Inetspired

Lego From the Sea

I wonder who lost the giant lego man in the water.

IP Location Lookup

Ajax Powered IP Lookup is a handy service, which displays the geographical position of a IP adress on a Google Map. IP-to-location lookup is done via the GeoLite database.

Embed Feeds in Your Web Site

With the free service Feed to Javascript you can embed any Atom or RSS feed in your blog or web site. Just submit the address of the desired feed, specify some details about the appearence of the embedded feed (how many items to display, full text or just headlines, display dates …) and Feed to JavaScript returns a snippet of JavaScript code to insert into your web site. The appearence of the embedded Feed can be adapted via CSS.

Managing Audio-Tags with MP3 Book Helper

MP3 Book Helper is a free program for Windows for editing MP3 and OGG/Speex/Flac Vorbis tags. MP3 Book Helper supports mass tagging with the help of variables and Regular Expressions. Missing tag-information can automatically be obtained by querying the freedb-Database. MP3 Book Helper does not require installation. Just download and unpack the ZIP archive from Sourceforge into a folder of your choice.

A full list of MP3 Book Helper’s features can be found here.

Visual Meta Search Engine

KartOO is a metasearch engine with visual display interfaces. When you click on OK, KartOO launches the query to a set of search engines, gathers the results, compiles them and represents them in a series of interactive maps through a proprietary algorithm.

Determine the Gender of Your Baby

GenSelect allows parents-to-be with some money to spare to determine the sex of their baby with 96% accuracy…

The Kits allow customers to modify the body chemistries of both mother and father according to scientifically-proven clinical tests to influence the gender of their next child before they conceive.

Creating Free Ringtones

With the Free Web Ringtone Maker you can upload your favourite tunes from your computer and convert it to a ringtone. Supported file formats are MP3, MIDI, WAV, M4A, AAC and MP4.

However, as the page states:

Do not upload copyrighted, obscene or any other material which violates cellsea’s Terms of Service . By clicking “Go”, you are representing that you own all copyrights in this item or have express permission from the copyright owner(s) to upload it.

Backup Windows Drivers

Driver Collector is a cool freeware tool for Windows, which allows you to copy all used device drivers to a specific folder:

Driver Collector is a tool designed to find and collect installed windows drivers for the hardware you select on your PC. Once you tell it which type of drivers you want to collect, it will copy them to a specific folder. This can be very handy when preparing for a format and reinstall of Windows, especially when you or a client have since lost the computers driver disks.

Guessing the Killer

The New York Times reports about a new study which demonstrates that people with low self-esteem don’t like surprise endings in stories:

A new study finds that people with low self-esteem don’t seem to like it much when a story ends with a twist. In a whodunit, they like the “who” to be the person they suspected all along.

Here is a link to the abstract of the original article in Media Psychology.

Printable Christmas Tree

For people allergic to christmas trees, HP offers a printable christmas tree for free download. The tree spans about 18 pages of paper and is 4 feet tall.

How to Colorize Black-and-White Photos

Over at Digital Photography School there’s a pretty straightforward tutorial which shows how colorize black-and-white photos with the help of Adobe’s Photoshop. The tips in the tutorial can also be applied to coloring black-and-white photos with applications like Gimp, though.

Gmail Wizardry

Dumb Little Man has a list with links to loads of tips for using Gmail more efficiently. The tips include hacks which allow for the use of Gmail as a blog database, tips how to cofigure the look’n'feel of Gmail, how to use Gmail as a notepad, some Gmail-notifiers, and how to use Gmail as an efficient GTD utility.

Points of Attention in Web Sites

The online service Feng GUI visualizes regions within Web Sites which grab the viewer’s attention as a color coded heat-map.

Vista Start Menu For Windows XP

With the Vista Start Menu Emulator users of Windows XP get a start menu which is similar to the start menu shipped with Windows Vista. Service Pack 2 required.

Dangerous Roads

Thrilling Wonder has a list of the most dangerous roads in the world, with loads of pictures. Included are the Russian Siberian road to Yakutsk, the Russian-Georgian “Military” Mountain Roads, Bolivia’s “Road of Death”, and tibetian and bangladesh roads.

Replacement for Avatars

MyAvatar is a WordPress plugin which displays MyBlogLogs Avatars instead of Gravatars in the blog’s comments. List of features of the current version:

• Gets MyBlogLog avatars of your commenters
• Links directly to their MyBlogLog profiles
• Easy installation & template integration

Free CSS-Templates

Code-Sucks has a collection of more than 50 free good looking CSS Templates (1 column – 4 column layouts)

All the CSS layouts you see here are 100% free: no catch. There’s over 50 to choose from, so there’s no need to worry about running out of ideas. Grab ‘em, use ‘em, love ‘em – that’s all we ask.

