MakeUseOf.com: “Cool Websites and Tools [June 28th]” plus 11 more

Cool Websites and Tools [June 28th]
The 14 Toughest Tech Questions [MakeUseOf Answers]
Convert Videos & Export Them To iTunes Easily With Evom [Mac]
5 More Cool Things To Do With An Old Computer
Velvet Brigade – Show Off Your Fashion Style With A Chance To Get Your Designs Made
Hot Tech Deals – Samsung 24in LED-LCD Monitor w/ HDTV Tuner for $269.99 + more
7 Websites That Will Help Your Career With Company Information & Anonymous Job Reviews
NoLED – Shows Notifications Even If Your Device Has No LED [Android 2.1+]
Customize Your Browser’s Start Page To Look Like The Windows 8 Theme
Test Your Computer For Security Misconfigurations With Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer
Does The Duracell myGrid Really Charge As Well As A Power Cord?
BranchOut Business Networking Rivals LinkedIn [News]

Posted: 28 Jun 2011 08:31 PM PDT

Check out some of the latest MakeUseOf discoveries. Most of the listed websites are FREE or come with a decent free account option. If you want to have similar cool website round-ups delivered to your daily email, subscribe here.

Add Your Website Here!

PhotoSync – is a simple web app that lets you transfer all of your Flickr photos to Facebook, and also keeps them in sync. It checks the Flickr account every hour so as you upload new pictures there, they'll automatically get copied to your Facebook account. Everything happens in the background. Read more: PhotoSync: Transfer & Sync Your Flickr Photos To Facebook

		yaM – is a web based tool for planning and organizing meetings. What differentiates it from the other meeting planners out there is its list of advanced features. It provides the ability to capture data and information related to the meeting, collaborate with the attendees, analyze things using its built-in tools, etc. Read more: yaM: Online Meeting Organisation & Collaboration Tool

		MegaVideo09 – MegaVideo is a popular video hosting website, but after a certain viewing time limit has been reached, you have to wait before you can view further videos. These time limits can be easily bypassed using a service called MegaVideo 9, a free to use web service that lets you bypass the time limits on MegaVideo videos. Read more: MegaVideo9: A Tool To Bypass Megavideo Time Limit

		History Calendar – While Chrome is the favorite browser of many Internet users, its History page interface could use some major improvements such as browsing the history of a particular date. This improvement and a few others to Chrome's History page are added by a tool called History Calendar, a simple browser extension for Google Chrome. The extension adds a helpful side window to the History page. Read more: History Calendar: Easily View Chrome Browsing History By Date

		Block-Disposable-Email – If you are running a web service you would not want users to create one-time accounts using disposable email addresses. This would contaminate your userbase and be counterproductive. A useful tool to check whether or not an email address is one-time or bogus, is a site called “Block Disposable Email”. Read more: Block-Disposable-Email: Easily Detect Fake & Disposable Email Addresses

Add Your Website Here!

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.

Cool Websites and Tools [June 28th] is a post from: MakeUseOf

What Is Evom?

Evom, a product of the Little App Factory, enables you to drag-and-drop and convert videos quickly and easily. It lets you enjoy online content without being tethered to the web and, like I stated in the introduction, it was built for speed. It is designed to convert movie files and Flash videos quickly, taking advantage of your Mac’s multi-core processor, allowing you to get content off of the web and onto your favorite devices.

With Evom, you can drag folders, individual files, or links into the program’s window to start, and your items will be converted for you and exported directly into iTunes or – optionally – saved to your desktop. Once converted, your videos will be compatible with your iPods, iPhones, iPads, and many other devices.

How Do I Use Evom?

Although I gave you a rough idea of how Evom works above, let’s take a closer look at the actual process from start to finish. The first thing you’ll need to do if you want to take advantage of Evom’s power is head over to the website and download the app.

export videos to itunes

Once you’re ready to go with Evom, just drag or specify the video folder you would like to convert video from. If you leave the iTunes option selected, your videos will go straight to your iTunes folder after conversion to be synced with your iOS devices.

