But who offers such a service?   These tools are not normally offered in a very prominent place and you have to do some digging on each site for them. After some browsing, I found 5 services who offer secret email addresses for you to update while on the go.   There are probably many more but here are 5 of the top ones that a lot of people normally use.

Flickr

Flickr is the first service I found that supplies secret updating email addresses.   If you take a photo with your phone and you want to directly send it to your Flickr photostream then doing so is extremely easy.

Just go here to see your own updating address (Flickr log-in is required).   Then add that address to your email address book (you can even ask Flickr to send the address to your email address book if you are too lazy!).  You can also specify any default tags you want added to emailed-in photos.   Since I will always be using the email function with my mobile phone, I chose to have added #frommobile with these pictures.

Then in the future, when you take a photo with your phone :

• open a new email window
• add your secret email address
• add the photos as attachments
• put the desired title of the photo in the email subject line
• put any photo description in the body of the email
• tags can be put in the subject line or in the body of the email using the tags: title.

Or for those of you who like graphical explanations :

When I tested it, it took 15 minutes for photos to arrive on my Flickr photostream. So it isn’t an instant thing. But if you are out and away from your computer anyway, 15 minutes won’t make any difference.

If you think your secret upload email address has been revealed to others, you can also easily reset the address by pressing a button on your Flickr page.

As soon as the picture(s) arrive at Flickr, the site even offers to put them on your blog automatically.   Is there anything Flickr won’t do for you?

YouTube

This one is a bit redundant for me as my Android phone already has YouTube uploading built in.   But for those of you who haven’t got this feature by default, here’s a quick and easy way to send your videos to YouTube.

By going here (again, log-in required), you will see your secret uploading YouTube email address.  Now whenever you want to send a video to the site, just attach it as an email attachment and send it to your secret address.

Be aware with this one that virtually all email services have an attachment size limit.   Videos are normally huge in size so unless you keep the video clip small, you may have trouble getting your email service to accept it.  So no uploading Ben-Hur!  Keep it short, simple and small.

Facebook

The Facebook one seems to only allow the uploading of photos so no status updates or poking with this address.   But if you regularly upload lots of drunken party photos to Facebook then go here and find your secret Facebook uploading address.  Speed is of the essence if you want your boss to find out why you really took the day off sick.

Blogger

Blogger has two methods of letting you post content via your mobile, and of course, me being me, the first method didn’t work at all!  Typical.

The first method, which you can read about here, involves authorising your phone to send content to your blog.   But when I tried, I got an email back saying that my “device was not authorised”.   Wait a minute – a Google Android phone is not authorised to send content to a Google-owned blogging company?   Spot the irony there.

The second method is to set up a secret blogging email address.  Unlike the other services, you can choose what the second half of the address will be (so you can choose a secret word or phrase that only you will remember).   You can set this up by logging into Blogger then going to settings–>email & mobile.

The title of the blog post goes in your email subject line and all blog images go as email attachments.

Posterous

I couldn’t do a post like this without mentioning Posterous, the blogging site which seems to be doing surprisingly well.  The whole concept of Posterous is that you email in everything and it will be automatically posted for you – text, photos, mp3’s, videos, documents, the lot.

Just set up your blog, associate an email address with it and then send your blog entries with that email address to post@posterous.com .   It will then shortly appear on your Posterous page.  The simplicity of it is winning over a lot of bloggers and I have to admit, I am starting to weaken.

So there are 5 services where you can email in your updates.   Do you know of any more?   If so, let us know all about them in the comments so I can update my email address book…

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

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Looking through the Android Market, I have come to the conclusion that there is a lot of crap in there (busty bikini girls washing your Android screen with soap and water, while grinning insanely at you?) but there are also a lot of gems.   Finding those gems can be really difficult, unless you know exactly what you are looking for.  I have found things simply by thinking to myself “what would be useful to me?   What do I need on a phone?”.   Busty bikini girls are definately not on that list but the following items are.

So let’s start once again at looking at some of the things you should consider installing on your Droid.

PicSay

I have an excellent camera on my phone but nevertheless, some photos just don’t come out the way I want them to.   In the absence of an official Photoshop app for the Android, PicSay is a suitable alternative in the meantime.

As well as being able to alter the photo in terms of contrast, brightness and many more (see the screenshot to the left for examples), you can also add fun special effects such as word balloons, titles, graphics, color correction and highlighting.  Just increase or decrease the desired special effect by running your finger over the bar at the bottom of the screen and see the photo being updated in real time.

PicSay then saves the altered photos in its own folder on your phone so if you ever need the original photo for whatever reason then it’s still there.

A great app and one that is definately needed if you use your phone camera a lot.

WikiMobile

OK, you could go to the mobile Wikipedia website but that is just a stripped down bare-bones version of the regular Wikipedia site.  WikiMobile on the other hand is another version of Wikipedia which has some extra features I like when I am looking for some obscure fact while out on the road.

Searching for a topic is as simple as inputting it into the search box.   Entries are laid out on the screen nice and compactly, and are easy to read.

If you don’t know what you are looking for, try clicking “Random Article” to see….yes, you guessed it….a random article!   Clicking it just now took me to the page for “naked imperialism” while clicking it again took me to the page about koala bears.   You can also click the popular button to…do you need me to spell it all out?   Nah, I guessed not.  You can work out all by yourself what the “popular” button does.

With “My Bookmarks“, you can easily save WikiMobile entries to a bookmarks section for later reading.   Just go to the entry you want to save, tap your menu and choose “add bookmark“.  Now article research is made much easier and those visits to the doctor’s waiting room need not be boring ever again.   Who needs to read a woman’s magazine when you can read about how to build a fractional rig on a boat?

Barcode Scanner

This one is limited in its usefulness but I included Barcode Scanner because I still like it and I love the looks I get in shops when I walk up to products and zap the bar code with my phone!

Starting the app, you will get the red laser-like line across the middle of your screen.   Just place the barcode completely within your screen with the red line through the middle.   Hold it steady for 30 seconds or so and the barcode scanner will then give you the option to open a product search or a web search.   Both options lead to Google so I recommend going with the web search.

The app is most successful with books as it takes you to the book on Google Books.   I particularly like this part as I am often in bookshops, trying to figure out whether to buy a particular book or not.  Now I can just get my phone out, scan the barcode and then quickly scan the relevant book reviews on Google Books.   No more buying total stinkers.

Nightwatch

Nightwatch turns your Android phone into a glowing alarm clock.   You will need to either lay the phone down on its side (the screen turns as you turn the phone) or you will need to buy/make a stand for it to sit on.   But either way, this allows you to see the time in the dark and set your alarms effectively.

The clock is very customisable :

• Choose from either an analog clock or a digital clock.
• Choose how you want the date to be shown.
• Choose 24 hour clock or am/pm.
• Choose how bright you want the screen.
• Choose how loud you want the volumes to be.
• Choose what colours you want the screen to be.

Process Monitor

This one is perhaps one of the most important ones of all and I don’t understand why Android doesn’t include this as a default function.   Process Monitor is basically an app to mimic Windows’s Task Manager.   You can see a list of all running apps with the ability to either kill the application (shut it down) or open it.  To choose, just press down on the desired app and wait for the pop-up menu to show.

One of the things you have to bear in mind about an Android phone is that the battery is not that great.   If you use the internet and apps on it quite a lot, the battery will drain in less than a day.   So you should always be looking for ways to decrease the pressure on the battery such as disabling needless taskbar notifications and killing unneeded apps.   Since Android doesn’t have a similar default app, Process Monitor is definately needed.   As well as showing all the currently running apps, PM also shows you the level of your battery and the amount of currently available memory.

So that concludes my ten recommended apps for the Google Android phone.   In the next few articles, I will be looking at the games you should be installing on your Droid as well as the best websites to view on a mobile phone.  While you are waiting for all that, let us know what you think about these 5 apps and whether you know of any better ones.   I am always open to suggestions about how to improve and refine my phone!

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

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This can take a while because the Android Market, which is the Google equivalent of the Apple iTunes store, has lots of good stuff. Granted not as much stuff as the Apple iTunes store, but it’s slowly getting there. So, just like a kid in a candy store, you are likely to start installing everything to see what it is all like.

But in the long term, you can’t install everything you find (phone performance would take a serious hit if you installed the kitchen sink) so finally you have to scale back to the best, most essential apps.

To help all you fellow new Android users out, here’s the ones I personally consider to be keepers. After less than a week, I am still looking and refining my phone but the following are ones I will find really hard to get rid of. To find them, just go to the Android Market on your phone and search for them.

Meebo

As someone who makes his living online, being able to chat to my colleagues and other contacts is a must. Pidgin is my favourite IM app but until they make a mobile version of their software, Meebo seems to be the best option for multi-client instant messaging.

An online account from the Meebo website doesn’t seem to be needed for this app. Just add your instant messaging ID’s and passwords and log in. You may be asked to confirm all your contacts again (it asked me to confirm 5 of my contacts who have been on my Pidgin IM list for over a year) and then you will see everyone in a neat vertical list.

If you are more of an AIM fan, check out the Android app Hi AIM. Yahoo Messenger fans can download Hi Yahoo, ICQ users have ICQLive (does anyone still use ICQ?) and Windows Live Messenger users can use Hi MSN Beta. But honestly, if you use more than one of these apps (and who doesn’t these days?) then Meebo is an easier tidier option.

Skype Lite

Another of my requirements, when buying the Android phone, was that it had to be able to run Skype. Not all mobiles can run the Skype Lite app (my partner bought a Palm Pre phone last week and then discovered that it doesn’t run Skype. Boy is she unhappy!).

The Skype Lite app (as it name suggests) is a slimmed down bare-bones app that allows you to call your Skype contacts via your mobile (so very useful for national and international calls). You can also instant message your contacts.

But what Skype Lite will NOT do (at least for me here in Germany) is allow me to send SMS messages, which is rather inconvenient as I am a big SMS sender.  You also can’t receive video.

Nevertheless Skype Lite is an extremely useful app to have on your mobile phone and absolutely essential if you need to make a national or international call (and you don’t want to pay your mobile company’s extortionate standard rates).

Twidroid

The next essential thing I needed on my phone was a good Twitter app. As someone who is really getting into the swing of twittering, I needed something other than visiting the mobile version of the site.  I needed a proper app which would allow me to follow / unfollow people as well as do other things such as make changes to my Twitter profile. I found it in Twidroid.

Twidroid allows you to do virtually everything you can do on the regular Twitter site, as well as give you a nice clean easy to navigate interface to read and respond to tweets. You can also read peoples profiles and follow / unfollow them.

If that wasn’t enough, you can also be notified on your Android desktop when new tweets have arrived (and you can choose what notification tone you want). But having this one is actually a battery drainer so I chose to switch it off. As well as a battery killer, it is also a productivity killer. I don’t want to be looking at my phone every 5 minutes reading the latest tweets. I can easily wait a couple of hours and then scroll through them all in one go.

Facebook

I am not THAT much into Facebook but every now and then I like to visit the site and see what my friends are saying. Android has a nice Facebook app which, like the Twitter app, puts everything into a nice compact easy-to-read format.

You can like / dislike entries, write on peoples walls, comment, upload photos, poke people, send friend and invite requests and much more.

One of the things I really like is that, to refresh the app, you just need to shake your phone! That’s right, find out who has just poked you by shaking the Droid.

Again you can be notified on the Android notification bar at the top when new updates come in (as well as get an unique sound to alert you). But once again, these features are battery drainers and if you have a battery which runs out after a day, then it would be best to switch off all the instant notifications.

