TimeSnapper is slowly becoming one of my favorite new pieces of software for Windows, because it’ll let you know exactly where all of that time went. Putting TimeSnapper to good use means your desktop or laptop will be your own personal spy. As if the rest of the internet doesn’t do that on us enough, already.

Check out TimeSnapper’s official website!

TimeSnapper is a Windows application that sits in your system tray and gradually takes screenshots of your active window so that you can have a running log of exactly what you were doing at any random interval of the day. The software costs $24.95 and is available under a free, 30-day trial license. In this post, we’ll be focusing on their completely free, legacy product: TimeSnapper Classic.

You’ll need to enter your email address to download TimeSnapper Classic, where afterwards a hyperlink to the direct download of the software will be sent. Installation is very simple and painless. After installing the software, you should see the following window:

At this window, simply specify where you’d like your screenshots to be dumped and at what interval you’d like them to be taken. The Pause button you see there is in place of the Start button (as I’m already recording).

Then, in the View menu, click Options…. Here you’ll see the rest of the configuration for the program. It’s all very simple.

You’re able to pick the image type and resolution at which you want your screenshots saved. If you’re taking screenshots at a low interval, I highly recommend using the JPG format. Otherwise, PNG is the best format for screenshots. Changing the resolution will automatically resize your screenshots to a certain percentage, which can also save some disk space.

Here, you’re able to determine what windows are captured with each screenshot. If you use dual monitors, you can even select which screen to capture. I capture only my active window, as it saves disk space and is more true to what I’m working on at the time.

These options make concerns with your disk space less glaring. You’re able to automatically purge images based on their age or the size of your TimeSnapper archive.

When you’ve configured everything to your liking, give it some time and then feel free to check out the playback features. On the main window, you can click Play Movie.

From here, you can play through your archive, frame by frame, or scroll through manually. As you can see, at this particular time, I was doing nothing productive that I’d like to reflect on…

TimeSnapper is quickly becoming my favorite way to track time on my desktop. If you need a less visual way, give ManicTime a look.

Let me know what you all think of the features of TimeSnapper in the comments!

TIWIB is a blog updated every other day with kooky and crazy things for you and I to wish we had. With products in categories like gears and tools, stuff for geeks, toys, wearables, food and drink, and more, this website has something for everyone. Check the site out and let’s look over what kind of stuff you can expect to find.

TIWIB is practically a single-page website with an infinitely-scrolling, Tumblr-esque feel to it. Across the top, you’ll see links for the aforementioned product categories, and then below the product slideshow you’ll also see ways to filter the displayed items by most popular, newest, and item pricing on both ends of the spectrum.

For each product displayed, you’ll be able to check out a small picture, a brief description, and the price of the item. If you click on the picture, text under the price, or “Check It Out” button, you’ll be taken straight to that respective product’s page at the store where it is sold.

Now that you know how to navigate the website, let’s check out some TIWIB items that MakeUseOf readers can appreciate!

Transformer 4GB USB Drive

Yes, it holds only 4 gigs of data. That isn’t the point though. It is a USB flash drive that is shaped like a Transformer. That is all.

U-Socket USB Wallplug

Starting this year, I feel like every newly-constructed home should have at least one of these outlets installed. As smartphones, tablets, and other USB-chargeable items become ever more popular, this is simply a brilliant concept.

USB Typewriter

This is a really amazing concept. This USB typewriter is set to work with the iPad, as well as any PC or Mac computer. Even cooler is that a DIY conversion kit is offered that can turn any typewriter you’ve got into a USB typewriter.

’80s Retro iPhone Case

Big and bulky has never been so awesome or nostalgic. I’d tough it out just to see the stare on some of the younger kids faces. In the age of the smartphone, a contraption of this shape and size is practically foreign now. Represent the old school.

Hyperkin SUPABOY Portable Pocket SNES Console

The fact that this even exists is enough to make me smile. For those of you with those SNES cartridges from about 20 years ago, you finally may have a use for them once again. SNES games probably look even better on the smaller screen. Great idea!

Like me, you don’t have to be a buyer to be able to appreciate TIWIB. As a casual browser, the site is a great way to kill time and stay up with the latest and most interesting products that are floating around the market.

