Just to help you inch just a little bit closer to that cloak and dagger lifestyle, I’d like to offer 4 Windows Mobile downloads that you can use to transform your regular mobile phone into an honest-to-goodness cool spy gadget.

Cool Spy Gadget #1 – A Room Bug To Record Conversations

In many countries and in many situations, it may be illegal to record a conversation without the knowledge of those involved. This is at least true if the conversation is being transmitted over the phone. If this is illegal in your country, don’t do it! Otherwise, if you just happened to leave your cellphone laying around in a room where there just happens to be an interesting conversation going on, that’s not really your fault now, is it?

NoteM is a Windows Mobile app that is supposed to serve as a voice note-taking tool, but left recording in an inconspicuous place, it could pick up some very interesting conversations.

This software is a simple recorder, and it doesn’t do anything fancy like ftp the file to your web server or email the audio to you automatically, but if you install a 2GB or larger storage card in your SD (or micro-SD) slot, you’ll have plenty of storage to save hours of recorded audio without a problem. The screen on the left is before any recordings are created. Just press the red “record” button and walk away. Recordings are stored in MP3 format in whichever directory you choose.

Cool Spy Gadget #2 – See In The Dark With Sonar

It may seem like science fiction, or something you’d expect to see on Ghost Hunters, but with SonarCE you can transform your Windows mobile phone into your own personal sonar device. The way this application works is that it emits the sonar signal from the device speakers, and reads echo to the microphone. It’s pretty impressive, and according to the programmers it is accurate at, ” around 5-10 cm at distance of 10 m.”

During my own testing with an older model Cingular 8125 running Windows Mobile 5, I found that it was a little difficult to get used to, but what I really liked was the cool screen.

The one annoying thing about this mobile app is that it requires a little bit of tweaking in terms of scale. However, there’s an automatic “search offset” feature that goes through a cycle of pings and calibrates the device for you. The website features a useful setup guide that’ll help you at least get the sonar working to the point that when you move close to an object, you’ll notice the difference on the sonar display (even if you don’t really know anything about how sonar works).

Whether or not the tool would ever be very useful is debatable, but I suppose if you ever find yourself in a completely pitch-black room and you don’t want to crash into any objects, this cool little mobile app could help. Beyond that, it’ll at least be a very neat feature to show your friends and family how cool your phone is.

Cool Spy Gadget #3 – Disk Encryption Software

Every spy needs a safe place to store sensitive data, and the best way to store your critical files that you don’t want anyone tampering with is in a hidden, encrypted “virtual disk” that no one can find or access but you – with the appropriate key.

To accomplish this task, a neat free application called FreeOTFE4PDA will do the trick. The software supports a long list of encryption algorithms and supports various cypher modes and security tokens. Your volume will be created without a signature – virtually invisible to anyone looking for it.

Configuration is fairly simple, as you can see from the screens above – and it works well by simply using all of the default settings. However, for security experts who understand and are looking for a product that offers deeper security, the functionality is there. This is one of the best free applications out there for completely encrypting any data that you want to store and transport on your trusty mobile device. If you don’t understand data-encryption though, skip installing this app because you could make entire folders disappear without being able to retrieve them again.

Cool Spy Gadget #4 – Remote Video Streaming

Recently, I wrote about using VZOChat to integrate videoconferencing into your blog. One of the items in that article that I touched on was setting up the videoconference with your Windows Mobile device configured as a webcam, transmitting your end of the video while you talk to your blog visitor face to face.

However, another very cool use of this software is to convert your mobile device into a video and audio surveillance gadget. This may not be very practical over the cellular data line because first of all, you could rack up some crazy data use charges, and secondly the quality of the video won’t be that great (as you can see from my example in the blog article). With that said, you could configure your phone with VZOchat and then set it up with the camera pointed at the room that you want to monitor.

The software will pick up sound from the microphone, so you’ll be receiving and transmitting both. All you have to do is make sure your phone is connected to the Internet through your Wi-Fi network and that the VZOChat software is running (it doesn’t have to be connected yet).

Just make sure the software is configured on your phone to automatically accept incoming calls, as shown above. Then, go to another room or anywhere else where you have an Internet connection (it doesn’t have to be on the same home network), and go to your VZOchat account. Keep in mind that you’ll need two VZOchat accounts -  one account for your remote connection, and a different account for your cellphone. Go to the video call page for your cellphone profile, and you’ll see the call button as shown here.

The moment you select “Start videochat“, you’ll establish a connection with your remote mobile device that will trigger both the camera and the microphone to activate – recording everything that’s going on in the room and streaming it over the Internet directly to you. Here, I’ve set up my cellphone as a remote webcam in the living room to keep an eye on who keeps stealing the TV remote control. Looks like someone already stole it…

The screen you see above is what I saw on my PC across the property in our other building. I could keep my cellphone running in this room in order to watch and listen to everything that’s going on. With a cellphone just left lying around somewhere, no one would ever know that you’re using it as a surveillance device. Again – make sure that this sort of activity is legal in your area and in your situation!

