Assignment #147

Virtual Worlds

One thing I haven’t touched much in this email is virtual worlds. We hit Second Life a little back in Assignment #58, my kid plays with Runescape, and one of our techs and her husband do World of Warcraft which I guess is very popular. Second Life has evidently been losing its popularity since they won’t let people gamble any more. Anyway, here’s an article on what the author calls “casual” virtual worlds.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/05/virtual-world-hangouts-so-many-to-choose-from/

Here’s the Wikipedia article on the whole idea:

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

And this guy’s blog is devoted to rating bars in the UK with rating the virtual bars as well.

http://barblog.lastminuteliving.com/my_weblog/virtual_bars/index.html

I’m not sure I can handle a virtual world. I can barely handle the real one.

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Assignment #146

Here’s another Assignment from Mary Kyle at Learning 2.1

Dressing up your photos

It seems that everyone has a digital camera, if not a high resolution one, then at least one on their cell phone. Everyday library computer labs have more people coming in wanting to edit their masterpiece images. If we don't have Photoshop or at least Picasa, what can we do? Last year we played with Flickr and it's a great online photo album and even has some toys to play around with the photos but what if you want to fix red eye or crop the photos before you post? After this exercise you can fix them online with just a computer with an internet connection.

I use Picnik the most but I discovered it first and I like it's flexibility. There are others but let's start here. You do need to register but your photos can come from Flickr, Picasa, and Facebook; or you can upload from your computer. Fixes the most common issues, cropping, image size, exposure, red eye, and many more. You can also apply a few creative filters using the Create tab. When you are done save it back where you got it or someplace new. You will need to login to Flickr, Facebook, or Picasa to open from or save to there. The interface is fairly clean and they add a few cute bits to entertain you if a process is a bit slow to load.

Here are a few more to try:

Fauxto - No registration, upload, edit, and save. Mostly I'll say, I'm impressed. I'm used to Photoshop and wow, this one gives them some free, to the user, competition. Layers, Filters, even looks like a software window on the screen. Some effects are a bit slow to happen but they do eventually.

I suspect Fauxto is why Adobe has announced the launch of a free online version of their popular Photoshop software. Rumor says to look for it in November.

Pixenate - reads from and to Flickr or disk. No registration. Simple tools, can't handle high resolutions but if you don't have a high resolution camera this is fine. Window isn't as clear as I'd like though.

Snapfish - product of HP and there are strings attached. You do have to register and editing is limited. Free unlimited online storage! Well, not so free if you want to download or print your images. I only mention it as someone may ask you about it.

I found a few more but had issues with uploading images, may be a browser or flash version conflict.

Pixer.us - cute name, wish it worked
CellSea - Created for Cell Camera Phone users.
ImageEditor - Associated with Google Photo Organizer, which is confusing since they also own Picasa another online photo storage and organizer site.


Discovery exercise:
1. Pick one of the above mentioned Photo editors, or locate one of your own.
2. Edit a few pictures and save them.
3. Write about your experience in your blog and include either a link to or embed one of the pictures you edited. Maybe even a before and after images?


Enjoy!

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Assignment #145

5min.com a Videopedia

In my sojourns though the Internet the other day I ran across this site.

http://www.5min.com/

Prepare to spend at least an hour or so.

For example, here’s a computer trick you can play on your friends that’s fun, relatively harmless, and teaches you a little about your computer.

http://www.5min.com/Video/Learn-a-computer-trick-to-prank-your-friends-4021

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Assignment #144

More Video Capture

OK so you know how I was griping in assignment #137 that Jing and Screen2Exe didn’t capture the videos for learner.org. I got an email from the guys at Jing and they told me why.

It’s probably that you are capturing Windows Media or Real Player or
something. Jing needs hardware acceleration turned off to do that.
More about that here:
http://techsmith.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/techsmith.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.
php?p_faqid=27
Hope that helps.
have a good day,
bill scanlon
TechSmith developer

And it worked-- Right click on your desktop-Properties-Settings-Advanced-Troubleshoot-Move Hardware Acceleration Plunger to None.

Now I don’t know what that Hardware Acceleration thingy does normally so you are on your own after that.

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Assignment #143

Here’s Mary Kyle over at Learning 2.1

Mini or Micro Blogging

What is Mini Blogging? Where can I set one up? Why would I?