Generating Rounded Corners

RoundedCornr is a free online service for creating various kinds of rounded corners. You can specify corner radius, corner color and background color (but no transparency? bummer!). The nice thing about RoundedCornr is that you can create rounded corners with gradients.
Another free service for creating rounded corners is Cornershop. And, here is how Google generates rounded corners.

Digg for Gadgets

I Like Totally Love It is like a Digg for Gadgets.

iliketotallyloveit.com is a unique service that allows you to submit cool, hot, beautiful stuff, preferable with a link where it may be bought. If enough people agree that it is hot it will get promoted to the front page and thus exposed to a broad audience.

David Pogue on Windows Vista

The New York Times has an interesting review of Windows Vista by David Pogue:

… it’s fortunate that Vista is better looking, better designed and better insulated against the annoyances of the Internet. At the very least, it’s well equipped to pull the world’s PCs along for the next five years — or whenever the next version of Windows drops down the chimney.

Default Passwords

The Default Password List is a huge collection of default passwords for different devices. Most devices are given default usernames and passwords when they come from the factory.

Linux for Windows XP Users

LXP (Look Win XP Desktop) is an open source project which aims to mimick the look of the Windows XP Desktop for Linux:

LXP is a desktop enviroment identical to Windows XP. LXP is a collection of different pieces of GNU software (icewm, xfe, idesk, etc) modified in order to look and feel identical to Windows XP. LXP has its own icewm themes and utility pack.

I am not sure how useful such a project is. In my experience people are not switching over to Linux because they do not like the look, but rather because they think that it’s a PITA to install, and to get all peripherals working correctly. Furthermore they fear that there is no substitute for their favourite piece of software (Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, …). The former is not a big problem nowadays, especially since the advent of Ubuntu. Finding software substitutes for popular Windows apps is a bigger problem. But in my opinion it’s not the look of Linux, which scares people off.

Photoshop CS3 Screenshots

PhotoshopUser has some nice screenshots of the new Photoshop CS3 soon to come. Amongst other things, the screenshots show the new user interface, changes in the camera raw function, the new curves dialog and an improved interface for printing.

Diagramming For Your Web Site

mxGraph sounds like a perfect solution for people who want to provide their Web applications with the ability to dynamically draw graphs and diagrams:

Leveraging the latest in browser and web technologies, mxGraph is the ultimate solution for drawing diagrams in a browser. Using open standards, mxGraph does not depend on any third-party plugins and proprietary software. mxGraph works straight out of the box, no client configuration, no plugin installation, no platform dependencies – it just works!

Chopping Onions Without Regret

With the Onion Goggles:

When all else has failed, succeed with these Onion Goggles, which have a comfortable foam seal that protects ones eyes from irritating onion vapors. Their hip design may result in a few giggles but you’ll have the last laugh. Comes with a storage case to keep goggles clean.

Lots of Food Hacks

SlashFood has a list of 25 food hacks, including How to avoid crying when chopping onions, Make fire with a can of Coke and a chocolate bar, how to make your own coke with OpenCola and how to chill a bottle of wine in six minutes. Interesting read.

Archiving Web Sites

There are many situations in which it is convenient to have local copies of Web pages: in order to read them when you don’t have access to the Internet, to create a backup of temporary accessible sites, or because you fear the site may go offline in the near future. In this article I present five ways to create local backups of Web sites:

Print it

If there is a printer at hand, a straightforward way is to print the page and create an dead tree archive of interesting articles. However, many pages may turn out not to be important enough to occupy space in your offline shelf.

Store it as a collection of PDF files

Another possibility to archive Web pages is to convert them to PDF. There are online services like Media Convert, which converts arbitrary URLs to PDF files. You could also use software, which basically acts as a virtual printer driver and “prints” Websites (and all other printable documents) as PDF files (FreePDF, Doro, eDocPrintPro, CIB pdf brewer or Pdf995). PDF files have the advantage that the original formatting of the page is retained. However, you may loose the possibility to search within certain documents.

Save it

Just hit File -> Save Page As in your browser, but be sure to save all page information (images, stylesheets, …), not only the HTML sourcecode.

Email it

The free service toread sends Emails with the content of the site to your email account. After registration with your email address, you can use a bookmarklet to prompt toread to email the currently viewed page to you. However, toread only sends the HTML sourcecode of the page, without any images, stylesheets or script files. Thus, toread is mainly meant for Websites which contain predominantly textual content and don’t rely on the exact formatting. With an email-service like Gmail you can conveniently search through the content of all archived pages.