When you drop video files that you want to convert, a configuration box will pop up asking you to specify the output format, as well as the output folder, title, and quality of video.

how to add videos to itunes

If you don't want Evom to convert videos for some specific device, you can always choose to convert video in a specific format. Evom supports the AVI, FLV, MP4, HTML5, MOV, MPG, and WMV formats. Also, you can extract audio out of a video file and convert it into OGG and MP3 format.

As a side note, Evom is also capable of converting selected videos directly to your Apple TV in a compatible format.

export videos to itunes

Once you’ve made all of your selections and set up Evom just the way you want it, you can go ahead and click Convert to transform your files into watchable ones.

If you’re a fan of video conversion, I also recommend you check out MacX Video Converter and Handbrake too. Will you be using Evom to convert your videos? Or do you have another favorite?

Convert Videos & Export Them To iTunes Easily With Evom [Mac] is a post from: MakeUseOf

More articles about: converter, iTunes, video converter, videos

1. Turn It Into A Web Server

Many of us here probably own a website. Well, if you’re up to the challenge, you can set up your own server to serve your websites from. Having your own server gives you the advantage of controlling what software to use, as well as the freedom to upgrade flexibly. Running out of server space? Just add another hard drive! Are the pages loading too slowly? Just add more RAM!

old computers

Dave has previously detailed how to build a Linux web server in two parts.

2. Experiment With Viruses

things to do with an old computer

If you can’t turn it into a web server, you can use it as your torture machine. Abuse it anyway you want, install anything and everything. If you ever saw some free app you like the look of, but aren’t sure whether it’s a virus or not, you now have a sandbox to test it in. This is a real sandbox, not those fancy software sandbox techniques that are so common nowadays.

It doesn’t even have to be a virus. If you’re experimenting with dangerous software, you can do all your damage here. Just make sure to keep a Windows install disc handy.

3. Modify It

things to do with an old computer

The next thing to try is to turn it into art. At least you can appreciate the supple curves of your computer as it sits there collecting dust. There are many mods on the Internet, such as these ones here. Some mods also serve a purpose. For example, you can turn the computer into a photo frame. If it’s new enough to have a built-in WiFi card, you can also connect it to your Flickr feed, or something similar.

4. Destroy It

Failing any useful task that the computer can handle, you can enjoy watching it die. Why just throw it away? How about destroying it?

If you haven’t got a new computer yet, your old computer may help you raise the cost of the new one. It may not be worth the new one, but the amusement of blowing it up certainly is, as this YouTube user has proven.

5. Recycle it

old computers

For the more environmentally-conscious, there’s always the option to recycle it. First, make sure all the useful and surviving parts are out. This could be used later. You never know, your new computer’s RAM may fail and 2GB of working RAM is better than 8GB of non-working RAM. Before you attempt that though, make sure your new computer can take your older one’s RAM. Also make sure that any personal sensitive information has been securely wiped from the hard drive.

There are many computer recycling programs around. You can go to a manufacturer or to your region’s local recycling program. Here’s Apple’s recycling page, which also holds a list for some US states. Saikat wrote a great post last year detailing 10 websites that help you recycle or reuse old stuff.

So do you know of any other possible uses for an old computer that we haven’t listed here? Or have you tried one of the above? If so, how did it go?

