includes cool extras.
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| 3 Great Websites To Learn About Art And Its History Posted: 07 Sep 2010 11:30 AM PDT
It can even serve as an urban means of expression, like graffiti art. So why not learn more about the styles and history of what inspires so much of a world today? And with some of the sites below, you don't even need to go to art school to learn about art. Explore and Learn – METExplore and Learn was developed as the educational part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and has an ever changing and large source of materials. A lot of what is available draws its inspiration, logically, from the particular exhibitions they are featuring that season. The advantage of that ever-changing collection is that new materials get added often and full educational materials are created to support teachers and professors who visit the museum. A lot of what is available is made of interactive Flash presentation of particular artists, themes, cultures, and even artists and includes materials especially for kids.
Another amazingly helpful section of the site is the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History which is almost a whole site in itself. It features a world map which allows you to search by areas, specific categories divided by time periods, and an extensive search engine of thematic essays as well as a search engine for artist, work title, materials and techniques among others, which brings up an awe-inspiring list of results.
Art History Resources On The Web
Maintained by Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe, an art history professor since 1995 and still updated today, this site is mostly a collection of links to various art topics, but what differentiates it from the other link resource sites, is the level of organization and absolutely astounding number of links relating to art history. Listing everything from pre-historic art, traveling through the whole world and into modern times, the site lists everything in the most detailed sub-categories, making delving into a topic and gaining a lot of information on it before moving on to the next topic a very simple process. There are very few aspects of art history that cannot be found with a few clicks. The look of the website is not appealing to the eyes, but I guess it takes a professor to figure out how to create a site that is conducive to learning, even if he is not a graphic designer. MOMA – Online Activities
If modern art is what you would like to learn about, the Museum of Modern Art has a very interesting educational website which features audio, video, online projects, interviews and materials for parents and educators. Because it is modern art, a lot of the resources foster experimentation and the Red Studio section of the site includes projects on how to write your own Dadaist poem, how to make a Photogram and even a sketch character contest. The site also links to specific sites of artists currently in exhibition and includes a lot of the original videos currently used at the museum. It is an affordable way to see some of MOMA without having to come to New York, or for New Yorkers like me, it's a good way to prepare to visit an exhibition, by learning more about it before you even make it there. What each and everyone of us considers art is immeasurable, but one can always take advantage of the free resources we have today to learn more about the masters who influenced so much of our world, so explore and tell us about it. What other art sites do you use to learn about art? How do you find new exciting art works? Do you know any other educational art resources you'd like to share with us? Got Questions? Ask Them Now FREE on MakeUseOf Answers!
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| Manage Your Fonts With The Fonts Panel & Font Book [Mac] Posted: 07 Sep 2010 10:31 AM PDT
But if we are willing to spare a little bit more time digging, we can find many amazing things that we might not have known before. If you are a Mac user, you might have noticed that Apple pays special attention to the use of fonts. And you don’t have to be a typographer to make use of fonts. Here are several things you can do to manage fonts on your Mac to tap their potential. Summoning The FontsThe most obvious way to use the fonts is to use them in text. The quickest way to summon the list of fonts is to use “Command + T” or “Format – Font – Show Fonts” menu from any Cocoa-based text editor in your Mac – such as TextEdit and Bean.
The Font panel will open and you can use it to customize the font(s) that you are using in the text, starting from the simple settings like changing the font type and size to the more advanced options like changing the color and applying drop shadow.
If you click the settings button at the bottom of the window, you’ll get more options such as adding the used font setting to favorites, hide/show Preview and Effects toolbars, and Color Panel. Choosing “Typography” will open the Typography panel where you can further customize the font that you are using. But please note that different fonts have different customization levels. One font might give you more options than aother.
The settings button will also give you access to lots of characters and symbols that you can use in your texts. Just choose “Characters”
And, clicking on “Manage Fonts” will open up the “Font Book” window. Managing The FontsAside from the Fonts Panel, you can also open the Font Book by navigating to “Applications – Font Book.app” (or by using one of these application launchers). This free font manager allows you to easily add, remove, disable and other kinds of font management.
While it’s very obvious that you can add (or install) new fonts by clicking on the “Plus (+)” button under the “Font” column, Font Book also allows you to group fonts based on your own categories. To do that click the “Plus (+)” button under the “Collection” column. The yellow alert triangles next to the fonts mean you have duplicates in your collection. You can resolve the problem by right clicking on the duplicates and choose “Resolve Duplicates“.
Right clicking on the font (or group of fonts) will also allow you to disable the fonts that you rarely use. This will free up some system resources – very useful if you have a slow system or if you have too many fonts installed on your system by third-party applications.
