Check out some of the latest MakeUseOf discoveries. All listed websites are FREE (or come with a decent free account option). No trials or buy-to-use craplets. For more cool websites and web app reviews subscribe to MakeUseOf Directory.

(1) Babelwith.me - Real-time chat translation app that lets you instantly communicate in multiple languages (up to 45). It automatically translates every message you type in into the language selected by the receiver in real time. Now, you could enjoy real-time conversations with friends without language barriers. Just enter your name, language and start the conversation. Read more: Babelwith.me: Real Time Chat Translaton Tool
Continue Reading…

Have you heard about Milo yet? According to the their website they dub their service as: “Your local shopping companion”

What does this mean exactly? Milo is an online service that will search the inventory of major retailers in your local area to advice you of the availability of the product which you’re looking for. In other words, it’s a multi-search engine for shopping.

I was then shocked to see them say that 95% of sales happen at real stores in the real world. That is brick and mortar shops as opposed to somewhere on the Internet. Are you surprised as well?? Crazy, right?

If you have shopped for something in the real world recently, you’ll know that the stores with the cheapest prices are also usually sold out of what you want. And when do you find that out? When you get to the store, of course.

I hate taking pointless trips! And I hate being unhappy even more! What about you?

Enter Milo, which will help you answer these three questions:

1. What’s available at local stores?
2. Which product is the best for me?
3. Where is it cheapest and available in stock?

Continue Reading…

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

1. Web Site Story: Hilarious Internet Musical (Video)
2. Microsoft’s Vision of the Future (Video)
3. Pacman Joins Twitter (Pic)
4. 1 Illegal Download = 3⅓ Dead Relatives (Pic)
5. The Evolution Of Online Journalism (Pic)
6. In Case Of Fire, Do Not Use Twitter (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.

Unite is a ‘component’ that was added to a version of Opera 10 Beta. It’s an incredibly small server integrated into the Opera browser. This platform enables you to run various plugins or mini applications that accomplish different tasks such as file sharing, note sharing, photo sharing, secure notes and instant messaging.

Unite eliminates the need for a third party server that would normally proxy or relay the content, such as Flickr, Twitter or Yahoo Messenger. It’s essentially like setting up a web server on your own computer, without the hassle of manually installing various software, configuring them and getting a DNS (Domain Name System) account. It also makes the installation of new functionality a “point and click” process.

I’m sure we’ll have a review of Opera 10 shortly, but let’s focus on Unite for the moment. Here are the steps you need to take in order to use the various Unite services.
Continue Reading…

While you may be content with knowing how many times your video has been viewed, it’s nice to know when other sites have decided to take the privilege of embedding your video on their web pages. YouTube has a tool for videos known as Insight, which provides demographics and other data on who has watched your videos.

Today, we’ll show you how to use this service and find out which websites have embedded your video.

Let’s start it off.

Head over to YouTube and go to your My Videos page. Browse for the video you want to check to see which websites have embedded it. Click the button labeled Insight for that video.

You should be able to see a line graph of the number of views and a world map showing the location of the viewers. On the left side, there will be a list of options under the video name (Views, Discovery, Demographics, Community, Hot Spots). Click Discovery.
Continue Reading…

Time is a commodity that every single one of us needs to manage and keep track of. You get a little complacent and it will slip through your fingers. It’s always nice to know where you are spending your time so you can manage yourself better, or perhaps you may need it to create invoices for your work. Whatever the reason, if you are on Linux, you are in luck because there is a simple yet powerful application to do all this for you - Hamster.

Hamster is available as an applet for the Gnome desktop environment and you can install it using your distributions package manager. It is most likely in there (or else you can install from source). Ubuntu users may sudo apt-get install hamster-applet. Once installed, you can add it to any of your panels by right-clicking on the panel choosing Add to Panel and then look for Time Tracker (not Hamster).

Hamster will appear as “No Activity 00:00″ in your panel. Click on it, key in what you are doing and it gets down to the mundane work of counting how much time you spent in that activity. It also displays how much time you have spent in the current activity in the current session while inconspicuously adding them all together in the background to create reports for you.