Image Credits: Monochrome, zdw, Enric Martinez, The Official CTBTO Photostream, SobControllers

5 More Cool Things To Do With An Old Computer is a post from: MakeUseOf

More articles about: geeks, hardware, hobby, Interesting, offbeat, recycling

Voters

The voters are the fashionistas which make all the big decisions around Velvet Design. Create an account using Facebook or your own details and you can get straight into it. All your votes are collected on your profile so you can browse them whenever you like and show off your fantastic fashion sense to your friends.

get your designs out there

Designers

Designers are the life blood of Velvet Brigade. Without new designs there’d be nothing to vote on and no clothes to make. Anyone can become a designer – it simply requires you to submit a decent sketch of your garment. Winning designs are created for sale and the designer receives 5% of the sales proceeds via cheque or PayPal. Anyone worldwide can be a designer, so what are you waiting for?

get your designs out there

To become a designer, take a read of the designer guide and create your sketch, then submit to Velvet Design for approval. When your design is approved (within 3 days) you can promote it to your friends and networks. You’ll have 30 days to collect as many votes as you can for your design before the voting phase expires. Every week, Velvet Design explores the designs which have just finished their voting phase, then chooses a winner according to votes and self-promotion of the garment. If your design wins, they’ll make your design and sell it through the Velvet Design site.

get your designs out there

Ideas For The Future

Velvet Design is still in beta, so there’s plenty of room to play with ideas at this stage. My personal opinion is that Velvet Design should help users to promote their favourite designs a little more, by offering RSS feeds for each user. It would also be great for Velvet Design to suggest a more visual way of sharing designs with other social networks – at the moment they suggest sharing a simple link, whereas an option to share the picture on something like Tumblr would do more to share each design.

It would also be great to offer an HTML/Javascript badge showing a user’s most recent votes which users could promote on their own website. Basically, Velvet Design should attempt to do whatever it takes to keep the voters voting, and I think that allowing the voters to show off their great taste is an easy way to achieve this.

get your designs made

More Fashion

If you love your clothes, you’ll love these articles too:

So, will you be submitting a design to Velvet Brigade soon?

Velvet Brigade – Show Off Your Fashion Style With A Chance To Get Your Designs Made is a post from: MakeUseOf

More articles about: clothes, fashion, lifestyle

Vault.com

Ping My Company

looking up company information

The career related website's 'disclaimer' reveals its true purpose (as you can see on the screenshot). Just a scroll down the comments gives you an idea of the companies that are doing well in the employee's eyes and the ones that aren't. As a 'Pinger' you do not need to get registered and can contribute anonymously your feedback on the company you are working for or never want to work for. Green colored comments show approvals and the red ones augur disapprovals. It's also a forum for companies to respond to the issues raised by the community.

Rateyourjob-Rateyourboss

looking up company information

It was difficult for me to gauge the popularity of the site, but at least it's pretty much updated with rants against the guy who is above you on the job ladder. This site does not require a log-in and you can browse or read comments on quite a few jobs and bosses. Of course, the comments are bound to be majorly subjective.

JobBite

looking up company information

You can use the alphabetical listing or the search bar to dive into the index of companies and learn about their work cultures. Each company gets a salary rating along with an organizational one on this plain Jane website.

Wovox

learning about a company

Wovox says it in photos and pictures. It is an assemblage of workplace photos and reviews that enables you to get a good idea of the workplace you might be employed in. Snoop around the site and look at pictures, watch videos, and read reviews. Discover a company and its culture.

Career Leak

learning about a company

This website lets you research employers, job description, and companies. Find out salary information, and get interview tips. The job reviews and salary information are first person accounts by people who are (or were) employed in the companies.

Glassdoor

Using Eight

The concept of the start page has become popular for the past several years in the browser world. Every time a user opens a new tab, they will see a graphical list of the sites they visited the most. So instead of repeatedly typing in the URLs of those favorite sites, users can just click on the sites on the start page.

For the following walkthrough, I used Firefox. But the steps should be more or less the same under any other compatible browser.