Rap Genius is a database of hip-hop lyrics that sits somewhere between Wikipedia and Urban Dictionary. Rap tunes, from the most complex to the everyday radio hits, are indexed on this website and explained by contributors. Tracks are broken down line by line, and if you think some of these rap songs are a mouthful then you should really look at how analytical and precise some of these explanations are.

Rap Genius takes this all pretty seriously. This isn’t an amateur site and it’s recently gone through some major design changes that really has me impressed. You can create an account on Rap Genius to earn “RapIQ”, which is basically a reputation system amongst the community that gauges how well you’re able to understand and explain rap music. It’s a nice incentive that encourages more user interaction and contribution.

On the main page, you’re able to see the newest additions to the website. This is a good place to start if you’re looking to pick up some of that RapIQ. Songs are even tagged with what percentage of explanation (by line) has already been contributed.

Searching for or clicking on a song will immediately bring up the lyrics and a YouTube or Spotify embed of the song, if you’re interested in listening along. In the lyrics, you’ll see golden text and white text. The golden text is a hyperlink. Click on it and it’ll show the user-contributed meaning of the line or bar that you’ve selected.

If you’d like to contribute to an unexplained line, simply highlight that line. Rap Genius does a great job of keeping explanations clean and precise. That’s a credit to their community too, as users are able to suggest improvements to explanations or corrections to lyrics.

The community seems to be what Rap Genius is all about and I think that’s what has the site as popular as it is today, sitting at an Alexa traffic rank of under 10,000. You can thumbs up or down individual explanations, Like or +1 explanations and bars (so that your friends can see the lyricism you appreciate on social networks), and Rap Genius seems to thank its contributors at every opportunity (as they should)!

Aside from the core “dictionary” function, Rap Genius has interviews, a blog, and a forum. It’s a very unique and individual site that stands far apart from what seems like its single competitor.

Here are a couple songs with quality explanations if you’re looking for great examples:

• MF DOOM – One Beer
• Mos Def – Mathematics
• Jay Electronica – Exhibit C

Have you learned anything new from Rap Genius? If so, I’d like to hear about it. Let me know what you think of the site and its community in the comments. Maybe even share some of your favorite songs and explanations!

Taking notes is really important. You need and should do it every day, whether you know it yet or not. If you use the internet for more than two hours in a day, there are always things worth noting. Don’t clutter your hard drive with individual text files saved by Notepad. That’s primitive. With Flashnote, you’re able to store all of your notes cleanly and in a single place.

Download Flashnote now!

Straight from the Flashnote website, here’s what makes it great:

Whether it’s recording a telephone number when the phone book is far away, saving an URL to reuse, writing a simple TODO list or collecting some information, there are lots of examples. And just as many solutions: open Notepad, use a personal information manager, or use some other programs for creating and saving text. But all those options are slow. Even a PIM is a “heavy” class program. And before you use it to make rough notes, you must create a new file or find a place to write without creating a “litter” of files or damaging important work.

As aforementioned, Flashnote comes with a portable version. That makes it perfect for a flash drive or your Dropbox. Otherwise, there is also a full Windows installation. A version also exists for Linux. The application package is just a little over two megabytes in size and it consumes less than 9000 K of memory while active as a process.

Upon starting the application, you’re already able to see how simple it is by appearance. You’ll immediately want to go into File and then Options… to make sure Flashnote is configured to your liking.

Other than just worrying about the basics, I’d like to recommend that you create a hotkey. Creating a hotkey will allow you to create a new note on the fly.

From there on, there isn’t much explaining required. There are two types of notes. A note and a child note. A child note serves no other purpose than to help you keep your notes organized, should you require many notes on a single subject.

No need for a bulky PIM or a ridiculous number of Notepad windows cluttering your taskbar. This software serves a single purpose and is incredibly simple. That’s what makes it great. Other features that come along with it are the ability to send the application to your tray, the ability to automatically insert the current data and time, the ability to change the background color and font styles, etc. Nothing special, just the basics that are required to get the job done.

When you create a new note (regular note or child), your clipboard is automatically pasted into the note. This is just to save you time, as the application assumes that the typical contents of a note would be copied text from the user. It’s a nice little feature.

Do you take down a lot of notes while at your computer? Give Flashnote a go and I’ll bet it beats your previous note taking habits. Let me know what you think about the software in the comments.

