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Gyminee – “Stay Motivated. Have Fun. Get Fit.”

Anthony — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 21:06:38 +0000

Don’t let the fact that you don’t exercise often discourage you from joining this free workout community. Walking is exercise too! Gyminee is composed of a broad member base, ranging from professional athletes and people who just want to stay fit. With its wide variety of tools, Gyminee allows even the industrial working man (or woman) to stay fit and live healthy.

One way Gyminee does this is through user-created workouts. Create your own workouts by specifying exercises, activities and selecting the total time you should perform each exercise, the target heart rate and details such as altitude (for running) and weight (for lifting); If you can’t really think of a great workout, browse through the millions of user-shared workouts for one that fits you and your lifestyle.

Set personal goals for yourself and track your progress with a convenient calorie intake logger. If you feel proud of your progress, share it with your Facebook buddies with an easy-to-use widget! Join other groups to meet people who share your interests and add them as “Gym Buddies”. I know I’m just listing here, but I hope you get the point that Gyminee has a broad range of user-specific tools that fit you. With the tools listed above, I’ve barely scratched the surface!

Workouts on the Gyminee website are created by professional athletes and just people who like what they do and want to share it with other users. In fact, the other day, an interesting workout caught my eye: “The 300 Workout”, featuring a picture of a bulky body-builder. Upon further examination, I read that the 300 workout was actually the exact workout performed by the actors of the movie “300″. A lot of these workouts can definitely provide expected results, as long as you persist in doing them. If you have a set of exercises you like to do, you can make your own workout, with a full list of stretches, activities and lifts to choose from. Add a description and title to make your workout more noticeable and helpful!

Once you’ve made your own workout, browse through hundreds of groups to find people who share the same interests as you. With groups with titles ranging from “Runner’s Only” to “Body Builders”, Gyminee has a group for everyone. Within group discussion areas, you can talk with other athletes and compare techniques and training equipment. If you really get to know someone, add them as your “Gym Buddy” and workout with him or her.

Another great tool featured is the Food Diary and Dietary Tracker. Log your day-to-day dietary information and track your dietary intake and look back to see exactly how many calories you consumed last Friday. Before you exercise, track the amount of carbohydrates, fats and proteins you consumed and if you like your pre-workout snack, save it as a “Favorite” and pull it up with a click of a button!

Regardless what types of exercise you enjoy, whether it’s hard-core cardiovascular workouts to if you’re just trying to stay fit, Gyminee is a great community for you to join and share your stories with. Plus, membership if free and the basic membership includes all the tools profiled above. In addition to all of this, if you’ve ever been sitting in a restaurant and can’t decide what foods are most healthy, check it up! With the new Gyminee application for the iPhone, you can log your dietary intake anywhere!

(By) Anthony is a student, blogger and a distance runner. In his free time, he enjoys running track, and sifting through the web. Drop by his blog at Radicitus, Dude!

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3 Must-check Traveller Websites before your Next Trip

Anthony — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 03:08:10 +0000

All of us take at least one trip annually, whether it be locally or overseas. As much we love them, most of us aren’t able to have trips very often. Whether it’s work, school, financial problems, there is always something that holds us back. Thus when we finally get a chance to get out it’s in our best interests to take necessary precautions to ensure that the next trip is a success. Many factors that ruin good trips include delays, insufficient information about the place you are visiting and just plain old loneliness. Here I would like to introduce to a number of useful websites that can help you make your next trip a better one.

Insufficient information for your trip?

Try WikiTravel

WikiTravel is a user-powered travel guide. There are about 18,000 travel guides and articles written and edited by regular travellers from around the globe. You can find pretty much anything here. So if you’re looking for relatively non-biased destination reviews definitely check it out.

There is one other emerging website that I want to mention here. Chokti is a YouTube-inspired site where you can find virtual tours of places you are planning to visit. At the moment there are about 1200 video/audio tours there. Mostly submitted by users themselves. While it’s highly unlikely that you’ll find a video tour of some remote village in India here, it does cover most of the major cities. Chokti does not require an account – however if you plan to upload videos, you need to register.

Hotel Reviews

For hotel review, pics, and map locations I recommend TripAdvisor. Not always true and objective, but usually offers enough info to get a basic idea. If photos are not enough and you want a visual preview of the hotel then try TVtrip, Trivop and Tripr.

Lonely on your trip?

Try Dopplr

Dopplr is essentially a virtual travel log. It allows you to add friends, share your travel schedule with them and discover other people with similar travel plans. It includes an action-feed on your profile page that shares all your current travel activity with all your friends. In addition to comparing travel schedules with friends, Dopplr also allows you to link your Dopplr account with Facebook and share travel activity with Facebook buddies.

Another useful feature Dopplr has to offer is picture sharing. It allows you to link your profile to your Flickr account and share travel pictures with friends and family. Registration is absolutely free, and they rarely send you emails so there’s no need to worry about “Great Offers” or “Daily Newsletters”. Check out Dopplr infocommercial below:

Delays on your trip?

Try FlightStats

Weather and air traffic make travelling a pain. With flight stats, you’ll know of any flight delays and weather issues BEFORE you leave for your trip. We have already briefly mentioned it here.