All four of these gadgets offer some cool ways that you can transform your Windows Mobile device into a fun and exciting gadget that you can use for far more than just making phonecalls and checking your Facebook account. Do you know of any other cool Windows Mobile apps like these? Have you tried any yourself, and what do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Image Credit : Dunechaser

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As a person who spends a great deal of his spare time researching old and new conspiracy theories, folklore and legend, I find the prospect of traveling to a remote part of the world for such exploration one of my greatest dreams. However, with a small family to support and responsibilities to my employer and my writing clients, there is very little time left over to travel around the world. With that said, there are times when some claims or legends really require an examination of the land, buildings and civilization surrounding a specific area.

In this update I’d like to take readers on a few amazing adventures to explore some mysterious areas of the earth where local folklore and legend makes claim of strange creatures, scary encounters, secret military bases and countless other conspiracy theories. If you’ve got all of your gear ready and you’re ready to board the flight, let’s head out on our first adventure.

Exploring The Island Of Malta

Back in 2006, I wrote a speculative article about underground caverns around the world, and in particular about the amazing story published in Borderland Science magazine where an employee of the British embassy, Miss Louis Jessup, claimed that when she explored the catacombs beneath the Island of Malta, she had a surreal and terrifying experience where she saw large creatures walking around in the darkness.

To give this story a little bit of reality, it would be interesting to explore the Island of Malta, in particular Valletta, to see if we can’t spot at least the entrances to these underground passages, or determine whether or not these places even exist in the first place. According to the archeological website I found that described the excavated caverns under the temples of this island, these temples with many underground levels of catacombs are scattered all throughout the island. The map below shows a significant temple, called the Hal Saflieni, an ancient site that dates back to 3,600 to 2,500 B.C.

It would be interesting to see what the area actually looks like. According to the archaeology site, the area should be free of buildings and structures, but with plenty of pits and recesses in the earth.

Let’s jump in our Google Earth plane and see if we can visit the island of Malta and locate the temple.  Typing in “Valletta, Island of Malta” in the “Fly To” field gets us there.

Just from this distant overhead view, it’s pretty clear that the island is a beautiful place. The inlet of water must provide some beautiful scenic spots. Exploring the area on foot must be a real treat, with so many old palaces and other buildings to tour. However, we’re here to find the ancient temple Hal Saflieni – which, according to the archeological maps, was located just southwest of Valletta itself.

Sure enough, zooming in a bit closer and rolling the mouse over a few of the site markers lands the right one. Marker C is the legendary Hypogeum itself. Zooming in as much as possible without the map becoming blurry reveals a few details about the real location.

Sure enough, while there are buildings and structures around the area, the Hypogeum itself is an area of land that remains untouched. You can see the brown indentations of Earth where there’s no vegetation and the above ground parts of the ancient structure remains. While you can’t zoom any closer than this, you can click on the Wikipedia symbol to learn more about this particular Hypogeum.

Just reviewing the images of these subterranean caverns, it’s very easy to understand how so many local legends exist about these ancient ruins. To think that this is only one of the many multi-layer underground catacombs throughout this entire island is fascinating.  Thanks to Google Earth, you can actually check out the location and read more about each one.

The Human-Alien Conspiracy Theory – The Military Base of Dulce, New Mexico

This is a very fun conspiracy theory to explore because it’s one that I’ve seen debunked so often it’s almost pointless to pursue. But in this second half of this article, I wanted to show how you can explore even the most remote areas of the earth. Unfortunately I didn’t succeed in solidifying my case for no secret base…read on.

According the the various silly legends and stories within Ufology throughout the years, the legend of the human-alien base near Dulce, New Mexico is an old conspiracy theory that claims that the military created the base around 1969 when Project Blue Book (the Air Force investigation of UFOs) was officially closed. According to the stories, the base entrance is at Mt. Archeleta, and the base itself exists on the Jicarilla Apache Indian Reservation (I’m not sure how the government got the Apache to allow such a project – go figure). Considering that there are actual, geographical locations to check out with Google Earth, this is an excellent exercise to show how you can use Google Earth to debunk such conspiracy theories.

The first thing you’ll notice when you map out the distance from Mt. Archeleta to the Jicarilla Reservation is that it’s well over 40 miles from one location to the other. An entrance to a base over 40 miles from the base itself? Not very likely. Forgetting about the Indian reservation, we’ll zoom in on Mt. Archeleta to show that the terrain is so rugged and the mountain so remote that nothing could ever make it there to enter any sort of “secret base entrance.”

You can zoom in pretty close in this territory, and following the various roads shows both roads or riverbeds traveling between the enormous mountains, but not a single road or trail headed up toward the steep incline toward Mt. Archeleta. There’s no obvious structure or even anything that looks like a cave anywhere around the isolated mountain.

