MakeUseOf.com: “Cool Websites and Tools [July 2nd]” plus 6 more

Cool Websites and Tools [July 2nd]
How To Customize, Delete & Arrange Photos In Your Facebook Photo Album
Anokimobi, LapDawg and Sticky Password Pro Giveaway Winners
Hot Tech Deals – Dell Inspiron 14R for $549.99+ more
Brain Workshop: A Game Scientifically Shown To Make You Smarter
How To Install Arch Linux On Your Computer [Part 2]
Skype For Android 2.1+ Now With Video Calls [News]

Posted: 02 Jul 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!

Fundraise – Are you looking for an easy way to set up an online fundraiser? If yes then you require a tool that lets you set up any type of fundraiser and supports organizations of all sizes. FundRaise offers precisely that. It is is a web service that lets you browse various fundraisers and create online fundraisers. Read more: Fundraise: Easily Set Up Online Fundraisers For Any Cause

		CSS3 Shapes – Web designs often feature many commonly used shapes such as rectangles, circles, and triangles. If you are a developer about to use these shapes in your design, you can now save the time required to code in CSS3 thanks to a site called CSS3 Shapes, that provides users with the CSS3 codes for commonly used shapes. Read more: CSS3 Shapes: Get CSS3 Code Snippets For Most Commonly Used Shapes

		Timeslot – Keeping a to-do list for the day helps you to not forget any tasks you were planning to get completed. While usually to-do lists only let you add names of tasks, a new web service called Timeslot lets you add times to your tasks and helps create a complete schedule of the day, in a very convenient way. Read more: Timeslot: Conveniently Create Your Daily Schedule

		JobMuncher – Most online job listing websites do nothing more than letting you list a job. People viewing the job details can send their applications to the specified email address with the listing website not having any part in managing the applications. "JobMuncher" is an exception to that rule. Read more: JobMuncher: Create A Job Listing & Manage The Applications You Receive

		NotSharingMy.Info – Disposable email addresses are fine as far as anonymity is concerned; but when you want to receive emails while staying anonymous, you have to look beyond traditional disposable email addresses. That is where Not Sharing My Info steps in, a free to use web service that lets you create a ‘mask’ for your existing email address. Read more: NotSharingMy.Info: Create A Mask For Your Email Address To Ensure Online Anonymity

Add Your Website Here!

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Cool Websites and Tools [July 2nd] is a post from: MakeUseOf

1. HOW TO: Customize The Facebook Photo Album Cover (Thumbnail)

When you create a Facebook photo album, one of the photos is automatically selected to create the photo album thumbnail. This thumbnail is a clickable image taking you and your friends to the photos inside (in your profile “Photos” section).

To customize your photo album thumbnail, you will need to do the following:

Go to your profile, click “Photos” in the left-hand column, click the album cover thumbnail to access the album;
Click a tiny blue link “Edit Album” and then “Edit photos“:

Scroll down to the photo you need and set it as the album cover:

2. HOW TO: Delete Multiple Photos From A Photo Album

If you were ever wondering how to delete many photos from an album (while still keeping the album), here are the necessary (yet not really obvious) steps:

Go to your profile, click “Photos” in the left-hand column, click the album cover thumbnail to access the album;
Click a tiny blue link “Edit Album” and then “Edit photos“:
The next page will let you check the boxes below the photos you want to remove and delete them on in bulk (here are a few checkbox helpers for you as an added bonus):

3. How TO: Arrange Photos In Any Album

This one is easy but not many people are actually aware of the fact that they can do it – photos in your album can be dragged around.

This means that to change the order of your photos in an album, you need to:

Go to your profile, click “Photos” in the left-hand column, click the album cover thumbnail to access the album;
Hover over any photo until you see a four-arrow icon, left-click and drag the photo to where you want it to appear:

More Facebook photo guides and tips we have covered previously:

Here’s a great tool that lets you download all Facebook photos with your tag as well as these 3 apps to download Facebook photo albums. Here’s yet another great tool to easily download entire Facebook albums called Pick ‘n Zip.
Don’t forget to bookmark 10 solid tips to safeguard your Facebook privacy (to control which photos are available to all your friends or even random people as well as be able to block any of your friends from seeing your private photos).

Any other useful Facebook photo sharing tips I missed? Please share them in the comments!

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How To Customize, Delete & Arrange Photos In Your Facebook Photo Album is a post from: MakeUseOf

More articles about: Facebook, photo albums, photos

Sticky Password Pro

Rigoberto Garcia
Dan Nowak
Willy
Perry Lowe
Leanne Hamby
Yen
Dana Simmelink
Theodore
Harshana
Annette Whyte
Janice Jacoby
Jonathan Biggs
Mike
Pedro M Cabanillas
Katherine Hutter
Ayman Mahmoud
Lisa Kidder
Abhinav Dhiman
Vern Hoffman
Roger Gardner
Samsudeen Hussain
Brian Rahenkamp
Paul
Ted Betts
Mayank

LapDawg

Gustavo Ibarguengoytia
Leow Yen Lin
Carol Rowley
Tim Nicholls Harrison
Robert Randolph

Anokimobi e-pouch

Stephen Kelley
Karl Joseph Ku
Jim Aspinwall
Rachel Ohana-Levy
Brian Lawrence

Congratulations to all! To the Sticky Password Pro winners, your licenses have already been sent via email. To the others, we’ve sent you an email requesting for shipping information. Please reply that email in 48 hours to claim your prize.

Enjoy!