What I do have is over 1,500 Facebook friends, a percentage of which are nosy, critical, and always in the brush just waiting to pounce. Listen to the wrong song or read a weird article and you will see a commenter laughing at you about it within 15 minutes. That’s what happens when you have so many services connected to your Timeline. Activity gets nuts.

Maybe you like that though. Maybe you’re one of those people who are into breaking your life down so finely that you don’t mind broadcasting every waking second of your day to your friends on Facebook. So be it. Let me give you a hand.

Last.fm Scrobbler & Spotify

Facebook integration is a big part of Spotify. You’re probably used to seeing Spotify spam all over your Facebook feed by now, so that’s nothing new. A lot of people don’t know about Last.fm‘s app on Facebook though. Last.fm precedes Spotify so I’m sticking with it. I’ve got a ridiculous amount of scrobbles and I prefer to download and play music over streaming it. Facebook’s Last.fm Scrobbler will allow you to do that.

The Last.fm Scrobbler will put your most recent scrobbles all over your Timeline. I still haven’t pinned down the exact algorithm or how and when it does this, but every now and then it’ll post one of your scrobbles directly to your Wall as well. If you’re scrobbling music 24/7, you’ll probably see 5+ posted to your Wall per day.

It doesn’t get much more invasive than having your entire friends list know what is in your ear at all times!

Digg, The Huffington Post & Yahoo!

Though there are a lot of social reading apps on Facebook, these three are the powerhouses. With millions of users shared between them, now everyone in the world can know every article that we read!

I don’t have a problem with these apps at all, really. Looking at my friends’ recently read articles is interesting in both creepy and informative ways. It can go wrong for you though. If you’re a guy looking at an article about Miley Cyrus’ new boyfriend and that article happens to be on Yahoo!, have fun with explaining it to the guys. Digg is full of all sorts of varying content, too. Try to be comfortable knowing that any link you click out to on the Digg network is going to be streamlined right to your Facebook for everyone to see.

Sharing through Facebook Connect can be opted out of when connecting your account to Yahoo! or Digg. Bow to Open Graph, nonetheless.

Viddy

Viddy has been described as the Instagram of video. One thing Instagram doesn’t do is announce that you’ve browsed certain people’s pictures on Instagram (and if it does, please inform me because that is taking it to another level). Viddy won’t give you that comfort though.

Videos that you watch on the Viddy network are posted to your Timeline. It’s not a big deal until you think back on all of those weird videos you’ve looked at on YouTube. Already I’ve witnessed friends on my list watching 8-second “fight video” clips and an awful lot of rump-shaking and dancing videos. I wonder if they know.

Tinychat

Now this one has me a little bit uncomfortable. I think Tinychat is really a great service. Open video chatting has been historically used for some pretty nefarious purposes though. I have a little story to go along with why this app has me on edge, anyway.

I’ve connected my Tinychat account to Facebook before, there’s no denying that. However, I recently went into a Tinychat room that a friend created. I wasn’t logged in. I joined the room as a guest. A few hours later, someone sends me a screenshot of my Timeline, showing that Facebook decided to announce that I was in that Tinychat room.

Being the one that ever connected to Facebook in the first place, I’ll call it my bad on this one. Either way, just know that everyone is going to know what room you’re in. How weird would it be to suddenly see two or three of your friends randomly pop up in a room thanks to Facebook? Come on.

Foursquare was just the start. In the coming years, our entire “real life” should be available and open for documentation online. Facebook and Open Graph are doing well in exposing the start of that. Love it or hate it, you can always avoid or disable it.

Let me know how you feel about these Facebook apps in the comments.

You can sign up for Svpply by linking directly to your Facebook account. Doing so will connect the Facebook app to your account and allow Svpply to interact with your Timeline. It won’t spam your Facebook, as it only shows on the Activity section of your Timeline, and on the feed on your Home page.

The way Svpply works is really simple. If you’re a user who regularly browses the web and drools over clothing or accessories that you can’t buy for yourself or your home, you can help contribute to Svpply by using their bookmarklet to essentially “pin” an item, as you would on Pinterest. If you’re more interested in simply browsing the more-than-a-million products that already exist on Svpply, clicking on “Shop” in the header will allow you to do just that.