However, with that said, as I was scrolling around the peak of Mt. Archeleta, I noticed a very strange, faint track that looked like an old dirt road. Sure enough, when I looked a bit closer it was – and tracing it back along the winding peak I found that after a very long and twisty journey it joined up with the main road at the base of the mountain. The image below is the road along the ridge, headed toward the Mt. Archeleta peak.

Eventually, the road passes just below the peak of Mt. Archuleta, fades out quite a bit (I thought it ended there because the trail faded), but it does continue on well past the mountain.

Regardless of the very odd existence of the road (I could find no similar roads along the top of nearby mountain ridges), there was nothing at all in the area to suggest any sort of entrance or even a structure in this isolated and desolate area. Why don’t you take a look around yourself and see if you spot anything out of the ordinary? As you can see, exploring some of these isolated areas can be a lot of fun, especially when you base your searches around the Earth on the very strange and surreal conspiracy theories and legends you’ll find throughout the Internet.

Do you know of any locations on Google Earth that might be fun to explore? Are you able to spot anything strange at any of those locations? Tell us about your Google Earth adventures in the comments section below!

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How to Set Up a Voicemail Feature For Your Blog

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

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

The widget is actually pretty well designed and would look good on any blog. However, if you don’t like how it looks, you can configure it in the settings box to the right on the same page.

The most important field to set up a voicemail account properly is the email field. Make sure to type in the email address where you want your voicemail notifications to go. You can also set up the message that initially appears in the widget on your blog, and the final message that the user sees after they’ve left their message.

Once you click “Get Widget,” you’re provided with the embed code. You can choose from Javascript, Flash or MySpace code. If you’re unsure what you need to use, scroll through the specific applications at the bottom – if your blog is in Blogger or Wordpress, click on those icons and you’ll get the embed code that will work for you, or Widgetbox may insert it for you once you enter your credentials. In my case, I just copy and paste it into my Wordpress widget for my TopSecretWriters blog, and this is how the widget appears in the sidebar on my blog.

Whenever a visitor comes to my blog, and if that visitor is possibly some insider with secret knowledge about how much the government really knows about aliens, they could anonymously share that information with me by clicking on the “Next” button inside the widget. When they do so, the widget produces a one-time pin number and then provides the visitor with the number they can call to leave me a message.

This is a one time pin, and the caller can call from any phone that they like, meaning that when the Men In Black come knocking on doors, there’s no trace left and no one to point any fingers at. This widget allows your blog visitors to feel like they’re having a  much more interactive experience with your blog because they can take part. Being able to contact a blog owner directly like this is not always easy on many blogs, so by offering this feature you’re providing a very unique service for your loyal visitors. The coolest thing about this widget is that it actually updates while the call is in progress. When the caller dials the number and is leaving you a message, the widget displays the following on their computer screen.

This assures the caller that they really are leaving a message for the blog that they visited and that the blog owner (you) will receive the message. Once they hang up the phone, the widget updates with the customized message you defined when you set it up.

Save the embed code that you created, because you can use this service on Facebook, in your HTML-based emails, and even on forum posts or on your various online profiles. Wherever you want to offer website visitors an opportunity to leave you a voice message instantly, you can embed this widget.

When I tested the service through my own blog, it was instantaneous, and I love the fact that you can download and save the voicemail message on your local hard drive if you like. The service takes less than five minutes to set up through WidgetBox, it requires no sign up or registration, and of course it’s absolutely free. Just one more very cool way to set up a voicemail feature on your website or blog that your visitors will love.

Would you consider setting up a voicemail widget on your blog? Can you think of any other cool uses for this voicemail widget? Share your insight in the comments section below.

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One of the coolest memories I have as a kid is when my brother and I would copy BASIC programs from the computer magazines of the day (1980’s) into the old Franklin 64 desktop computer with one floppy drive and a whopping 64k of RAM. I’ll never forget when we finished typing the last line of that first program and then entered the command to RUN – how the screen started flashing characters and the miniature speaker beeped through a pathetic rendition of “Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy.”  Pure magic.  I was only 9 years old, but at that moment I was hooked on computers for life.

For anyone who has never created an application, it’s hard to describe the feeling of creating something from nothing. Programming is a lot like any other form of art in that way, except instead of the canvas we’ve got the computer screen, and instead of the paint brushes we have the various programming platforms.

Here at MakeUseOf, we believe in the importance of simple learning tools that can teach complex skills, such as computer programming. For example, Guy covered how you can learn to write a program with SmallBasic, and he also covered a cool application called Scratch that can teach kids how to program. Today, I’d like to cover another innovative software application called Alice that can teach kids how to program in object oriented languages.

Alice 3D Programming – What It Is & What It Isn’t

Alice 3D is a programming environment offered by Carnegie Mellon University. It’s provided for free as a public service, through the funding of various programming  and computer giants, such as Electronic Arts, Sun Microsystems, the National Science Foundation and other major organizations.