The advantage of disabling the font instead of removing it is that you can easily enable the font anytime you need it again. Printing Type SamplesAnother trick that you can perform using Font Book is the ability to print out type samples. Whenever you need hard copy of font samples for reference – what will they look like off the screen – just select the fonts that you want to print and hit “Command + P” (or go to “File – Print” menu).
The only setting that you have to tinker with is the “Report Type” on the printing option page. This setting will determine the face of the print outs.
And here’s the example of a print out page, Repertoire Type.
Do you have your own tricks in managing fonts? You can share them using the comments below. And don’t forget to check out our other articles about fonts. Hey Facebookers, make sure to check out MakeUseOf page on Facebook. Over 24,000 fans already!
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| 5 Extensions To Add Calendar & Task Manager To Thunderbird 3 Posted: 07 Sep 2010 08:31 AM PDT
What really breathes life into Thunderbird is its ability to be personalized with themes, extensions, and plugins. Is your Thunderbird ready for a custom makeover? Per default, Thunderbird does not come with a calendar. Fortunately, a full calendar can easily be integrated. Here are 2 extensions to add a full-fledged calendar and task manager to Thunderbird and 3 to make use of it.
LightningWith Lightning you can easily upgrade Thunderbird to become your desktop time and task manager. Once installed, you will see two tiny new buttons on the very right of the tab bar: one opens a new tab for your Calendar, the other a tab for your Tasks.
As soon as you click the calendar tab, you enter a new world. On the left hand sidebar you see the current month and a list of your calendars. Click on > File > New > Calendar… in your Thunderbird toolbar to create a new one. You can add multiple calendars and color code them. On the right is your calendar in either day, week, multiweek, or month (default) view, with all upcoming events listed at the top of it. Through the menu at the top left you can toggle the list of upcoming events to show today’s events, events in the next 7, 14, or 31 days, events in this calendar month, all future events, or currently selected day. You can also search your events.
I will not go into details regarding the Task features, but it’s just as easy to use, so I’m sure you can figure it out. LightningButtonThis extension adds a set of new calendar buttons to Thunderbird. These buttons are insanely useful because you can now automatically attach email contents to events. This will come in handy, for example if you’re invited to a party and the email contains directions on how to get there. Not only will you be reminded of the event, you also don’t have to dig for the email to retrieve any meaningful details. After installing the extension, right-click an open space in the Thunderbird toolbar and select > Customize from the menu. This opens the > Customize Toolbar window. In that window find the buttons displayed below and drag them to their new home in the toolbar. Click > Done and that’s what you are.
The > Event… button becomes available when you select an email. The content of the email will automatically be loaded into the event > Description when you click the > Event… button. The > Task… button works the same way. The other buttons just give you quick access to adding a new event or task. The Calendar and Task buttons are redundant, but you may find them useful anyways. ThunderCalIf you can’t be bothered to set up an extension and if you are already using Google Calendar, you will be delighted about this simple solution. What it does is add a toolbar button to Thunderbird that opens Google Calendar in a separate tab within Thunderbird. Add the new button via the > Customize Toolbar window and enjoy!
You can actually run Google Calendar directly out of Thunderbird with Lightning. This will save you the Google log in every time you want to access your calendar. Check out my article How To Integrate Google Calendar Into Thunderbird for setup instructions. It’s easy and works like a charm! ThunderBirthDayDo you always forget people’s birthdays? Did you know you could add personal details, like birthdays to your addressbook in Thunderbird? If you have been doing that or if you’re looking for an easy reminder solution for upcoming birthdays, you must try ThunderBirthDay. First, open your address book, go through your contacts, open them with a double-click, and add their birthdays in the > Private tab.
Since ThunderBirthDay adds events to a calendar, it requires Lightning. When this is done, install the ThunderBirthDay extension. This extension only works with its own calendar.
TimelineWith this extension a Timeline is inserted above the status bar in Thunderbird. It displays events coming up during the next couple of hours or days. When you hover the mouse over it you can zoom in and out using the mouse wheel. The vertical red line indicates the current day and time, while all other entries are events from your calendars. Unfortunately, no event details are shown. However, you can open the edit event window by double-clicking its entry in the Timeline.
Countless articles have been written about Thunderbird on MakeUseOf. Here are a few of my favorites:
I will admit frankly that I slightly dominate this list! If you’re using Thunderbird, what do you think makes it better than Yahoo! or Google Mail? Is customization a key element? Got Questions? Ask Them Now FREE on MakeUseOf Answers!
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