As you can see here, Svpply indexes not only clothing, but artwork, books, music, movies, accessories (like watches and headphones), stylish home appliances, and more.

There are three ways to categorize your findings on Svpply: you can “want” the item (the equivalent of a Like on Facebook), “collect” the item (which is adding the item to a specific list of items you’re keeping for collaboration with other users), or “mark as owned”.

Any item that you perform an action on can be found in your own personal profile, which shows everything you’ve liked, collected, or own. As it stands, there is no way to have a private profile on the network, so if you’re a guy who happens to love Hello Kitty and you don’t want everyone in the world knowing about it then take heed.

Within your own profile (which can be accessed by the “You” link across the top navigation), you’re also able to sort your items by category, gender, and price.

That functionality really transforms your profile into a wishlist for yourself. Clicking on a product, from your profile or any other page, will bring up a zoomed-in view of the item and will also show you what store it’s from, the statistics on the network for that product (total wants, etc), a comment box, and it’ll also offer a link to where you can go to buy the product.

Let me be the first to warn you that the majority of Svpply is higher-end, pricey material. I wouldn’t be browsing with a full pocket on any given day.

As your lists grow, Svpply seems to do a really good job of matching your interests to other items and users. When you’ve put your tastes out there, you can use the Find People feature to put yourself on to users with similar interests. From there, maybe you can steal some swag from other members. It’s a full social networking site.

Another useful feature is being able to individually follow certain stores. Upon doing so, you’ll know right when new items hit Svpply. Features like this really give Svpply the potential to take off as a huge earner when it comes to affiliate-based commissions, and when a website is making money it tends to lead to great success. The future looks pretty bright for Svpply.

As well as being one of the hottest new sites to dig into clothing and other gear, Svpply is also a good way to daydream and spend some spare time. The web has gone social and Svpply puts a great spin on social shopping.

Make sure you check out these related articles, too:

• Do You Have A Photo Of A Great Fashion Item? Here Is How To Find Out Where To Get It!
• 5 Places To Find Free Clothes Online So You Don’t Have To Go Naked
• Find Rare And Unique Clothing With Wanelo

If you’re a big shopper or browser, Svpply is a site you’ve got to look into. Let me know what you think of the network in the comments!

If you’re new to cloud storage, I won’t blame you for going Google. Both services are great in that they offer a nice chunk of free storage that anyone should be able to put to use. With the cloud’s rising popularity and on-the-go computing as popular as ever in 2012, it’s time for you to get on the ball. But what exactly should you be using Dropbox, Google Drive, or another alternative for? Let me help you figure that.

Music

Though with awesome software like Spotify out in the open, some of us still take the primitive route of (legally) downloading music. There’s plenty of reasons why having a hard copy of an MP3 is better than having one exist in a streaming environment like Spotify.

Keeping your favorite music stored in the cloud not only offers a painless way to synchronize some of your favorite stuff across devices, but it also is giving you peace of mind. When you love something, you want to keep it and have as many copies of it as possible. If you pay for music on Amazon, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be enjoying that MP3 on your desktop and laptop together.

Most of our music collections are too extensive to store entirely within the cloud (or at least on a free Dropbox or Drive account). I use my Dropbox account to store only some my favorite songs.

Programs

This is the biggest one for me. “Mountable” cloud storage like Dropbox, Drive, or SkyDrive really behaves no differently than a flash drive. Flash drives are really great for packing with useful applications. A Dropbox folder is the same.

I’ve literally got hundreds of portable applications stuffed in there. Even if an application isn’t portable, you can use something like Cameyo to virtualize it and put it in it’s own little sandbox. Almost everything of yours can be portable, you can buy a brand new desktop and probably only have to install Dropbox and a few other small things. You can put in your browser, email, photo and video editing software, everything.

Screenshots

Though I am a huge online hoarder, some things aren’t worth letting go. It doesn’t matter if it’s for the sake of a memory or nostalgia, or if it’s something more technical, screenshots don’t belong to an uploading service like MediaFire or on a flash drive. Set your saves to within your Dropbox and enjoy the time machine.

If you’re looking for a quick and easy tool to take some screenshots, give ScreenSnapr a look.

Fonts

Are you big on design? You’re cheating yourself if you’re spending hours relocating your favorite fonts every time you switch to a new machine.