Alice is not a scripting tutorial where students will learn about the correct syntax used in various programming languages. It isn’t about developing the best structured For Loop. Instead, Alice provides students with a virtual world – a 3D modeling environment where students can learn how putting together various components, which each individually have their own properties, can create a larger, working project. The 3D environment is meant to show students, in a simple way, how the concept of object-oriented programming works.

The software itself has a built in tutorial, which makes sense because it’s main purpose is to serve as a teaching tool. The first screen allows students to choose from one of the tutorials, open a recent world they created, see examples or open a world they’ve saved on the computer. The option I want to show today is how a student can start from one of the available templates and create their own 3D animation. For this example I’ll go with the space scene.

If you’re a programmer, the first thing you’ll notice are the panes on the left side of the screen where all of the objects and the associated properties, methods and functions are listed. The interface is so intuitive that students don’t even need to understand what objects and methods are, just by adding objects and using the interface to manipulate them, they’ll be slowly learning the concept of object oriented programming. Adding an object to the screen is as simple as pressing the green “Add Objects” button.

In the object gallery, students have dozens of very fun “objects” to choose from. These include characters, machines, vehicles and even special effects like fire and thunderstorms.

In this scene, I’ve added the moon surface, a lunar lander and an astronaut. As you can see in the upper left window, every object is made up of many components, each individual objects with their own properties, methods and functions. You can control any one of these by dragging and dropping the component into the programming area at the bottom of the programming interface.

When you do drag the object in, a pop-up screen shows you all of the available methods and functions you can use to program the behavior of that particular object. This is similar to how, in most object oriented programming languages, the programming platform typically offers this same feature. Once you drill down through the available functions and select the one you want, it gets inserted into the program.

The program itself can be as simple or as complex as you like. As you can see here, it’s possible to create intricate and highly functional programs by using If/Else statements, While loops and other standard conditional statements that are a part of most programming languages today. Within a few minutes of playing around with this addictive learning program, I created a 3D animation where the astronaut moved closer to his lunar lander and waves “goodbye.”  The camera pans in closer, and then as the lunar lander launches without him on board, he says, “Uh-oh.”

The exciting thing about this fantastic free learning tool from Carnegie Mellon University is the fact that it can be a very simple learning tool for very young kids to learn basic programming skills, or it can be a useful tool for even high school kids to generate very intricate and ingenious programmed 3D worlds.

In either case, this is one of the best programs that teach computer programming to kids that encourages children to engage with their computers in ways that they may never have considered – with a depth of understanding kids just never really achieve when all they do is chat on IM and update their status on Twitter and Facebook. Alice helps kids understand the heart and soul of what makes computer technology and programming so cool.

Would you ever consider using Alice in your own school or as part of your curriculum? Is this a learning tool you would consider sharing with your own kids? Share your insight and experiences in the comments section below.

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While you might already be familiar with the many apps that are available for your personal webcam that you use at home, there are also many very cool applications that are especially valuable if you travel a lot with a portable USB webcam, or if you use many different computers that have their own built-in webcams. These days, most laptops or desktops have them.

I’ve shared my own obsession with webcam software here at MakeUseOf with my own articles, such as adding VZOChat to your blog to interact with your visitors. I’m not the only one! Simon also wrote about how to use your webcam to control games, and Mark mentioned a couple of useful motion sensor webcam applications as well. To add to the MakeUseOf library of useful webcam resources, I’d like to turn now to three free applications that let you use your webcam live and online to take and share photos, broadcast or “tweet” video updates, and even speed date however, whenever and wherever you like.

Take Hilarious Snapshots From Your Browser With Cameroid

MakeUseOf covered Cameroid briefly before, and for good reason. If you like the ability to quickly take a snapshot and modify it in a way that will make people really laugh – you have to check this out. This isn’t an application you have to install on your PC. If you’re on any computer that has a webcam, or you have a portable USB webcam with you, just visit the Cameroid website and you can start taking and playing around with your snapshots.

Obviously, you can take perfectly normal snapshots of yourself if you like, but the real exciting thing about this browser-based software is how quickly and easily you can insert various special effects. On the right, you’ll find the various types of special photo effects that are available, including adding a filter, distorting the photo (this can be really funny), inserting yourself into scenes, or framing the snapshot. My personal favorite is the hilarious “scenes” section where you can insert your face into any of a number of scenes.

Here, I decided to go on my first scuba-diving expedition with the rest of the MUO crew, and they thought it would be funny if they unplugged my air supply. Thanks a lot guys. Wait – my even more favorite section is the “filter” section where you can select from a whole list of filters that add a very cool sense of drama or intrigue to your photo.

As you can see here, the aliens were coming to get me and I had no way out. Luckily, I survived the ordeal and lived to tell about it, but the rest of the MUO crew got massacred during the battle – such a shame.  As you can see at the bottom of each snapshot you take, if you have the nerve, you can add the photo to the public Cameroid Gallery for all of the world to see. Otherwise, you can either save it to your hard drive or print it out on paper. No registration and no fees required – all from the convenience of your web browser and any webcam.