Last.FM

The phone shouldn’t only be for work but also for play.  It should be able to relax you when you’re feeling a bit stressed out. Until Android develops a back massage app, then Last.FM is the best app for you to close your eyes for 5 minutes and unwind.

Just like the website, the Last.FM app allows you to

• Log into your account and listen to music.
• Choose a radio station (or start a new one),
• Say who you like listening to and the Last.FM app will find similar artists and play them.
• Like / dislike the currently playing song
• Skip to the next song

The quality of the music sound will depend entirely on your phone speakers but my Android phone came with headphones and the Last.FM music sounds fine through them.

In the next post, we will discuss the next 5 free Android apps you should be putting on your Android phone. In the meantime, what do you think of these 5? Do you have these ones or do you prefer better free alternatives? Let us know what you think in the comments, and stay tuned for part two.

[Update: 10 Free Android Apps For Your New Android Mobile (Part 2)]

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

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A better solution, if you have a Google Apps-run domain, is a service called Google Short Apps. This is a Google powered URL-shortening service you can run using your own domain and which you can customise the way you want it. 

The advantages include :

• With every short link you send out, the name of your domain is attached to it. If that link goes viral around the web, so does your web domain name. Good advertising!
• Most importantly, you can decide what the short URL should be called. So instead of the ending being 28jenq (which tells people nothing about where the link leads to), you can instead tell people that a link comes to MakeUseOf by inserting makeuseof into the tiny URL link.
• It requires zero setup on your part. Unlike other domain-based URL-shortening services we have profiled in the past which seem to require that you have a degree in IT to understand how to set it all up. With Short Links, you just press a button and it is instantly installed on your Google Apps domain. Then you just need to do a little tweaking to get it the way you want it. Typically Google – very easy, direct and to the point. No messing around.

To get the whole lot set up on your Google Apps domain, first go here and press the “add it now” button. This immediately puts a new link on your Google Apps Dashboard.

You’ll see on the screenshot, the URL http://tinylinks.markoneill.org. That isn’t there on your Dashboard immediately. You have to go into the options and decide what you are going to call your URL-shortening service (and “tinylinks” is what I decided on).  It’s to your advantage to not make it a long name though because all of that becomes part of the shortened URL. The longer you make the URL….well you would be eventually defeating the whole purpose of a short URL service in the first place!

So, the next step is to customise things the way you want them. Go to the Service Settings at the top of the Apps Dashboard page and choose Short Links. The first option you will see is naming your URL service. As I said, I chose “tinylinks” but you can choose whatever you want. But being a short URL, make your choice as small as possible. I initially contemplated “tl” but I wanted to give my shortening service a proper name. Saying that, you can have as many links as you want. So I have http://tinylinks.markoneill.org but I will also shortly set up http://tl.markoneill.org (which I will probably exclusively use from then on as it’s shorter and therefore easier to remember and type.

Once you have chosen your URL-shortening name, you then have to your domain webhosting panel and make what is called a CNAME record.  This is basically an instruction to your website that everytime someone goes to your URL-shortening weblink, it should automatically redirect to Google so they can do their shortening magic. Once you have set up a name for your service, Google then sets out, step-by-step, what you have to do to set up a CNAME record and it is very easy.

The other options are not really that important, such as enabling API access and creating IP Whitelists. There are a couple of good options though that you should consider.   They are :

• Only Administrators can create new links :  this is handy if you have other people using your Google Apps domain for email and you don’t want them using the URL shortening to send out their own links.
• If a link cannot be found, do a lowercase search
• Convert all new links to lowercase

OK, now that you have successfully set up your very own URL-shortening service, it’s time to start using it.   Just go to your weblink that you set up and you should now see this screen :

To make a short URL, just enter the URL into the URL box. Then on the left hand side, decide what you want the link to be called and enter it into the box after your domain name. So a link to MakeUseOf could be called http://tinylinks.markoneill.org/makeuseof (click it, it works).

You can also have a “hashed short link” created which is the same as TinyURL. By entering the URL and then pressing the button for a hashed short link, you would get something like http://tinylinks.markoneill.org/vhzvc. But as I said at the beginning, URL’s like that tell you nothing about the link destination so I personally won’t be using that option.

You are also provided with bookmarklets which you can drag up to your browser toolbar. So any time you want to make a Google short link, just go to the webpage link you want to send out and click on the bookmarklet. You will then be taken directly to the Short Links page with the URL boxes already pre-filled with the website URL you were just on.

The last feature I should mention is the stats page.  The Short Links service gives you a page where you can see how many people have went to your short URLs :

On this page, each entry has an edit button so if you messed up typing the destination URL or if you want to delete one of your short URL’s, then you can do so at the click of a mouse button.

All in all, this is a very nice service and I have noticed visits to my personal domain increase since I started using this.  So if you do short URL’s a lot and you are also looking for a free easy way to advertise your domain, then give Short Links a try.

If you don’t have your domain attached to Google Apps, then I highly recommend that you do it now. Your email can be run via Gmail and you can store all your documents via Google Docs, as well as some of the other usual Google Services (but not Google Reader, which is very strange). Plus you get little Apps goodies like Short Links.  Setting up on Google Apps is also very easy and can be done in under 30 minutes. I showed you how to do it here.

Which URL shortening service do you use? Do you use Google Short Links? If so, what has been your experience with it?

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

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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When reading RSS feeds, do you prefer to see the full post inside your RSS reader or do you just want to see an excerpt?   Why is one better than the other?

Let us know in the comments what you prefer!

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

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What comes first in your day?   Having breakfast or checking emails / RSS feeds?

Are you someone who has their laptop / iPhone next to the bed to check online as soon as you wake up? Or do you prefer to have your cornflakes first?

Let us know in the comments!

Image Credit : Selva

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

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And here it is :

If you work online, what time do you normally start working?   Are you an early-to-rise kind of person or do you like to have your long lie in bed and start working in the afternoon?  What time do you do your best work?

Let’s light up the comments section below with your replies!

Image Credit : Juanpol

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

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It’s been such a success that we decided to roll this feature out to our readers as well.  We want to know what you think.

Around two or three times a week, we will be asking you a question on some internet & technology-related subject and we hope you will respond in our comments section and generate some good discussions.

So without further ado, here is the first question :

Have you ever had to explain the internet to your parents, older relatives or non-techie friends? If so, how did you explain it to them, were you successful, and how would you recommend others to explain it?

Tell us all your stories in the comments below.

Image Credit : wheresmysocks

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But what about all those photos you see when you click on the more tab at the top of a Google map?

Where do all those photos come from? That’s right – Panoramio.

Today I will show you how to get your photos uploaded with Panoramio so they too will start appearing on Google Maps and Google Earth. Basically, this will be a guide on how to geotag your photos.

Using Panoramio is a good way to get more eyeballs on your photography work and gain some more exposure. I mean, how many people use Google Maps and Google Earth? Precisely. The numbers are huge and as soon as those users switch on the photos layer, relevant images will start popping up on the screen for them to click on and view.

Now, if your photos are located in a really busy location such as New York City, then your photographic contributions may end up getting lost in among all the other pictures. But if your photos are located in a really quiet, not so well known area then your pictures may end up being the only ones on display.

Our journey to photographic fame and fortune starts with Panoramio, obviously. If you don’t have a free account then you will need to make one. Then sign in.  Once you have logged in, you’ll see a link at the top which says “upload“. Click on that to begin sending your photos to Panoramio.

Now, before we continue, I should mention that you will save a lot of time if your photos are already geo-tagged before sending them to places like Panoramio. If you don’t know what geo-tagging means then you probably haven’t done it before. Geo-tagging basically means that you are adding some extra identifying information to each photo consisting of where the photo was taken.    This information isn’t immediately apparent to anyone viewing the photo (as in it’s not splashed all over the front of the picture). But if you then insert the photos into say a mapping application then that information CAN be read and the photos will be positioned in the right places.

The way I like to do it is by using a bookmarklet called Localize. When you are on your Flickr photo page (it doesn’t seem to work with Picasa Web Albums), just click the Localize bookmarklet and the photo is suddenly replaced by a Google map.

Move the pink arrow, as shown in the screenshot, to the photo’s correct location and save. That’s all there is to it. You will then get a URL below your photo which, if clicked, will take you to the Google map and the location you specified. If you make geo-tagging a habit everytime you upload a photo to Flickr, then it won’t be such a big boring unappealing job.

OK, back to Panoramio and our upload link. On the page, begin uploading your photos (if they are not geo-tagged yet, don’t worry, we can do this later inside Panoramio).

Once the photos are uploaded, you will be asked to tag your photos. This is not geo-tagging, just tags for Panoramio visitors to find your pictures when they search.

Fill out all the required information and save it all.

Now it’s time to properly geo-tag them (if you haven’t done that already). To do this, click on each individual photo and you will then see a “Map This” button to the right hand side. Click on that and you will then be prompted to enter the location for the photo. Try and get it down to the actual street if you can so the map is more accurate.

A Google map will now open up and you then have to move the red marker to its proper position on the map

Now save your changes and then move onto the next photo. As you move each photo to its proper position on the map, Panoramio will update.

Now it is worth stressing here that your photo uploads don’t take effect immediately. So if you now went straight to Google Maps or Google Earth, you will NOT see your photos appear. A notice on Panoramio says that you currently have to wait a couple of days before your images will start appearing on the map. So don’t get frustrated or angry because you don’t immediately see your picture of you mooning from the Hollywood sign.

Upload the pics, leave it for a couple of days and then check back to see if they are there yet.   Just have a think of how many photos Panoramio must be receiving every minute and then you will then appreciate why it will take some time for yours to appear.  Have faith my young apprentice.

To get Panoramio photos to appear on Google Earth, you need to go to the lower left hand corner box, find Geographic Web and then tick “Panoramio“.   Pictures corresponding to the area you are currently viewing in Earth will now pop up all over the place and you can now click on each one to view them.

In each picture box is a link to the Panoramio user’s profile so you can see, with one mouse click, what else they have uploaded (here’s mine).  So if you put a lot of effort into uploading your photos, tagging them and geo-tagging them, then Google Maps and Google Earth will provide the necessary audience readily interested in taking a look at your work.

Do you have any other tips, tricks and suggestions for geo-tagging your photos and getting them onto Google Maps / Google Earth? If so, let us know in the comments.

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

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Being portable, none of them require installation and can easily be run off a USB stick. These portable games for flash drive are fairly simple and straight forward so don’t expect any World Of Warcraft types of game. But that doesn’t make them any less fun to play.

So, let’s take a look at 5 portable games and see which ones are best.

Jooleem Portable

Jooleem’s appearance reminds me a bit of Bejewelled (a.k.a. Diamond Mine). In Jooleem, you have to click on four marbles of the same colour to form a rectangle. They then disappear, the remaining marbles rearrange themselves and off you go again. It takes a while to get the hang of the whole rectangle thing but eventually you are whizzing along and the whole thing is really addictive. Guess what I’ve been doing today! Still, I prefer Bejewelled and I wish it would be brought out as a portable app game.

Atomic Tanks Portable

Another addictive time waster!  In my opinion, Atomic Tanks is the best of the bunch. You are a tank, pitted against another tank and you take turns firing potshots at each other. You use your arrow keys to aim your gun at the right angle then fire with the space bar. The first one to destroy the other one wins.

I spent literally hours today playing this. The best and fastest way to win is to destroy the ground around the enemy tank which makes the tank sink lower into a hole. This makes it more difficult for them to aim at you properly. Once you have them deep in the hole and you have the right angle for your gun, then you have them at your mercy.

L Breakout 2 Portable

Maybe I am just being a bit slow today but it took me a while to figure out how to play this game. I eventually worked it out. You launch a ball and then, just like tennis, you have to move left and right hitting the ball again towards the bricks until all the bricks are destroyed.