Replacing your browser’s default Windows 8 start page with Eight is easy. First, you have to download the 2.5MB theme package (top right of the page under “Add To Favorites“) and extract it to a folder in your computer. Please make sure that this folder will not be moved or changed in the future, since doing so will break the file path used by your browser.

windows 8 start page

Then, use the “File – Open File” menu in your browser to navigate to and open the “index.htm” inside Eight’s folder. Close all other opened tabs before you continue.

browser start page

To set Eight as the default start page, go to “Preferences – General” (under Tools menu in Windows or the Firefox menu in Mac) and choose “Show my home page” from “Startup – When Firefox starts“.

browser start page

Then, click the “Use current pages” button, and close the Preferences window. If you have other open tabs while doing this, other tabs will also be recorded as the home page. So make sure they are closed.

browser start page

Now, every time you open your browser, Eight will show up. You can click on one of the links to open the URL destination.

Customizing Eight

Eight comes with twelve default pre-set links: YouTube, Yahoo!, Facebook, BBC News, CNN, Grooveshark, Last.fm, DeviantArt, Twitter, Wikipedia, iTunes, and Google. Users can quickly go to those sites by clicking on the visual links. But everybody has their own preferences, and luckily Eight is fully customizable. You can change the destination links, logos, and even the background color of each visual link according to your preferences.

If you want to customize Eight, you can find a very short explanation in the Readme.txt file inside Eight’s folder. But let’s now replace one of the visual links (thumbnails) with MakeUseOf’s link, so we can fully understand how the process works.

First, let’s open the “Sketch.jpg” file for our guidance. We can see the reference number, location, and maximum icon size for each thumbnail.

internet start page

Let’s pick one square as the location for the MakeUseOf visual link. I picked box number 10 because I want the largest possible size but I don’t want to replace Google (box number 6). This means I should put the logo inside a 420 x 205 pixel image area with a transparent background. You can use any decent image application to prepare the thumbnail. The instructions suggest that you use a white logo for clarity, but you can use any kind of color for your logo. Give a name to your thumbnail logo and put the image file inside the thumbs folder.
The next step is to open the “source.xml” file using a simple text editor to edit the source parameters.

internet start page

Find the entry that you want to edit and change the name, URL, and image name. You’ll see the new thumbnail after refreshing the page. You can repeat the process to change the other thumbnails. Please note that the numbering in the source starts with 0 while in the sketch, it starts with 1.

windows 8 start page

Customizing thumbnails in Eight is not difficult, but the setting up could take up to a couple of hours, especially the image editing process. However, once everything is set up, all of your favorite sites will be on the tip of your mouse.

Do you use a start page? Would you try Eight? Do you know any other similar tools? Tell us what you think and share your opinions using the comments below.

Customize Your Browser’s Start Page To Look Like The Windows 8 Theme is a post from: MakeUseOf

More articles about: browsers, customize, start pages, themes, windows 8

Getting Started

The startup interface of MBSA is very simple and basically offers only three options: scan a computer, scan multiple computers, or view existing security scan reports. The sidebar also offers links to the program documentation and the Microsoft security website.

security misconfiguration

Note that you require Administrator rights for all machines that you wish to scan. You can scan a single or multiple systems based on the computer name or IP address. If you select to scan multiple computers, you need to enter a domain name or a range of IP addresses.

For this demonstration I went with scanning a single computer.

security configuration

The scanning options are straightforward, although not necessarily clear for the inexperienced user. If you don’t understand what some of the options mean, click the > Scanning Options link at the bottom for detailed explanations. The information will load in a separate Internet Explorer window.

security configuration

The scan merely takes a few seconds and returns an overview of issues found in different categories. Each item is scored and a summary of the result is provided, along with links to further information material.

security configuration

Checks that were passed receive a green score, items that could not be checked are marked with a grey minus, room for improvements is highlighted by a blue score, a yellow score indicates a non-critical vulnerability and a red score alerts the user to a failed check and thus a critical security issue. Follow the respective links for detailed information about what was scanned or instructions on how an issue can be corrected.

