List Your Website Here!

Web Page Analyzer – Nothing will deter web users from visiting your site faster than slow load times. If you want to find out how to make website faster, Web Page Analyzer is a good place to start. This web application will take a look at your site and tell you how long it would take someone with various sorts of internet connections to load it. Read more: Web Page Analyzer: Find Out How To Make Your Website Faster.

		FollowerWonk – You are trying to find a Twitter user but you don’t remember anything about them except that they had the word ‘blogger’ in their bio. How would you search for them? The answer lies in a little app called FollowerWonk. FollowerWonk lets you search user’s twitter bios using keywords. Read more: FollowerWonk: Search Twitter Bios, Location and Name.
		ShadyURL – Beyond Bit.ly and TinyURL, there are a lot of URL shortening services that have popped up. But if you are looking for a fun and geeky way to link share links with your friends, then you should check out ShadyURL. This web app shortens your URLs to make them look shady and suspicious. Read more: ShadyURL: Shorten Your URL In A Scary Way.
		Drumbot – is a website that offers a set of free online tools for musicians or anyone interested in composing beats. Drumbot is made up of a guitar tuner, a drum beat generator, metronome, a drum pattern sequencer, and a tap beats per minute (BPM) indicator. Read more: Drumbot: Set of Free Online Tools For Musicians.
		Senduit – No matter how good an email service is, it usually doesn’t allow you to send attachments more than 10 MB. So how should one share files that are large? Senduit is one way to do that. It lets you upload and share files up to 100 MB in size. Read more: Senduit: Hassle Free & Quick File Sharing.

List 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.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Check out the top picks from MakeUseOf Geeky Fun during the last week.

1. The Ask-Our-Computer Service in 1967 (Pic)
2. A Video Explananing Why You Should Fear Google (Video)
3. I Know Photoshop (Pic)
4. New Anthem For Web & Social Media Dorks (Video)
5. I Need YouTube To Come and Film Me (Pic)
6. World War II, Facebook Version (Pic)

If you would like to keep up with all latest Geeky Fun additions, please subscribe to the Geeky Fun feed here. You can also subscribe and get the latest additions via email.

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All questions are moderated and the titles are optimized. Questions are sometimes rejected because they are lacking details. In those cases we explain what information is needed to answer the question. Once a question is published, we do our best to quickly provide an answer. And with the help of the entire MakeUseOf team, I think this has been working quite magnificently!

So here are five of the most popular questions from the past two weeks. Do you agree with the answers?

1. Can you recommend a task manager or lite project manager?
2. How can I get a Meebo Bar and Drag’n’Share photos for my website?
3. Can you recommend a video converter that allows to limit the output file size?
4. How can I use freeware when I have no admin rights for a computer?
5. How can I backup my mobile phone settings and contacts?

Would you like to browse other popular questions or see which questions we weren’t able to answer? You can switch back and forth between latest, unanswered, and most popular questions using the respective buttons at MakeUseOf Answers. You can also follow Answers via RSS.

And if you have a question of your own, don’t hesitate to ask! No sign up or registration is required.

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All you need to accomplish your fitness goals is your Nintendo Wii Fit. 22.5 million copies have sold since December, so now’s the time to put it to good use.

In this article I am going to cover the top Wii Fitness games you can use to get in shape without leaving your house. Again, I know what you’re thinking – MakeUseOf only covers free software and tech. Well, we’ve decided that when it comes to your health, it doesn’t hurt to explore all of your options, so we’ll let it slide this one time.

Recommended Wii Fitness Games

When you buy a Wii Fit, it comes stocked with a balance board and various strength training, aerobics, yoga, and balance games. While these exercises can be effective, they aren’t all that fun to do, at least in comparison to some of the games that have come out since.

If you’re going to go all out to get into shape you might as well have a little fun, right? The following games are a few of the more popular Wii fitness titles out right now. They aren’t in any particular order.

Wii Fit Plus

If you liked the games that came with Wii Fit but wanted a little extra, Wii Fit Plus might be for you. The Wii Fit Plus has over 20 new games for you to play, and includes a calorie burning counter, ability to create custom workouts, profile creation, and quicker navigation than its counterpart.

If you already own a Wii Fit, you can purchase the Wii Fit Plus game by itself to serve as an upgrade. If you don’t, you can buy the Wii Fit Plus bundled with a balance board.

The Biggest Loser

Whether you are familiar with the TV show or not (one of my favorites), The Biggest Loser video game is a fun way for players to get in shape and maintain their ideal fitness. Like the TV show, the game is set at The Biggest Loser ranch.

Settings allow you to compete in 4, 8, or 12 week programs against former contestants from the show. Your progress and schedule is kept on a calendar for you. If you want to see who can lose the most weight between you and your friends, you can compete that way as well.

The game allows you to keep track of in-game achievements and even allows you to receive credit for progress made outside of the game, like walking, running, cycling, etc. You do have to enter in outside progress on your own, however, so remember to write down your achievements during your daily workouts.

The Biggest Loser also features a lot of suggestions and tips from former contestants and trainers in the game. These healthy tips include 50 recipes straight out of The Biggest Loser book that you can follow.

EA Sports Active: More Workouts

The successor to EA Sports Active, EA Sports Active: More Workouts has, like the title implies, more workouts for you to follow (35 to be exact). These exercises allow you to customize your routines to target different areas of your body, like upper body, lower body, and cardio.

If you don’t want to focus in on one area of your body, you can try one of the full body circuit routines. It also has warm-weather activities for you to try like water-skiing and paddle surfing.

The game features a 6 week challenge of core exercises, including abs, curl ups, and crunch and punches. It has a warm up/cool down feature as well as an in-game journal for you to record your progress.

Jillian Michaels’ Fitness Ultimatum 2010

Jillian Michaels, trainer from The Biggest Loser (see above game), is one of the more intense trainers out there. Her fitness game, which is a sequel to the 2009 title, is pretty intense too. In the game, Jillian coaches and trains you for up to six months, giving you custom routines to work on in a one-on-one style session.

When playing this game, you will participate in a boot camp setting that is packed with energetic workout modes and 16 core exercises for you to follow. Included are cardio training, strength training, and balance training superset routines.

You can tailor your workouts to your specific abilities by adjusting the difficulty settings. Jillian gives you feedback while you’re working out so you can see if you are doing the workouts correctly or not. If you want to (I don’t know why you wouldn’t), you can work out on tropical beaches or in exotic jungles.

Don’t want to train with Jillian alone? Challenge family and friends in multi-player competitions.

My Fitness Coach

In My Fitness Coach, you get to work out with a virtual personal trainer named Maya. The game is designed to fit your personal goals. It tests your fitness level, sets your goals in the form of a calendar, and takes you through workouts that allow you to build routines.

There are over 500 unique exercises in this game, including yoga, pilates, kickboxing, cardio fitness, strength training, flexibility, and weight loss routines. You can choose which areas you want to work on if you have a particular need.

If you don’t know how to do one of the workouts in the game you can pause it and view a tutorial. You can workout in 9 different environments and customize the game’s music to your liking. You have 4 types to choose from: hip hop, 80’s, Latin, and dance.

Conclusion

The number one thing you need to get in shape is determination and focus. OK, that’s two things, but you need to set goals for yourself and stick to them if you want to reach your ideal fitness level. Be committed! Get motivated! Perhaps making a game out of it will help you get going. Put your Nintendo Wii to some good use, and above all, have fun!

Did you find this article useful? Is your favorite game not on the list? Let me hear it in the comment section below!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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On these roads, patrol officers enjoy sitting at several spots that maximize the likelihood they will clock someone speeding who has just passed the drop in speed, without realizing it. The road doesn’t change, but the speed does. It is the perfect definition of an unjust police radar speed trap. It was on this road, on a bright and sunny day, that an especially arrogant officer decided to pull me over and charge me with criminal speeding. A charge that, in the U.S, could carry a fine of up to $500, a suspended license and possible jail time.

I visited one of the best lawyers I knew, gave him the details and paid him the lawyer fee. He was able to take care of the ticket for me. However, the lesson I learned from this experience, the third or fourth speeding ticket I’ve received in this particular speed-trap town called North Berwick, is that there are occasionally those communities that are unscrupulous in collecting funds from such unfair and unjust posted speed limits. It’s for this reason that I was very pleased to discover not one or two, but six technological solutions that can give the poor, unsuspecting citizen a little bit of an advantage in these dangerous and unfair police radar speed traps.

Tools To Combat Unfair Police Radar Speed Traps

One of the first things I did when I upgraded from my Windows Mobile phone to a GPS-enabled Motorola Droid was to check what applications are available that might help protect me from such unscrupulous speed traps by local cops like the officer that pulled me over. The first online system that I discovered is also the one that I consider the absolute best one out there – Trapster. There’s an entire online system on the website that shows you all of the active speed traps. The map is constantly updating and changing as new reports come in from all across the world.

Of course, the best part of the community-driven Trapster system is that there are mobile apps for just about any mobile device out there, including Blackberry, iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile and even certain GPS systems. You can set these apps to alert you any time you come within range of a known speed trap, or a recently reported police stake-out location.

You can set the alert distance from the speed trap so that you have plenty of time to look for the sudden change in speed limit and slow down to the posted speed. Most importantly, when you spot a speed trap that wasn’t recognized or alerted by Trapster – do your part to make the system more effective by adding that speed trap into Trapster’s database.

Here, I’ve added the famous Morrell’s Mill Rd, North Berwick, Maine speed traps to Trapster’s database. Hopefully that will save a driver or two from the horrible fate of having their wallet drained into the town coffers.

For the sake of variety, I’m going to cover the top sites out there that can give you additional insight into the police radar speed traps in your area. Unfortunately, most of the remaining online services are focused primarily within the U.S. Or course, maybe that’s because the U.S. is most plagued by such unreasonable speed traps?  CopSpy is one of these useful websites. This is more of a log of historical speed traps, with comments about particular speed trap areas that date back to 2003 and go up to today. You can really get to know the habits of local police by reading through these citizen logs.

