Thursday, November 20, 2008
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Make Your Own Glass Whiteboard For Under $70
8:48AM Gina Trapani | Purchasing a large commercial whiteboard can get expensive, but if you’ve got a home office or dorm room with a big white or dark solid wall, you can build your own glass whiteboard. Instructables user johnpombrio did just that in his son’s dorm room. The result could be a lot more finished, and you need a white or dark background behind the glass to see the writing on it, but at around $65, the price is right. He writes: Does it work? Yes. Is it the best whiteboard my son has ever used? No. It’s the contrast. A white whiteboard with a black marker is, by far, the easiest to see and use. Unless there is a dark background or a white background, the writing is harder to see on a clear whiteboard. Have you opted to built your own whiteboard instead of buying one? Did you use showerboard, glass, whiteboard paint or another material? Share your secret in the comments. A glass whiteboard [Instructables via Make] More »
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Google Image Search Adds Search-By-Style Options
6:58AM Gina Trapani | Today Google adds clip art and line drawings to their image search criteria, in addition to photos and faces. To restrict your search to either line drawings, clip art, photos, or faces, choose the style criteria from the drop-down on an image results page. (Alternately you can add the right parameter to your search URL to set up a keyword quick search; for line drawings, for example, it’s &imgtype=lineart.) Check out a cool example search for Celtic art line drawings. For more Google search fun, check out our top 10 obscure Google search tricks. New search-by-style options for Google Image Search [Official Google Blog] More »
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Make Your Own Homemade Butter
6:00AM Gina Trapani | A homemade jar of butter makes a good gift in and of itself, and Slashfood details how to make some. The process doesn’t look that difficult, either. The finished product might be even more fun and delicious if you threw in some cinnamon sugar, garlic salt, sun dried tomato, or any other of your favourite sweet or savory butter-spicer-upper. Everyone loves butter. Go forth and make some. Photo by Marusula. Homemade Butter [Slashfood] More »
Work
Video Demonstration Of Butler In Action
5:49AM Gina Trapani | Quicksilver isn’t the only Mac launcher on the block: in this eight minute video, Macworld’s Rob Griffiths does a nice demonstration of what’s possible with the free Butler. Hands-on With Butler [PC World] More »
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TrayProdder Adds Vista-Style Checkboxes And Selection To XP
4:00AM Kevin Purdy | Windows XP only: Free system utility TrayProdder adds some of Windows Vista’s handier file-handling tools, checkbox selection and full-row highlighting, to Windows XP. The small app doesn’t require installation, so you can try out selecting multiple items by checking them off, rather than praying you don’t slip off the Control key, without burdening your system. All properties of each file are also highlighted while in “Details” view, which is great for shuffling music, movies, and big files around. One quirk of TrayProdder, though, is that you use the actual app’s utility window to select, copy, or otherwise handle the files you’ve checked, though it can be convenient, too, depending on what you’re doing. If you like how TrayProdder’s features work and want to keep it running in your system, the How-To Geek details how to auto-start the app with relevant options enabled at the “via” link below. TrayProdder is a free download for Windows XP systems, requires the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 TrayProdder [Everator.com via the How-To Geek] More »
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LifeTango Tracks And Shares Your Goals
3:15AM Gina Trapani | Webapp LifeTango hosts a community of people setting life goals, sharing them with each other, and tracking progress and milestones along the way. Fill out the brainstorming wizard to set goals in various areas of your life, from places you want to travel or live to career, financial, and fitness goals. Along the way choose from goals others have set that make you go “oh yeah!” (like “ride in a hot air balloon” or “drink more water.”) Designate your goals as daily or weekly or just assign a due date to get email nudges about your progress. Compared to previously mentioned Lifetick, LifeTango appears to be more social but offer less of a clean interface. LifeTango More »
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Dailymile Brings Your Friends And Neighbours Into Your Workouts
1:00AM Kevin Purdy | Free workout tracker Dailymile works fine as a logging and analysis tool for your running, cycling, or other cardio-oriented training, but its highlights are the ways it uses friends and locality to motivate. It’s a fairly new webapp, so don’t expect to see many friends or fellow runners in your neck of the woods up just yet. But you can use Dailymile to connect your workout notes to Twitter (and, eventually, Facebook and other apps), and keep track of races and other events near you. If disappointing your exercise-focused friend is motivation enough to get you out the door, Dailymile is worth checking out. The site is a little AJAX-heavy, though, and left my Firefox browser chugging to keep up at some points, so don’t expect a quick visit from a low-speed or mobile connection. Dailymile is free to use, requires a sign-up. Dailymile More »
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Freepath Is A Free File Sharing And Presentation Solution
11:30PM Lifehacker US Edition | Windows only: Create and mix your own file and media playlists with Freepath. Users can create file playlists from a variety of sources: files from their own computers, video files found on YouTube, photos from Flickr, nearly anything you can drag and drop from the web or your own computer can be dumped into Freepath. Once the files are placed within a playlist, users can opt to keep the list as spartan or create a slideshow complete with transitions and extra effects. One of the more unique features of Freepath is that files remain editable once they are embedded into the playlist. More »
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Make Gmail Your Productive-Minded Web Gateway
11:00PM Kevin Purdy | Web PR worker Steve Rubel has a great post at his Micro Persuasion blog detailing how he adapted Gmail to serve as his ideal start page for nearly anything he needs to get done. Lots of stuff is built into Gmail by default—like web or mail search and RSS web clips—but Rubel goes into detail on using Google Talk to update IM-friendly social services, Labs tools like Quick Links and the new gadgets to access his calendar, documents, and vital services, and start his writing in an auto-saving Gmail box, to be mailed to other writing apps. It’s a neat primer for creating a manageable, inter-connected workflow in the webapp cloud, if you’re down for that sort of thing. Got your own Gmail-centric system, or another app that’s a smarter start page? Tell us in the comments. Making Gmail Your Gateway to the Web [Micro Persuasion] More »
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