Fonts don’t take up a lot of disk space so you can throw a whole lot of these into a Dropbox or Drive folder. From there, you can install the fonts locally with a simple click. Some fonts are hard to come across. Don’t trust your external to keep them around forever.

ROMs

Now this is one of my favorites. I recently did an article teaching everyone how they can enjoy their SNES games on their home computer using ZSNES. When it comes to snatching up all of those ROMs you want to play, it can consume a lot of your time. Store them in your Dropbox and you only have to take that time once.

Isn’t it comforting to know that your favorite childhood games can be pushed to your hard drive instantly and easily with the simple synchronization of cloud storage?

Make the most of your cloud. It’s been made easily available to you. If you’re not using it, you definitely should be. The icing on the cake is the fact that, if you’re reading this right now, you’re late to the party. Being late is a good thing in this situation, because it means that a lot of your favorite music, programs, fonts, and ROMs have already been uploaded to services like Dropbox. Using technology that allows them to “cache” files, you won’t even need to waste the bandwidth uploading them to Dropbox now. They’ll sync instantly.

There are plenty of other reasons you’ve got to jump on and start storing your goodies. Look into Dropbox’s Pack-Rat. Let me know what you think of these ideas in the comments section!

The lifeblood of the Steam community is the constant sales, trading, exchanging, bartering, and all-around excitement over Steam users experiencing new games. The Steam platform has made it very easy to trade games, in-game items, beta keys, and more within the client. It sucks that we can’t physically sell these games, as we could with our Nintendo cartridges, but some of the efforts that Valve has come out and made really soften that blow a bit.

With that in mind, allow me to introduce you to a network of three websites that will make your Steam experience even steamier.

SteamGameSales.com

SteamGameSales.com is the place to go when you want easy access to visualizing what games are receiving the highest current discounts on Steam. Not only Steam though: Direct2Drive, GamersGate, Green Man Gaming, GOG, Impulse, Desura, Beamdog, and Get Games as well.

Right on the frontpage, all of the latest sales are being displayed to you. By clicking the headers of each column, you’re able to sort sales by those specific elements: savings, price, etc.

I’m a Steam sales addict. This really makes the process so much less painful. Pop on this website once a day, check the latest deals, and you’re all set. If you sign in through Steam, you can even check your account versus games that you already own, to make sure you’re not having your chain jerked (in case a game is on sale that you forget you own).

This is a very simple and effective service. Completely useful.

SteamTrades.com

The premise of SteamTrades.com is very simple. Trading is huge in the Steam community. SteamTrades.com offers a simple forum where users can come to look for offers and trades on games. Users post what they want and what they’re offering and patiently wait for interested others to come along.

As every site should, SteamTrades.com has a reputation system so you know what you’re getting into before you even get involved. The site is put together very well and it’s been responsible for (what I’d assume to be) thousands and thousands of successful trades.

SteamGifts.com

SteamGifts.com is the more unique and clever of the network. Generous gifters use this website to hand out their extra, giftable copies of games, DLC, and other assorted goods.

The site operates on a “points system,” as best explained by their FAQ page:

The point system is designed to prevent users from entering for every single giveaway. This lowers the overall number of entries, and provides everyone with better odds of winning games they’re interested in playing. New users start out with 25P. Every time anyone submits a game, every member of the site, excluding the giveaway creator, receives 5 percent of that gifts value (in USD) in points. For example, if a $50 gift is created, every user on the site receives 2.5 points. And, if a $20 gift is created, everyone would receive 1 point. These points can then be spent on entering giveaways.

In the above screenshot, you see a player listing a game with an entree of 30P. The game costs $30 on Steam. Entering the giveaway is as simple as clicking the button you see there. These giveaways happen often and fast. It’s the kind of website you’ll want to keep up with every day, as points are constantly being shuffled around.

These three websites do a great service to the Steam community. If you’re into Steam, check out the other recent articles we’ve done on the topic:

• Steam Gets Mobile Apps For iOS & Android [News]
• A Selection Of The Best Free-To-Play Steam Games
• Microsoft Flight Now Free To Play On Steam For Some Countries [Updates]

Instapaper and Read It Later aren’t for everyone though. A lot of us are more simple. Our email is the headquarters where we get everything done. With that, I’d like to use this article to introduce you to the powers of toread and CC:to me, the best in-email alternatives to IP and RIL.

toread

The toread website is incredibly straightforward and simple. The three lines on the homepage alone are enough to introduce you to usage of the service:

“toread” is an email-based free bookmark service.