The Bear Traps website, shown above, provides a very basic and general overview of the police trap “hot spots” along any major Interstate in the United States. The site lists all reported red light cameras as police radar speed traps that were reported by citizens for major highways and exits.

Njection, a popular automotive website and forum, offers this awesome mashup that provides a satellite overview with a layer for crashes or speed traps. This particular system doesn’t feature a whole lot of speed traps (nowhere near the number Trapster offers), but as far as crash history, the system is remarkable. You can view all crashes reported throughout the history of the system – which really offers a great oversight as to what areas are dangerous. The speed trap feature is also useful and is still getting updated, but the user base needs to grow a bit more for it to be very effective as a real-time reporting tool.

SpeedTrap labels itself as the National Speed Trap Exchange, and this is exactly the public service that the site provides for U.S. citizens. No matter what town you check, you’ll likely discover well written speed trap reports from local residents who are fed up with the unfair and unjust tactics of local police departments.

Police Traps is an excellent International resource that covers police trap sightings, red light cameras and traffic incidents all throughout the world. In the map above you can see the mashup for reports throughout Europe. This resource does have a fair user base and could rival Trapster in its usefulness.

Have you had your own experience getting caught in an unfair speed trap? Do you have any of your own favorite resources that you use to find which towns have such areas with inappropriate posted speed limits? Share your insight in the comments section below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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The Internet is good at helping us to save money.  We used to have to buy books (and other information sources) in order to learn about dieting and cooking healthy food. Now we can now hit up the ol’ Internet and find stuff for free!  We can also find free online diets and diet tips to keep our costs low.

You will find four different categories of links in this article that should get you well on your way to dieting on a budget: nutritional guides, recipe sites, counters and calculators, and journaling.

Nutritional Guides

In order to begin eating healthy, you’ll need to figure out what foods are good and what foods are bad.  Some of these guides will help you see what is in some restaurant foods while others will offer some overall good nutritional information on many different foods.

• Fatburgr (MakeUseOf Directory mention) – find out what is in that fast food restaurant food with this site.
• FitBuff.com’s Fast Food Calorie Counter: Nutrition Facts and Statistics – This is another fast food nutrition guide and calorie counter.
• DietFacts.com – This site offers nutrition facts about many different restaurant establishments.

Recipe Sites

Cooking at home can be a great way to control your diet.  This way you don’t have all of that junk that restaurants put into their food.  True, you could hit up one of those bookstores and find some good healthy recipe books but isn’t it easier to find recipes for free online?  There are sites that will help you avoid eating out, sites that will help you cook on a budget, and sites containing healthy recipes.  Any of these sites will help you eat healthier and keep your costs low.

• notakeout.com (MakeUseOf Directory mention) – By offering simple recipes and simple instructions, this site will help you avoid eating out so much.
• Budget Bytes (MakeUseOf Directory mention) – This is a cool site containing low cost recipes and includes the cost per recipe and serving.
• Healthy Eating via the Food Network – This site contains some top notch healthy recipes from the Food Network website.

Counters & Calculators

While on your journey to dieting, you’ll want to make use of some tools that will help you “see the numbers.”  Use some of these tools in order to find your target weight, count calories, and even map an exercise route.

• CaloriesPerHour – calculate your calorie intake goal (how many calories should you be taking in)
• Halls.md Ideal Body Weight Calculator (MakeUseOf Directory mention) – This site will help you find what your healthy weight goal should be.
• Gmaps Pedometer (MakeUseOf article – great how-to guide) – Map a route and find out the distance and the probable amount of calories that will be burned with this Google Maps tool.

Journaling

What better way to keep an eye on how you’re doing and to get back on track than to keep a journal?  This list of links will give you instructions on how to keep a journal and one even has a free online journaling tool for you to make use of.

• How to Maintain a Diet Journal for Life – This is a great how-to article about how to keep a diet journal. (via wikiHow)
• Keeping a Diet Journal – This is an article outlining 2 types of diet journals and why they are used. (via 7habitsofweightloss)
• FitDay (MakeUseOf Directory mention) – This is a free online diet and weight loss journaling tool.

Sure, you can go out and buy books, pay money for those diet tips and plans, and even spend money on tools to help you diet.  The purpose of this list of resources is to help you get it done on a budget.  The tools here are free and many of the recipes are inexpensive to make (avoiding restaurants alone will help your diet and your pocketbook).

What tools and sites can you suggest to help someone dieting on a budget?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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However you can’t please everyone and Google search results pages can hardly be customized to fit everyone’s needs and tastes.

Luckily, with help of the following Greasemonkey scripts, you can try to adjust Google’s interface to your own preferences (Note: I don’t recommend installing them all, just pick the ones that seem to be most useful for you).

1. SearchJump: Switch To Other Search Engines

SearchJump is a Greasemonkey script that adds a a search sidebar to redirect to the same search in other engines.

Enhances productivity: faster switching between search engines (between: Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Ask, etc)

A similar one: Try This Search On

2. Google Anonymizer: No Link Redirects

Google Anonymizer (or a similar Greasemonkey script: Disable Google Search Result Redirect) removes tracking from a Google results page.

Enhances productivity: faster copy destination URLs right from the Google search results page:

Before:

After:

3. Google Speed Dial: Keyboard Shortcuts

Google Speed Dial: allows you to navigate Google search results using keyboard shortcuts.

Enhances productivity: press 1 on the keyboard to go to the first result, press 2 to go the 2nd etc…Use 0 to go to the 10th (works only for top 10 results).

4. Shortcuts To Navigate Results Pages

Keyboard Shortcuts for Google Search: allows to navigate Google search results pages using keyboard shortcuts.

Enhances productivity: faster navigate results pages and faster edit the search query:

• n – Go to the next page
• p – Go to the previous page
• e – Select the query to edit it
• a – To add something to the search query

5. No Clutter From Ads

Push Google Search Ads Right

Enhances productivity: don’t get distracted by Google advertisements that appear above the search results: less scrolling as well.

Before:

After:

OR: just remove Google sponsored links all over.

6. Google Results In Two Columns

Google Two Columns is a Greasmonkey script that shows the search results in two columns

Enhances productivity: more information available at a glance which means less scrolling:

7. Google Bump: Multi-Search

Google Bump: multi-search and inline player (customized)

Enhances productivity:

• Search multiple search engines and multiple terms with one click (all search results will open in new tabs);
• Image and video search results on the same page with general search (together with in-line image and video previews);

8. Google MonkeyR: previews and favicons

GoogleMonkeyR: Page previews and favicons

Enhance productivity: faster recognize familiar pages from within Google search results.

Additional options (all can be customized):

• Turn-off Google tracking;
• Show results in multiple columns;
• Remove “sponsored” links;
• Open links in new tabs;
• Auto-load more results;
• Numbered results:

9. Google Search Sidebar: More Information At A Glance

Google Search Sidebar: adds a sidebar with search results from Dictionary.com, Wikipedia, Flickr, and Youtube.

Enhances productivity: more information is available at a glance, less time searching the web and doing research.

Now your turn: do you use any other Greasemonkey script to increase your Google searching productivity?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Apple’s iPhoto is one of the best applications for using smart albums, especially if you import image files into your iPhoto library on a regular basis. Using smart albums in iPhoto also makes it easy to quickly put together slide shows, web galleries, or photo books because they keep you from having to shift through hundreds or thousands of files to locate the ones you need.

Basically, at minimum, smart albums require you to do two things to your photos after they are imported into your iPhoto library: keyword and rate them. These two tasks alone followed by setting up some essential smart albums will keep your iPhoto library well organized.

Rating & Tagging

There are various purposes for rating and tagging your images in iPhoto, but essentially you want to make the task less time consuming as possible. My iPhoto library consists mainly of family related photos, so I rate images as 1, 3, or 5, with an emphasis on 5. I always trash the images that have no redeeming value, e.g. too blurred, subjects eyes are closed, multiple shots of almost the exact same picture.

My keywords are based on how I and my family typically view and use photos. I use keywords for individual family members, holidays, vacations, and school. In the professional photography work I do, the keywords of course have different purposes and are more elaborate.

As we begin to explore the kinds of smart albums that can be created in iPhoto, you will see how and why tagging and rating photos can help keep your iPhoto library in tip top shape.

Creating Smart Folders

Creating smart folders is easy. In iPhoto, simply click on File>New Smart Folder. In the resulting dialog box, you are presented with options for creating rules for a smart album. Let’s create perhaps the top essential smart folder: Favorites

The favorites smart folder is based on all the images you have given a five star rating to. To create the rule, select “My Rating“ in the first drop-down menu, “is” in the second menu, and then select all five stars in the ratings field. Lastly, give it a title.

Recent Favorites

Another version of the favorites smart album in iPhoto is recent favorites. When your iPhoto library is packed with hundreds or thousands of images, sometimes you want a quick a way to get at your recent favorite photos to show off, print, or post online. For this album, create another smart album like the one described above. Then click the + button and add a second rule: “Date” “is in the last” and “2 weeks,” or whatever time you would like to use.

Okay, now that we know how to create smart albums, here are some essential others that you will want to consider using.

Not Rated Or Tagged

This smart album is a great way to track which images have not been rated or assigned a keyword.

Smart Albums in iPhoto For Your Kids Photos

You will want to keep smart albums for each of your family members and friends. These of course can only be kept up to date if you assign keywords. Using the Faces feature in iPhoto ’09 is another way to keep track of family member photos.

Flagged Images

When you want to print images, assemble a photo book, or post selected images to a web gallery, you might first go through albums and flag the ones you want to use. Creating a smart album for flagged images will be a great one for automatically capturing those images into one album.

Not Edited Photos

If you’re keen on editing your photos, use this smart album for keeping track of photos that have not been edited.

Camera Model Photos

If you shoot with more than one camera, you might want to create smart albums for each particular camera you shoot with.

Holiday Albums

Create smart albums in iPhoto for each of your favorite holidays. They come in handy for creating slideshows of current and past holiday photos.