Mini blogs are limited to short messages (frequently 140 characters), they began as cell phone text messages limited to a geographic region that could be used to find your friends, find out what's going on in the area that night, or to invite your friends to all go to the latest Harry Potter movie on opening night together. The original miniblog, Dodgeball, has all but disappeared and isn't available in Charlotte. However, several others have appeared and brought it to the web, though they still have the option to send and receive the messages on your cell phone. I don't advise getting that unless you have unlimited text messages in your phone plan though.

The new mini-blogs are:
Twitter - your posts are called Tweets
Jaiku - allows you to set up groups and has easy search
Hictu - mostly popular in France, Italy, and England
Frazr - French and German
Pownce - allows the biggest posts and also can be used for file transfer (up to 10MB in the free version, sounds more like email) since an invite is required I can't find out much more about it.

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Assignment #142

Lyrics and Cheaters

One of the best Internet skills that you can have is the expeditious use of quotation marks. Sure, you can go to Lyrics.com to get words to a song but why not put 4 or 5 consecutive words of the song between quotation marks and into Google and watch those lyrics pop up.

One of my teachers wanted to know if an assignment paper she’d been given had been copied from the Net. Putting a few words in quotation marks and then into Google showed that it had.

Quotation marks make Google and other search engines treat the phrase as one big word and a significant 4 or 5 word phrase is usually specific to a given literary work. Ah, the power of knowledge!!

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Assignment #141

RaimaRadio

Something new to play with. It’s called RaimaRadio. Now I know I got into this other Internet Radio Station program called Songbird back in Assignment #11, but that one couldn’t record. This one can and to MP3s and you can set it to record when you’re not around like recording Coast to Coast AM in the middle of the night. It’ll also takes out any empty spots caused by buffering and it’s supposed to break up the recording session into individual songs but I haven’t had much luck with that feature yet. It’s pretty straight forward and the learning curve is low so have fun.

http://www.raimasoftware.com/

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Assignment #140

Trulia

I did a Real Estate assignment on Zillow back at Assignment #18. Rule the Web just had a blog entry on the web site Trulia. http://www.trulia.com/

It’s a Google Maps/Local Real Estate mashup but works well and fun to play with.

And Derek just left me a comment on Assignment #119-Craigslist

--have you seen allurstuff instead?

http://allurstuff.com/

it's also a classifieds site, but with more emphasis on searching, and with a pretty slick google maps integration. (i think it’s the best out there so far)--

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Assignment #139

Free Stuff

Raise your hand if you like good free programs. The King of GFPs is Gizmo Richards. You can spend days at his main site. He has a good monthly newsletter that I actually spent $10 to subscribe to and it had an excellent site in its latest edition. It’s got a list of the best open source programs and their pay counterparts. It’s here:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ListOfOpenSourcePrograms

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Assignment #138

Zabasearch

Just a quicky today. Here’s a search engine that’s supposed to find unlisted phone numbers from all 50 states (but not Guam, sorry to say).

It comes very highly recommended.

http://zabasearch.com/

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Assignment #137

Jing Project

This is a neat idea. Jing is a little program that sets on your desktop and, when you want it to, captures what’s on your screen. It can capture videos, or individual pictures or even do a screencast. The downside is that you need XP or Vista or Mac OS X and it captures to .swf shockwave flash and you may not have that on your computer. And the files are huge. Over 2Mgs for every second of captured video.

But it works, although it didn’t work with those Annenberg videos at learner.org. I just got the audio with those.

Keep trying guys. When you can capture everything and give it to me in a reasonable size, I’ll be your first customer—if it’s free.

Update: Gizmo Richards had a link to a better program. It’s called Screen2exe and it does things a little differently (it records to an exe file) but it’s super simple and the files are tiny compared to Jing. Still doesn’t do those Annenberg videos though.

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Assignment #136

Meez/Avatars

OK so the new Learning Guide over at Learning 2.1, Mary Kyle, had her own avatar and it looked interesting so I went over to http://www.meez.com/ and made one for me. It’s easy and fun and when I was done the thing actually looked quite a bit like me in a glorified self concept avatarish way. Since I’ve already got enough stuff on my blog I’ll see if I can put this on the blog demo. Your turn.