Speed Date From the Comfort of Your Home With Randomate

So you’re single, alone, and on a business trip. You’ve just suffered through a full day of conferences and you’re back in your hotel room with nothing to do – and you start lamenting the fact that you have no one in your life who even cares about you. So go down to the lobby where there’s a computer with a webcam, and log into Randomate to set up a free webcam speed dating session. You never know, you just might find the person you’ve always dreamed of.

How does it work? Basically, you sign up for a session, and when it begins you get to chat with the other people in the session who are also looking for someone. The catch is that it follows the rules of speed-dating, which is you get to talk to the person for only five minutes. Then you move on to the next person, who you talk to for five minutes. Honestly – don’t you know within the first five minutes whether there might be a spark there?

Sessions are ongoing constantly, but slots are limited – so if you know you want to take part in online speed dating, sign up for a session early and remember to be there when it starts!

Seesmic TV is Twitter with Video

Another very cool online tool that you can use from anywhere and with any webcam is Seesmic TV.  David reviewed Seesmic Desktop not very long ago, so did Jason, and made mention of Seesmic Web as well – both tools that you can use to better interface directly with Twitter.

However, Seesmic TV, the app which Mark briefly mentioned being integrated with Twhirl, is an interesting community where you can issue video Twitter-like messages in video format, and reply to other folks video updates just like you do on Twitter. On Seesmic TV, this amounts to an interesting collection of actual discussions with actual faces and actual voices…just like actual live. It really makes you feel like you’re right there having a conversation with the person face-to-face.

The interface where you record your message is just as simple as in Twitter. You simply title your video clip, add a description and post to the community or send it privately to the inbox of another Seesmic user. You can do this from any computer anywhere in the world as long as it has an internet connection and a webcam (or you bring your own USB webcam with you).

The beauty of all three of these applications is that they let you interface with Internet communities in ways that simply aren’t possible in a purely text or even an audio medium. Using facial expressions and tone of voice, you can convey your messages to the world much more clearly and effectively.

Have you taken part in any webcam-based community? Would you ever consider it, and if not, what holds you back? Share your opinions and insight in the comment section below.

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Wouldn’t it be nice if your computer could just automatically do a Facebook login and provide you with an alert whenever anything new happens? Or wouldn’t it be wonderful to just pop open a little application on your mobile phone that would show all of your friends’ latest updates?

All of these things and more are possible – there are many ways to login to Facebook without going to the website, and in this post I’m going to detail four methods that you can use to do so. The four ways you can log into Facebook without directly navigating to the website and logging in is with your cellphone, with a desktop aggregator, with an Internet based aggregator, or through a desktop gadget.

1. Monitor Facebook on Your Computer With Digsby or Trillian

Since I spend a large majority of my time sitting in front of the same laptop while I’m writing articles, the ideal way for me to do a Facebook login without going to the website is through a desktop aggregator. Now, personally I use Digsby because I prefer the interface and I find it very easy to quickly update my status or add comments to my friends’ posts.

It saves a great deal of time because Digsby automatically logs into all of your social networks the moment you boot up your computer, and it immediately reports whenever there are any updates. You can review and respond to them right in the interface. If this sounds like the choice for you, make sure to check out David’s article on Digsby to learn more.

Now, it wouldn’t be fair to mention the PC aggregator method of an automatic Facebook login without mentioning Trillian. There are many people who prefer Trillian Astra over every other IM/social networking client, and for good reason.

Just like Digsby, you can set up Trillian to login to Facebook automatically, and all you have to do to see Facebook updates is hover the mouse over your Facebook connection. While I don’t personally prefer the Trillian interface, I can certainly see why it would be the preferred client app for many people. If this app appeals to you, then stop navigating over to Facebook to log in and instead read Saikat’s explanation as to why Trillian is the best IM client.

2. Check Facebook on the Web With Online Aggregators

Now, if you don’t want to download any software to your computer, there are still ways that you can login to Facebook without having to navigate to the website all of the time. You can do this by using an online aggregator of all of the social networking tools that you use. These usually not only include Facebook, but also things like your IM accounts, blog accounts and Twitter or Myspace.

One of the oldest portals is often also an overlooked approach to logging into Facebook automatically – iGoogle. When you search iGoogle for Facebook gadgets, you’ll find a number of them. Most of them are similar and work fine.

For example, the gadget I chose above works well, and it lets you login to Facebook directly from your iGoogle page.

Now, if you prefer an online portal that aggregates all of the social networks you use (in addition to Facebook), there are two very popular options. If you’ve been following along here at MakeUseOf, then you may know what they are. First, the one that’s my own favorite – Zooloo.

Once you’ve got the widget set up to automatically log into your Facebook account, all you have to do is set Zooloo as your home page and it’ll log you into Facebook every time you load up your browser. Mahendra covered Zooloo in excellent detail just recently. It’s definitely an option people use to connect to Facebook that’s worth checking out.