Movies

Many digital cameras can now shoot movies. If you’re importing them into iPhoto, this smart album will collect them.

With these and other essential smart albums, you will have little need to manually drag and move images to regular iPhoto albums. Smart albums will do all the work for you once you create them.

The above are some of my essential smart albums. Please share the rules for smart albums that you use in your iPhoto library.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Here are a few of the choicest freeware Photoshop addons, to get your creative juices flowing, and hopefully to enhance your experience with Photoshop!

Actions

Normally, when you alter an image in Photoshop, you take a series of steps to get your image from its raw, unadulterated form, to the final, polished masterpiece. If you manipulate your images often, you’ll find yourself taking the same steps for different images, over and over. This is where actions come in – steps are recorded in sequence, and when an action is played, all the steps are carried out on your image of choice – reducing repetitive tasks like framing pictures or changing skin tone to one click.

50 Photoshop Postwork Actions

This is a great pack of actions that alters the tone of your image.  The effects that it produces replicates many of the popular tones seen in magazine photo shoots and professional images, and allows the recreational photographer to achieve better results when post processing.

Photographer’s Toolkit

Another task that photographers have to carry out constantly is digitally framing their pictures. While the process itself is simple, it gets tedious and repetitive when there are dozens of pictures to go through. Luckily, Photographer’s Toolkit produces a myriad of frames for your choosing, and applicable at the click of your mouse.

Brushes

Just about any brush you can think of can be found on the internet. Whatever you need- whether it is a blood splatter, a pair of wings, or even eyelashes- is just a Google search away. Here, I’m going to pinpoint a few brush sets that I like, but keep in mind that there are literally thousands more brush sets out there.

Urban Scrawl Photoshop Brushes

This brush set is perfect for adding a bit of that hand-drawn feel to your projects. I personally adore this set because, while vector or splatter packs are a dime a dozen, this set is truly unique.

Real Smoke

This gorgeous brush set is another example of how anything you can think of has probably been made into a brush. The sample brushes pictured above are just a small selection of the ones in the actual set (there are actually about three times as many). Perfect for adding a bit of mystery and allure to photo manipulations, the variety of brushes in this set makes it useful in many situations, and definitely a set worth adding to your arsenal of Photoshop tools.

Plug-Ins

Plug-ins are a bit like actions in that they simplify the process of manipulating pictures, but they’re a bit more customizable than actions, which produce the same results every time. Think of, for example, how the Gaussian Blur filter allows you to adjust the extent of the blur you want. Plug-ins are like that – they’re essentially filters that change the way your pictures look. Unfortunately, most plug-ins are not free, but the effects they produce can be replicated by hand through a much longer process.

Xero Plug-in Pack

This plugin pack includes about twenty different plug-ins that allow you to do everything from make a picture foggy, to produce a lithograph effect on your picture. All of the plug-ins are adjustable, so you can play with the extent of the transformation. The image above demonstrates the effects of a few of my favorite plug-ins; clockwise from the top, they are: Titanium, Artworkx, Artifax, and Seasons.

Now that I’ve introduced you to just a few of the Photoshop resources on the internet, I hope you’re feeling a bit more artistically inspired by the extent of Photoshop’s adaptability. If you feel like you need to browse a few more brush sets or action packs, websites like deviantArt and Photoshop Tutorials house hundreds, even thousands more resources for you to peruse.

Do you have any trusted sources for Photoshop addons? What are your favorite brushes/actions/plug-ins? Let us know in the comments!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Paragon NTFS for Mac 7.0 provides instant gratification by pulling all the strings in the background, supplying you with instant NTFS support; and puts you and your Mac back in the game.

Today, we’ve got a whopping 20 licences worth $800 to hand out as the grand finale to our 11-day must-have Mac apps giveaway.

Like I mentioned earlier, Paragon NTFS installs itself on your Mac and supplies write support for NTFS-formatted Windows hard disks. And it’s in no way crippled; read and write performance approach native Mac HFS transfer speeds. View the benchmark results here.

Plug in any NTFS external hard disk and Finder will automatically mount it without hesitation. Notice the read and write permissions?

There’s nothing more to it. Install it and leave it be. You’ll be accessing Windows partitions on your Mac so naturally that you’ll forget that Paragon NTFS is actually running the show. It has a preference pane in System Preferences where it will list attached NTFS partitions.

Paragon NTFS is also bundled with MacBrowser — a Windows file-browser which is capable of reading Mac HFS formatted hard disks; closing the gap between the two operating systems in a mixed environment. Read a complete list of its features here.

When it comes to must-have apps, Paragon NTFS is definitely a worthy contender. Download the 10-day trial (MacBrowser not included) to let it impress you. If you’re sold, grab yourself a free copy now!

How do I win a copy?

It’s simple. Just follow the steps.

STEP 3
	Post a link to your Facebook profile in the comments section below Make sure to enter your real email address so that we can contact you if you win!

As the final app in our 11-day must-have Mac apps giveaway, this ends tomorrow. You may participate in as many giveaways as you want, even if you’ve previously won!

Let the giveaway begin! Have fun! Want to know what else we gave away? Check out this post 15 Must-Have Free Apps For Your Mac & Giveaway.

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Call an outline a brief sketch or a schema of the main points and you won’t be off the mark. A rough idea of where you are going to go is important for every kind of project, from organizing your life to organizing your next writing assignment.

Whether the point where you create outlines should come before or after research is debatable. In my opinion, an outline should serve to organize the research data. Even as we begin organizing all the data, an outline will tell us if we have all the gaps filled in or if we need to do something more. In effect, an outline logically shows us the path from the beginning to the end (and the curves in between).

When you create outlines, it also helps to shape web writing, as web content ideally is about scannable content with bulleted points and headlined sections.

To create outlines is actually easy. It starts with a bit of brainstorming and then you can reach for some paper or MS Word. MS Word is the processor of choice for documents and creating effective outlines is just one of its more mundane jobs.  So here’s one more MS Word How-to…

Open A New Word Document & Create Outlines In 5 Easy Steps

1. MS Word 2007 has a special view called Outline that makes the task almost child’s play. Click on the View tab and then select Outline from the Document Views panel. Here you have all the commands to manage your document outlines.



2. The new document has a bullet with a minus symbol. This is the marker for the first heading. Type it in and press enter. Enter other headings similarly. The headings define the main sections of the document.



3. You can write the headings spontaneously. The little up and down arrows on the ribbon allows you to change the order and organize the headings. You can also drag and drop to change the order or to move the text right or left.



4. A document has many levels of detail. To elaborate on the headings, keep adding ideas with the same steps of type and enter. Any heading created can be converted into a subheading. Place your cursor in the sentence you want to make into a subheading and click on the Demote arrow on the Outlining toolbar. It marks down the selected text in relation to the one above it.



Similarly, you can take a subheading one level up by clicking the Promote button on the Outlining toolbar.

5. Using the demote button, a multi-level outline can thus be created in a flash. The lowest level of the outline is the body text. For instance, body text can be written as ideas for dialog or sentences that you want to include under the subheadings. For body text, create a heading or a subheading and then click the double headed arrow (Demote to Body Text). The Promote to Heading 1 on the other side does the exact reverse.

Want To Improve The Look Of Your Outline?

Click on the Home tab and then the Styles panel. For instance, if you want to change the appearance of the main headings, right click on Heading 1 and click Modify to set your own formatting style.

Main topics are formatted in Heading 1, subtopics in Heading 2, and so it continues. You can choose to keep the style by adding it to the Quick Style list.

To change the look of the entire outline, click on Change Styles and pick one from the available Style Sets.

Take A Printout

While brainstorming, it often helps to stand back and look at the ideas from a distance. A printout helps to keep the outlines close at hand. In MS Word, printing outlines works just like a normal print job, but with one tiny difference. You can collapse or expand the headings and subheadings to set the print view you want. After that, it’s all the same.

Or Use It In PowerPoint Too

Outlines can be easily exported to PowerPoint. Each main heading level goes as the heading of a separate slide. The easier way is to save the outline document and then open it from PowerPoint’s New Slide – Slides from Outline.

The second way is to use the Send to PowerPoint command which can be accessed from Word Options – Customize – All Commands and placed in the Quick Access Toolbar.

Well, now that I have outlined and elaborated the steps, here’s a resource that can come in handy – Microsoft’s 18 Outline templates as free downloads.

How often do you use the outlining habit for your documents and presentations? Do you think ‘prefabrication’ of your work is a quicker way from brainstorming to the finished project?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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License information will be sent via email. Thank you for participating. Catch our last giveaway in an hour’s time!

MakeUseOf would like to thank Simonas and the Pixelmator team for their generosity while participating in this giveaway. Interesting in sponsoring? We’d love to hear from you. Get in touch with us via email.

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The teachings of basic HTML code can (almost) be broken down in two all-ruling disciplines: style a.k.a manipulating the appearance, and referring, a.k.a marking and pointing to locations of, and within documents. HTML can’t do anything more complicated than drawing a table, or creating frames, and we’re not going to cut into PHP or Java.

Yet HTML is still far off the beaten path for your average Joe. It’s wizardry, and none of your business. My goal today is to give you some of the HTML building blocks in the course of a few minutes. You won’t be a programmer just yet, but you’ll be able to skim the source of a webpage, understand it, and grab that image that Flickr is trying so hard to keep from you.

Step One – The Concept Of Tags

As said previously, basic HTML code manipulates a plain text document to apply style and reference. It does so by applying ‘tags’. A tag does nothing more than indicating a position or selection of the document, and specifying the kind of wizardry that needs to be done.

<tag-example-1>This, and only this part of the document is affected.</tag-example-1>

<tag-example-2>Something just happened, preceding this part of the document

Example 1 shows a sentence that’s encapsulated by two tags, a begin- and end tag. Everything in between is affected. Very common examples are making text bold, cursive, or creating a link. The end tag is identical to the begin tag, but is preceded in angle brackets by a forward slash ( / ).