You can bookmark your “toread” web pages by just clicking the bookmarklet on your browser.

To register, simply enter your email address and click “start now”.

Following those instructions, you’ll receive a confirmation email.

Go check your email (and be advised that it may land in your junk folder) and confirm your registration by clicking the hyperlink. Afterwards, you’ll be sent to an account confirmation page that will give you all necessary information required to start using the web service.

If you’re new with bookmarklets, you’ll want to simply click and drag the link up into your bookmarks bar in your browser. I’ve created an entire “Bookmarklets” folder in Firefox.

When you want to push a webpage through the toread service, you simply need to click on that bookmarklet. If you’re an iPhone/iPod user, the instructions are on that page for you as well.

Here’s exactly what emails from toread will look like. Just to test the service, I used toread on the toread account confirmation page.

It really gets the job done.

CC:to me

If you took the time to look over toread, CC:to me is an very similar process. Just like before, you’ll need to enter a valid email address. After, you won’t even need to confirm your email. You’ll be taken right to your account page.

The coolest and most noticeable difference between CC:to me and toread is that you can text notes to your email by simply sending a text message to the CC:to me phone number. If you enter your number on this page, it’ll automatically associate that SMS number with your account. Then, any texts you send in will automatically be sent as a note to your email address. It’s a very cool feature that sets the two services apart.

A bookmarklet is also available, one that you’ll use in the same way as toread’s.

By default, you can attach notes to your CC:to me pages. Those emails won’t contain the page’s content. Here’s an example:

I prefer toread, but if you’re a big note-taker then I can see why CC:to me would be your choice.

But tell us which one would you pick? Also, tell us if you prefer services like Read It Later over these simpler bookmarklets.

In this article, you’re going to learn how to re-live and enjoy those amazing classic games on your computer using Nestopia.

Downloading Nestopia

Nestopa is no longer being actively developed. It doesn’t need to be either, it’s practically perfect as it stands!

There are versions of the software available for the Windows, Linux, and Mac platforms. Here are direct links to the latest version (1.40):

• Windows
• Linux
• Mac

Nestopia is also open source! You can find the source code here. Nestopia is portable, so it can be thrown onto a service like Dropbox or a flash drive and go with you.

Configuring Nestopia

“Out of the box,” Nestopia doesn’t require too much advanced configuration. It’ll work just fine after unzipping the archive. However, I do recommend going into the Preferences… beneath the Options menu.

Here, just go ahead and check the boxes beside each file association. It’ll make loading ROMs a lot easier for you in the future.

Other than that, you can familiarize yourself with the controls at the Input… screen, also under Options.

The controls are pretty simple by default: directional keys for the directional pad, comma and period for A and B, and then Enter for the Start button.

Getting ROMs

CoolROM is the only website I’ll recommend that you download your NES ROMs from.

Please be advised that you are only legally allowed to download ROMs if you own a license for any and all that you download and you will not distribute or attempt to profit from the ROMs. I’m not going to spew any more legal mumbo-jumbo because the emulation sites themselves should have their own disclaimer. You should know what not to do.

Download and extract the ROMs into the same folder. It’ll get messy and confusing otherwise. NES ROM files have the “.nes” extension.

Loading ROMs

Loading your games is as easy as can be. Simply go to File and then Open… and navigate to the location where your ROMs are stored.

If you made the file associations that I recommended before, you can alternatively just browse to the folder in Windows Explorer and double-click the file. It’ll automatically load and start in Nestopia.

Saving States

This sure does beat having to remember a 16-digit password or having to play through 10 minutes of gameplay just to reach a stopping point. Nestopia supports the saving of your states, which is basically instantly saving your game progress.

All you’ve got to do is go to File and then Save State…. Load State… will allow you to restore your progress.

Go now. You’ve got time to waste and an entire childhood to catch up on. Or if you’re one of our younger readers, how about you go enrich yourself in some real gaming with Nestopia!

If you’re a Super Nintendo fan, I did a very similar article on how to emulate SNES games using ZSNES. Go check it out and let’s talk some NES in the comments here!