Use ScrapBook

With the Firefox extension ScrapBook you can grab the content of whole sites or just a selected part of a given website and organize those in a hierarchical tree. ScrapBook will not only grab the HTML-Source, but also images, stylesheets and scripts. Thus, the archived copy will look exactly like its original.

Christmas, the Web 2.0 Way

10zenmonkeys has a collection of dubbed christmas toons and tunes for grown ups.

Yes, Christmas traditions pass from generation to generation. But 2006 finds Santa visiting some very naughty children playing with YouTube, digital editing software, and a wicked imagination. They’re dreaming of a Christmas that’s web 2.0 — with networked audiences re-interpreting all the classic holiday specials. Or maybe they’re just returning the holiday to its pagan roots.

Working with Digital Images

The article How to Turn an Ordinary Photo Into an Extraordinary Photo has some nice tips on postprocessing digital images with photoshop to make them look more interesting.

Pole Dancer, the USB Way

Whenever you think you have seen the worsest USB gadget on earth, there is always a worser one: The USB Pole Dancer.

[via Everything USB, daily mail]

IE 6 and IE 7 on the same computer

Currently webpages need to be optimized for both IE 6 and IE 7 (besides browsers like Firefox, Safari and Opera). Unfortunately there is no obvious way to install both versions, Internet Explorer 6 and 7, on the same computer. However, one solution is to run Internet Explorer within a virtual machine. Microsoft has released an Internet Explorer VPC image, which lets you run both versions of Internet Explorer on the same virtual machine (you need the free download Microsoft Virtual PC). A drawback is, that the image will expire in April, 2007.

Smarter Searching with Google

informit.com provides ten tips for finding what you are really searching for with google.

Most people use Google in a very inefficient and often ineffective manner. If all you do is enter a few keywords and click the search button, you’re one of those users who don’t get as much out of Google as you could. In this article, Google expert Michael Miller shows you how to search smarter — and more effectively.

Community-Driven Tutorials

Tutorialicious is a community-driven website which collects the best tutorials on subjects like programming, design and photoshop. Tutorials can be submitted by every registered user of tutorialicious, and are rated by its members. Initially, a newly submitted tutorial is in the “unpublished” state. After it received a certain amount of votes it is moved to the front page. Thus, good tutorials rise to the front page and unuseful tutorials remain in the unpublished state.

Creating Web sites with Firebug

Firebug is an exteremely useful Firefox extension which gives the user the ability to edit and debug HTML, JavaScript and CSS “live” in any web page. You can either display Firebug in a separate window/tab or as a toolbar below the page.
For users of other browsers like Opera, Safari or Internet Explorer there is a project Firebug Lite which provides most of the Firebug functionality after inserting a JavaScript-snippet in the corresponding pages.
The current version is Firebug 1.0 beta

Sushi for Dummies

The video How to eat Sushi explains the adequate way to eat sushi. Among other things one learns that you should eat each sushi piece in one go, that you sould not pass sushi from your chopsticks to the chopsticks of another person, because this is reminiscent to a ritual during Japanese funerals, and that it is considered impolite to leave food on your plate.

Jimmy Wales launches OpenServing

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia launched a service called OpenServing, which gives anyone the ability to create websites. Although the websites are hosted on the OpenServing computers, all advertising revenues are passed through to the creators of the websites. Yahoo! News reports:

Website creators will get to keep all the advertising revenues, “providing a whole new world of entrepreneurial business models to bloggers and website owners,” according to a release from Wales’s company Wikia.
The websites would be built as “wikis,” which means their content could be edited or changed by visitors in the communal style used at Wikipedia, a popular, multi-language online encyclopedia refined by those that use it.

Tools for Webmasters

Site Admin Stuff is a great resource for web admins and developers. The site provides a bunch of links to resources for things like web servers, Ajax programming, JavaScript and diverse programming languages.

Searching the Deep Web

You can find nearly all kinds of information on the web, provided you know where to look for it. Large parts of the internet are not accessible via the major search engines: sites which require registration, sites which consist of large amounts of JavaScript, sites denying access to search engine-bots, sites in obsure formats (there were times when Google didn’t know PDF-files), and databases.  Supposably, this so called Deep Web (the part of the internet, which is not indexed by search engines) is several times as vast as the Shallow Web, which is accessed day after day by search engine-users. However, with some knowledge it is definitely possible to access parts of the Deep Web. Ways to do so are described in the article Mining the Deep Web: Search strategies that work by Lee Ratzan. Definitely worth a read.