This is actually a really difficult game to play – it requires lightning fast reflexes as the ball comes back at you really fast. You don’t have any time to hesitate or think about it. Just keep moving left and right with the left and right arrow keys, trying to catch that ball before it gets past you (and it got past me MANY times!)

Tile World Portable

This one is a maze puzzle. In the middle, you have Chip and you have to guide Chip towards the exit so he can proceed to the next level. Trouble is, there are many things in Chip’s way, such as blocks and hostile creatures. You have to successfully navigate the maze and bring Chip out without bringing him to any harm.

Poker TH Portable

I am currently trying to learn Poker (blame it on my repeated viewings of James Bond’s Casino Royale!). This portable version of Poker Texas Hold’em is a good opportunity to play poker with 6 networked or computer players. It also has custom avatars, custom cards, online chat and sound.

There are many other portable games for flash drive in the Portable Apps Games Section but these were the ones I found to be the best. Which ones do you like the best? Let us know in the comments!

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

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There’s an option to have RSS feeds converted into printable PDF newsletters (which can then be emailed to you) and the service is called Tabbloid. The only slight drawback to this service is that the recipient has to, at least, have a basic understanding of what a RSS feed is (so they can enter it into the right boxes). But assuming they know what a RSS feed is when they look at one, they can set up Tabbloid to have website updates emailed to them as a very neat and tidy PDF newsletter which they can then read at their leisure and pleasure (and print out if they want). Or a RSS-knowledgeable person could set it up for them.

You could also use this service to start collecting blog posts in PDF format as a kind of archive. Have them emailed to you and then archive them for posterity. There’s quite a few possibilities to this service.

Getting it set up is a cinch – and you don’t even need to set up an account!

1.  Add the RSS feed

When you click to get started, you will be asked to enter the RSS feed in the first box in the top left. Let’s choose MakeUseOf’s feed as an example:

Or as you can see, the site also offers lists of recommended feeds, if you are not sure what to subscribe to. MakeUseOf isn’t there though! Oh dear…..

You can see on the right hand side which feeds you have chosen and you can remove any of them at any time.

Enter Your Email Details

Now you have to enter your email details.

You can choose between daily delivery and monthly delivery (just remember that with a monthly delivery and a very busy feed like MakeUseOf’s, you are going to get a HUGE file!). Also choose your delivery time and time zone.

If you want to preview the issue before clicking on “save delivery options“, just click the big blue “generate sample issue now” button and you will get a PDF to preview. One thing here though – your issue will come through without a pdf file format at the end (which is slightly irritating I have to admit). So in Explorer, open it by right-clicking on it, choose “open with” and then choose Adobe Acrobat or any other PDF reader.

You can view a sample issue here that I quickly made using the MakeUseOf feed.

As you will see, all weblinks are clickable and the layout is fantastic. One little minor gripe that I would make is that the rest of the newsletter is not very customisable. You can’t give the newsletter another name for example. But that is all very minor and may only bother you if you wanted to make a personalised newsletter to send out to your blog subscribers. But if you only want to use Tabbloid for post archiving purposes or to read RSS feeds inside your email, then it seems to be a perfect service.

Do you know of any other similar services that do a better job? If so, tell us all about them in the comments.

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

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All you need is a decent webcam which will take good clear shots – a concealed webcam (like the ones embedded in a laptop monitor) would be better, rather than one which is perched on top of your computer, all exposed as if to say “cheese!“. Or use Skype which I discussed in a previous article (that isn’t motion sensor but still another good option though for checking up on your house).

Setting up a motion sensor on your computer would be useful for things like :

• finding out who is on your computer when you are away. Maybe your roommate is secretly reading your emails while you’re in the shower?
• have it covertly installed on your laptop in case someone steals it and you want to get a snap of your thief.
• use it to check on your home while you are away. In the case of Secure Cam, you will need to have remote access to your computer and therefore able to check the hard drive folder from another computer or your internet-enabled mobile device.

Let’s now take a look at both Secure Cam and YawCam and see which one is best.

Secure Cam

Secure Cam is the most basic package of the two. This will snap pictures of anyone and anything that walks in front of your webcam and sends the pics to a folder on your computer.

After setting it up, you first need to choose which webcam you are going to use.   So go to Device in the top menus. Clicking on that will take you to a screen where you can choose your webcam in a drop down menu. Once you have chosen your webcam, click initialize and that will start the whole motion sensor process. You can also choose how large you want your captured images to be.

Once all that is done, click on the image and that will bring up your options :

The options you need to look out for are :

• Tick all the boxes for saving images
• Decide at what intervals images should be snapped, under “save every ***** second(s)“
• Choose the folder paths to the captured images folders.  You may want to bury these folders deep so no-one else can find them.
• Decide how long you want the images to be archived for
• The most important one – set the minimum “Motion Trigger Level” for it to kick into action and start snapping images.   Zero means every movement gets snapped and 255 means they would have to be headbanging to Bohemian Rhapsody before the motion sensor detects them.   To get everything (otherwise, what’s the point of using it?), set the sensor to zero to make it ultra-sensitive.
• Choose how many images you want captured and saved at the one time.   The default is 5.   If you’re hoping to catch someone “in the act”, for the purposes of a criminal prosecution, then you may want to raise this level to perhaps 10 so you don’t miss anything.

Once the options are saved, you can close the open Secure Cam windows so there is only a small icon left in the taskbar. But behind that icon, here’s what’s going on in the background.

When someone walks in front of the camera, whether a snap will be taken will depend on how sensitive you made the motion trigger level. When the webcam detects a movement, small red squares will start appearing around the image area where the movement was detected. When the detection meter reaches the sensitivity level you specified in the options, the software starts snapping shots and then saves them to the folder path you specified.

That’s basically all there is to this software. When someone walks in front of the webcam, pictures are taken and saved. End of story. A pity that there is no ability to send the images to a FTP server or email address but the next one I tried DOES offer these extras if this is what you really need.

YawCam

Now this is MUCH better if you want all the bells and whistles attached to your motion sensor. This is surprisingly good for a freeware product and it is very easy to set up.

When installing, if you don’t already have Java Runtime, then it will tell you that you need to install this first.   Then go straight ahead and install YawCam.

When you start it up for the first time, this is the first thing you will see :

The first things you need to set up are :

Settings–>Camera–>Select Camera – select your webcam.

Settings–>Startup–>Enable Motion Detection – to start the motion detector

Window–>Motion Detection – to go to the set-up window for the motion detector

The set-up window is this here :

Everything is more or less pretty straight-forward. On the left, that big blue blob is my head (but the X-Files poster and Star Wars poster on the wall behind me comes out pretty sharp). Underneath, you have the bars showing that movement is happening and being picked up by Yawcam. Just like Secure Cam, when it reaches the sensitivity level that you specified in the settings, pictures will start being taken and sent to you via a variety of ways.

On the right, choose how you would like to be notified. You can save the images to your hard drive, have them sent to a FTP server, have the images emailed to you, run an exe program or play a sound.  Choose either one or them all. It doesn’t matter. Maybe you would like them emailed to you, with a backup going to your FTP server and a loud siren blaring “INTRUDER ALERT!” scaring the hell out of your snooper. Go on, let it rip.

With the last two, you can set up a really loud scary sounding alarm to go off to scare the hell out of those pesky kids who won’t stop playing with your laptop. Remember to disable it though before Grandpa goes on the computer or you’re likely to give him a heart attack.

If you want the images emailed, you will need to specify your SMTP mail settings. Just look for the POP / SMTP settings in your email program. Gmail’s is here if you happen to use Gmail.

And of course, remember to click that “enable” button there to start the motion detection.

All in all, I much prefer Yawcam for its wide variety of notification features. On the other hand, if you just want something simple and basic, then you may be drawn to Secure Cam instead.

Which one gets your vote? Or do you prefer another? Can you think of other uses for motion sensor software?

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

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As more and more libraries and museums take their collections online, the less people need to actually visit those places.  This is both good and bad.   Good because more and more people have access to collections they wouldn’t normally be able to see.   But bad because, as I said, it removes the need to actually go there in person if you can, and see the items for yourself.   Falling attendance means falling revenue which means these places will ultimately be forced to close.  So it’s a bit of a catch-22 digitising these amazing collections.

Here are some places which have taken either all or most of their collections and papers online for all to see – and it’s all completely free to view on your screen.

Library Of Congress

As well as being able to search their library for a particular book title, you can also view their Digital Collections.   This includes a wide variety of things including photographs, newspapers, legislative records from Congress, and map collections.   I am a big fan of old maps so the last section was particularly fascinating for me, especially the old military campaign maps from the Civil War (they can also be downloaded to your computer).

I also particularly enjoyed the Manuscript Reading Room, where you can view the private papers of Hannah Arendt, Sir Alexander Graham Bell,  Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.   There are literally hundreds of thousands more documents by various other people, all meticulously scanned online with foreign language documents accompanied with translations.   You can literally spend hours on this site and still not get through a small fraction of what the LOC offers.

Smithsonian Institute

The Smithsonian actually consists of 19 museums, 9 research centers, and the National Zoo.   So it is a huge institution, covering so many diverse subjects and this is reflected on their website.

Check out their art and design section with scans of tens of thousands of images which are searchable.   You can also view their History & Culture section, Science & Technology and even view a bug photo collection in their Museum of Natural History (not for the squeamish!)

British Museum

The British Museum is also a world-renowned place which utilises the internet to its full advantage.

You can search over 4,000 items in the Museum’s collection, including Chinese Jade and Sacred Objects from the Pacific.   Explore ancient cultures such as the Romans and Medieval Europe.   Gaze upon one of the Museum’s most prized objects, an Anglo-Saxon helmet.

The British Museum also embeds their own specially-made videos on the site including one on the Greek Parthenon (although there seems to be no way to embed the videos on your own site).  They even show you how to make a mummy (if a close relative dies and you feel so inclined to put them on display!)

British Library

One of the big players in the library/museum collection business and it’s no different with their online offerings.

This is an institution I have huge respect for as it houses some of history’s most important documents.   You can look at, and translate, the Magna Carta.  Using Shockwave Flash, you can “turn the pages” of some of the greatest books ever, including the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Lisbon Bible.   You can view and compare over 100 quartos by Shakespeare.  If that isn’t enough, you can listen to nearly 24,000 audio recordings and explore another 20,000.

Still not enough?   Then read and compare the Library’s two copies of the Gutenberg Bible.  Or read and compare the Library’s two editions of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.

Hermitage

The Hermitage is in St Petersburg, Russia and consists of the following :

The main architectural ensemble of the Hermitage situated in the centre of St Petersburg consists of the Winter Palace, the former state residence of the Russian emperors, the buildings of the Small, Old (Great) and New Hermitages, the Hermitage Theatre and the Auxiliary House. The museum complex also includes the Menshikov Palace and the Eastern Wing of the General Staff building, the Staraya Derevnya Restoration and Storage Centre and the Museum of the Imperial Porcelain Factory.

As well as viewing a list of their current exhibitions, you can also browse countless other collections including paintings and drawings, archeological artefacts and costumes.

Louvre

Most well known as the home of the Mona Lisa, the Louvre in Paris has 30,000 works of art which are digitised and searchable on their website.

The best place to start is the Overview, which leads off into the various different sections of the gallery.  As well as listing the various departments, you can also see the latest news and latest acquisitions.

They even have pages devoted to Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code!

The one complaint I have is that their font is too small and so you have to increase the font size.  You can find out how to do that in Tina’s article.