Example 2 shows a tag that works alone and (arguably) doesn’t need to be closed. Although not required, it’s occasionally also written as <tag /> to emphasize this very attribute. Loner tags don’t affect ‘part’ of the document, but signify local wizardry, things that happen ‘in between’. Common examples are line breaks and paragraph breaks.

Note: for loner tags, <tag>, <tag />, and <tag></tag> all mean the same thing.

<tag attribute=”value” attribute2=”value2″>This, and only this part of the document is affected.</tag>

Sometimes tags allow for additional attributes to be supplied. Common examples are text font and color, or image width, height and source. In those cases, the tag name is followed by a space, and a number of attribute with a value, again separated by spaces. The value is the variable part of this formula. Note that the end tag remains the same, regardless of the attributes.

We’ll review some common tags in the next few steps.

Step Two – The Parceling of HTML, HEAD & BODY

The HTML, HEAD and BODY tags are to an HTML document what a bedroom, kitchen and living room are to a house. These encapsulating tags parcel out the big parts of a document.

• <HTML></HTML> simply indicates the use of HTML code. They’ll show in every webpage, usually at start and end, and embrace practically all the other code, including the next two.
• <HEAD></HEAD> mark the ‘administrative building’. These will encapsule the title, and enable certain scripts. Usually at the very head (no pun intended) of the document, this is where you don’t need to be.
• <BODY></BODY> is located below the HEAD tags, and makes up most of the document. This part tells the tale of what’s actually showing on your webpage. Living here are the text, images, links, and pretty much anything you can see in your browser. This is where we play. The following tags all occur within the BODY part of an HTML document.

Step Three – Because <P>, <BR> & <FONT> Make You Feel Pretty

We’ve already said HTML was a markup language. This means as much as making text feel pretty. Remember, HTML dates back to when the web was a very text-y experience. Besides, the internet would’ve been far too slow to support YouTube. Here are some of the most common pretty-making tags.

• <b></b> makes your text look bold
• <i></i> makes you write in cursive
• <u></u> underlines what you just wrote

You’ll be delighted to know that these also work in the comments section. Don’t overuse them, though.

• <br> hits the break, making you continue on a new line
• <p> indicates a paragraph, creating an extra large break

These allow you to structure the document, because an actual break doesn’t mean anything in an HTML document.

<FONT></FONT> allows you to manipulate a bunch of other stuff with text, by using attributes like size, face and color.

An ideal example would be <FONT color=”blue”>smurfs</FONT>.

• <H1></H1> to <H6></H6> allow you to quickly draw up different sized headers. H1 is biggest and H7 smallest. The ones we use in MakeUseOf articles are usually about H3.

Nowadays, markup is often kept in a separate CSS file. The exact style figures are explained externally, and one only needs to ‘mark’ part of the document to apply them. This is done by using div tags. For example, <div class=”headermakeuseof”>sometext</div> will look for a headermakeuseof class in the CSS file. We won’t discuss this in detail.

Step Four – Embedded Images with <IMG>

Images have become customary on HTML pages, and yet there’s a piece of code behind it. The <IMG> is one of two tags we’re going to discuss in detail, because it’s something you’ll be able to use. Just think of those annoying web sites that don’t allow you to download some pictures to your desktop (I’m looking at you, Flickr). Next time, just go into the source and grab the source yourself.

Here are some of the attributes used in conjunction with the IMG tab.

• src=”http://site.com/image.jpg/”

Very important. The source attribute specifies the location of a picture. That’s right, a picture is never really rendered in a web page, but gets pulled in from an external source. Once you’ve got that address, you’ve got the picture.

Sometimes, only part of the URL is displayed. The actual URL will depend on the location of the HTML file. This is called a relative address, contrasting with an absolute address. An exemplary http://site.com/dir1/dir2/dir3/page.html may show a value of “image.jpg” when the picture is located in the same directory as the webpage. In this example, the full address would be http://site.com/dir1/dir2/dir3/image.jpg.

If you encounter a relative address of “dir4/image.jpg”, the image will be located in http://site.com/dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4/image.jpg

Similarly, “../image.jpg” will have you go back one directory, “../../image.jpg” two directories, and so on.

• height=”200″ width=”50%”

These tags define how large the image is displayed. It doesn’t say anything about the actual size of the image. Sizes can be added in pixels (where 200 and 200px are one and the same) or percent. With only height or width specified, the other one changes accordingly. Using both tags allows you to ’stretch’.

• alt=”alternative name or comment”

The alt tag specifies the text shown on mouse-over, or when an image fails to load. More specifically, these are what XKCD uses for those funny afterthoughts.

Proper usage would be, e.g. <IMG src=”image.jpg” height=”20px” alt=”example”>

Step Five – Links Are Made With A Tag

This one could be even more important than the IMG tag. An <a></a> tag allows you to mark a spot in a document, and link to documents, pictures, files, and even anchors in other HTML sites. Here are the most common attributes.

• href=”http://www.makeuseof.com”

One of the most common attribute, written <a href=”address”>text</a>. You can create links by defining the web address and encapsulating said ‘anchor text’. Links can also be used in the comments section, provided you don’t link to spam or inappropriate content.

• name=”neverwhere”

Used in conjunction with the name attribute, the tag will create an anchor. You can use this anchor to link back to from within the same page, or even over the web. One can link to an anchor by using a relative or absolute URL, respectively <a href=”#name”> or <a href=”http://site.com/page.html#name”>.

In Conclusion

This is the part where I admit we’ve only brushed the surface of basic HTML code. What we’ve seen today will allow you to skim through and understand a big part of simple websites. Go ahead, try it. You’ll definitely find some tags you don’t know, but that’s where Google comes in handy. If you’re willing there’s a lot more information where that come from, and you can all find it online.

If you’re looking for something very specific, like an image, an audio file, or a link, there’s no need to read the entire HTML page. Press Ctrl+F and search for those files or the relevant tags. You know what you’re looking for now, and especially when you’ve found it.

What do you think? Your first or last encounter with HTML? Let us know what you think in the comments section below, and don’t be afraid to try out some of the markup code!

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Now what if you want to use your mobile phone’s internet connection to power your network? And what if, instead of using a physical wireless router, you decided a freeware application called Mobile Wi-Fi Router would do just fine.

Now remember if you and your phone leave the house you will not be able to remotely connect to your home computers. You are essentially taking the connection out with you.

This makes a good setup for a few computers and casual Internet browsing. NOT if you have seven computers and a server all pulling in gigs and gigs of data.

I am sure you can do this from any mobile platform but today we will be using a Windows Mobile 6.5 device to connect. I have also tested this on Windows Mobile 6.1. If you try it on other versions please let us know in the comments.

First, to setup a wireless home network we will need to download the Wi-Fi Router application. You can grab it from here. Once you have it downloaded and installed on your Windows Mobile Device, you can launch it. Go ahead and start up the application by simply clicking on the desktop logo. Set up from there is just as easy.

The main interface of Wi-Fi Router looks like this:

The options are ready to go right out of the box with a WEP password of 1234567890 and a generic network name. These will be fine for testing but when you decide to put this to use please do everyone a favor and change the network name and the WEP key.

Once you have your settings as you want them, you have the option to check the box next to Use these settings next time without asking.

I only have my 3G connection active so that is the only option that appears under Internet Connection. When you have another connection active like Wi-Fi or Bluetooth those will appear there as well for you to choose from.

When you are ready to test, go ahead and hit the Start soft key button.  You will then see a screen that looks like this:

As you can see it clearly spits the network information back at you so you can look at your device to reference the WEP or network name. Hitting OK will allow you to use your device again keeping the Wi-Fi network active.

Now walk on over to each computer you want to join your new wireless home network and connect to it. Remember to enter your WEP key in the correct field on your computer.

Before the first computer connects the status screen will say Ready to accept connections as you can see below:

When the first computer connects that status message will change to Connection Established.

Go ahead and test out your connection – we will wait right here! If your connection to your phone is flaky you might want to position the device better. Maybe move it closer to the window or somewhere it gets the most bars / best reception.

To disable your wireless home network you can hit the Stop button on the Wi-Fi Router’s main page like so:

If you know how to do this on the iPhone or on Android please hit us up in the comments. Do you have a better way to setup a wireless home network like this? Put us on and let us know!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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List Your Website Here!

Etacts – Enter Etacts. Give your Gmail login and this service will analyze your email history and tell you which contacts are most important to you. It will also tell you how long its been since you’ve contacted these important people. Read more: Etacts: Find Out Who You’ve Lost Touch With On Gmail.

		JustUnfollow – If you are one of those who feels offended by those who do not follow you back on Twitter, you can easily recognize and unfollow them using JustUnfollow. It is a Twitter-based app that displays your Twitter contacts that do not follow you back. Read more: JustUnfollow: Unfollow Twitter Users That Don’t Follow You.
		ZipList – There are hundreds of to-do list apps online that let you create grocery lists, however, there are very few that are actually created for the sole purpose of making grocery lists. ZipList is one of them. Read more: ZipList: Create Grocery Lists To Print & Share Online.
		BuzzCounter – Even though it was launched just recently, Google Buzz has become one of the popular social networking tools, more so because of it’s integration with Gmail. BuzzCounter provides you with a Google Buzz Widget that lets you display your information on any website or blog. Read more: BuzzCounter: Embed Google Buzz Widget On Your Website.
		CodeOrgan – Ever wonder how your favorite website sounds? Me neither. The folks at CodeOrgan evidently have, however. The site is really easy to use: simply enter any URL and hit the “Play This Website” button. CodeOrgan will then analyze the web site’s content and isolate all the characters on the musical scale to construct a melody. Read more: CodeOrgan: Hear How Any Website Sounds.

List 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.

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In this guide, we’re going to show you how to create a bootable USB flash drive using either Windows XP or Windows Vista, and then install the files onto the USB and then install Windows 7 onto your Netbook from USB.

You will need one USB flash drive, with a capacity of at least 4GB, a copy of Windows 7, a program to extract the contents of your Windows 7 image file, such as 7-Zip, and a computer running either Windows XP or Vista. Windows XP users will need to download an additional program, MBRWizard.

