Thursday, May 31, 2007

Assignment #87

A really good place to get caught up on the latest in Web apps is the netcast Net@Nite from Leo Laport and Twit. Here’s their website:

http://www.twit.tv/ITN

or you can just subscribe to the podcast from iTunes.

Anyway, episode 21 talked about Tumblr

http://www.tumblr.com/

It’s kind of a combination blog and scrapbook. You can add things to it really easily but there’re no comments allowed. It’s just the thing to keep stuff that you find on your wanderings around the Net.

Play!!

Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Assignment #86

After my email and blog post about OpenOffice the other day, I got this note from Kaj Kandler

“May I mention, that our Plan-B for OpenOffice.org

http://plan-b-for-openoffice.org/index

is becoming increasingly popular with librarians. And for the time being it is in free beta test as well. Forgive me the plug, somehow I need to get the word out. K

(We are) busy, creating screencasts for non technical users of OpenOffice”

Plan B’s Screencasts are free so check them out.

But also, don’t forget Youtube and Google videos for free instruction.

However, if you’re willing to spend some money ($25/mo) for instruction, try

http://movielibrary.lynda.com/html/index.asp

High quality screencasts and 1000’s of them. A lot of them are free. They’ll teach you everything you’ll ever need to know about things computer.

And don’t forget the Video Professor

http://www.videoprofessor.com/

He’s got lessons on all the most popular applications. He’ll let you go through about a third of each lesson for free THEN for $.99 you can get unlimited access to all his products for the next 99 hours. After that it’s $30/mo. Such a deal!!

Play!!

Assignment #85

Putting Your Bookmarks on the Web

OK I’ll admit that I’ve never gotten into Delicious http://del.icio.us/

I did register a couple of months ago but I couldn’t really get into the shared bookmark thing. However, I did use it over the weekend as I am tired of getting on a strange computer and having to type in all my destinations.

So… goto your browser and click on

File-Import and Export-Export Favorites if you’re using IE or

Bookmarks-Organize Bookmarks-File-Export if you’re using Firefox.

Put your Bookmarks-Favorites on your desktop.

Then go to Delicious and register if you haven’t done so. On you main page click on Settings and look for Bookmarks-Import/Upload. Upload that Bookmarks File you just saved on your desktop. It’ll take a few minutes to show up but you’ll then have all your bookmarks in one place ready and waiting.

Play!!

Friday, May 25, 2007

Assignment #84

So a patron came in the other day and wanted to know if there was anything that he could get for free that was a good word processor. I told him about OpenOffice. http://www.openoffice.org/ which is a free…clone(??) of Microsoft’s Office Suite. Our Base Historian swears by it.

I also showed him Google’s web based word processor and spreadsheet that more and more people are starting to use. Just goto Google-More-Documents.

And finally don’t forget you have a word processor with your Windows operating system already. It’s called Wordpad and you get to it through Start-Programs-Accessories. No, it doesn’t have Spell Check but you can’t have everything.

Play!!

Thursday, May 24, 2007

Assignment #83

Search

Ok, I’ve collected some search stuff in the last couple weeks so here it is all together.

First, here’s my new favorite meta-search tool

http://www.zuula.com/

Meta search means searching across several search engines simultaneously and with this one you can line up the results one after another. I especially like to use it for searching blogs.

Here’s a search engine for torrents (see assignment #32)

http://torrentscoop.com/

Now Google is, of course, still king so here’s

All things Google,

http://lloydi.com/blog/simplygoogleoriginal.htm

Google with no ads,

http://www.google.com/search?output=googleabout

and

GovDocs Google (that’s Government Documents for those of you not in the Lib Biz).

http://www.google.com/ig/usgov

And finally, here’s an interesting screencast about using Google to search for music and other interesting things.

http://fuvoo.com/FuvooPermaLink.aspx?PostID=660

Play!!

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Assignment #82

Adding Things to your Blog

A couple days ago I added a slideshow and music to my blog. Check it out by clicking the link down below. Here’s how I did it:

Lifehacker recently had a post about a site called FlickrSlidr

http://flickrslidr.com/index.php

It makes a slideshow out of your pictures on Flickr.

http://www.flickr.com/ (Assignment #2)

Now unless you want ALL your pictures on the slideshow you’ll need to either make a SET at Flickr or make sure all the pictures you do want have the same tag—like e.g. BLOGSET.

After you have your URL from Flickr go to FlickrSlidr and put it in. Put in the right tag if you did it that way, erase what’s there if you used sets. Change the H and W to 200 as 500 will be too big if you want it on the side like I have it. Click the blue box with the crazy Lolcats grammar. Make sure it works and then COPY the code.

Sign into your blog (I’m assuming it’s Blogger from Assignment #5) Click on Manage LAYOUT then ADD A PAGE ELEMENT then HTML/JAVA SCRIPT ADD TO BLOG. Paste in the code and save. Put the element where you want it and save.