National Library of Scotland

I am a little bit biased here, being Scottish myself, but I honestly believe that the National Library of Scotland has some fantastic exhibits worth looking at.   If you are ever in Edinburgh, I recommend a personal visit but for those unable to make it to Edinburgh, the NLS’s website has some fairly good digital collections.

See the last letter written by Mary Queen of Scots before her execution.  Turn the pages of a Gutenberg Bible.  View ancient maps of Scotland and zoom right in to get all the close details.   Read the entire First Edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Kidnapped”

But I think one of the most serious downsides to the NLS site is that they don’t have scans of their extensive Robert Burns collection.   They only talk about it and refer you to book titles which they have in their library.   How can they have a Scottish digital collection and not talk about Mr Burns?   That’s sacrilege ah tell ya.

I’m sure there are many other libraries and museums online with unique and valuable digital collections but I have to stop this post somewhere!    I hope this article has given you a bit of insight into the treasures available for view online and if you know of any more, please do tell us about them in the comments.

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

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There are things that Google does well and some things they do really well. Picasa is one of the ones they do really well and if you do a lot of image viewing and editing on your computer then you should use Picasa by default. It takes image viewing and editing to a completely new level and offers a lot of other features apart from letting you look at your photos.

Here’s five Google Picasa tricks and tips, the ones I found really good and ones which I am likely to use often.

Resize Images Properly For Frames

I am in the habit of framing a lot of my good pictures for the walls but other image editing programs can’t seem to get the photo resized properly. Even if you specify the exact size you want, the picture still seems to be too big or too small. Then you have to start cutting it down (if it’s too big) or having big gaps in the frame (if it’s too small).

But with Picasa, you don’t have this issue. When you resize an image, it gets the new measurements exactly right, straight away.

Just go to the photo then press the print button. It will then give you a variety of sizes available.

They give you the opportunity to add a border to the picture, under “Border and Text Options“. Choose how many copies of the picture you want and it tries to put them all on the same page (depending on the size). Then choose your desired size and off it goes to the printer. Very easy.

Turn Your Photos Into An Instant HTML Webpage

This one is extremely useful if you would like to upload your photos to a website but you are not too sure about your HTML skills. This is even easier than the Web Album Generator which I wrote about in December 2007.

Choose the pictures you would like on your page by clicking on the first one then using your left and right arrow keys to choose the rest. Then go to Folder–>Export As A HTML Page and you will then be asked some options:

Make your choices and then you will be asked what type of page you would like :

After making your choices, Picasa then very quickly makes the page and opens it in your browser. If you like what you see, save the page to your computer by going to File–>Save Page As in the browser menu :

Send The Photos Directly To Blogger

Now that I have started using Blogger again, this one will become especially useful for when I quickly want to send my snaps to my blog.

Just double-click on the photo you want to send to your blog and press the BlogThis! button at the bottom.

This opens up a window to log into Blogger (if you’re not already logged in).  Log in with your Google account and when you are in, you will get size options and then the opportunity to write some text next to your picture.

Then press “Publish Post” as you would do in any normal Blogger post.  The image will then instantly appear on your blog page. No waiting required.

Turn Your Images Into A Collage – Then Into A Desktop Wallpaper

This one is really cool. We have already covered how to make a collage on computer before but the Picasa method is really quite easy.

Again, highlight the photos with your mouse then go to Create–>Picture Collage. Your images will then appear as one of the collage styles and you will have options to try out other ones.

Once the collage has been made, there is an option to then make your creation into a desktop wallpaper.

This will make my girlfriend jump hen she comes home and finds me on the desktop!

Turn photos into movie slideshows with music then upload to YouTube

I was at a wedding on Saturday and the bride & groom’s friends wanted to show a slideshow of the bride and groom at various stages of their relationship. But the software program they were using to play the show from their laptop constantly stopped working. Looking at how Picasa easily makes movie slideshows with music, they could have used this instead.

Granted, this is not going to make anything Oscar-worthy but if you are just looking for a way to show photos along with a bit of music (or no music if you prefer) then this works perfectly well.

Put all the photos you want in the slideshow into its own folder. Then in Picasa, there are options at the top of every folder.  One of them is Create Movie Presentation. Make sure the pictures are in the correct order in the folder as you want them to appear in the slideshow (just name them picture1.jpg, picture2.jpg…..or something similar)

Clicking the “Create Movie Presentation” button puts the pictures in the folder into a straight line with a screen above it so you can view what you have created.

On the top left hand side, you also have the option to add music. Just navigate to the music file’s location in your computer and choose it. Then underneath, choose your “transition style” which is how you want the images to change on the screen. Do you want them to fade out? Or cut from one to the other? Pan and Zoom? There are quite a few choices there for you to choose from.

You can then press the green “play” button for your slideshow to start. Go full screen for maximum effect. At the end, if you are really pleased with your slideshow, Picasa even gives you the ability to upload your creation to YouTube so everyone else can see it.

So those are the five features that jumped out at me. I did want to do the geotagging of my photos from Picasa to Google Earth but for some reason it didn’t work for me. Picasa told me to download Google Earth first but I already had it! So perhaps when I finally get that feature to work, I may write about it in a separate article.

We have done quite a few Picasa articles on MakeUseOf in the past. Here are a few to get your Picasa fix :

• Jim’s Five Part Introductory Series To Picasa – Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five.
• Ten Tips To Manage Photos Better Using Google Picasa – Shankar
• Send Your Photos To Your Picasa Web Album With An Email – Saikat
• How To Use Facial Recognition In Picasa Web Albums – Tim

Which features of Picasa do you like the best? Let us know in the comments.

Picasa

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

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But the one thing that Twitter does NOT allow, by default, is the ability to post pictures. That is where TwitPic and Flickr comes in.  By posting your pictures to one of these services, a short URL is automatically generated and then posted on your Twitter stream in seconds.

Let’s take a look at both services and see how they can help you with posting pictures on Twitter. We’ll also see how they stack up against one another.

TwitPic

TwitPic is not new but it is one of those services that I constantly heard about but never got around to trying it out. I finally tried it out today and I am amazed at how easy it is to use. With just a few clicks, you can start posting pictures to Twitter for all to see.

You need to give TwitPic your Twitter credentials and after logging in, you will see a Photo Upload page. I decided to upload a photo of me in my new A-Team t-shirt :

After uploading the picture to TwitPic, a unique URL is created and that URL is then posted to your Twitter account for people to click on and view.   Easy.  Nothing to it.

But TwitPic also has a few other features worth mentioning. They also collects the replies to your TwitPic tweet and lists them on the unique TwitPic page underneath your photo. As you can see here, I have got one reply already to my A-Team t-shirt picture. You can also reply on the TwitPic page to everyone who sent Tweets and those replies will then also be posted to your Twitter stream.

TwitPic also gives you a unique email address which you can use to email pictures in. It says on the site that it is for “sending pictures from your phone” but I tested it from my Gmail address on a normal PC and it worked fine. The picture appeared on my TwitPic account within 5 minutes of sending it.

You can also choose to not have your pictures show up on Twitter but to be honest, why would you choose that option? The whole point of using TwitPic is to post pictures on Twitter. Not having the picture links posted to Twitter would be like going to the airport but refusing to get on the plane.

TwitPic also has a Public Timeline of all the photos passing through their site. You can also subscribe by RSS to have all the photos sent to you if photo gazing is your thing (and if you have the time to look at them all).

The one downside to Twitpic is that they don’t have their own branded search engine to look for other pictures. Your own pictures are neatly laid out in your account but if you want to search for other peoples pictures, Twitpic doesn’t offer a search engine. This seems to be a rather amazing oversight.

You will have to look for pictures using a Twitter image search engine, two of which I will briefly look at towards the end of this article. But if you want to search the Twitpic site, you will have to go to Google and use the site: search term.   So to find actress Demi Moore’s pictures (Demi is a big user of Twitpic), go to Google and type :

site:twitpic.com Demi Moore

Flickr

Now there are probably a lot of people out there who don’t want to give out their Twitter details. In that case, another possibility is Flickr. Flickr connects to your Twitter account using their API and so no password is inputted.  It’s all done through “tokens”.

I tried looking to see if it was possible to post to Twitter using Picasa Web Albums but I was unable to find a solution. If you know of one, please do let us know in the comments.

Anyway, back to Flickr.   Here’s how to post to Twitter using Flickr.

Go to the picture on Flickr that you want to post to Twitter.  You need to be logged into Flickr first and it doesn’t have to be your picture. You can tweet any picture on Flickr you want.

Click on “Blog This” on the bar above the picture

If you don’t have Twitter set up yet on your Flickr account, you can click through to a menu asking you which blog you want to send the picture to. Twitter is near the bottom.

Flickr will then connect to Twitter and Twitter will ask you if you want to grant access to Flickr. Say yes and then you will be redirected back to the Flickr photo page. When you click on “Blog This” again, you should now see this :

Now just click on that Twitter link and you’ll be taken to a preview page where you will see the photo along with a text box to write your Tweet. As you can see, the link to the photo has already been shrunk into a short Flic.kr URL.

Click “post entry” and then go to your Twitter stream. You should now see the Tweet there along with the link to the picture.  It’s all done in seconds.

Like Twitpic, Flickr also gives you a unique email address to email your pictures into your Twitter account.

As far as I can see, these are the two easiest ways to send pictures to Flickr.  As I said, if you know of a way to do this with Picasa Web Albums, please do let us know in the comments how to do it.

There are two Twitter picture services which I like if you want to see what people are uploading – Twitcaps and Twicsay although I slightly prefer Twitcaps because it connects my pictures with my last tweet. Twicsy just generates lots of random, sometimes pointless, tags for the pictures.  But both offer good search and real-time updating of pictures to Twitter.

How do you go about posting pictures on Twitter? Do you know of any other good alternative methods apart from Twitpic and Flickr? Or any good alternatives to Twitcaps and Twicsay? Let us know all about them in the comments.

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

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Although this seems to work fine (and I used it all day today for searches), you seem to be limited to the first four search results only.  So this wouldn’t be something that you could use for deep searching.   But if you are looking for the correct URL of a website, the Wikipedia entry for something, basically anything that would – in theory – show up in the first few results, then you could use these bots instead.   No different from Google’s “Are You Feeling Lucky?“.

The bots are for Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger (so no AIM love it seems).   But a lot of people now have a Google account so the lack of AIM shouldn’t be a hindrance.

Just add the following chat bot depending on what service you use :

Google Talk – sbot@bot.im
Yahoo Messenger – searchbot@ymail.com
Windows Live Messenger – searchbot@live.com

As soon as you’ve added the account to your contact list, it should go online virtually right away and then you can start searching.

Searching is very straight forward.   If you want to search Twitter, just type t and then your search term.   So :

t makeuseof.com

and this will give you :

I think for Twitter, 4 results is not really enough. You need probably at least 10-15 to give you a better overview. 4 is just too random.

For Google, type g followed by your search term.   For Bing, precede your search query with b and can you guess what it is for Yahoo?   Yep, you guessed it!  y.   I know, it’s tough to follow but I’ll try and not get too far ahead, OK?

So searching Google for MakeUseOf :

And you get pretty much the same results with Yahoo and Bing.

There’s not much more you can say about it – it’s just a no frills search function for your IM program which will give you the first four results for any given search query.  I am personally finding it very useful because if I am in a Firefox tab and I don’t want to break the writing flow by opening up a new tab for Google, I can just quickly open up my Pidgin program with a keyboard shortcut and quickly type a quick search into one of these bots.

I look up all my dictionary definitions using Google using the define search parameter and I thought for a moment that I could use this bot to make all my dictionary lookups without having to open the browser.   THAT would have been REALLY useful. But the define parameter doesn’t work with this bot.   Strange.  I hope the bot writers can fix this little glitch.