Before getting started, you need to make sure you can boot your netbook from a USB by going into the BIOS settings. This can be done on most netbooks by hitting F2 as it is starting.

Once you are in the BIOS settings, go to the Boot tab, and ensure that ‘USB HDD’ is included in the Boot priority order list. If it is, you should be able to boot from your USB flash drive.

Format The USB Flash Drive

First, we need to format the USB to get it ready for use. Right click the USB drive in your Explorer window and click on ‘Format.’ The file system you will be using is NTFS.

Windows XP users, if you do not see that choice in the drop down menu, follow this guide, to enable formatting your USB flash drive, using NTFS.

Activate The USB Partition

At this point, Windows XP users will put the program, MBRWizard to use. After you have downloaded the zip file, extract its contents to the C drive, then open the Windows Command Prompt. (Click the Start button, hit ‘run‘, type ‘cmd‘ and press enter.)

Using MBRWizard and the command prompt, you are going to be able to activate the partition, by typing the following commands:

cd\

cd mbrwiz2.0

mbrwiz list

You should now see, as in the screenshot below, your USB listed as one of the disks, in my case, Disk 1.

You will then type the following command:

mbrwiz /disk=X /active=1 (Where X is the number of your Disk)

When prompted with “Are you sure you want to set the partition(s) Active?“, answer Yes.

Windows Vista users will not need to download MBRWizard, but rather can go straight into the command prompt and type the following:

Diskpart

list disk

You will then need to identify your USB flash drive, again in my case, it is Disk 1, and type the following

Select Disk X (Where X is the number of your Disk)

List partition

Select partition 1

Active

You should then see the message: Diskpart marked the current partition as active.

Extract Windows 7

Navigate to your Windows 7 image file, and extract its contents to a folder named Windows7 in the C Drive. These files can be deleted once you are done.

Return to your command prompt window and type the following:

cd Windows7\boot

bootsect /nt60 X: (Where X is the letter of your USB drive – in my case G:)

You should then see the following:

The final step in getting your USB ready is putting Windows 7 on it, which is where unetbootin comes in.

Once you have the program installed, select Diskimage, and browse to your Windows 7 image file, and select the USB that you have prepared for the install, and click OK.

Unetbootin should take about 15 to 30 minutes to copy the files onto your USB.

Installing Windows 7

All that’s left to do is install your new OS. Plug the USB into your netbook, and start it up. When starting your netbook, you can select to boot from the USB by entering the Boot Menu. In my case, on the ACER Aspire One, I had to hit F12, but with some other netbooks, this can be done by hitting the ESC button.

Once you are in the Boot Menu, you can choose to boot from your USB flash drive, and will then enter the Windows 7 set up menu.

If you are upgrading from Vista, you should be able to preserve your program files and settings, but upgrading from XP is not possible. A clean install is necessary, but all of your files and folders will be preserved in a folder in the C drive, labeled Windows.Old.

If you’re not sure where to start once you have Windows 7 installed, check out the 15 Best WIndows 7 Tips and Hacks and 12 More Windows 7 Tips and Hacks.

Did you manage to install Windows 7 on your netbook? Let us know how it goes in the comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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If you have friends that live too far away to literally play a practical joke on them, you could send them an email instead. Here is a list of 6 scary emails to send to friends.

Scary Stories

Do you know someone who is scared easily? Then you don’t have to come up with anything smart, you can simply send them a scary story just in time for bedtime. Maybe spice it up by adding some pictures or by sending it anonymously. Scary For Kids has a neat collection of scary stories.

Dead Fake

Dead Fake is a service that lets you send anonymous emails. That alone is not a prank. The thing with this site is that you can make your email appear to come from anyone you choose. Do I need to say more?

You could pretend to be your friend’s boss or a government official and I’m sure you can come up with content that will scare your friend. After all, you know them best!

If you’re short of ideas, check out this Prank Ideas site.

Fright Gauge

Do you have a friend who is very proud of their “visual acuity”? Send them this “Find the Fiend” gauge to reveal how well their eyesight is. It will show them just how much higher-than-average their perception skills really are.

A similar page better suited for a younger audience is Where’s Waldo.

Online Hearing Test

For this one to work, you have to embed the code on a website or one of your social network profiles and then send your friend the link. Unfortunately, the source website gives quite a few clues to this being a fake test. However, if you manage to set this up somewhere, it’s one of the most scary tests to email a friend. Fortunately, the code to embed the test is included.

A similar test is Color Vision Deficiency.

Driver’s License Search

This is a website prank. The site claims that the National Motor Vehicle License Organization is now required by law to provide public access to all US driver’s licenses online. It’s the perfect prank to play on someone who has been refusing to show you their passport or driver’s license with the claim that their picture was so ugly. You can now tell them how shocked you were by how ugly their photo really was.

WOT warns that this page has a poor reputation. Well, does it really surprise you?

The Dexter Hit List

If you want to scare someone in the UK, take advantage of this ingenious video generator. Be sure to enter your victim’s full name, their real age range, an actual occupation, and a real characteristic of them into the form.

Your friend will receive a link to icetruck.tv, a video webpage. The video is that of a press conference in which a serial murder is described with hints to potential future victims. At the end of the video the prank is revealed, so no reasons to worry.

The preview for the video did not work for me, the link that is emailed, however, worked perfectly.

Do you want to remain anonymous when sending scary emails to friends?

• Simon showed you How To Send Completely Anonymous Emails

Are you looking for more scary stuff? Here is some material for you:

• Ryan found the Top 5 Sites With Scary Stuff That Makes You Jump
• I gathered up the Top 5 Spooky Websites That Will Keep You Awake At Night
• Sharninder listed the Top 6 Sites To Watch Horror Movies Online for Free

If, however, you’re looking for more pranks to play, check out these articles:

• Justin described Four Funny Ways To Prank Your Parents With The Family Computer
• John wrote about the Top 3 Fake News Prank Story Generators
• Simon explained Two Great’n Simple Nerdy Office Pranks to Play On Friends
• Ryan has written about 4 Really Popular Prank Call Websites & How They Work
• I compiled a list of 20+ Prank Phone Numbers To Hand To A Bad Date

What is the best prank you ever played on someone?

Image credits: svilen001

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An issue we often run into is keeping an up to date list of the items we are out of.  Sometimes we are all ready to go and realize we haven’t made a list yet and we need to drop everything and check the cupboards and refrigerator for missing items.  If there was a tool that would make keeping a list easier, our shopping day would go that much smoother.

Here’s 5 printable grocery list apps you can try out.

ZipList

ZipList is an online service that makes managing your grocery list a lot easier.  It has many features such as:

• Options to add and delete items (web, mobile, text, email and IM).
• Sharing your list with others to help manage the list or even help shop.
• A universal recipe box in which you can save your own recipes AND recipes from other sites.
• Easily add contents of a recipe to your shopping list (with a click).

Check them out.  You don’t even have to register (but registering will open up many of the useful features such as accessing the list from anywhere, sharing, and various accessing options).

Kitchen Monki

Kitchen Monki seems to have taken the grocery shopping list manager to a social level.  With Kitchen Monki you can share recipes with friends via tools such as Twitter and Facebook.  There is also a section where you can search other user-generated recipes.  Very cool and hip, right?  Features?  Check them out :

• Manage your recipes.
• Create printable grocery lists.
• Share via Twitter and Facebook.
• “Fun” recipe adder.
• Search other users’ recipes.
• Manage different stores and lists.

While using the quick add feature, a popup shows similar items helping you to add items even quicker.  Then the items are automatically organized in categories which will aid shopping.  And then there’s the fun design!  Who doesn’t like monkeys?

GroceryWiz

GroceryWiz is another grocery list manager.  The check list-style list manager makes finding and adding items quite simple.

It has a coupons section and it has items listed out by category making finding items simple and fast.

GroceryListMaker

GroceryListMaker is a bit of an older site but the simplicity could actually be inviting!  The design is a simple check list.  All of the grocery categories are there, you just need to check which items you want added to your list.  There are also blank boxes for items that aren’t on the lists.  Then, just click the “Create Grocery List” button.  You’re then taken to a page containing everything you’ve added.  You can then manually highlight what you want displayed on your printable grocery list.

The only thing I didn’t like was that categories that you don’t have any items in still show on the page.  Oh well, still a simple solution.

Grocery List by the Aisle (By BetterBudgeting)

By far the least techie of the choices, this is basically just a printable grocery list page you can print in order to manually write your grocery items down.  It does make keeping the items in categories easy.  If you’d rather stay away from the list managers and write things down “old school”, this print out will be a help.  Otherwise, refer to the other sites on this list:)

That’s the lot of printable grocery list sites for your ease of shopping.  Some of them are easier to use than others.  And I’m sure there are more tools out there.  What tools do you use to help manage your grocery shopping list?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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In the U.S. alone the self-improvement market was estimated at $9.6 billion in 2005. Self-help materials generally come in the form of infomercials, audiobooks, books, seminars and personal coaches. Since 2005, many online self-help resources have emerged, seeking to take advantage of the Internet as another vehicle to distribute their materials. In addition, a new group of self-help websites have shifted the entire learning mechanism to the Internet utilizing features common to Web 2.0 web sites.

Here are a few free options to help you along with your journey towards self-improvement. You just might end up changing your life.

43Things

This site focuses on goal-setting, utilizing a simple approach that starts with your answer to the question: “What do you want to do with your life?” If you are having trouble answering this question, there is a tag cloud on their homepage that shows what others in the 43Things.com community are wanting to do with their lives. You can find further inspiration in their Zeitgeist section, where you can search and filter results.