Now go get your music playlist from Assignments #36 & #38.

It’s at http://projectplaylist.com/ if you can’t remember.

Back at LAYOUT click the bottom ADD A PAGE ELEMENT as the side area is too small. Make sure everything works.

Play!!

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Assignment #81

So here I am vanity surfing the other night and I come upon Helene Blower’s PowerPoint presentation called “Using Discovery & Play to Monitor New Technology” and the blog that archives this email is featured.—Cool. But what was cool, too was the site—SlideShare.

http://www.slideshare.net/

A place to go to share your presentation files.

Here’s one on the Beatles

http://www.slideshare.net/mcmrbt/teaching-popular-music/59

and here’s Helene’s presentation that features us on slides 9 & 10.

http://www.slideshare.net/hblowers/using-discovery-play-to-monitor-new-technology/2

Some of the files you can download, others you can’t. It depends on the author.

Play!!

Monday, May 21, 2007

Assignment #80

Of course, what this little news letter is every day is kind of a “How To” as far as the Internet is concerned. But did you know there are real “How To” Internet sites already there and going strong. Here are some of the better ones.

http://www.ehow.com/

http://www.wikihow.com/

http://www.howtodothings.com/

and even

http://www.howstuffworks.com/

is a good “How To” site.

What’s fun is to stick a general term into SEARCH like “music” or “dogs” or whatever you’re into and see what comes up. Now all of these sites are Web2.0 and they want you to contribute your own expert “How To” article. But whatever you do don’t forget to

Play!!

Friday, May 18, 2007

Assignment #79

Music Lessons

I have a sign up in the Library which says “Free Guitar Lessons-see the Reference Librarian” and someone will ask me about the lessons at least once a week. Now most people are completely unaware at what a tremendous resource YOUTUBE is for music lessons. Put guitar lessons into search and you get almost 100,000 hits. Depending how you search you can find over a dozen people willing to teach you just how to play that hot lead in Johnny B. Goode. Many of these people use YOUTUBE to hype their website. Some sell more extensive lessons, other do not. Here’s a guy I found on YOUTUBE that will give you 12 free lessons and then sell you more lessons for $9/ea. http://www.vguitarlessons.com/

He’s fun and kind of different. I’ve downloaded his free lessons and I hand them out to people who ask about the sign.

So…

Goto http://youtube.com/

And put in (INSTRUMENT) LESSON(s) –and maybe--(SONG) or BLUES or HARD ROCK. See what you get.

Play!!

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Assignment #78

MapMashups

OK, so I don’t see these changing anybody’s life but they are kind of interesting so check out

Twittervision

http://twittervision.com

and

Flickrvision

http://flickrvision.com/

See! They are kind of interesting but check out

http://www.mibazaar.com/top99women/

Or how about for a little virtual exercise

http://map.talleye.com/bighole.php

You can access almost 2000 mashups like these at

http://www.programmableweb.com/

Play!!

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Assignment #77

One of our officers here dropped me a note the other day.


RA,
I recommend checking out paint.net. It's an open source free paint
utility that is right up there with Adobe and getting better every day.
Their site is http://www.getpaint.net/index2.html. It's kind of fun
seeing this develop since my college roommate was one of the programmers
for it. I got the test the early versions quite a bit, and it's really
becoming a useful tool. It will open almost any type of photo format,
and it has lots of really neat features like history. Anyway, I hope
you find it interesting.


It seems to be a good program but you have to install Microsoft’s .NET Framework to get it going. I had a bit of a problem with that as it seemed to take a long time and much stuff from the net and wasn’t big on keeping me informed as to what was going on.

Play!!

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Assignment #76

Did you miss the late night jokes last night? No problem.

Goto http://politicalhumor.about.com/library/bldailyfeed3.htm

Or try http://www.newsmax.com/entertainment/late_night_jokes.shtml

Play!!

Monday, May 14, 2007

Assignment #75

The next time your kid has a project to do

Goto the mashup schoolr

http://schoolr.com/

Great site.

This site has a citation creator that uses a service from the North Carolina State University Library System. I had recommended Ottobib in Assignment #54. From that post I got this comment:

Benjamin said...

You may also want to checkout BibMe.org, a similar automated bibliography generator. In addition to allowing for automatically citing books, BibMe supports the same for a bunch of other types of sources and lets you download the resulting bibliography as an RTF document.

Play!!

Friday, May 11, 2007

Assignment #74

If you’ve kept up with our assignments you’ve seen that Google is so much more than just a pretty search engine. If you really want to get into the World of Google here’s the place.

http://www.googletutor.com/

Also here’s the official Google blog.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/

Now remember that hack from assignment #42 where we had Google find us downloadable mp3’s? Well last week GoogleTutor had a search engine called G2p.com that did all the work for you. Here it is

http://www.g2p.org/

and here’s the GoogleTutor article

http://www.googletutor.com/2007/04/30/g2p-looking-for-others-files-the-dummy-way/#more-710

Play!!