A very close second favorite is a site Daniel covered called Second Brain, which organizes your online networks into interesting “collections.” Either approach you take, the online approach to logging into Facebook allows you to check your Facebook account from anywhere, possibly even if Facebook itself is blocked by a firewall.

3. Login to Facebook From the Vista Sidebar

While this approach is limited to Windows Vista users, it is another convenient method you can use to receive notifications of Facebook updates. I covered a few of those Vista sidebar options a while ago.

Of the available options, myFacebook is my favorite because it offers more information than other widgets, such as a scrolling update from your friends’ status comments. This widget automatically logs into Facebook when your computer boots, and you receive notification of private messages, pokes and friend notifications.

You can download MyFacebook from the Windows Live gallery.

Just keep in mind that when you do install it, you need to go through a few steps to confirm authentication with Facebook, including obtaining and entering a special login code, and clicking on a link in Facebook that allows the application to access your account details.

The good news is that the widget wizard goes through the setup process in a few very simple, easy-to-follow steps.

4. Accessing Facebook From Your Mobile

The fourth and most commonly sought-after method to access Facebook is with a mobile device. Whether people use a Blackberry, iPhone or Windows Mobile device, they want to login to their Facebook account while on the go. The good news is that there are several ways to do this, depending which mobile device you’re using.

My personal favorite that I’ve been using for some time is F’im, a Windows Mobile based app for mobile Facebook. With that said, if I was running Windows Mobile 6.0, I would probably download Microsoft’s official Windows Mobile Facebook app.

While the user online status screen looks pretty cool, many of the screens just look like straight Facebook mobile screens. However, what F’IM lacks in terms of creativity for status screens is the software’s ability to automatically post images from your phone to your Facebook account.

Do you have a favorite way to log into your Facebook account other than going to the website? Which solution do you prefer, mobile, desktop aggregator, desktop widget or online aggregator? Share your feedback in the comments section below.

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Sleep disorders, behavior disorders, obesity, diabetes and so many other ailments produce physical pains and emotional reactions that many doctors can predict, but which most of us lack the medical training or expertise to understand. This is why, especially if you’re caring for someone who is mentally or physically ill, it’s so important to track and monitor health factors such as weight fluctuations, mood swings, sleep problems and more.

As the Earth gradually drifts further from the sun and the daylight hours begin to shrink, I would like to focus on an important online resource I discovered that can help you create a mental and physical fitness log to monitor and predict physical and emotional problems and get yourself or someone you love the help that they need before it’s too late.

Here at MakeUseOf, we believe in the importance of living a healthy life, which is why we’ve offered a number of articles with geeky resources that might help, such as the miVitals online system to store and share your medical information, Trusera – a health information social network, and iMedix – a health search engine. The application I’m going to cover today is an excellent online community called MedHelp, which offers a wonderful library of “trackers,” which are tools that can help you monitor every aspect of your health that you might be concerned about.

Tracking Your Mood With a Mental Fitness Log

MedHelp is a health conscious online community that, according to the website, has over 8 million members. The social community itself would require an article all of its own to review, but what I’d like to focus on are the free tools offered for free when you sign up that allow you to log dozens of mental and physical fitness factors. Having some personal experiences in the mental health field, there’s one particular tracker that I found extremely valuable and an excellent resource for anyone suffering from depression or other mood disorder – a mood tracker.

When you click on one of the mood trackers on the main MedHelp page and provide your sign-up information, you’re immediately presented the page where you can modify the particular tracker that you chose. You can customize the tracker depending what type it is.

You can set the tracker to be your own mental or physical fitness log or someone else’s that your monitoring, and you can also make it public – either to just specific friends or completely open to the world (it’s surprising how many people are willing to share their personal logs. You can configure the tracker to remind you to update your mood tracker daily, weekly or monthly (or never), and finally, you can set it so that it’s customized for a particular mood disorder such as major depressive or bipolar.

The major chart area is where you click to insert your log entries, and you can scroll from month to month so that you can see the history.

On your profile page, you’ll notice the community features on the menu bar at the top. You can add friends (or family) who can view your charts, add private or public journal entries, notes, photos and of course post to various message boards about health issues. When it comes to health, having a community to ask questions and share experiences is absolutely invaluable – especially when you’re going through a major medical health crisis. There’s always someone out there who has suffered through the same thing.

When you click the “Manage” button  at the right of the top menu on your profile page, you can add additional trackers to your profile. When you enter this area, get ready to be shocked by the impressive number of tracker apps that are available, including ones to track addictions, anxiety and panic attacks, baby health, cholesterol, diabetes, headaches and migraines, ovulation and even weight and exercise trackers.

Back to the mood tracker example, when you add a new item to the chart, you can choose the update based on what you’re tracking. In this case you can update what your (or your family member’s) overall mood was that day. Not only can you track mood, but you can keep track of a whole assortment of symptoms and other signs that something might be going wrong.

The items mentioned on these menus and screens hint that a doctor or some other medical professional put them together because they really do hit on the items that are relevant to what you’re trying to track.