Let us say one of your goals is to Read more books. Here is how you would use 43Things.com to help achieve that goal:

1. On the home page, in the text box under “What do you want to do with your life?”, enter Read more books.
2. At this point, you will see Read more books in your goals list. Click the Save icon underneath the goal.
3. Now it’s time to become a member of the site, as you are taken to the login page. Click the Sign up link to begin that process.
4. Once you fill out the brief form, you will be taken to your profile page, which will already have the Read more books goal in your list.
5. Optionally, you can click the Add a photo link to add some personality to your profile.
6. Now go ahead and click the Read more books item. Here you will find entries from other users who have the same goal. Each entry generally offers some advice as to how they achieved the goal along with comments from the community and Cheers (similar to getting a Digg at Digg.com). Along the right side, you will also find interesting data such as: how long that goal takes to complete on average, whether the community thinks the goal is worth achieving and a list of people who have achieved the goal.
7. Once you complete the goal, click the I’m done button.
8. At this point you can decide to add your own advice on how you achieved that goal.

ToolsToLife

If you prefer a more direct approach, ToolsToLife.com offers free online self-help “programs” where a virtual coach guides you step-by-step each day of the program. There are five programs currently available: Body Makeover, Get a Job, Optimal Health, Start Living Green and the flagship ToolsToLife program.

I would recommend that you start with the flagship ToolsToLife program which is designed to help you improve your life in general over a period of 90 days. Here is a step-by-step to get you started:

1. Register for an account.
2. Now you will arrive at a dashboard where you have several options, select the Work on your profile option.
3. I suggest you fill out this profile with as much detail as you feel comfortable with. You do not need a public profile to participate; however, if you want to fully take advantage of the community features, this is the first step to doing so.
4. Once you have finished updating your profile, click the Programs button on the menu. From there, click the Start Now button next to the ToolsToLife program.
5. Here, you will need to sign a commitment contract with yourself designed to motivate you to complete the program.
6. Once you have seen the introductory video and text, you will be entered into the Toolbox. This is where you will login each day to complete the 90 day program. The toolbox contains an audio & video component along with exercises, tips & advice, a checklist and a tool room to help track your progress.

Once you get comfortable with participating in a program, you may want to check out the Challenges and Commitments sections. The Challenges section allows you to work towards a goal/challenge with a group of people, while the Commitments section allows you to work on specific goals alone, but with support from the community.

PeopleJam

When you want advice about what products and resources can best help you achieve the results required to improve your life, PeopleJam.com is the solution. They have put together a collaborative directory that attempts to help identify the best resources to achieve specific results.

Let’s say you wanted some help with Stress Management. Here is how you would use PeopleJam.com to help you:

1. Type Stress Management into the search box.
2. On this page you will find a list of many articles relating to that topic. Click on the Stress Management link under Matching topics for Stress management. Alternatively, you could have scrolled down to the All PeopleJam Topics section on the front page and click the Stress Management link there.
3. Here is where you find information relevant to Stress Management along with reviews of each piece of information. For example, scroll down to the Popular Videos section and click on one of the results. There, you will find the video, percentage of people who recommended the video and an area to comment.
4. Now go back to the Stress Management page and click on one of the items under Top Products & Services. Most products have star ratings as well as written reviews, similar to what you would find at Amazon.com.

Once you are comfortable using the site as a resource and you want to give back to the community, consider creating your own profile and add your own ratings and comments.

Have you used one of these sites to improve your life? Is there another online self-help tool that you would like to recommend? What is the most important area of your life that needs improvement? Please join the conversation in the comments.

Image Credit: Oddsock

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What most people don’t know, however, is that this same program allows you to seamlessly combine your native and guest operating systems, allowing you to work with windows from both systems side-by-side. Heck, you can even copy and past text between any two platforms. Combine OSX and Windows, or Windows and Ubuntu, or Ubuntu and Fedora: the possibilities are endless.

Installing Two Operating Systems With VirtualBox

If you’ve never used VirtualBox before, or any sort of virtualization software at all, some preliminary reading may be in order. If you want to create a virtual Windows environment, check out Jorge’s article on installing Windows 7 on a virtual machine in Virtualbox. These instructions are quite specific to Windows 7, but can be easily applied to any version of Windows. Alternatively, you could make a VirtualBox-ready clone of your existing Windows operating system, courtesy of an article by Varun.

If testing various Linux distributions is more your thing, Jorge also has you covered: he wrote all about test driving Linux operating systems with VirtualBox. This is actually a great deal simpler than running Windows, as you can download pre-built packages.

Want a virtual OSX? I’m sorry to say that Apple’s licensing forbids this, though if OSX is your native platform you can easily install VirtualBox to test other operating systems.

It’s also possible, in theory, that some legally-questionable BitTorrent trackers have VirtualBox images you can use to boot OSX. But these are illegal, and VirtualBox’s seamless mode won’t work with these anyway. Don’t check them out, and don’t share links to them in the comments below.

Installing Guest Additions

So you’ve got your guest operating system of choice up and running, but notice that it’s anything but seamless at this point? It’s time to install the Guest Additions. These operating system tweaks make it possible to move your mouse from the guest OS to your native OS without missing a beat.

Installing these additions is simple: on the window of the VirtualBox instance containing you Guest OS click “Devices,” followed by “Install Guest Additions.” Then follow the on-screen instructions within your Guest OS to complete the installation.

For those running a guest Linux Operating System: if you downloaded a pre-built VirtualBox image, it’s likely you already have the Guest Additions installed. If you suspect this isn’t the case, however, the above method should work wonderfully for you as well.

Seamless Mode!

Now that you’ve got the Guest Additions up and running it’s time for the real fun: trying out seamless mode. Click “Machine,” then “Seamless Mode.”

After you do this your host operating system and your virtual operating system should seem to combine. You’ll have a taskbar from each and programs from each will be visible over your native operating system’s desktop. If this hasn’t worked, try pressing “Seamless Mode” again – this will usually do the trick.

As you can see above, this is a great way to play Ubuntu and Window’s versions of solitaire at the same time. If you’re looking for more practical ideas, however there are a few. Using Ubuntu’s version of Firefox is a great way to ensure your native Windows system is completely secure. If you’re a Linux user, seamless mode is a great way to use your Windows-only applications whilst still feeling at home within Ubuntu.

Any application supported by your guest OS can be installed on a virtual machine, provided you’ve allowed for enough hard drive space to support them all.

Conclusion

Seamless mode is a slick, underexplored feature of VirtualBox. It’s fit into my workflow on a regular basis, and can work wonders for anyone who needs to run two systems at once for any reason.

What do you guys think? Is this a cool and useful feature, or merely a gimmick? Do you have any advice for using it and getting it all set up? Can you think of any specific use you’d have for this functionality? Let us know in the comments below!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Just like every other industry, Internet marketing has its share of marketing schemes and scams. Countless websites out there promise that if you purchase their e-book for $39.95, you’ll become an Internet millionaire in less than two to three years. And just like every other industry, those who get sucked into the scam quickly learn the basic truth of life that Thomas Edison left us many years ago – Success is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration. That, my friends, is the gods-honest truth.

With this basic truth in mind, I’d like to provide those of you who are looking for such a way to make at least a decent level of income online with a glimmer of hope in the world of affiliate business – let this be your 10 percent of inspiration, and then I’ll leave the 90 percent of perspiration up to you.

Putting Up an Ad for Free – Affiliate Program Mistakes

Before I get to a system that does work, I’m going to cover my own early online advertising mistakes so that others can avoid them. I’m not too proud to admit to these – it’s important to fall before you can run when you’re starting out with your blog or website, as you know you will not have hundreds of thousands of clicks every month.

Mistake #1 – Ads Unrelated to Content. Making money with affiliate advertising when you have a high-volume website (like MakeUseOf) requires far less work and creativity than making money from a small blog. Does that mean that it’s not possible? Not necessarily. But the one biggest mistake many new bloggers make after signing up for numerous affiliate programs is just to publish the advertisements along the side of their blog and call it good.

Sometimes blogs will include ads that are relevant to the content in the blog, but other times the ads really make no sense. For example, what’s a National Geographic ad doing on a blog about SEO and web content?

Mistake #2 – Unfocused Affiliate Campaign. Another common mistake beginning bloggers make is that they’ll head out and try to sign up for as many affiliate programs as possible, and then place those ads on every single website across the net that they are affiliated with. Unfortunately, most visitors to a blog or website are already inclined to ignore sidebar or banner advertising, so using ads that run the entire gamut, and for the most part are unrelated to the content, simply increases the odds that the ads will be ignored.

Mistake #3 – Ignoring the Advertising Potential of Your Content. If you travel through the amateur blogosphere, you’ll see countless blogs with ads plastered across the top, bottom and sidebar of the blog, and not a single advertisement within the content itself. Ironically, it’s actually the inverse that serves as a more effective method to get people to click on the ads. Most website owners across the net have recognized this truth in terms of the dramatically higher click-through rates with Google ads that are situated within the content itself.

This one subtle change in your website advertising tactics can easily increase your clickthrough rates by 10 to 20% or more. It doesn’t only work with Google Adsense – it will work just as well with your affiliate advertisements. So, keep your header and footer banners if you must, but remove those gaudy sidebar advertisements and start carefully and tactfully inserting your affiliate ads into your content itself. After all, this is where your readers are focused on when they visit your site, so it’s exactly where your advertising should go.

Focusing On A Niche & Showing Me The Money

Now, for the secret weapon that will take your carefully placed affiliate ads and send the click-through rates into the stratosphere. The secret to “winning” the traffic game as a little guy on a newer blog with lower pagerank is by identifying online niche areas that have little competition but very high demand. Yes, there are tools that the big boys have which provide targeted insight and SEO analysis, but quite honestly anyone can perform a similar analysis for free – it just takes a little bit more effort.

Just remember the two principles – high demand (search engine searches) and low competition (other high-ranked websites offering content).  If you think that every popular topic already has something written about it online – think again. To find high volume keywords, we will once again turn to Google Adwords.

Here, I’ve conducted a search for “dog” – a very generic and popular term. As you can see, if you sort by “Search Volume,” you will have the terms with the highest monthly search rate. While the competition numbers in here may not look too promising, don’t worry. Just scroll down the list and look for high volume keywords with at least less than 3/4 bar of competition. Once you have a good list, the next step is to really examine the actual competition that’s out there. To do this, I recommend a great free tool called Niche Watch.