Thursday, May 10, 2007

Assignment #73

So you have what you call your Image Macro. It’s a picture with a caption on it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_macro

A subset of Image Macros is lolcats. Here’s an article on the art form

http://granades.com/2007/05/02/loltrek/

with a Star Trek TOS parody.

Lolcats have their own pidgin English so be aware.

This is a part of the Internet I had no idea existed before I saw the article.

Play!!

Wednesday, May 9, 2007

Assignment #72

Redos

Thought I’d hit a couple redos today. That’s when I’ve got more information on a topic I’ve already covered. Here’s the first on streaming from just yesterday. Lifehacker has a couple of good articles:

http://lifehacker.com/software/alpha-geek/how-to-stream-your-music-to-any-pc-256052.php

http://lifehacker.com/software/screenshot-tour/stream-your-music-with-orb-257816.php

AND

Let’s revisit the Youtube downloading thing again (last time, I promise).

Now I’ve showed you a couple ways in assignments #49 and #17. Anyway here’s the latest article by way of Digg.

http://mashable.com/2007/05/05/download-youtube-video/

23 ways to do it.

I tried zamzar.com on a video that I couldn’t get as it seemed to be protected somehow. It worked like a charm and even changed the format for me.

Play!!

Tuesday, May 8, 2007

Assignment #71

What we're going to do is take your mp3 music collection on your home computer and stream it to your computer at work.

1) Goto http://www.vibestreamer.com/

Download and install Vibestreamer 2.06 on your home computer.

2) Configure vibstreamer

Click USERS AND GROUPS--Right click inside the left open box--Click ADD--Give yourself a username and password so you can get in from work.

Click SHARING--Right click inside the box--Click ADD--Browse for the directory where your music is--Then check the username box.

Click SETTINGS--Click that pull down tab on the IP ADDRESS and set and write down the ip address along with the port.

Go back to STREAM SERVER and click START

3) Leave your computer on and go to work.

4) At work, put that ip address and port into your web browser like this--(e.g.) http://123.456.789.101:8081

You'll be prompted for your username and password--up will pop your directory with the music. Worked like a charm for me though I am concerned with security so I probably won't do this very often. But it is cool.

Play!!

Monday, May 7, 2007

Assignment #70

Here's something that has been in the news lately. Google has what they called Personal Homeages and now call iGoogle. The reason they were in the news as they lost everybody's settings. But no biggee. It's just ones and zeros. iGoogle is like Netvibes, only flashier and less serious and they have a ton of feeds that you just click to get.

Goto http://www.google.com/ Click MORE--EVEN MORE

Left side Click iGOOGLE Sign in using your gmail account username and password. Get feeds by clicking on the ADD STUFF link in the upper right. Put widgets on the second page by dragging them to the page 2 tab.

The themes are cool. My beach theme changes with the sun though it seems to be linked with my Watertown, SD weather widget rather than my actual Guam location.

Play!!

Friday, May 4, 2007

Assignment #69

So you’ve got Greasemonkey on your Firefox browser. Now

Goto http://userscripts.org/

Search for SEARCH TERMS (hit enter)

Click on Search Term Highlighter (the third one)

This cute little program highlights your search terms on the various web pages--something I need sometimes.

Click on VIEW SCRIPT SOURCE if you want to see what it looks like otherwise click the INSTALL THIS SCRIPT button.

For an interesting though somewhat difficult to hear presentation on Firefox and it’s add-ons goto

http://www.sirsidynixinstitute.com/archive.php and listen to

Your Firefox can do That?

It’s the sixth one down.

Play!!

Thursday, May 3, 2007

Assignment #68

FireFox

The FireFox Browser keeps getting cooler and cooler. It’s open source so anybody can add capabilities to it and there are a bunch. If you haven’t got it yet goto http://www.download.com/ and download and install it. Now click TOOLS and ADD-ONS. Click the GET EXTENSIONS. Now click on Recommended Add-ons. Go through the list to see if anything appeals to you but do download Greasemonkey. We’ll play with that tomorrow.

Play!!

Wednesday, May 2, 2007

Assignment #67

Ok – Here are two sites where you start by uploading a picture:

The first is a site where you upload your photo and then it tells you which movie star you long like and how much.

http://www.starsinyou.com/home.php

The second lets you make a baseball (or any sport) card out of an uploaded picture.

http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/deck.php

Play!!

Tuesday, May 1, 2007

Assignment #66

RSS

Really Simple Sindication

We’ve already looked at this but here’s a cute video to explain it.

http://www.commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english

For more info here’s Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rss

Play!!