Continue Reading…

The other week I moved my email service over from Yahoo Webhosting to Google Apps.   I finally managed to stop the procrastinating after a year of dithering about and just did it - and I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to set up.

This was one of the reasons why I procrastinated so much - I am not much of a technical whiz and I was nervous that I would well and truly cack it up.  Then I would have to go through the embarrassment of asking someone to look at my mess and clean up after me.    Meanwhile, all my incoming emails would be disappearing into a black hole never to be seen again.

But it turned out to be a cinch.   I had the whole thing up and running in 30 minutes and the emails flowed in without a hitch (after being briefly slow at the beginning - but I put that down to the email servers being transferred over and my new Google Apps account being processed.  After a while, email service went back to the normal speed).

In case you have ever wanted to move over to Google Apps but you’ve been nervous about the set-up, I would like to help you end your apprehension and get you started.  Kudos to Google for making it so easy.
Continue Reading…

Check out some of the latest MakeUseOf discoveries. All listed websites are FREE (or come with a decent free account option). No trials or buy-to-use craplets. For more cool websites and web app reviews subscribe to MakeUseOf Directory.

(1) DocShare - Document sharing community that enables everyone to easily find and share documents online. It’s pretty much like YouTube for documents, you can search the documents by entering the title or browse through the categories. You can also go for the most popular, most viewed and the most discussed ones. Read more: DocShare: Find And Share Documents Easily
Continue Reading…

Anyone who has spent any time simply browsing the Internet for interesting things to read quickly realizes that while the Internet is certainly filled with interesting and fascinating websites covering all sorts of useful topics, it’s also overrun by countless rotten websites that promote things like racial hatred, anti-semitism and even encourages fanatical censorship.

Sound hard to believe?

While here at MakeUseOf, you’ll always find lots of great advice about cool websites, such as Aibek’s list of 40 unusual websites you should bookmark or his other article on 5 cool websites to procrastinate at work, in this article, we’re going to take a stroll down a few dark alleyways of the Internet; and carefully take a glimpse at the seedy underworld that exists there - like a growing, cancerous lump that you didn’t realize was there until it was too late. These are a list of 4 websites that you shouldn’t ever bookmark.

Taking Pot Shots at Rotten Websites

Revealing the slimy side of the Internet is dangerous business. Many people reading this may actually secretly hold some of the views or beliefs expressed on some of these websites. In the end, whenever you label anything as “rotten” - you’re going to tick certain people off. With that said, it’s also critically important in the world we live in to acknowledge and accept that hate exists in many forms all around us. And yes, some of us (myself included) have, at one time or another, allowed hatred toward a group of people to exist inside of us. Then, a day comes when you meet one person who falls within that category of people that you’ve built stereotypes in your mind about. That one person blows all of those stereotypes away - and suddenly you realize that the hatred you’d formed for that group is baseless and without any real foundation.

Here at MakeUseOf, writers are from a very wide range of nationalities, religions and other groups. Every day, we collaborate and work together to present readers and the Internet community with unique ways they can “make use of” the Internet. In the spirit of that borderless cooperation, it’s time to break down a few more walls and expose some of the hate-filled or fanatical content that exists on the Internet today.
Continue Reading…

It’s summer in the northern hemisphere and lots of people are taking their summer vacations and are off to travel around the world. Have you ever found yourself in a foreign country and you weren’t 100% sure of the currency conversion rates?

The last time I was in France, I had an approximate conversion rate in my head for French Francs to the United States Dollar. When I got back to the office and handed in my expense reports, I realized I was very wrong about my conversions. It turned out the rate I was using was wrong. So, every calculation I did was also wrong.

To make a long story short, I wound up spending more than I was supposed. I won’t say how much but someone was not happy writing that cheque! If I had this fancy smancy currency converter called CurrencyConv installed, I would have known that the cab driver was charging me way more than he should have!
Continue Reading…