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Assignment #135

Wikiyou

OK, I think I may have found the next big thing. Wikiyou.

http://www.wikiyou.com/

It wants to be the place for biographies for the rest of us. Now, you can get bios for biggees on wikipedia. And bios for other biggees at http://www.biography.com/

but a place where everybody can put their own bio for posterity or just for fun might just be the next big thing. So go and be there. Put your (auto)biography on Wikiyou.

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Assignment #134

Cached-Another Homer Moment

Assignment #107 was a Homer Moment. I showed you how to do something that I had just learned that was so elemental as to be, sadly, funny. Here’s another.

A number of times I’ve Googled something and clicked on a promising result that was already gone or updated. “#*$@,” I said. All I had to do was click on the word CACHED to see the original page that Google had, duh!!, cached. It also works if your system blocks your access to a particular domain, but maybe I wasn’t supposed to tell you that.

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Assignment #133

Google Hacks Galore

Now some of these we’ve gone over before but different articles have come out and these are fun so—

Phil Bradley’s blog has Google Easter Eggs here:

http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2007/07/google-easter-e.html

Here are some great tricks:

http://www.marcandangel.com/2007/07/25/7-clever-google-tricks-worth-knowing/

Here are some not so great ones but the last one is infamous:

http://www.marcandangel.com/2007/05/30/7-google-searches-i-wish-i-could-take-back/

This is a more general article but item #3 is very interesting for Googlephiles:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118539543272477927.html?mod=fpa_mostpop

And finally, PC Magazine had a cute little article that was interesting.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2155901,00.asp

You are now qualified to wow! your friends.

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Assignment #132

Julia was quite prolific this last month over at Learning 2.1 It made life easier for me. In case you’re questioning my work ethic with all this plagiarism, I am slotted to be the learning guide for this blog for the month of October.

Better Health

For some of us losing weight is never easy. Fortunately, there are nifty online tools available to help you along the way. I've found two that I recommend - FitDay and Nutridiary. They have similar features, and both are helpful. Set a target weight and track the calories consumed and calories burned. You can do this daily or, if that's too much of a time commitment, use these tools to occasionally look up the nutritional content of last night's dinner or find the approximate number of calories you burned working in the yard.

Here's how it works. You enter basic information about yourself (height, weight, age, lifestyle level). Using this information, the website calculates an approximate value for daily basal (metabolic) calories burned and lifestyle calories burned. For any given day, you can enter calories burned from activity, which ranges from biking to household chores to yard work. The sum of these three categories equals the total calories burned per day. Then you can enter the foods consumed on any given day. From this information, the website calculates total calories consumed, as well as where these calories come from and how they are distributed. It also creates a chart of all of the necessary vitamins and minerals and records how much of each you are getting, highlighting any that you are not getting enough of.

The only significant difference that I can find between the two services is that Nutridiary is also a social network. If you diet better with "community" support, perhaps Nutridiary would be a better choice for you.

Discovery Exercise

1. Create an account at Nutridiary or FitDay
2. Fill in the food chart and the activity chart for a typical day. Find out how the number of calories consumed compares to the number of calories burned.
3. Find out whether you are meeting recommended nutrient requirements. Are there any nutrients for which you aren't getting the recommended amount?
4. Evaluate the site in your Learning 2.1 blog.

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Assignment #131
Here’s another lesson from Julia over at Learning 2.1
Express Yourself Through Online Art
Since the previous two entries were so darned useful, it seemed entirely appropriate to make this one equally useless. Indeed, the Internet provides endless opportunities to waste time. Here are a few sites where you can be creative, have fun, and, yes, waste time - but hopefully not too much time.
Have an urge to express yourself artistically? Try Mr. Picassohead. It's a drawing program with Picasso-like pieces that you can drag and drop onto a “canvass.” Each piece can be enlarged or reduced, rotated, or colored. When finished, you can add your work of art to their gallery or send the link to family and friends.
More time to kill? Then click over to String Spin to create string art or try your hand at snowflake making.Then for more fun and fascination, try one of the Falling Sand games. Is this art or is it a game? You decide. Here's the general idea. You are given materials (sand, oil, salt, water, seeds, etc.). You can use these materials to draw on a board (game field?). These elements interact with each other. For example, you draw a plant. You also have the option of drawing fire which will burn the plant. Or you can draw water which will put out the fire and also make the plant grow. There's absolutely no purpose to any of these sites except just idle fun. So if you’re feeling a little creative and would like to kill some time, check one or more of them out.
Discovery Exercise:

1. Explore one of the following:
· Falling Sand
· Mr. Picassohead
· Snowflake Maker
· Sting Spin
2. Blog about your experience.