Flight Stats uses a cool map in which all major airports are mapped out and color-coded. The colors represent the Flight Delay Index which is based on weather conditions and data sent out from the airports themselves. Red representing major delays and green representing smooth flying. Upon clicking on the dots, you’ll receive more detailed information about the airport in question, such as the exact temperature and the weather conditions.

A sub-feature of the map is the weather overlay. With this feature activated, it is possible to view cloud conditions overhead and predict beforehand if there will be any delays.

If you usually leave for the airport a hour and a half before your flight, you can glance at the ticker-tape at the top of the webpage that shows minute-by-minute delay updates on major international and domestic flights.

Some other included tools are mobile/email updates, real-time flight tracker, airport information, etc.

Other

Not so long ago Aibek published 10 travel websites that should be bookmarked. Check it out as well, there are a number of really useful tools there. These include ATM locator, Taxi fare estimator, public-transport maps and more.

(By) Anthony is a student, blogger and a distance runner. In his free time, he enjoys running track, and sifting through the web. Drop by his blog at Radicitus, Dude!

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3 Floor Design Services to Decorate and Plan your House

Anthony — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 20:46:58 +0000

We’ve all had some sort of attraction to architecture in our lives, whether it be Lego blocks, models or drawings. With the three floor planning tools profiled below, you’ll have enough architectural fun to last you a while. Whether you’re bying a new home, planning to paint walls, buying new furniture or just want to see if your piano fits in that spare room, these tools can help you out.

Plus you don’t need ANY experience in visual arts whatsoever to use these three services – Floorplanner, SeeMyDesign and previously profiled MyDeco .

Floorplanner

Floorplanner is an interactive, drag-and-drop, browser-based program that allows users to create and visualize floor plans. A prerequisite to running this application is Adobe Flash – it is recommended that you have Adobe Flash 9 or newer.

Buying a new home, moving into a new office, planning an extension to your house or just want to give your living room a make-over. Floorplanner offers and easy way to create and share interactive floor plans with others. You can see whether your furniture fits well, plan and visualize new kitchen design with the contractor, etc. Although the application is quite easy to use it requires some familiarity with the concept.

You start with a set of measuring tools that allow you to specify the area your floors cover and what color and material floors will be made of. It is also possible to build walls with custom thickness and height. Next you can add different types of doors and windows.

Once all the framework is complete, Floorplanner gives you the option of visualizing your room/house filled with the furniture of your choice. With a growing collection of furniture of different sizes, shapes and colors, users can find, if not the exact one, furniture that will pass as reasonable imitations of furniture they have now, or plan on purchasing.

Some other features include camera pan, which allows you to build as big of a house as you can dream of. It includes props such as cars (for your garage) and bushes for the garden. You are also allowed the capability to create sand and grass turfs to simulate your front or back yard.

Finally, with an extra cost, it is possible to view the plans in 3D and even advertise them (good if you’re in the real estate business). The service itself, at the most basic level is free. The free version is limited to 5 floor plans, the option to share the plans with others, embed ready plans on other websites, and all furniture and floor planning features.

SeeMyDesign

SeeMyDesign is an alternative to Floorplanner, but with a focus on interior design. The idea behind the service is to provide designers with a simple solution to test and preview room designs and later share it with others (clients) to get feedback.

One of the noteworthy functionalities is ability to decorate and preview living rooms with some different furniture and wall colors. The only problem there is a rather limited variety of furniture (couches, chairs, etc.) so it’s not very effective. However one good reason to use it is the wall color selector features which makes it easy to see how different wall colors go with furniture.

SeeMyDesign also provides is an overall cost calculator. This nifty feature helps you calculate the cost for each material (i.e. paint), furniture, windows and doors and get the total cost. It will determine a total cost for your house decor and email it to the provided address.

MyDeco

Mydeco is a web-based room planner that lets you recreate your room and furnish it in a 3D environment. The cool thing about it, it lets interact with almost every aspect: change colors, add wallpapers, try furniture etc. You can visualize changes from any angle you want. And the best part of all it can recreate your room directly from the pictures.

I spent 20-30 minutes just playing around with the room designer and some of the features are quite impressive. There is a draggable camera that shows you a first-person view in a small window. In addition to using the camera, you can also change the “height” of the camera (i.e. ground-level, adjacent to the ceiling, or any of the other heights in between) and it’s also possible to change whether the camera is looking down, eye-level or up.

What’s amazing about MyDeco is that it is totally free. The furniture selection is immense and on the side it shows you how much money you are currently spending. The only set-back is that the money is in euros, and the furniture is probably also in Europe. In addition to sorting furniture by type, you can also search for furniture by dimension and cost. So say you’re on a $20,000 furniture budget and you’ve almost exceeded $19,000, all you’d have to do is search up all items (in a certain category, i.e. beds) costing $1,000 or less. In the end, you can view a list of all the furniture you’ve included in your design.

(By) Anthony is a high-school student, blogger and a distance runner. In his free time, he enjoys running track, and sifting through the web. Drop by his blog at Radicitus, Dude!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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