If you want, you can even type a journal entry for the day to note an event or a situation that you want to remember later on when doctors or anyone else asks what might have caused a condition to worsen. As you enter data every day, you’ll notice a trend line developing on the large chart at the top of the tracker.

While you’re entering in your daily information, little details that may seem inconsequential all get accumulated into the big picture and the tracker shows you, in a graphical format, how all of these things – events, medicine, mental state and physical state – all factor into your sense of well-being. For example, how the change in season and shorter days has a significant negative effect on your mood (so you should plan a fall vacation!)

The MedHelp library of trackers include such a variety of tools that you could use it even if you’re perfectly healthy and just want to start exercising and losing weight. There’s a weight tracker, diet tracker and an exercise tracker that can show you what exercises and food have the greatest impact on your weight and how. Here’s the summary data for an obese, 220 pound guy who sits on his chair all day writing articles (why are you assuming that’s me?)

You can set goals, monitor progress, and troubleshoot your own health with mental and physical fitness logs for every aspect of your life. You can analyze, with real information and real data from your daily life, what works and what doesn’t. By tweaking your daily life – removing what you learn has a negative effect and adding what you learn is positive – you can transform your physical and emotional well-being.

Which of the tracker tools look like they may help you? Do you use any other tools to track and analyze your health? Share your feedback in the comments section below.

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Some people consider it annoying, others consider it as a form of flirting, and others just use it to get their friend to wake up and start posting updates again. This means that at the moment there’s no real accepted “poking etiquette,” and people are pretty much making up their own rules. In simple technical terms, a “poke” is a link that you click on under someone’s profile picture in order to post a message on their Facebook page that you’ve just poked them. That’s really all there is to it – it’s simple. Or is it?

Since “poking” is basically the process of posting a message to your friend’s wall to wake them up, flirt or annoy – why couldn’t you do the same thing with a simple message? The fact is – you can. And message “poking” adds a bit of flexibility and fun to the process.

How to Poke a Friend

Experienced Facebook users can skip over this section, but I’m including it for those of you who are very new to Facebook and you’ve never used the poke feature before. This explanation strictly the Facebook “Poke” feature – not the message approach. First, go to a friend’s profile and take a look under the profile picture.

Underneath their photo is where you’ll find the “Poke <name>” feature. Poking someone is as simple as clicking on that link under their photo. Once you do this, a new window pops up asking you to confirm.

Once you click the “Poke” button – the person will receive a poke notification on their wall and they’ll see that you just poked them. As you can see – there’s no way to tell a person why you just poked them – so it’s up to the other person to read into your motivations, and of course this can lead to misunderstanding and confusion. But then again, isn’t that the fun of a social network? Don’t worry though, this is only the very simplest version of “poking” on Facebook. There are lots of other ways to do it that are a lot more fun.

2 Cool Ways to Poke People on Facebook

For experienced Facebook users, the standard Poke feature is old hat. If you want to take the “poking” approach to get your friend’s attention, you’ll want to install the Facebook Superpoke! application.

The Superpoke! is a much more interactive method you can use to send over the kind of pokes that’ll leave very little room for misunderstanding. For example, go ahead and blow a kiss at the girl you’re trying to date. Send a high five poke to a friend who just aced an exam. Or maybe even dropkick someone for saying something stupid. Once you’ve installed SuperPoke!, all you have to do is go to the person’s profile and just under the status box, you can click on the “more” drop-down arrow. If they have SuperPoke! installed on their profile, you’ll see the option there.

Even if they don’t have it installed – have no fear, you can still Superpoke! a friend – just go back to the Superpoke! app and on the right side you’ll see a box where you can select who to superpoke from your list of friends.

Go ahead and superpoke anyone you want. As you can see, this version of poking lets you add a message to your poke. The odds are that they’ll find it so funny they’ll probably install the app and poke you back. Beware – superpoking is addictive!

The second form of poking that some people use is ASCII art pokes. Instead of using any sort of poke feature, you can send someone a message in the form of a poke in ASCII Text.

You can do quite a bit with ASCII art, if you know how. If you’re curious how you can create images with simple ASCII keys, check out Saikat’s article on keyboard techniques to create cool symbols. You can really go crazy with ASCII art (and a lot of people do!)

So, what does it mean to you when you poke someone on Facebook? Hopefully, these two new methods to poke your friends has inspired you to prod those friends into becoming a little more active and posting some fresh new updates to their status. Do you know of any other cool ways to poke people in Facebook? Share your own techniques in the comments section below.

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How do you offer such a service for these Internet latecomers? It’s easy, you offer online tech support that’s available whenever you’re online (and you and I both know that’s pretty much all the time.) Here at MakeUseOf, we love chat services. Tim offered a few cool ways to add chat to your website, and MUO also covered Olark, a live chat widget for your website.

Today, in the spirit of my usual theme of ways to earn extra income, I would like to offer another easy business idea – using the free LiveZilla chat system in combination with Paypal to sell your expertise in the form of online PC support. Excited?  I know I am – and it’s so easy you’ll be asking yourself why you didn’t think of doing this before now!