Make the define parameter work so you can do dictionary searches and increase the number of search results to between 10-15 and these bots will become even extremely more useful.   What do you think?  What else could they add to make these bots even better?

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

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Turn Your IM Program Into A Productivity Tool Using Imified (23)
• How to Expand Google’s Universal Search (20)
• Update all your Social Status Messages with Ping.fm (14)
• Trillian Astra – Is It the Best Instant Messaging Client Now? (16)
• Translation For MSN: Auto Translates Messages While Chatting (17)

Synchronizing your Gmail email messages with Thunderbird is a breeze by using IMAP.   Every change you make in Thunderbird is more or less instantly reflected in your online email account.

But what about your Gmail contact book, your Google calendar and Google Reader RSS feeds?    Although Thunderbird offers their own versions, I wanted it instead to synchronize with my Google accounts and keep everything updated as I made changes.    The thought of having two versions, one in Thunderbird and one online, was not very appealing.

Here’s how I finally managed to do it.

Synchronize Your Google Contacts With Thunderbird :

This can be achieved by using an extension called Zindus.   Just install the extension and after restarting Thunderbird, go into the options :

It’s very easy to set up. Just insert your Google account name and password.   Then click the “test connection” button and it will connect to your Google account.    Your contact book will then be downloaded and any further changes in Thunderbird will also be synchronized with your online account.

Synchronize Your Google Calendar With Thunderbird

This one has already been covered by Tina (which is the guide I used) but here’s still a quick summary.   You need two extensions – Lightning and Provider For Google Calendar.   When you install them and restart, you’ll then see your calendar on the right hand side.

To start the synchronization, find the XML link of your Google Calendar (found under the settings on your GCal page), insert it into the Thunderbird calendar settings, and bingo, your events are downloaded and synchronized.

To get the full, in-depth process, read Tina’s excellent how-to.

Synchronize Your Google Reader With Thunderbird

This was the biggie as far as I was concerned.   With over 2000 unread RSS messages, I wanted to be able to browse through the feeds and have it instantly updated online.   I didn’t want to read them in Thunderbird but for them still to be sitting unread online.   That would have led to chaos.    Finally I discovered one possible solution.

Basically what the following method does is install a mini browser in your Thunderbird.   So technically you are still reading them online but inside your Thunderbird client instead.   So it’s not an offline synchronization solution which is what I am really looking for.   But for the moment this will do until I find a better method.

• First download Thunderbrowse and CSLite and install them in Thunderbird.
• Now go into your Thunderbird options and on the ‘General‘ tab, make sure the box labelled When Thunderbird launches, show the Start Page in the message area is checked, and in the location field, enter the URL http://www.google.com/reader/i/.



• Now go into your Thunderbrowse options. On the ‘Content‘ tab, check the option Enable SmartJavascript?, and click OK.
• Open the preferences for the CS Lite extension, and on the ‘Global‘ tab, select Allow cookies globally from the drop-down box.
• Now restart Thunderbird.   You should now see Google Reader in the main browser pane.   Log in and your feeds will appear.



• One piece of advice – place the Thunderbrowse button on your Thunderbird toolbar.  Then when you need to navigate away from the window to read your emails, you can click the Thunderbrowse button to go back again.

Do you have any better solutions to synchronize your Google accounts with Thunderbird? If so, I would love to hear about them. Let everyone know in the comments.

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

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• How To: Integrate Google Calendar Into Thunderbird (22)
• FeedDemon Can Now Sync Google Reader to the Desktop (13)
• Two Online Services To Clean Up Your RSS Feeds (10)
• Read Your RSS Feeds in a Whole New Light with Feedly (11)
• Newsgator – The Most Complete RSS Solution (11)

And so begins one of the pinnacles of my childhood – Luke Skywalker fighting the evil Darth Vader.   I can still remember playing Star Wars games in the school playground where we would take turns playing the Jedi Knight. We would get the pleasure of beating the hell out of the poor soul who had ended up getting the part of the hapless stormtrooper, chasing him around the playground while he shouted “right, it’s my turn to be Luke Skywalker now!“”

Nowadays, you can still play Star Wars but, as with everything else these days, it has moved itself online.   Here are some online Star Wars games you could play (and I don’t mean the drinking game).   OK granted, they are not as good as the paid PC games but if you have a spare 5 minutes to kill, these freebies are good enough to satisfy your Star Wars fix.

Star Wars Lightsaber Simulator

Well, this isn’t really a game as such.   All you can do here is swing a lightsaber about which does get boring after a while.   But if you want to practise your Jedi moves before moving onto an actual real game, this is a good one to start off with.  Just choose your lightsaber from the bottom, click your mouse to activate it and then use the mouse to swing back and forth.  Can you feel the Force yet?

Lightsaber Training

This basic game (but still quite fun and addictive) involves killing droids with your lightsaber by deflecting the lasers (which they are shooting at you) back at them with the lightsaber.   It is actually not that easy to do and you lose points if the laser hits you instead. And yes, I got my butt whooped.  By a droid.   I’ll never live it down in the bars of Mos Eisley.

Jedi Versus Jedi – Blades Of Light

This one has a bit more to it and the graphics are MUCH better.   Hosted by Hasbro who make the Star Wars toys, you have to choose which Jedi you are going to be and then begin fighting the other one.   Pressing A & D on your keyboard gives you the fighting moves while pressing the space bar releases the Force (if you have enough that is)

I predictably got my ass well and truly kicked. Can you do better?

Clone Wars

This one involves you aiming your mens guns (who are in fixed positions) so that, when the time runs out, they will then fire and hit your opponent’s men, wiping them out.   Each side has three men and the first one to wipe out the other side wins.   I actually won at this one!   Maybe I am not such a write-off after all at this gaming lark.

Gunship Over Florrum

Another offering from the Star Wars website.   This one has you in control of a gunship and you have to use your left mouse button to fire at the enemy which are flying your way shooting at you.   Use the spacebar to drop bombs too if you have any.

The Star Wars site also offers other free online games called Sharpshooter and LiveFire.

There’s a lot of stupid pointless games online as well (including one I found where you have to fire at Imperial Tie-Fighters but they don’t tell you where the fire button is – you have to find it yourself!).   If you want a decent free game, the Star Wars website is the best place to go but as we’ve seen, there are a few other sites if you keep looking.

Which sites do you go to when you want to play Star Wars for free?   Let us know in the comments.

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

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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If that’s the case, here is a complete list of everything that came out during August. Why not see if there’s something you haven’t read yet?   You may have missed a gem or two.

Please also take a moment to visit each writer’s website to find even more posts for you to read and subscribe to.

Simon was on summer break this month so unfortunately there were no published manuals during August.   But he is back to work starting today so look out for some new MakeUseOf manuals coming soon!

Karl – Ask The Admin

Preschool Online Games That Are Fun For Children
Do an Internet Speed Test with SpeedTest
How To Disable CD/DVD Drives, USB ports, Floppy etc. on PCs in Your Home Network
Easy Mobile Internet Plan Comparison for United States
Use PowerPoint Video Converter to Convert PowerPoint Presentations to a Video
PicTreat- Online Free Photo Editing Software to Fix Your Pictures
Extend Your Laptop Battery Life With BatteryCare (Windows)
Make Unique Free Ringtones & Share Them With Friends
How To Split a Huge CSV Excel Spreadsheet into Separate Files
Monitor Files & Folders for Changes with HDD Profiler
How To Make A Creative Collage On Your Computer With Shape Collage (Windows)
How to Copy DVDs That Are Copyright Protected (Windows)
Check Your Blog or Website Status With Are My Sites Up
PadMapper Helps You to Find Apartments for Rent on CraigsList
Help Predict Airport Flight Delays & Save Time With Flightcaster
Use LicenseCrawler To Recover Your Lost Software Serial Numbers
Use OfficeTab To Give Microsoft Office Firefox-Like Tabs
Create a Free Disposable Web Page with DinkyPage
Videosurf – One Video Search Engine for All Video Sites
ThomasNet – An Awesome Repository Of Technical Information for DIY Men

Ryan – BetterContent

Make a Personal Budget on Excel in 4 Easy Steps
A Head-to-Head VoIP Review: Skype Vs Gizmo
How to Set Up Laptop Wireless Internet Access Through Your Cellphone [Windows]
5 Really Popular Online Job Application Forms: Burger King, Mcdonald’s, Wal Mart etc.
How To Have a Blog You Don’t Have To Babysit
Geeks Weigh In: Can You Fix A Scratched CD With Toothpaste?
4 Useful Microsoft Word Tips & Tricks You Should Know About
How To Use Skype To Record Calls or Conduct Interviews with HotRecorder (Windows)
4 Free WiFi Software Downloads to Get Most of Wireless Networks
3 Alternatives To Local Phone Companies That Will Save You Money
How To Resell eBooks For Free Online
How To Make A Calendar Template In Excel
Technology Explained: What Is Blackberry Technology?
How To Start A Blog That Gets Instant Traffic

Saikat – The Things I Do

How to Set Up Microsoft Outlook to Schedule Email Delivery
How To Recover Lost A Gmail Password With A SMS Message
2 Great Photo Tips to Digitally Enlarge a Picture Without Ruining Picture Quality
How To Automatically Batch Rename Photos With Dates They Were Shot
How to Trace an IP Address to a PC & How to Find Your Own
SmillaEnlarger – A Portable App To Increase The Size Of Digital Images
10 Great Windows Media Player 11 Tips and Tricks
Technology Explained: How Does An Email Server Work?
10 Firefox Add-ons To Find Friends On Social Networks
Immunet Protect – Free Antivirus Protection From The Social Cloud (Windows)
Top 5 Free OCR Software Tools To Convert Images Into Text
3 Cool Addons to Replace The Mozilla Firefox Downloads Window
How To Find A Book Without Knowing The Title Or Author

Simon – Wombat Labs

Jinni Recommends You Movies You Should Enjoy (500 Invites!)
How To Transfer Music From Your PC To Your PSP
Top 3 Sites For Video Game Soundtracks
Manga Fighter – MMO Arena Fighting Game For Kids
How To Send Completely Anonymous Emails
How To Hide Your Torrent Files Inside Pictures
How To Download Games Onto Your PSP For Free
Apocalypse Now With These 3 Online Zombie Games
How To Download Free Movies For Your PSP
Create Online Mind Maps with Seavus DropMind
3 Websites To View Your PDFs Online
A Perfect World International – Great Free MMORPG
The 3 Best NFO File Readers To Open Those NFO Documents

Guy – Extreme IT

Internet Security: How Criminals Hack Other Peoples Computers
4 Sites To Get Good Free Advice Online
How To Make Corrupt USB Jump Drives Work Again
Technology Explained: How Do Satellites Track Mobile Phones?
How To Get Data Off A Dead Hard Drive
7 Websites Women Should Find Interesting
Technology Explained: How Does StumbleUpon Work?
Design Your Own Custom Shoes Online & Buy Them
How To Build a Free Website That Makes Money Without Any Coding
5 Sites To Help You Prepare For the Flu Season
5 Great Sites To Watch Things Blowing Up
5 Must-know Tips For Safe Computing – Without Dying
4 Sites That Give You A Free Updated Proxy List

