Creativity is a lot of fun for those with that streak. Now add a pinch of learning to it. No, the mix doesn’t turn sour, in fact web apps and multimedia have combined to make learning not only creative but also fun. The result has been that these web apps appeal to the casual set and also those who want to make something serious out of it.

Creaza is a web based tool designed for learners and educators. But spend a few moments with it and you realize that Creaza has scope beyond that. All of it underlined with fun.

What if I gave you four tools that inspire creative, fun ideas – a mindmapper, a cartoon creator, a movie editor and an audio application and asked you to let loose your creativity. I am sure you could come up with a lot of creative and fun ideas. That’s the canvas Creaza gives you to play around with.

Creaza is a suite of four apps for making planning, creating and publishing digital content, or for the fun of it, let’s say digital stories. The four creative apps are :

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Lala has become my music player of choice, simply because it is, as far as I know, the most affordable way to purchase music on the Internet. I’ve reviewed the Lala music player for another site, and an how-to article has been published here on MUO.

Lala has become my main jukebox and is used ten times more than I use iTunes. With my setup, it doesn’t take much effort to access my Lala account. This article explains the method I use as a Mac user. I’m sure there are similar applications for PC users.

What You Need

FluidApp
Butler
Airfoil (optional)

Each of the applications, except for Airfoil, can be downloaded for free. Donations, of course, are accepted.

Creating a Site Specific Browser for Lala.com

The Lala music player lacks a dedicated desktop web application to play music. You must sign into your account and use its web application. To get a dedicated player of sorts onto your desktop, you can use FluidApp, a “site specific browser” (SSB), for a dedicated website or page. Making your Lala account homepage a SSB is like making it an application, which means it’s less likely to get lost in the clutter of all your other web pages on your desktop, especially if you use some of its advance features that I will describe below.

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Google is the Nirvana of most nerds. They’ve given us things we could only dream of for free. They’ve showed us on multiple occasions that they’re more than just ‘the search engine guys’.

One of those occasions was very recently. With its own mobile operating system, Google has been challenging Windows Mobile (not much of a challenge) and the iPhone.

If you’ve got an HTC Windows Mobile phone, you might not have to buy yourself another device to enjoy the hype. But install Android on your Windows Mobile device instead. Nevertheless, porting this operating system has proven a tedious task, and not all phone types support it yet. Newer GSM devices will have a better chance, and to date CDMA is scarcely supported.

Right now it’s not yet possible to boot Google Android as the default operation system. Instead we’ll be using HaRET, a Windows Mobile boot loader. Note that we’re not running or emulating Android in Windows Mobile, but using it to reboot the phone into Android.

1. Gathering Files

Different phone types require different base Google Android files. Even for supported phones, the files will be scattered over different sites and developer areas. I will supply links for some of the most popular HTC phones.

• HTC Diamond
• HTC Vogue/Kaiser/Polaris/Nike
• HTC Raphael/Fuze/Touch Pro

Again, if you don’t see your phone listed, don’t give up. Do a Google search with your own model – because it’s a user-generated wiki, some major advancements aren’t listed on the site yet. When going off-site, always double check your sources, making sure that you aren’t downloading any malicious content.

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On my way to have a more organized life, I’ve tried to utilize iCal to the fullest. I have found the quickest way to add tasks and events to iCal, but have yet to find the quickest way to show them. I figure that instead of opening another app just to show my tasks and events, why not make them always available on the desktop?

If I could do that, I could just use Expose’s shortcut (Command + F3 in my MacBook) – or the Show Desktop we’ve discussed before – to show the desktop to see everything that I have to do printed there. Of course, those with large screens will have everything visible at all time even without the trick.

With my recent adventure with GeekTool, everything comes full circle. Now my tasks and events can be shown beautifully on the desktop, and I can look at them anytime I need to with a single stroke of a shortcut key combination.

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As the name suggests, play-by-mail offers a number of popular games that can be played via mail.

Chess is a historic example for a play-by-mail board game. The game known as correspondence chess even kept the greatest figures of history entertained. A match was said to be played between King Henry I of England and King Louis VI of France in the early 12th century. Also Voltaire and Frederick the Great were engaged in play-by-mail chess during their time. In 1943, the FBI allegedly suspected Humphrey Bogart to be sending secret enemy codes to correspondence chess players overseas.

Today, eMail and websites make play-by-mail games quicker and more convenient than ever before. However, eMails play only a minor role. However, play-by-mail remains a fun way to find fun games to play online throughout the day, without devoting too much time to it. Besides, you don’t have to be online at the same time your match partner is. Here is a small selection of online games.

SoundChess

The SoundChess website is the link between you and your partner. Either one of you can set up the game and make the first move. With each move you can also include a message to your partner. The site shows the current board and provides some resources on possible chess openings.

After you made your first move, you will see the history of exchanged messages on the very right of the site.
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So you got yourself a fancy smancy DVD drive. It could be a burner or just a reader and it is just not working. How do you figure out what is wrong with it?

These tips to fix dvd drive errors will also work for a CD or CDR drive. The first thing we need to do is determine where the issue is. It can either be a physical issue like power not getting to the drive or a IDE / SATA cable has come unplugged. It could be a Windows operating system problem that is preventing your drive from showing up or reading disks and finally it could be that disk is garbage. You might have a scratched up dirty disk and it is unreadable by your player.