To show what you’re looking for, I’ve conducted a search for a highly popular and highly competitive term – “ghost hunting.” Niche Watch gives you the top 20 ranked competitors for that search term. As you can see here, the Anchor, Title and Text columns are filled in pretty well. This means that not only are the top competitors ranked highly for the term – but Google likely ranks the site highly, and your little blog will have a lot of difficulty “beating out” those sites to the top of Google results for that term. On the other hand, you will eventually discover that one of your high-volume keywords have Niche Watch results that look like the following.

Here, you’ll notice a lot of empty spaces under Anchor, Title and Text. These are the terms where you can easily skate up to the top of Google results on a very popular term, so long as you use the SEO techniques that we’ve discussed earlier. If you perform your optimizing better than those competitors (who are, for the most part, already not valued very highly by Google) – you will get the majority of that traffic.

How High Traffic Benefits Your Affiliate Business

Forget about the $39.95 book about how to get rich quick with an affiliate business. You can get rich, but by working smart, not quick. The recipe for success is no secret – these are the only steps you need.

1. Simply identify those niche search terms that so many people are searching for, yet there’s barely any useful content online for.

2. Register a domain name that capitalizes on that specific keyword phrase.

3. Create optimized (and valuable) content on the website, with your content-relevant affiliate advertisements embedded tastefully throughout.

Obviously, there’s much more to developing a successful website from scratch – but if you don’t already have a highly popular website, then focusing on an underserved niche is the only path to success for an entrepreneur like yourself.

Please share your experiences with your own affiliate business efforts and any tips that you would offer anyone who is new to the business in the comments section below.

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Its gorgeous UI and incredible ease-of-use makes it just amazing to work with. It’s loads quickly, does exactly what you need and goes out of your way. Oh, did I mention that it’s perfect?

We’ve managed to “heist” 10 copies of Pixelmator worth $600 to give away for free to 10 lucky MakeUseOf readers.

I guess this is something that amazes me so much that I have to mention twice — Pixelmator loads so quickly, it’s unbelievable. When I need to make simple yet sophisticated adjustments to my images quickly while multitasking, forget about Photoshop, I launch Pixelmator.

It greets me with a simple Welcome window.

Then here’s the gorgeous (yet very usable) UI I spoke of earlier. All of the tools you need are laid out on the screen. Like Photoshop, it supports layers, advanced image correction, retouching tools, cool filters and effects. And before you ask — yes, Pixelmator is compatible with PSD files. In fact, take a look at the full list of features it has to offer.

If you’re harbouring some doubt as to whether Pixelmator is as powerful as Photoshop, don’t. Pixelmator has a very creatively driven community which share and help each other bring out the best from Pixelmator. Here are some web-based tutorials to demonstrate that Pixelmator won’t cripple your creative mojo.

And what about exporting images? Pixelmator saves to a native “pixelmator” image format but it will also allow you to export your images to any image format you desire. I mean any. In the screenshot below, notice that the common image formats have their own quick-to-reach tabs but within the Other tab lies a whole bunch of other image formats I’ve never even heard of.

Pixelmator is the perfect, cheaper alternative to Photoshop on a Mac. If you don’t believe me, download the 30-day trial and check it out for yourself.

How do I win a copy?

It’s simple. Just follow the steps.

STEP 3
	Post a link to your Facebook profile in the comments section below Make sure to enter your real email address so that we can contact you if you win!

This giveaway ends tomorrow, just the final one starts. You may participate in as many giveaways as you want, even if you’ve previously won!

Let the giveaway begin! Have fun! Want to know what else we gave away?

MakeUseOf would like to thank Simonas and the Pixelmator team for their generosity while participating in this giveaway. Interesting in sponsoring? We’d love to hear from you. Get in touch with us via email.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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As organizations started spanning multiple sites, they started using WANs. What about the situations where organizations have offices spanning a number of countries? Surely connecting them with dedicated wires is no longer a cheap solution. An alternative solution that addresses most of the needs and is much more secure and reliable is that of Virtual Private Networks.

The Definition of a Virtual Private Network (VPN)?

There are a number of definitions of a Virtual Private Network depending upon which purpose it serves. The bits that are common and essential to every one of these definitions is that you use an existing network (generally a public network like the Internet) and then create a virtual network atop of that to serve some other purpose. To allow you to understand this better, let me give you an example.

Suppose your office has a network of computers which you make extensive use of when at work. Now one day you want to access your work from home, that is stored on the network computers. Obviously your home computer is not a part of the office network. You could remote login into your machine if that is an option and then use it as if you were present in the office.

The other option is that of VPN. It is a common practice these days to give employees access to VPN’s. With VPN you are essentially on the same office network although you may be at a different physical location. In this case the VPN would be configured to work over the Internet to give you access to the internal organization network.

You can thus exchange and share data as if on the internal organizational network although you are not directly connected to it. A VPN thus let you use the public network (the Internet in this case) to transmit private data.

How VPN’s Work?

There are two main technologies that facilitate the creation of VPN’s to allow you to transmit data safely and reliably over a public network. These are encryption and tunneling. Encryption in simple words, as you may know, is the act of scrambling data so that only the intended recipient can view or understand what you have sent and that it looks worthless and gibberish to other parties who may happen to view it.

Tunneling on the other hand refers to the act of creating a virtual tunnel of sorts where you place the contents of an entire packet into another packet to transmit it over the public network. The encapsulating protocol is so chosen that it is not understood by other computers or network devices over the public network which the packets may pass through.

The result of putting these two together is that you can now transmit your data without having to worry about security and reliability issues over the public network.

Advantages Of Using VPN’s

As would be clear by now, one can easily use VPN’s to connect multiple sites (think branch offices) onto the main corporate network and to gain remote access to internal organizational networks (or even your home network for that matter). It is also the cheaper solution in most of the cases when compared with traditional WANs. VPN’s are secure and offer reasonably good performance with high reliability.

Have you ever configured a VPN? What software did you use?

Image Credits: Cisco Inc, Microsoft Technet

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License information will be sent via email. Thank you for participating. Catch out next giveaway in an hour’s time!

MakeUseOf would like to thank The Omni Group for their generosity while participating in this giveaway. Interested in sponsoring? We’d love to hear from you. Get in touch with us via email.

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The better solution to plugins would be bookmarklets, which use little to no system resources and will also work with every browser and OS.

One Quix Solution To Bookmarklets

To work more efficiently with bookmarklets, you can use a little help from Quix – a bookmarklet which serves as a container for other bookmarklets. You can have all the functionalities of many bookmarklets using only this one, but how do you create bookmarklets within Quix?

Quix comes with tons of commands that can replace your existing bookmarklets. But as extensive as it may be, Quix still left many custom bookmarklets out of its list. Even though Quix provides you with the way to add your own sets of commands, there’s no clear explanation on how to do it that I could find.

There’s no point of having the powerful all in one bookmarklet container if there are still many bookmarklets that can’t be contained. So I sat back and tried to make sense of all the resources that I could find, and then experimented on adding custom bookmarklets into Quix.

Building The Chain Of Commands

Basically, to add your own custom bookmarklet commands to Quix, you have to create a text file with the lines of commands inside, and load it after Quix’ own script. Here are the steps to do it:

First: The Text File

Create a text file and fill it with command lines. There are three components to these lines:

1. the command: the name of the command or the shortcut you want to call this command with.
2. the executable: the actual script that this command will perform
3. the description: the explanation about what this line of command will do.

More detailed explanation could be found at the syntax page. Don’t forget to also look at the real example for comparison.

The hardest part is figuring out the “executable” part of the command. In some cases, you could just copy and paste the command used in the real bookmarklet. I compared the Evernote command from its own bookmarklet and the one I found on Quix, they are exactly the same. But you need to experiment here as this method is not always working.

To know what command is used by your bookmarklet, open the bookmark library (“Bookmarks > Organize Bookmarks” menu in Firefox or “Bookmarks > Show All Bookmarks” menu in Safari)

Then select the bookmarklet to get the “executable command”.

Second: The Upload

After you are ready with the text file, you have to make it available online. The easiest way is to use Dropbox. Just save the text file inside your Dropbox folder.

Move it to the “Public” folder, right click on it and choose “Copy Public Link” from the Dropbox menu.

Then go to the Extend Quix page, paste the public link into the “Command file URL” field, and install the customized Quix bookmarklet by dragging and dropping the bookmarklet icon to your bookmark bar.

Congratulations! You’ve just upgraded your Quix with the commands that you need. Everytime you come across a new bookmarklet that isn’t supported by Quix, just add the command line in the text file, and you are good to go.

Have you tried Quix? Share your thoughts and opinions in the comments below.

em>Got Tech Questions? Ask Them on MakeUseOf Answers!

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We will start off with FreeLayouts. When you arrive at their site you will see templates for normal websites, blogs, as well as MySpace. Click on MySpace Layouts in the main navigation menu and then you will see more specific sections.

The sections are CSS< XHTML, 2 Column, Fixed Width and eleven different colors as you can see below from the screenshot.

Here are some of the free MySpace templates that were displayed on the homepage while I was checking it out. Notice a lot of themes surrounding holidays.  Valentines Day that just passed and St. Patrick’s Day which is coming up.

You can click on preview to see a close up view of what the template really looks like. That will bring up this window:

You can click on the Get Code button to retrieve the code you will need to integrate the template like so:

Simply highlight the code and paste it into your About Me section of your MySpace profile to get started. I clicked on the box, hit control A to select all of it, and then control C to copy it and finally control V to paste it where it needs to go.

You also have the option of setting up an account and creating favorites that you can refer back to.

The next website for free MySpace templates we will be looking at is called MySpaceLibrary.

I scrolled down and chose layouts and started browsing around what they had to offer.

Looking around they have a little something for everyone. I found sports templates, music templates, geeky templates…seriously if you use MySpace you will be able to find something here!

After finding the template that you like, click on the link below it that says Click to view large and get MySpace codes.

That will take you to this page:

Just like before, if you want to use it copy the code and paste it into your About Us page on MySpace. To view the template click on the preview button below the picture of the image. That will show it to you like this:

The last site we will be checking out is called MySpaceSkins.