Varun – Tech Crazy

5 Excellent Downloadable eBooks To Teach Yourself Linux
Take Google Maps Offline & Get Maps You Can Print using Google Maps Buddy
How To Change Windows 7 Logon Screen
15 Great Ubuntu Tips For Linux Power Users
Run Commands & Applications With Numeric Keys Using ControlPad [Windows]
How To Disable USB Ports To Prevent Malware Infection
How To Run Windows Keyboard Shortcuts Using Your Mouse
The Best Way To Effectively Clean LCD Monitor Screens
Run Windows Commands Easily with Commands In Demand
10 Cool Google Reader ‘Send To’ Buttons You Can Use to Post Feed Content to Friends
3 Emulators To Play Free Old School Games On Your Linux Machine
How To Get Rid Of A Trojan Horse Virus That Won’t Go Away

Dean – Ten Amp Talk

How To Use Google Maps On Your Basic Mobile Phone
A Quick Road Trip Planning Guide For Techno Geeks
3 Sites To Find Free Unlocking Codes For Mobile Phones
Creating Your Own Website For Free with BlueVoda
Download & Convert YouTube Videos for iPod with DVDVideoSoft
Snaptu- Free iPhone Theme for Pocket PC or Cellphone
How To Make Unforgettable YouTube Videos
Technology Explained: How Does A Hard Drive Work?
Top 5 Current Email Scams You Should Know About
HyperEngine – The Best Free Movie Editing Software for Mac
Top 3 Sites To Download Free Blackberry Themes
Top 3 Sites To Make Flash Cards For Your Kids

Stefan – The Tux Geek

How To Move Your Music Library Online with Moof
LifeIO: Check Your Email, Read Feeds, Post to Twitter, Keep Notes & More From One Cool Site
Buying Music: iTunes Store vs Amazon MP3 Downloads
How to Collaborate Effectively & Increase Productivity with Shareflow
Linux Mint: Your Best Choice for a Desktop Linux OS
Lala – Really Cool New Site for Music Streaming & Downloads
Notely Helps Students Get Organized Online
6 Reasons Why Mozilla Firefox Is Safe Compared To Internet Explorer
Exercises and Techniques to Beat Writer’s Block With Plinky

Tina

15 Best Mozilla Firefox Skins To Customize Your Browser
3 Best Sites For Alternative Music Lovers
The Complete Guide: Troubleshooting Mozilla Firefox Problems
10 Best Mozilla Thunderbird Themes
WiFi for Dummies: 9 Common Mistakes Setting up a Wireless Network
How To Install Fonts on Windows, Mac & Linux
7 Cool HTML Effects That Anyone Can Add To Their Website
Top 7 Things To Do Online When You’re Bored

Jeffry – Super Subconscious

The 7 Simple & Great Tricks to Tweak Your Dock on Mac OS X
Back To Basics: How To Get YouTube Videos On Your iPod
How To Create A Portable Ubuntu Installation USB On The Mac
6 Great ‘Quick Look’ Features You Probably Don’t Use (Mac)
How To Take A Better Screenshot Image With Jing (Mac)
How To Organize Your Mac Desktop With Spaces
How To Automatically Update 3rd Party Apps on Your Mac
10 Best Safari Browser Plugins (Mac)

John

Faux News: 10 Best Websites for Fake News & Satire
12 Best Websites For Nintendo Fanboys
How To Control Search Engine Top Rankings for Your Name
Top 5 Sites With Free Strategy Guides For Gamers
Top 5 Sites To Search For Cheap Online Car Rentals
Top 10 Sites For Online Coupons & Promotional Codes

David – The 2.0 Life

7 Tips to Make Gmail The Best Free Email Service For Productive People
How to Host Your Own Talk Show Online
How To Conduct a Song Search By The Lyrics You Know
How To Organize Your iTunes Collection With TidySongs

Tobias – Tobias Verhoog

How to Make Your Blog Truly Interactive with Wibiya (Invites!)
The Best New Features Of Wordpress 2.8
Review & Discuss Unusual And Cool Gadgets with Gdgt
Top 3 Reasons Kazaa Lite English Is Better Than Kazaa

Jack – Jack Cola

How To Use Your Domain Name As An OpenID Login
6 Free Sites To Learn About Programming in PHP
10 Sites To Send Free Text Messages To Cell Phones (SMS)
How To Resize Images for Email right in Thunderbird & Outlook

Sharninder – Geeky Ninja

How To Play DOS Games Under Windows XP
How To Copy & Edit YouTube Videos On Your Computer
Top 6 Sites To Watch Horror Movies Online for Free
How To Set Up A Secure & Free Proxy Server

Eyal – ProductiveWise

Excel Printing Tips – 6 Steps For Perfect Printing
5 Great Search Tips for Finding Cool Links Shared on Twitter
How to Subscribe to & Download Only Podcasts That You’ll Like
ESL Tools for Better Writing in English as a Second Language

Jim – Different Perspective

How To Use Styles In Microsoft Word To Save A Lot Of Work
How to Keep your Backups Current with FreeFileSync (Win)
How To Save Time In Excel By Using The Fill Handle

Prasanth

How To Make A WiFi Antenna Out of A Pringles Can
Top 10 Websites For PlayStation 2 Free Game Cheats
Top 10 Free Online Tycoon Games You Should Try

Ellie – Ultimate Geek Girl

10 Great Google Gadgets For Your Gmail Sidebar
20 Must-Have Bookmarklets For Your Web Browser
6 Subway Map Tools To Navigate Your Way Through NYC

Tim L – timmyjohnboy

4 Ways To Use a USB or External Drive Like Your Own Mobile Computer
5 Sites That Promote Internet Safety For Kids
Conduct & Embed Online Interviews With Wetoku (Invites!)

Angelina – Nothing Major

9 Sites With The Latest Fashion Trends For Fashion Maniacs
7 Great Sites To Get Free Romance eBooks For The Hopeless Romantic
How To Turn Gmail Into A Multitasking Machine (Part 1)

Will – Piccdrop

3 Ways To Track Tour Dates Of Your Favorite Rock Bands
Top 6 Torrent Alternatives To The Pirate Bay
4 Great Sites To Do A Book Search By Plot or Subject

Mahendra – Skeptic Geek

The Ultimate Guide To Speeding Up Firefox 3.5
How To Share High Resolution Photos Easily With Seadragon

Leon

Download & Play a MMORPG Called Ragnarok for Free
Feel The Need For Speed with Google Earth’s Flight Simulator

Tim W – Twenty Ounce

How To Install LimeWire & Use it Without Getting a Virus
Visikid- Free Parental Internet Control Software to Monitor Your Child Online

Israel

How to Set Privacy Settings to Make Skype Safe Against Snoopers

Wez – The Tutorial Blog

How To Use Automator To Batch Rename Images on Mac

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

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• September Roundup : Make Use Of Authors (3)
• September Roundup – MakeUseOf Authors (8)
• October Roundup : Make Use Of Authors (1)
• March Roundup : Make Use Of Authors (0)
• June Roundup: MakeUseOf Authors (3)

But now I am going to take a look at another link in the Google network chain by discussing a new iGoogle feature – social features.

This newly introduced set of features, which are still rather in the spartan stage, allows you to add social features to your iGoogle page.  This could be anything from playing chess with another Gmail user to sharing and collaborating information.

Let’s take a look at what there is.  I can’t cover them all but I can give you a broad overview.

The one I like the most is being able to play chess with another Gmail user. When you add the chess module, this is what it looks like on the main page :

The little crowd logo in the top right hand corner shows that the module belongs to the social gadgets group.  Now when you open it up, these are the options you will find :

You can start a new game (either by inviting a Gmail user from your Gmail Contacts or starting a game and waiting for someone to come along and accept), see your current games and you can even be taken to chess rules and techniques on Chess.com if you feel you are getting your butt whipped by your opponent.

There seems to be no limit to the number of games you can take part in and each game has various limitations on how long you have to move.   If you started the game, you can choose or if your opponent started the game, they get to decide. It’s a lot like “ItsYourTurn” which I have profiled twice in the past here and here..

But chess is not the only thing you can do on iGoogle. You can also play scrabble with other Gmail users but for some inexplicable reason, this game is only restricted to US users. Bah! Google, please remove this stupid restriction – I want to play Scrabble!

Moving swiftly on, you can also show your Flickr and/or Picasa photos and see others which your Gmail Contacts are also showing under “shared photos”.

As far as collaboration tools are concerned, the only current one is a basic yellow notepad where you can add tasks and then share it with other Gmail contacts who presumably can add to it or delete from it.  The collaboration column is to the right where you can specify who you want to share with but they must have this app installed too on their iGoogle page – or it won’t work.

If you wanted any further proof that Google is snipping away at Facebook, then take a look at iGoogle’s new “TimeLine” where you can say what you’re reading, listening to, watching and where you are at that moment – and read the same from your Gmail contacts.

When you start typing, you will start to get a drop down list of possibilities :

and eventually when you have filled in everything, it should look something like this :

As you start to play around with everything, you’ll see that it is all fully functional, but nevertheless a bit rough around the edges. The notepad collaboration is nothing to rave home about but obviously with a bit of improvement, this could turn out to be a lot better. They should also expand their list of social gadgets and maybe ditch some of the useless ones (a tile game is perhaps a bit pointless – at least to me anyway).

But once again, we are seeing another piece of the Google social network being slotted into place alongside Reader. What will be coming next?

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

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Ten Cool Gadgets You Must Add To iGoogle (15)
• Play-By-Mail: Play Fun Games via Email Casually (22)
• Make Your Own Personalised iGoogle Gadgets (8)
• Make Your Own iGoogle Theme With ThemeMaker (15)
• Jump Into The Sandbox & Play With The New iGoogle (7)

Today I discovered Fire.FM which puts a Last.FM toolbar in your Firefox browser. Normally I shun most toolbars in an attempt to keep my Firefox browser running smoothly but after installing Fire.FM, I just know that I will be holding onto this one for quite a while!

With Fire.FM, you can play Last.FM music directly from your Firefox browser without having to visit the site.  You can also get access to your Last.FM radio stations as well as finding similar artists.

The only snag is that listeners to Last.FM outside of the United States, Great Britain and Germany will be asked to subscribe for €3.00 per month ($4), after a 30 track free trial period.  But anyone in the United States, Great Britain and Germany will not face such limitations.

Let’s take a look at each feature in more detail.

After logging into your Last.FM account via the toolbar, you can access your stations by going to the drop down menu.

You can create a station via the toolbar and it will ask you what name you want to give it. Afterwards it will load automatically and start playing :

Whether you create a new station or load an existing one, the music will begin loading and start playing within seconds. You will also receive a pop up window at the bottom of your browser telling you what song is coming :

The toolbar also gives you access to your “Top Artists” and “Similar Artists” so you can discover similar new music :

And to round off the Last.FM features, you can tag, like and dislike the track that’s playing.

This seems to be a well-made Firefox extension which doesn’t slow down Firefox. I have had it running for hours and so far Firefox hasn’t slowed down at all.  It is great if you are browsing / working online and you would like to have some music playing in the background.   An extension like this brings your music to you at the click of a button and of course every song you listen to and every change you make is more or less immediately reflected in your Last.FM account.

With Fire.FM, there is practically no reason to visit the Last.FM webpage, except perhaps to approve friend requests, visit groups or view events which you can’t do with the toolbar.   But if your only use of Last.FM is to listen to music, get the toolbar.

What do you think of Fire.FM?   An essential extension or a piece of bloatware?  Let us know in the comments.

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

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Yolink – A Search Accelerator for Deep Internet Research (7)
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• How To Broaden Your Musical Horizons Online (8)

Like me, I’m sure you have a certain list of RSS feeds that you are absolutely loyal to and which you read every day. Perhaps you would like to put those RSS feeds into a clickable package so others can subscribe to them all with the click of a mouse? That’s where the feed bundle comes in.

Setting it up is a cinch so let’s take a look at how to do it.