Let’s see how we can identify and resolve these issues. I see issues with drives on a daily basis in my day job as well as hundreds of questions coming in at Ask The Admin. Let me share some of my troubleshooting tips with you. Maybe it will stop the questions – but I doubt it!

These instructions can be used for both internal and external drives but some of the fundamentals might be a little different. Like the power cord versus the internal power connector, the USB interface or a IDE connector. But use your intuition to guide you.

Some of these problems are common both to the external and internal drive and can be fixed with a little application or by following the tutorials that come with these drives.

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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) COL – This site allows you to compare the cost of living between US cities. Simply enter your current city and the city you are planning to move to and hit “Compare” button. It then presents a detailed comparison of living costs of two cities side-by-side in 100 categories including taxes, housing, food, utilities and transportation. Read more: COL: Compare Cost Of Living Between US Cities

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Now that I have your attention, I can tell you that there are a few things that you have to do first, before you can learn how to speed up your computer with that one double-click. When those things are done, though, it will always be a simple double click to speed up your computer. How can this be possible?

It’s simple logic really. Have you ever seen a stock car or drag race of seemingly normal cars? What they do is get rid of useless weight. They don’t need a passenger and back seat – gone! They don’t need carpet and fancy electronics – gone! They don’t need the spare tire in the trunk and all the excess trim – gone! They’ve stripped that car down to the essentials to do one thing really fast and really well. That’s what we’re going to do. Only, when we’re done, we’ll be able to put all the fancy bits back on with – you guessed it – just one double-click!

Identify the Dead Weight

First things first. Download and install a program that allows you to view all the processes currently running on your windows computer. I’m a big fan of Sysinternals Process Explorer. Once you’ve done that, open it up. You’re likely to see something like this:

Look at the Working Set and Peak Working Set columns. That shows how many kilobytes of your RAM are being used by the program right now, and what the peak amount used at one time was. As you can see, my Firefox is using roughly 245 MB of RAM. That’s about one-quarter of the RAM in my computer.

As I look down further, I see that RoxMediaDB12, iTunesHelper and SnagIt32 are taking up another approximately 43 MB of RAM. Let’s say that I want to use a program that is a real memory hog, like my DivXConnected. It has to compete with all of these other programs that I won’t be using, while I’m using DivXConnected. That’s the program that works with my D-Link Media Device I was raving about lately.
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For a little while, free voicemail systems were very common online. You could sign up for any number of services where callers could leave you a voicemail message, and you could retrieve those messages online. Over time, most of the voicemail services started charging or wrapping up the voicemail feature into a larger VoIP package. If you look hard enough, you can still find some pretty cool free voicemail applications, such as YouMail, the free voicemail service that Dave described, or services where you can download funny voicemail messages which Karl wrote about. One of the things I’ve been meaning to do for a while on one of my blogs is to provide visitors with a private method they can use to email me information anonymous (if they so choose). The best tool that I found to set up a voicemail system for a blog is through the VoiceMeMe widget.

How to Set Up a Voicemail Feature For Your Blog

VoiceMeMe provides you with an innovative approach to interacting with your website visitors. I’m always looking for new ways to provide a way for my blog visitors to interact with me, similar to the LiveZilla online tech support system I recently wrote about. While the LiveZilla tech support system was great for my writing and online SEO blog, for my other blog about alleged top secret government programs, I need an easy tool that allows visitors to click through and leave me a message in a way that’s both convenient and completely anonymous for the visitor.

With VoiceMeMe, you can provide such a tool to your blog visitors, where they can simply click on the tool to retrieve a phone number and a pin number that’s customized specifically for their message. They call the number from any phone, enter the pin, leave their message and you are immediately alerted to the voicemail, which you can chose to listen to from the VoiceMeMe website or download the file directly to your computer. To set up the voicemail widget, just visit the widget page on Widgetbox.

The widget is actually pretty well designed and would look good on any blog. However, if you don’t like how it looks, you can configure it in the settings box to the right on the same page.
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If you’re an avid reader of books like I am (though I don’t read nearly as many books as I used to, thanks to the Internet), there are a handful of useful social networking sites where readers can share and discuss what they reading.

The best part about each of these sites is they provide you a way to create virtual libraries, sharing with others what you have read, what you’re presently reading, and what you would like to read. Best of all, all these sites have free sign-up options with mostly unobtrusive advertising.

LibraryThing

Perhaps the site that set the tone for book sharing and virtual libraries is LibraryThing. Touted as the “world’s largest book club,” it has well over 900,000 members and over 45 million books cataloged. LibraryThing allows you to use a tagging system to your organize your books. Previewing its Zeitgeist Overview Page, you can find actual authors who are members of the site. Many of them include their own virtual library for public viewing.

The member libraries can be viewed not only by titles but also by book covers, which is the best way to browse. The site includes a large assortment of literary groups and discussion threads, such as Science Fiction Fans, Young Adult Lit, Historical Fiction, and “Books that made me think.”

Adding books to your library page is as simple as typing in a book’s title, ISBN or name of the author. When you select a book to add, all the pertinent information about the book is included for you. If you’re a serious about maintaining your virtual library, you’ll want to keyword or tag your books so they can be grouped together by genre, year or month read, and any identity you want to give them. You can also rate, review, and make recommendations to other members.
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