Anokimobi, LapDawg and Sticky Password Pro Giveaway Winners is a post from: MakeUseOf

What It Does

As I said, this free brain game can improve certain aspects of your mental faculties, as this 2008 article in Wired pointed out. The main improvement this gives your brain is the ability to think on your feet. To quote the article,

Fluid intelligence measures how people adapt to new situations and solve problems they’ve never seen before. Fluid intelligence differs from crystallized intelligence, which takes into account skills and knowledge that have been acquired — like vocabulary, grammar and math.

This is significant. Before the method employed by Brain Workshop was created and tested it was assumed that fluid intelligence could not be improved.

Want to know more about how this process works? You can read the original study, if you want, or the other two seperate confirmations. All seem to agree that playing regularly, around 20 minutes a day, is ideal.

How To Use It

So what does this software look like? The best way to get an idea is to watch this video:

As you can tell, the game is not focused on graphics:

free brain games

The point is to increase the function of your memory. In each round, a square shows up in a particular part of the grid, and a letter is read aloud. You must keep track of what letters are read and where the square was when they were read, then find matches later. If you find a match you press one or two keys in order to point out what you’ve found. The default mode, Dual 2-Back, means you must remember what was on the board two rounds ago.

brain games fun

Do well and you’ll hear some nifty music. You are scored after each game, and will move up to harder versions of the game as you improve. The step after Dual 2-Back, for example, is Dual 3-Back. This means you must match squares and letters from three rounds ago. This, to me, is a great deal harder, but I imagine it will seem easy if I ever get to Dual-16 Back.

Download

You can download Brain Workshop here, if you’re interested. It works on Linux, Windows and Intel/PPC Macs. The main interface might be a little foreign to some users, because it’s keyboard driven instead of mouse driven. Having said that, it’s not too hard to figure this out.

Similar, albeit not academically researched, ideas include:

Let us know how much smarter you become in the comments below, or please do recommend other free brain games you may know about.

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Brain Workshop: A Game Scientifically Shown To Make You Smarter is a post from: MakeUseOf

More articles about: brain, cross, game reviews, games, memory

Updating The System

First, boot up into your system and log in as root (the only user configured right now).
Once you’re in, you’ll need to refresh your repositories with pacman -Syy.
Next you need to update all packages with pacman -Syu. It will tell you that pacman itself needs to be updated first, so hit y for all prompts.
Once that completes, you need to run pacman-db-upgrade so that pacman works properly after the new version is installed, as it should tell you once pacman is updated.
Finally, run pacman -Syu one more time to install all the other updates that were put aside, and hit y for all changes requested.Then sit back while it downloads and installs.

Adding A User

Next you should add your own user. This can be achieved with adduser. So run that command and fill out the information. Type in your username, and leave the User ID and Initial group blank. For additional groups, you need to add yourself to numerous groups to gain permissions to use each one. To try to get as many as possible, add audio,lp,optical,storage,video,wheel,games,power,scanner. Make double sure that you add wheel, as this is required for the next step. All other fields can remain blank. It will ask you to confirm, then it’ll request other optional information that doesn’t really need to be filled out, and finally your desired password.

Give Sudo Permissions

Sudo is a great tool as it allows you to run commands with root permissions even though you’re not actually logged into the root user account. If you didn’t install sudo in Part 1, you can do so by typing pacman -S sudo. To be able to actually use sudo with your account, you’ll need to enter EDITOR=nano visudo and uncomment the line %wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL. Save, and that’s it. Now you can leave the root account to the side and use sudo in front of all your commands.

Install The Sound Base

For sound, you need to type pacman -S alsa-utils alsa-plugins. This will install the base system for your audio.

Install The Graphics Stack

Next you need to install your graphics setup. To get the graphical server, run pacman -S xorg-server xorg-xinit xorg-utils xorg-server-utils mesa xorg-twm xorg-xclock xterm. Afterwards you need to install the driver that works for your system. There is quite a long list, so I’d suggest you look here to find the right one. Remember, pacman -S [package name] will install it. I’d also suggest the same when installing input drivers.

You also need to install a system package called dbus. What it actually does is very hard to explain (something about allowing programs to communicate with each other), but it is required by GNOME, which we will install later. Install it with pacman -S dbus, start it with rc.d start dbus, and add dbus under DAEMONS(..dbus..) in /etc/rc.conf with your favorite editor.

To test out the graphical server, use startx. If all goes well (if you get something like the screenshot), enter exit. If not, you’ll need to troubleshoot by looking here.

Installing GNOME

You’re almost done! Finally we get to install GNOME itself. To do this, run pacman -S gnome gnome-extra gdm. Let all of that install, as it’ll take some time. When it’s all done, you should run modprobe fuse and then add it to /etc/rc.conf as MODULES=(fuse). The FUSE module is another tricky component that is hard to explain, but is highly recommended to set up. In the same config file, you’ll also need to add gdm to the DAEMONS list as you did with dbus. When you’re done, save, and restart. You should now see the GDM loading.

Conclusion

Congratulations! You finally installed a working GNOME system with Arch! There’s still plenty you can do and configure, but everything from here on out is up to you. If you need any help, I highly suggest that you look at Arch’s Wiki, as it’s one of the best of any distro. There is also a forum for Arch users where you can ask any specific questions that you may have.

If you’ve installed GNOME with Arch now, how are you liking it? If not, do you think it’s too complicated to get a working system in order? Let us know in the comments!

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How To Install Arch Linux On Your Computer [Part 2] is a post from: MakeUseOf

More articles about: install, Linux distro review, operating system