All reports are saved and can be accessed at a later time for reference. You can also print or copy your report to the clipboard.

security misconfiguration

Conclusion

Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer is a very good tool to quickly get an overview of security-related settings on your Windows machine. Instructions for correcting detected security misconfigurations are very clear and should therefore be easy to follow for the average user. Overall, the documentation is surprisingly detailed and well done, almost as if Microsoft expected non-IT folks to use this tool.

It must be said though that fixing most configurations does require some basic understanding of how Windows works. For example an issue with the file system is not necessarily security relevant and the instructions do not provide information on how to find the drive that doesn’t run NTFS. Moreover, some issues require advanced knowledge and should be left to the experts to be fixed, for example setting a password expiration.

For more information, also have a look at this article from Microsoft Patterns & Practices: How To Use the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer.

What is your opinion? Do you think this is a useful tool? Please share your thoughts!

Image credits: beboy

Test Your Computer For Security Misconfigurations With Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer is a post from: MakeUseOf

More articles about: administration, analyzer, Microsoft, network, scanner, security, security tips, troubleshoot

How It Works

duracell mygrid

The Duracell myGrid's concept is simple. Rather than plugging in your mobile phone to charge it, the myGrid lets you charge the device by placing it on the pad's surface. Your phone will then begin to charge automatically.

It's like magic, right? Well, not quite. Although the convenience is the driving force behind this concept, you can't just plop any old phone on the pad. That's because you need to have a connection between the myGrid and your phone, and that can only be provided by an appropriate adapter.

These adapters plug in via the phone's mini-USB port and extend around the rear of the phone. Alternatively, you can use what Duracell calls a “power sleeve”. This is simply a phone case with contacts on the rear side which negate the need for the adapter.

Does It Work?

Yes, usually. The technology here isn't complex or unheard of. Some brands of electric toothbrushes, for example, have used it for some time in order to charge the built-in batteries via a stand.

However, you'll may notice that your phone doesn't charge as quickly with the myGrid as it does with a normal power adapter if you're charging multiple phones at once. Some reviews also noted that bumping the pad or touching it with a metal object would interrupt charging, which could be a real problem if you wanted to put it on a busy desktop.

Far From Perfect

duracell mygrid charger

The Duracell myGrid can handle charging up to four phones at once, so it could ideally let you toss aside four separate power adapters. That's an impressive reduction in clutter, but there's a catch – several, actually.

Convenience is supposed to be the greatest advantage of this device, but the adapters themselves can be a pain. Since they take up the phone's mini-USB port, which in most cases is also used to transfer data between PCs and the device, you'll have to remove it frequently. In fact, its general bulk and unattractive appearance makes it unlikely you'll want to leave the house with the adapter attached.

duracell mygrid

Some phones, like the iPhone, have the “power sleeve” case available – but it is also bulky and unattractive.

These problems are due to the fact that the myGrid uses conductive, rather than inductive, charging. With conductive charging, an actual connection between metal contacts is required to charge a device, which is why the adapters are required.

Oh, and about those four phones at once. While the technology may be capable of pushing power to all of those devices, the mat itself will have trouble fitting them if they’re large. The mat is about 9 inches by 9 inches, so you'll realistically fit two or three smartphones on there depending on their sizes.

Conclusion

So does the Duracell myGrid charge as well as a power cord? Yes, it does. It will charge your phone just like a power cord. Only you don't need the cord, which is nice.

But the problem is the price. Duracell's myGrid costs around fifty dollars, which isn't a huge sum, but still worth some thought before parting ways. And that's just for the starter kit. If you want to use the pad with numerous phones you'll need to buy more adapters or sleeves.

Is gaining the ability to place your phone on a charging pad rather than connecting it to a cord worth the price? Perhaps in a few limited cases, but for most people that's a lot of money to spend for a different way to charge their phone.

What do you think? Worth the money or just a passing fad? Would you seriously consider buying one?

Does The Duracell myGrid Really Charge As Well As A Power Cord? is a post from: MakeUseOf

More articles about: battery, mobile phones, technology explained, wireless