Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Make your own 3D world from paper

6:12PM Sarah Stokely | This nifty earth relief globe was created using paper modelling. The images used to create the globe were taken from the National Geophysical Data Center – NOAA Satellite and Information service website. The template to make your own was kindly made available by paper modelling enthusiast Giuseppe Civitares on the PaperPino website. Download the template in  PDF format here. [via MAKE] More »

Avoid signing your rights away with EULAlyzer

4:14PM Sarah Stokely | I am really glad this software exists. It’s a little app which you can use to scan End User License Agreements  (you know those things that most people just scroll through and hit ‘agree’). Simply cut and paste the EULA into the program, and it will flag any suspect phrases for you to check.  It’s pretty unreasonable to expect people to read pages and pages of legal “agreement” before using your product or service, but the fact is that some companies rely on this to try to sneak spyware onto your computer, or share (sell!) your data to other companies. EULAlyzer is a nice way to get out of reading all the detail, but still checking for nasties. I ran EULAlyzer’s own EULA through the program and it flagged the word “third party” as a phrase of interest. You simply need to click to be shown each place where the suspect phrase occurs in the EULA. In this case, the software wasn’t trying to trick me into handing over my personal details to third parties, it was just referring to third parties as users of the software. But I’m glad I checked. :) You can download EULAlyzer here – it’s freeware and there’s a paid pro version available. [via Makeuseof.com] More »

Discover New Music at Thesixtyone

2:00PM Adam Pash | Find and download new music and build playlists of streaming tunes online with web site thesixtyone. This sort of site has been springing up a lot lately (like Songza, SeeqPod, and perhaps one of the originals, The Hype Machine), but thesixtyone is probably one of the most feature-rich, well thought-out sites of its kind. No matter what you do on the site the music keeps playing, so you can navigate anywhere and build playlists in real time, “bump” songs (à la digg), and download MP3s without ever stopping the music. Some music can be downloaded for free from thesixtyone, while other DRM-free MP3s can be purchased through Amazon MP3 [if you're in the US]. thesixtyone More »

Track Purchases with the Holiday Gift List Worksheet

1:00PM Gina Trapani | Ok elves, it’s T minus 15 days till your bag o’ presents is supposed to be wrapped and under the tree. To help you brainstorm, gather, and wrap the goods, Real Simple magazine offers holiday gift list worksheet as a PDF download. This is just a simple list with lines to fill in each person’s name, the gift idea, and checkboxes to mark whether you’ve purchased, received, and/or gift-wrapped it. If printing’s not your thing and you’d like to track your holiday spending as well, make yourself a spreadsheet with an additional column for cost, totaled at the end. Holiday Gift List Worksheet | 50 Gifts Under $50 [RealSimple.com] More »

Speed Up iCal Entries with Do-It

12:00PM Adam Pash | Mac OS X only: Freeware, single-use application Do-It provides a quick and simple way to create new iCal appointments without the clicking frenzy required with iCal’s default interface. Just launch it whenever you want to add a new appointment, fill out the details (the form is completely Tab-friendly), hit enter and go back to whatever you were doing. It’s a simple but wonderful improvement to iCal if the default behaviour has ever gotten on your nerves. Do-It is a free download, Mac OS X only. Do-It 1.0 [via DownloadSquad] More »

Generate Charts On-the-Fly with Google’s API

11:00AM Gina Trapani | Google’s newly released chart API generates charts and graphs on the fly called by a URL with the right parameters set. The Google Blogoscoped weblog runs down what data to hand the API to get back a pie chart, line chart, bar graph and more. Don’t hot-link the image on your high traffic web site, though, you only get 50,000 hits on it. Above I’ve used it to generate a chart of the percentage of the last 30 Google-related posts we’ve published here at Lifehacker by editor. Here’s the live URL if you want to play with it and modify for your own purposes. Google Releases Chart Image Generator [Google Blogoscoped]Google Chart API More »

Learn to love the Windows key

10:48AM Sarah Stokely | The Windows key seems to inspire loathing far beyond what is reasonable for a mere key on a keyboard. I know people who’ve pried it off the keyboard completely (disabling it just wasn’t enough). As a gamer, I’ve learned to hate it because of my propensity for leaning on it at inopportune times, popping myself out of the game just as a monster is trying to eat me. But Fast Company today has published a list of useful Vista shortcuts which it says could shave 10 minutes off the average person’s workday – leaving you with a spare week a year. Perhaps it’s time to learn to love the Windows key? Here are a couple of the shortcuts they recommend: Windows + # = Launches shortcut in Quick Launch with the position corresponding to the # entered. Windows + X= Launches Windows Mobility CenterWindows + G= Cycles through Sidebar GadgetsWindows + Tab  +CNTRL= Use the arrow keys to cycle through programs on the taskbar by using Windows Flip 3-D    While it’s typical for heavy keyboard users (like programmers) to minimise the amount they use the mouse, preferring keyboard shortcuts for efficiency and ergonomic reasons, I wonder if this love of the keyboard extends to the Windows key. I have to admit I wasn’t familiar with the shortcuts above. Do you use them? Shortcut keys in Vista [Fast Company] More »