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Assignment #130

Net Poster

Some things are cool and some things transcend cool. Here’s a poster with the top 200 sites of the Net.

http://www.informationarchitects.jp/slash/ia_trendmap_start.html

Now, it’s actually a augmented copy of the Tokyo Subway

http://www.tokyometro.jp/rosen/rosenzu/pdf/rosen_eng.pdf

but that doesn’t make it any less cool.

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Assignment #129

Let me steal another lesson from Learning 2.1

Online File Storage with Omnidrive

Online file storage sites are not new. However, some of the services have added features that make them hard to resist. I've discovered two that I particularly like: Box.net and Omnidrive. Both allow you 1 gigabyte of storage space, and both are absolutely free (and I REALLY like free). In addition, they both allow you to share your files with others which makes for an optimum opportunity for people to collaborate from different locations. Hmmm ... I can think of a lot of PLCMC teams that might need to collaborate from different locations.

I really love Omnidrive. They have combined forces with Zoho so that you can create new documents or edit ones you've uploaded using Zoho Writer or Zoho Sheet - all right from inside your account. In fact, I created this blog from inside Omnidrive using Zoho Writer.

Maybe I'm easy to impress, but I'm impressed. In the first place, I really like the idea of having a web-based storage site. I often find that I'm at home and want to see a file stored on my computer at work. I can just upload those files, then whether I'm at home or on my next trip to Paris, Rome or London (oh, how I wish), I can view them wherever and whenever I choose.

Then there's the sharing feature of Omnidrive. Want to collaborate on a file? If so Omnidrive sends an email to the people you want to share the file with. You determine the level of access. Files can be read-only or editable by the people you share them with.

Photos are another reason to use Omnidrive. SnipShot is another one of their affiliates. You can upload images, then edit them in SnipShot. You can crop, resize, adjust for brightness/contrast and rotate - in short do most of the things you'd ever want to do to an image and all from inside. There's even a option to view your images as a slideshow. Clever.

Another nice feature of Omnidrive is that they let you create a 'Live Folder' that will fill up with files from an RSS feed of your choice.

I've found lots of reasons to like Omnidrive. I'd like to hear what you think.

Discovery Exercise

1. Open an account at Omnidrive.
2. Upload a text document, then edit it online using Zoho Writer.
3. Upload an image, then edit it online using SnipShot
4. Blog about your experiences using Omnidrive.

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Assignment #128

Favicons

OK, I finally figured this all out (I'm not the sharpest...). If you go to my blog, you should see me on the blog and a mini-me in the address bar. That mini-me is called a favicon. Here’s how to do it.

1) Goto http://www.myfavatar.com/ and register. Verify the email.

2) Whatever picture or thing you want to be your favicon should be a square-96x96 pixels is best. Use your Irfanview to fix it. Make it a gif or jpg.

3) At Myfavatar click CHANGE FAVATAR and upload it.

4) Goto EDIT BLOG and put in the info for your blog-where you want the favicon to go. Don’t forget the forward slash at the end of the URL.

5) Click FAVATAR CODES and go to the fourth one down Favicon Code.

6) COPY the code and follow the instructions-essentially paste the code after the <"head"> in your html code for your blog. For Blogger it’s at SIGN IN-LAYOUT-EDIT HTML or at CUSTOMIZE-EDIT HTML.

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Assignment #127

Changing Your Look at Blogger

The email I did on Word Press yesterday got me thinking about my blog a bit. I found that I could change the whole template and make it look real pretty and professional. Here’s one I did as a demo. Anyway, put BLOOGER TEMPLATES into Google and you’ll get lots of sites and templates. You’ll have to download one. Next, go to your blog and sign in, click LAYOUT and then EDIT HTML on the tab. Browse to and upload that template you downloaded, save it and say “boy, was that easy.”

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Assignment #126

Word Press

Now, of course, it’s obvious that my archive blog for this email is at Blogger (see below) but there is a blog that seems to be making a lot of waves. It’s called Word Press and evidently you can do a lot more with it that you can with Blogger or some of the other sites. Smashing Magazine had an extensive tutorial for it at

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/06/29/wordpress-plugins-tutorials-your-pick/

It’s pretty cool.