First go to Google Reader and log in. Then go to this page and you will see this :

Your RSS feeds are in a list on the left hand side and the box above is on the right hand side. So as the picture says, just click, drag and drop the feed(s) from the left hand side to this box on the right.  Don’t worry, the actual feed will stay as it is so don’t worry about deleting a feed that still has 100 unread items on it or anything!

As the screenshot also shows, if you drag across a feed and you have second thoughts, just drag it into the bottom box and it will be taken away.

I have personally limited my bundle to 10 feeds (a nice round number) which was pretty difficult as there are quite a few more that I read every day. But for the purposes of this article, I limited it to 10 to make it easy.

So after I have finished dragging the feeds over, it should look like this :

The next step is to save it all and you will then be presented with this :

For the OPML file, just right-click on the link and save to your computer. The OPML file can be used by others to directly load the feeds into the RSS reader of their choice.

The “add a link to your website or blog” will set up another version of your Reader shared items page but only with those feeds on them (here’s mine). You can then link to that page however you wish.

The email option is pretty straight forward. The “create a bundle clip” will produce something like this :

With something like this, you can put it in your blog sidebar and people can instantly subscribe to all your favourite feeds simply by clicking the “subscribe” button at the bottom. The colors can be customized a little (but only 8 options and not very inspiring ones at that. It would be nice if Google provided a color table so you can mix your own tones).

As well as regular guys like you and me promoting our favourite feeds, a good use of this would be if a website had various sections all with their own individual RSS feeds. They could bundle all the feeds together into a package and people could then subscribe to everything with the click of a button.

What other uses do you think this could be used for? What RSS bundles have you made?

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

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Two Online Services To Clean Up Your RSS Feeds (10)
• Synchronize Your Google Contacts, Calendar & RSS In Thunderbird (17)
• Read Your RSS Feeds in a Whole New Light with Feedly (11)
• Is Google Reader The Next Friendfeed? (18)
• How To Get Google Reader Shared Items From Anyone (8)

I have always been more of a Reader person than a Friendfeed person. I don’t know why but I feel more comfortable with Reader. Maybe it’s because it is tightly integrated with Gmail so I can email things to myself, maybe it’s because Reader has a really nice user interface so I can whiz about from post to post. I can’t pin it down but Reader has always been my preferred app. Say what you like about Google but they always instinctively seem to know what is good for the general net user and what works / doesn’t work. As a result, they have built an app which is primed to benefit from any disgruntled Friendfeed users if Facebook messes too much with it.

Here’s what I find the best about Reader and why it is a good candidate to benefit from any Friendfeed/Facebook fall-out :

A Ready-Made Social Application

Google has done a lot of work over the last few years to build their own social network and they have kind of done it in stealth.

First, they built Gmail and Reader, then they connected them together so you can do things such as email RSS posts to yourself. Then they built the whole concept of Google Profiles (here’s mine) and connected that to both Gmail and Reader.

Then they finally did some work on Reader itself, allowing you to share items with the people that follow you and to “like” items. Gmail Contacts then became more social, allowing you to put your contacts into “groups” then those groups could be allowed /disallowed to comment on your Reader shared items with the tick of a box.

Let’s not forget that Reader profiles also have a “follow” button so you can follow a particular person’s items. With all the bits and pieces joined up, suddenly you were looking at a Google Social Network – and it isn’t really apparent unless you use all the Google services and can see everything coming together like that.   It’s not as if one day Google suddenly announced the creation of their own Facebook competitor.

The next stage seems to be Friend Connect which can be put on your website but that service is still a bit sketchy (at least to me) in terms of what it can actually achieve and I don’t feel Google is making much of an effort to promote this yet. We’ll see what will happen in the future.

Have A Conversation Inside Reader

One of the other improvements that Reader made was giving users the ability to have a conversation underneath a post. The downside to this though is that you cannot export your conversations so Reader basically “owns” them and the conversations don’t show up anywhere else such as Friendfeed, if you still happen to be using both services.

From what I can see, the commenting is still a bit sparse with not that many people using the feature. But I think this will start to increase fairly soon as more and more people start to use the social features of Reader.

Ability To Import Your Tweets & Search Through Them

This was something that I myself only did last week after reading about it on ReadWriteWeb and it is a really great idea. You can import the Twitter messages from all your followers and make it all searchable inside Reader.

So 6 months down the line, if you want to find a particular Tweet that someone sent, you should be able to find it with a simple Reader search.

A Customizable “Send To” Menu

When the Reader team made the “send to” menu customizable, they really opened the Pandora’s Box on people coming up with their own ideas. Just a simple Google search for “send to” + reader is already enough to find lots of possibilities.

My own one, with the help of MUO writer Dave Drager, is the “print” button where you can send the entire post to the printer :

http://www.printwhatyoulike.com/print?url=${url}

and the icon link is :

http://www.printwhatyoulike.com/favicon.ico

This will send the entire post (even if there is only an excerpt in Reader) to your printer. I don’t actually do that much printing these days but it is still a useful option to have.

Greasemonkey scripts

To round off this post, here’s a few Greasemonkey scripts which I use which you might find useful if you find yourself spending more time at Reader :

Google Reader With Favicon – this script puts the site favicon next to each site name.  Helpful if you have a lot of feeds and you would like some kind of visual aid to pick out the ones you read the most.

Open All Unread Button – this one places a new button on each feed and, as the name suggests, pressing the button will open all unread posts in a new Firefox tab. The posts will also be marked “unread”.

Straight To Reader – are you annoyed when you subscribe to a feed and you get that window asking you if you want to subscribe on the Google Homepage or Google Reader? Me too! This script will bypass that page and send you straight to Reader.

*New* Google Reader – a while back, the Reader team did a bit of a redesign and the result was awful (at least to me and to a few others).   This is proven by someone making a script which puts Reader back to the way it used to be. And this is it – *New Google Reader*

There is at least one flaw that I can see and that is you can’t get a proper overview of a webpage’s popularity in Reader. For example, in Friendfeed, you can make a search and then subscribe to that search so future results are either emailed to you or sent to your RSS reader. This way, I can see everyday what MUO pages Friendfeeders have been “liking” and commenting upon. As far as I can see, Reader doesn’t offer a similar function. I suppose Google’s nearest equivalent is Google Alerts but it isn’t quite the same. Hopefully the Reader team will introduce a search subscribe option in the future which I think would be brilliant.

Are you one of the disgruntled Friendfeeders who has now moved to Reader? If so, how does Reader compare to Friendfeed? If not, does this post make you think about moving? What Reader features are your favourites? Let us know in the comments below.

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Here today for your viewing and educational pleasure is the MakeUseOf Guide To The Biggest File Sharing Networks. Written by Stefan Neagu of TuxGeek and put together by our very own Manuals Editor, Simon Slangen.

We look at what P2P is, the popular file sharing networks and how to use them as well as the pros and cons for each. We also look at privacy issues and share some excellent tools helping you to protect your privacy on these networks. By the end, any questions you have about file sharing networks should hopefully be answered. If not, leave a comment below and we’ll see if we can answer it for you.

Download: The MakeUseOf Guide to Biggest File Sharing Networks

If you enjoyed this release, you should also check out other available MakeUseOf manuals.

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In order to make MP3 copies of my CD’s (for iPod listening), I have always turned to the trusty freeware open-source tool CDex. It’s fast, it’s easy and there’s even a portable version for your on-the-go ripping needs.

So if you want to rip a CD to mp3, here’s how to go about it.   It’s really easy.

Installing CDex is a breeze and when you open it for the first time, this is what you will see -

Insert your CD into the CD drive of your computer and within seconds, you’ll see the music files appear :

Now as you can see, all the files are named “AudioTrack“.  You could rip them with these names and then manually (and tediously) rename them all yourself when they are in your computer. But you don’t have to because CDex can (mostly) retrieve the song titles for you and automatically rename the files.  I say mostly because there have been occasions when CDex failed to find the titles and the automatic renaming failed. But this is rare.

To get the correct song titles, you need to access something called the CDDB Database. If you look at the screenshot above, you’ll see an option in the top toolbar called “CDDB”. But before you do that, you need to go to Options–>Settings–>Remote CDDB and enter an email address. Now, I have absolutely no idea why an email address is needed so I entered a fake one and you should too. Until the makers of CDex explain why an email address is needed, they are not getting my real one. I tried using the CDDB Database without an email address and it didn’t work.

While you are in the settings, go to Filenames and there you can say where you would like the ripped music files to go in your computer.

OK, now go to CDDB in the top toolbar and in the drop down menu choose “Read Remote CDDB“. After a few seconds or so, after the app connects to the database and looks up the names, you should now see all your files renamed properly -

Now all that’s left to do is rip the files. Look on the right hand side for the various options. There are a few there as you can see but I think the first two are all you really need -

The first one rips your music to wav files and the second one down rips to mp3 files. I personally prefer mp3 files and if you do too, hit that button!

It’ll immediately start churning out your MP3 files to the hard drive destination you specified in your settings in a folder with the title of the artist’s name.

And that is it. That’s the beauty of CDex. It’s as easy as inserting the CD, accessing the CDDB Database to get the titles renamed and then hitting the mp3 button. So straight forward – and it’s free.

And how do you to rip CDs to MP3 files? My father rips his CD’s with Windows Media Player and I know a few people who use Winamp. But as I said, I have always been swayed by CDex’s ease of use. What do you think?

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I’m sure there are others out there who would like to make a reasonably good looking logo for their website but they don’t have the time, patience or money for Photoshop or Gimp. So here’s how to make logos with MS Word.

Set the text

Open a new Word document (obviously!) and type in the text you would like to see in your logo.

For this example, I will use the words “Mark O’Neill’s Page” (not very original but enough to get my point across). Then make the writing fairly big (you can increase or decrease the size later – at this stage, you’re just putting in a placemarker text to work with) and choose a font.

The last thing to do here is to hit enter several times so the cursor is not flashing anywhere near the text. You don’t want an image of the cursor inside your finished logo.

The next thing to do is to put that text inside a box.   In Word, you need the menu bar called “Tables & Borders”. It looks like this (in Word 2003) :

If you don’t already have this small toolbar installed in Word, then it’s easy to find it. Just click on the little arrow at the end of an existing toolbar like so :

That then brings up a little tooltip called “Add Or Remove Buttons“. That leads to a few options – choose “customize“. When this box appears on the screen, scroll down until you find “Tables & Borders”, tick its box and press close.

A new toolbar should now have appeared on your screen. You can drag it up to the top next to all the other toolbars to make things neat and tidy.

OK, back to the logo.

Enclose the text inside the box

This is quite easy although you may need to fiddle around with the design until it’s to your satisfaction. If it doesn’t look right to you, you can do the key combination CTRL + Z which will reverse your last action.

First, highlight your text with the mouse (very important). Then go to this button and click it -

That then puts your text inside the box.

Now that looks a bit narrow so click your mouse inside the box and press enter at the top and bottom of the text to make that box look a bit more roomy (unless you want a narrow box that is).

So that is your basic logo. Now it’s time to tweak and it and customize it.

While you are increasing / decreasing the font, changing the font and generally trying out different looks, you can also add images to the box to give it that extra personalised touch. But before we get onto that, let’s take a look at changing the border size.

Changing the border size

Highlight all the text again in the box, including the two “enter” spaces you put in either side :

Now go to this drop-down menu in the “Tables & Borders” bar and choose which border you would like.

Then go back to this button and click it. This will apply your new border -

If you don’t like it, do the key combination CTRL + Z and it will be reversed. Then try another one.

Now our logo has a better looking border. As you can see, I have also changed the font type and size. Our logo is progressing.