Scroll down when you get to the site and you will see the templates. The first section is called Girly MySpace Layouts followed by grunge, fashion and beach layouts as you can see below:

Click on one of the layouts or on a More [Category] MySpace Layouts button to see more related layouts. After selecting a layout you will see something that looks like this:

You can grab the layout code as we have before for the other sites but here we have some other choices like customizing the layout with their online MySpace profile editor.

or adding a custom Google search box on the page.

If you have other sites and resources hook us up and leave the URLs in the comments!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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List Your Website Here!

Visual Recipes – Recipes are excellent to learn how to cook, but they lose their value when the instructions don’t make any sense. VisualRecipes solves this problem by bringing you step by step recipes with photos. Read more: VisualRecipes: Step by Step Recipes With Photos.

		TypeHi – Some people spend countless hours chatting with strangers. The only problem is, those strangers might be on the other side of the world and the chance to meet them in person is almost zero. TypeHi changes that by letting you chat with strangers in your city. Read more: TypeHi: Site for Chatting with Strangers in Your City.
		MultiDM – Almost every third party app for Twitter allows you to send direct messages, but there are no utilities that support sending messages to multiple twitter users at the same time. MultiDM is an app that helps you with that. Read more: MultiDM: Send Direct Message To Multiple Twitter Users.
		RSS.im – RSS feeds are extremely useful for getting the latest updates for your favorite website or blog. We usually read our feed from our RSS readers or e-mail. RSS.im is a web app that connects your RSS feed to your instant messaging clients so you can receive rss feeds updates in your IM window. Read more: RSS.im: Receive RSS Feeds Via Instant Messenger.
		Picmeleo – There are a number of excellent image editors online and Picmeleo is no different when it comes to ease-of-use and number of features. It is a light-weight photo editor that lets you crop and scale images, adjust color and brightness and apply various filters. Read more: Picmeleo: Embeddable Picture Editor For Your Website.

List 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.

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You’ll be rewarded with exclusive previews of future publications, what we refer to as “Sneak Peeks”; and the best posts from the day before, “Yesterday’s Bests”.

We also use our fan page to inform you about premium software giveaways and discounts that are not announced on the website. We get a lot of those from software developers and distribute them mainly on Facebook.

In addition to that, you’ll have the chance to participate in polls and ask our MakeUseOf writers questions or just tell everyone how much you love reading our site!

So grab some friends and become our fans today!

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Meanwhile the Sony PSP, a direct competitor to the DS, has the ability to not only play games, but watch movies, play music, and more. This has left some Nintendo DS owners feeling a little left out.

This article will explain basically how to turn your DS into a MP3 player so that you can add music playing functionality to your beloved dual-screened handheld console, so you may not need to buy that shiny new iPod.

Although the new Nintendo DSi does have native support for AAC, users with the older iterations or those wishing to play MP3s are left in the dust. However, there is a relatively easy way to unlock the hidden potential of the Nintendo DS.

Buy a Flash Card

The first thing you will need to do is buy a flash card to use with your DS. A flash card is a game card containing flash memory that you plug in as if you were playing any other game. It enables you to add more functions, such as running the application that lets you play MP3s, Ogg Vorbis, and AAC files. The nice thing about flash cards is their convenience, ease of use, and they won’t void your warranty like some other methods do since it’s just a card and no hardware modification is required. With that said, Nintendo does not condone the use of flash cards, so do it at your own risk.

There are many different brands of DS flash cards and all of them have their own set of features and quality. Notable brands include the CycloDS, the M3, and Acekard. In this tutorial, we will use the Acekard 2i, which is known for being an inexpensive quality card. Acekard’s official web site has a list of recommended distributors to buy from. Unless you already have a MicroSD card to use, I suggest you purchase a package that contains both the MicroSD card and the Acekard.

I bought my whole kit for less than $35, which is around the price of one game. The kit will include simple instructions to prepare the card for the DS, which is basically just downloading and copying some files onto the card using the included USB stick.

Download & Install Moonshell

Now that you’ve got the flash card, you need an application to play the music. This is where Moonshell comes in. Moonshell is an unofficial multimedia player for the Nintendo DS. It can be used to play music, watch videos, view photos, read text, and some other things.

To install Moonshell, follow these instructions:

1. Mount your MicroSD card into your PC using the USB loader from the Acekard kit.
2. Download Moonshell from the official web site.

   

3. Run or unzip the files to a directory and then run the setup.exe file. It will ask you to select a language.

   

4. Choose your mounted card. For me, it’s “Removable Disk J:”.

   

5. It will begin to copy the files.

   

   After it’s finished, you can also go ahead and copy over a MP3 to the Removable Disk as well. Then safely eject the USB reader and card.

6. Plug the Acekard into your DS and power on. Choose to load the Acekard from the main menu.

   

7. Select the Moonshell program to run it. On your first boot, it will ask you to select a language.
8. After it loads (takes a few seconds) you’ll see a file explorer on the bottom screen where you can select the MP3 you want to play. On the top screen you’ll see instructions for how to play tracks, change volume, and so on.

   

9. Now simply select the song you want to play, and if all goes well, it will begin to play immediately. Continue to add more MP3s to your SD card as needed. You can organize them using file directories, just like you would on your PC. Note: With Moonshell version 2.10, I’ve noticed MP3s with very high bit-rates may not play correctly, but most MP3s work fine.

Was this tutorial easy to follow? Have you used your Nintendo DS to play music? Do you have any tips to improve the experience? If so, please leave us a comment below!

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These days your logo needs to be adaptable to a variety of uses throughout social media.  It should look sharp and noticeable in many different forms including a Twitter icon, Facebook thumbnail,  and Flickr buddy icon.

Whatever your level of design experience, here are some tips to help you make your creation the most usable and effective for online marketing:

Watch Your Aspect Ratio

Most marketing folks will tell you that your logo design shouldn’t be too short and wide or too tall and skinny because it isn’t pleasing to the eye.  The social web gives you another reason to keep your width and height in harmony.

Most social media sites put your logo into icons and thumbnails that are square (or close to it).  While your logo design doesn’t need to be a perfect square, it should conform to one nicely with little fuss.  If you have ever watched a widescreen movie on a boxy 4:3 television, you will understand that the further from a square an image is, the more it will have to be reduced, clipped, or compressed in order to fit into one.  In whatever icon or thumbnail your logo is used, you’d like it to be as large as possible – using as much of the available real estate as you can.

Detach Text & Graphics

Because you can’t foresee all the ways you might use your logo design in the future, you want it to be versatile.  You may need to rearrange or use only a portion of your logo if it doesn’t fit well into a particular size and shape.  For some very small icons, it is usually impossible to include your entire logo.  As a result, many companies use a single letter or graphical element from their logo for social media purposes.  If your text and graphics are tightly intertwined, it will be difficult to divide your logo design into separate pieces.

Keep It Simple

Avoid thin lines, too many words, and overly detailed graphical elements in your design. Anything too intricate may not be recognizable when the image is resized.  If you’re a real estate broker that would like to include an image of a house in your logo, don’t try to include the front door, windows, and the family sitting around the dining room table.  Simple geometric shapes will communicate your idea more efficiently.  So don’t spend time browsing clip art galleries; they generally aren’t helpful for logo design.

You also want to limit the number of colors and shades that you use. If your logo is too noisy, it can get lost in the backdrop of a busy social media webpage. An uncomplicated logo with two or three colors will stand out better.  Not to mention it will be easier and more economical to put it on stuff in the real world – like t-shirts and golf balls.

You can have fun with gradients, shadows, and your favorite Photoshop filters when designing your website, but when it comes to your logo, stick with the principle “less is more”.

Be Consistent

It strengthens your brand when people see the same image everywhere for your business or organization, so try not to have too many different forms in use.  Many successful brands create one simplified variation of their logo design that they use for every social media outlet.  For example, Woot! uses only the exclamation point as its all-purpose social media icon … including everything from its large 200px Facebook image to its tiny 16px favicon.

This strategy is smart also because you can’t always control how your image will be used by social media sites.  They generally allow you to upload one image that is automatically cropped and resized for different uses.  Facebook is nice enough to let you specify how your thumbnail is captured from your main image, but Twitter simply resizes your original image to, at last count, as many as 4 different versions.  You want a logo that is likely to look the same no matter how it is altered.

Don’t Try To Tell A Story

Take a look around and you’ll notice that many great logos are simply made up of the business name (or abbreviation) in a unique font and color, with sometimes an adjacent graphical element.  Don’t obsess over trying to communicate everything about what you do through your logo.  While you want the style to be appropriate and complementary to your business, your logo doesn’t have to explicitly tell people what it is.

Your logo doesn’t need a house if you’re a real estate broker or a book if you’re a bookstore.  Even if your name doesn’t clearly convey the type of business you are (i.e. “Bill’s Photography”), your marketing activities and messages will associate your logo with your brand in peoples’ minds.  Besides, people typically won’t see your logo in isolation without any context.  Once you free yourself of the burden of trying to say too much with your logo, you are more likely to create one that is cleaner and more effective.

Take It For A Spin

You want to avoid having to change your logo once it is well established.  So you should feel comfortable that it can be easily utilized for any purpose.  Be sure to sample your logo in a range of different sizes, but also try it out in all the various social media venues that you may join.

You don’t have to create a profile to test your logo in each site.  Simply copy and paste a sample icon from the site into your graphics program, then transform your logo to the same size to see how it will look.  Although most of the major sites represent you as a square (geometrically, not personally),  there are many, such as shopping comparison sites, that use very specific dimensions.  It’s worth taking the time to make sure your logo will work easily everywhere that you want to be.

Conclusion

A good logo design won’t necessarily adhere strictly to all of these guidelines or fit perfectly into every situation.  But by taking social media usage into consideration when designing your logo, you’re more likely to create one that will be easy to deploy and have a distinctive online presence.

How well do social media sites handle your logos and images?  How do you make sure they look the way you would like?

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