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Assignment #125

Icons Again

So Monday we did some icons. Did you know that there’s actually a search engine for icons? http://www.iconfinder.net/

Unfortunately, it’s not all that good. But, there are lots of places to get icons on the net. Try http://www.iconarchive.com/

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Assignment #124

Online Image Generators Again

Those of you who appreciated the online image generators of assignments #110 and #52 should have a great time with this site. It's a blog dedicated to collecting image generators and he's got a bunch of them. The latest one changes your picture into a Simpsons character. http://generatorblog.blogspot.com/

Unfortunately with many of the sites, they allow you to save the
resulting picture at their site but not on your computer. Here's how
to get by this.

With the picture you want to save on you monitor, punch the PRINT SCREEN key. This puts your screen on your clipboard. Now open Irfanview (which you should have downloaded from the assignment yesterday) and EDIT-PASTE. Now, left click your mouse and drag so that you select just the picture and EDIT-LEAVE SELECTION or EDIT-CROP SELECTION either way. Resize if you want and FILE-SAVE AS.

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Assignment #123

Icons-Irfanview

On my computer at home I have directories for me, my wife and our son, Reed. They contain our stuff. The icons for these directories are pictures of each of us. Here's how to do that.

1) Download and install Irfanview from download.com It's a great little picture editor and viewer and we’ll use it again tomorrow.

2) Open the picture you want to use with Irfanview.

3) FILE-SAVE AS the picture as a Windows icon (ICO) file.

4) Now go to the directory you want the new icon for and RT CLICK - CREATE SHORTCUT (You can't change the icon here).

5) Now on the shortcut RT CLICK - PROPERTIES - SHORTCUT - CHANGE ICON

6) Browse for the icon you made and click OK - OK

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Assignment #122

Torrents Again

I went over torrents in Assignment #32 but I thought it might be time to revisit them, especially since Instructables has this cool posting on torrents and how to download them.

http://www.instructables.com/id/ECBXJQMF3SYTKSQ/

Also, here’s an interesting comparison on the best torrent sights though it might be somewhat dated.

http://comparebt.blogspot.com/

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Assignment #121

Google Search Trick

Here’s a cute trick I just used the other day. I wanted to search for some stuff on the movie/book The Maltese Falcon but I didn’t want everything, just the sites that had a lot of stuff and not just a mention. So…I reasoned that Maltese Falcon would be in the title of the pages that I wanted and I searched for Intitle:”Maltese Falcon”

Worked like a charm.

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Assignment #120

Homepages/Desktops

Whether you call them Personalized Homepages or Virtual Desktops, you can really up your productivity as far as keeping track of news and information. Now, even though these work with RSS feeds the way Bloglines does, there is a fundamental difference as their widgets don’t keep track of what you’ve looked at and what you haven’t. They just show you the present feed from the site. They’re great for news sites like CNN or magazine sites like New Scientist. And don’t forget Digg for both news and videos. It’s the best. Here’s a good article comparing the top PH/VD’s.

http://mashable.com/2007/06/29/personalized-homepages/

AND there’s a new one coming and it might be the best yet. It’s called Streamy and you can see a cool video here. It combines the news gathering abilities of the virtual desktop with the ability to share said news with a social network. They’re only in Beta so you have to get an invite but it looks great.

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Assignment #119

Craigslist

Time Magazine just did this article on the 25 Websites that we can’t live without. http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1638266_1638253,00.html

There were a few sites that I’ve been living without but not many. One of them was Craigslist. This site is basically a newspaper-like classified section for the whole world and theoretically you should never have to pay for a classified ad again, at least, if you only want to reach the geek community.

So now go to Craigslist

http://craigslist.org/

Click Guam in the US STATES column.

Note the number of ads next to each heading.

See what’s there. And don’t forget to

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Assignment #118

Counting Coup

OK so I finally put a counting tool on my blog. It’s a nice little counting tool. Won’t hurt anybody. I went to

http://www.statcounter.com/

just like Mark Frauenfelder said in his book Rule The Web. I registered and configured what kind of counter I wanted and it was easy enough. It’s pretty too – pale blue against the black background. Maybe you should get one.

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