Adding an image

A logo looks good with an image next to it. To add an image, first make sure the image is in your computer.

Right-click on the image and choose copy which will copy the image to the Windows Clipboard. Now go back to your logo and do the key combination CTRL + V. Your image will now appear on the Word document. For this example, I am using Mozart wearing a headset.

To position it properly, right-click on the image and choose Format Picture. When a box opens, go to the Layout sub-tab and choose In Front Of The Text and center. Hit enter and you should now be able to move the image around more easily.

Using your mouse, click on the image and then drag the image from the corners inwards until it resizes to the size you want. Then drag the image to the place you want to put it in the logo. This may take some time to get things in exactly the right position so play around with it.

Here’s my finished logo -

Lift the logo off the page to put on your webpage

Now all that’s left to do is to use a screen capture program to remove the logo from the page. I use the paid SnagIt (one of the few programs I am willing to pay for) but there are plenty of free alternatives such as Irfanview or the Firefox extension Aviary.

And that’s it. You can of course add whatever you like to your logo. Word is fairly flexible which is what I like about it. Granted, your end result is not the best that can be done when you compare it to Photoshop, but if you don’t have Photoshop and you just need a quick basic logo, then this is not bad.

Looking at my logo’s rather crappy font has made me realise though that I need to reinstall my favourite fonts!

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I am a big fan of Fantastic Fiction – my reading list is so huge that FF helps me to keep on top of new releases by the best in the business.   But up until now, the only way to check up on each author was to individually go to their FF page.

This as you can imagine was very time-consuming and I silently hoped that one day they would introduce RSS feeds. That hoping seems to have worked as each FF page now has its own unique RSS feed which will alert you to that author’s new book releases.

Using the site is simple. First, just use the search engine to find the author’s page. I will search for Jasper Fforde, one of my favourites.

You’ll then be taken to his page and part of the way down, on the right hand side, is a small RSS icon.

Click on the icon and you will be taken to your default RSS reader (mine is Google Reader) and you will then see his new book scheduled for release in a couple of months.

In this way, you can input all your favourite authors into FF and get all their RSS feeds running through your Reader. Then when a new book is announced, you’ll hear about it pretty much straight away.  The only downside to Fantastic Fiction is, of course, that it is limited to fiction. So any non-fiction fans are not going to get any use out of this new feature.

If RSS isn’t your thing or if you’re more into non-fiction, and/or if you prefer email, then most authors nowadays have a web presence (it’s pretty much essential) and some even embrace social networking with fan pages on places like Facebook (Daniel Silva, for example, has a busy and popular Facebook page and so does John Grisham).

So check to see if your author has a personal website and if so, if they offer a mailing list. Big thriller authors like Ken Follett and Jeffery Deaver have websites and mailing lists for example (Deaver even offers an exclusive short story to his mailing list subscribers). Author sites like these will also feature other news such as upcoming TV / movie adaptations and perhaps even podcasts. When the author brings out a new book, they will immediately notify everyone on their mailing list.

Here are some more big fiction writers with websites and mailing lists.  Stephen King’s site is particulary impressive with its artwork.

John Connolly

Michael Connelly

Stephen King

Dean Koontz

Dan Brown

Some authors though prefer to defer to their publishers to do things like newsletters. So if you went to John Grisham’s website, you’ll see that he promotes his publisher Doubleday’s newsletter. Virtually all major publishers have their own newsletters and if you subscribe, you’ll be kept up to date with their authors new books. For example, here’s Random House’s fiction email newsletter with an option to subscribe at the end. If you go here, you’ll get a complete list of all of Random House’s email offerings.

If you like to keep track of where your favourite author will be appearing in person to sign books, a good site is AuthorsTrack. It only shows US events though which is not so great for non-US fans.

How do you normally track your favourite author? Do you have a favourite web resource not mentioned here? If so, please let us know in the comments.

Image Credit: eclecticlibrarian

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I had to more or less give the whole bookselling thing up eventually as I am totally addicted to books and I become very attached to them. I found it harder and harder to part with gems that I had found at the local fleamarket or online. Nothing is worse than a bookseller who can’t part with his inventory without going into mourning afterwards!

The internet has been both a blessing and a curse for booksellers.  On the one hand, book businesses are instantly opened up to international markets and it is much easier to find rare books for your inventory on places like eBay. But the flip side of that is that a lot of rare out-of-copyright books are now being freely distributed on places like Project Gutenberg or Google Books. Not to mention the rampant illegal file sharing of book page scans (the Harry Potter books are a good case in point).

Another advantage of the internet are the various online and software resources for booksellers. Here’s 5 of them :

AbeBooks HomeBase

HomeBase was actually designed by AbeBooks as a selling and inventory app for their paid subscribers. But it can actually be used by anyone for anything. Whether you’re selling in your own shop or from eBay, HomeBase has you covered – and it’s completely free. Even though it has been around for many years, it is still in development by AbeBooks. They have just brought out 3.0 Beta.

As well as allowing you to make a complete digital inventory of all your stock, HomeBase comes with some really useful features. These include :

• Look up a book in your HomeBase by its ISBN number (the number on the back of all books published after 1970).
• importing and exporting book lists.
• associating books to the clients that eventually buy them.   So you can keep accurate sales records.
• Compile client lists along with their contact details.
• Generate printable sales invoices which can be sent to your printer at the click of a button.
• Compile a list of book “wants” which you would like to find for your inventory.
• Connect to AbeBooks (if you’re a paid member) and upload your inventory to their site.

You can find out more by reading the HomeBase user manual. For a free app, it is really useful.

BookFinder

As time goes on and you start selling your stock, you will need to start looking for other books to keep your business going. That’s where you will need a good book finding search engine if you want to start hunting for particular valuable editions.

A particular favourite of mine is BookFinder. After entering details of a book, it will then search across LOTS of bookselling websites and bring you a broad overview of the deals currently out there. It will even include the shipping / postage prices to your location. Here’s some of what it brought back for Kipling’s “The Jungle Book” :

Find Your Customers & Contacts Online

A big part of a bookseller’s time is spent on networking. After all, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know, right? So it’s essential to know some good forums and mailing lists that fellow booksellers and potential buyers hang out at.

AbeBooks has two great forums – a community forum and a Booksleuth forum (the last one is for people who can’t remember the name of a book so they leave clues and maybe you know the book they mean?). They also have a Bookseller’s forum but you can’t enter that one unless you are a premium AbeBooks member.

Another excellent forum is the one operated by Auctionbytes (full disclosure – I used to be a columnist for Auctionbytes). Their book forum is regularly visited by lots of book sellers and I made quite a few good deals with overseas sellers here. Well worth making an account and visiting regularly.

A good mailing list is one operated by BookFinder called Insider. When I last used it, it was VERY busy with lots of daily updates by other members, most of them professional booksellers.

Make It Easier For Customers To Buy From Your Website

As well as the common selling sites such as eBay and Amazon Marketplace, many booksellers also choose to sell from their websites.  There are many premium software packages out there for installing a checkout system on your site but the two easiest and cheapest are Paypal and Google Checkout. Both offer HTML widgets that you can place on your site and when the customer clicks through, they will be taken directly to that site to pay with their credit card. The use of the logos are free and you only pay Paypal and Google Checkout a small percentage of your sale.

If you insist on building your own checkout system and / or you want to have some good looking payment logos for your site, Smashing Magazine recently brought out a downloadable list of credit card graphics which you can freely use.

Get some good book covers

When it comes to selling your books, you need to be able to show some good quality book covers. If you were the customer, would you buy a book with a bad quality picture of the cover? (or even worse, no cover at all?).  Exactly.  So you need to make a big effort to show your books in the best possible light. It’s the picture that really will close the deal for you.

The fastest way to produce a good quality cover picture is to go to Amazon, find the book then click on the link under the book cover to show the enlarged version of the image. Once you have that, either right-click and save the picture. Or use a screenshot app to take a copy of the image.

Not all Amazon listings have this option though so there are other options you can try. You can try Googling for the cover, check Google Books, check Fantastic Fiction (one of my favourite websites) or check a site such as the Book Cover Archive.

If all else fails, you can just use a scanner to scan the book cover yourself. But scanning can take a lot of time if you regularly go through hundreds or thousands of books. Better to check first if a picture already exists online.

What online resources do you use to sell your books? Please tell us all about it in the comments.

Image Credit: Dr Jaus

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But from 2004-2007, I had up to 15 German students a week who would pay me for the pleasure of putting them through their lingustic paces – “the Polish started to polish their boots…..at the bank she looked at the interest on her loan with interest….after eating dessert, the army deserted in the desert…”.   At the end, I would wonder why the students staggered off looking for the nearest bar.

English language teaching is very hard and one of the hardest parts about it is preparing lesson materials.  Robin Williams made it look easy in the movie “Good Morning Vietnam” with his quick fire wit and dialogue – but that’s just in movie-land.  In real life, it is much more difficult.   If you are teaching classes of up to 30 people (which I did for a short while), then you have to constantly find lesson materials that will motivate them and hold their interest for the 45 minutes you have to teach them (it’s even more difficult if you’re teaching children).   This means spending up to 2 hours a day, each day, solely on preparing your lessons for the next day.   No wonder a lot of teachers burn out fast.

English language teachers are constantly looking online for new sources of material and the internet is a great place to look if you know of the right places.   A lot of the good sites on offer are run by ESL (English As A Second Language) teachers themselves who sympathise with their fellow teachers and who want to help out.

Here’s some of the places where I got my material from :

Breaking News English

If you are stuck for what to teach someone, the day’s current affairs is always a good place to go to.  Everyone has an opinion about what’s in the news, whether it’s the war in Iraq, the financial crisis or Michael Jackson’s death.

Breaking News English attempts to fill that niche by providing 1000+ news reports and questions for discussion.  As you can see on the left, the recent lesson plans have ranged from “Israel & Hamas reject Amnesty report” to something more low-brow “Manchester United agree to sell Ronaldo”.  So there’s something for everyone there.

You can download each lesson plan in doc, PDF and mp3 format.

ESL Cafe

This is quite a popular site which has been around for quite a long time.   It has a bit of an Asian angle to it (they have dedicated job boards and forums for Korea and China) but the stuff that Dave Sperling includes on the site can be used anywhere.

You can find links to lesson plans, links for students and teacher forums. You can even apply for a new job if you hate the one you’ve got.

One Stop English

One of my really favourite sites.   You can download LOTS of lesson plans here, made by other teachers.   They tend to steer you towards the paid “staff room” but you can ignore all that and stick to the free stuff instead.  Things like Lesson Share, Monthly Topical News Lessons, Games & Activities and Grammar & Vocabulary.

Inside Out

I’ve just discovered that this website has had a big makeover since I was last there a couple of years ago.   But it still seems to be hosting the free lesson plans.

This is good news because for quite a while, I relied mostly on Inside Out to give me ideas.   The site is part of the MacMillan dictionary people so the lessons sometime refer to the MacMillan definition of words but regardless, you can still use these lesson plans with other dictionaries (I’m an Oxford dictionary man myself).

The subjects of the lessons can be a bit dry sometimes (the recent one is on litter).   So sometimes you strike out here and you have to go looking elsewhere.   But on the whole, they have some really good stuff here.

ESL Partyland

This site (which has also had a recent makeover) has some really good conversational lesson ideas.   This was the first site that my predecessor at a local language school recommended to me before she left and I can see why.   With the conversational questions that ESL Partyland offers, you will have the students talking non-stop right away.

The site also has some excellent grammar lessons which I used constantly.

So these are the ones that I used.    If you teach English to foreigners, what sites do YOU use?   Please recommend them to us in the comments.

Image Credit : Trey Menefee

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