Using LiveZilla to Sell Online PC Support

LiveZilla is a freeware live support software package that you install on both your web host and your PC. Note that you don’t have to install any software on the web server itself, you only need to copy files over to your web hosting account – so there’s no need to set up your own web server to make it work. If you have a web hosting account, you’re good to go. There is one drawback to the software for our particular use. While it’s the best free software available for offering online PC support, it doesn’t provide any way to process payment for that service. That’s okay, because I’ll show you how you can integrate Paypal into the process so your website visitors can pay for the online PC support before the chat takes place. But first, you need to set up LiveZilla on your blog or website.

When you first download and install the LiveZilla software to your PC or laptop, it will initially launch the admin software. This is where you can set up and configure the LiveZilla service. The first step is to install LiveZilla Server on your web host. The process is made simple by the fact that LiveZilla will FTP the files up to your host automatically – all you have to do is select “Create new LiveZilla Server.”

On the next screen, create your administrator ID and password. Write it down or do whatever you have to do to remember it, because this is the account that you’ll use to create all other IDs that can use your LiveZilla Server – such as members of a technical support team. When you click next, you’ll be faced with a choice to FTP files or copy to your local server. If you’re setting up LiveZilla on your local machine, go ahead and select the local option. Most users will want to click on FTP.

Most of you who have used FTP before know the drill – enter your web host FTP user name and FTP address. If you don’t know it, contact your web host service and find out. The best setup for LiveZilla is to place the files in it’s own subdirectory on your hosting account. Here, I’m setting the software to FTP the files to a folder named “livezilla”.

This next step should be pretty straightforward for anyone who has ever set up a Wordpress blog on their own web hosting account. The software requires the use of a MySQL database. Before you can get through this step, you need to go into your hosting account and create a new empty database. Then, come back to this screen and click “Validate Database” to provide the software with the database name and details. Then click “Create Tables,” and this step is done! You’ll be directed to the online LiveZilla page on your web server.

Visit this page using every PC or laptop that you plan to use to interact with your website visitors. From each PC, click on the “Add Server Profile” button. This will download all of the files to that PC so that you can connect to the server to monitor website visitors, initiate chats or receive chat requests. Now, back at the admin screen (LiveZilla Sevrer Admin), you’ll notice another button for “Link Generator/Script Generator” under Integration. Now, if you want to offer simply free chat to your visitors – this is where you’ll go. When you click on it, you’ll see the following screen.

When you highlight the script and insert it into your blog or website, the status image that’s shown on the left will appear on your site. Select “Add Visitor Monitoring Script” if you want the ability to see when new visitors come to your site, or even interact with them if you want to. The “Live Support” button shows your online or offline status. As I mentioned, this is perfect if you’re offering free support, but in this case we want to integrate a payment system. So let’s go over to Paypal (my online payment processing option of choice), go into the “Merchant Services” tab, and create a new “Buy Now” button.

The last step of creating your button is where you’re provided the script for it. In my case, I configured the button with multiple options so that visitors can choose to purchase a 10 minute, 20 minute or 30 minute tech support session. Once they successfully submit payment, they are redirected to the chat link. There’s one trick here you’ll need to remember – when the button asks what image you want to use, go back to the LiveZilla button script and extract the “image src” link that has “image.php” in it. This will ensure that your new Paypal purchase button appears like the LiveZilla status button. This is what it looked like once I installed the new Paypal script on my blog.

Visitors can see that you’re available, and they can click the button to purchase an online support session with you, where they can ask you for help. This provides your visitors with a live person who’s always available to help them – a service that’s not always easy to find online. It also provides you with a valuable way to offer a more interactive experience for your readers.

Also, you can use your new LiveZilla chat service for more than earning income. Include the special link (see the script generator) into your email, and the recipient can click on it and instantly chat with you live – they don’t need to install any IM software at all! Post the link on your Facebook account and offer your friends and family with a place they can chat with you for free outside of the Facebook system. Provide your link as a way for work colleagues to meet up with you and collaborate on projects together. The uses for your own private chat system are limited only by your imagination.

Can you think of any other creative ways to use the LiveZilla chat service? Do you know of any other hosted services that are any better? Share your insight in the comments section below.

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I am not ashamed to admit I’m an avid Dilbert cartoon fan. Whenever I get off the phone, frustrated with HR’s lack of cooperation regarding the company sponsored insurance plan, or every time I walk out of an especially meaningless and pointless meeting, I pop open a few Dilbert comics on my browser or mobile phone, and I feel much better.

I’m not sure what it is about Dilbert that makes those of us who suffer through cubicle life feel better. Maybe it’s because it helps us to realize that even though we grudgingly agree to the new idiotic buzz-words passed down from management, and even though we allow ourselves to take part in moronic meeting discussions – we can know that we are not alone. Someone out there understands – and that someone is Dilbert. In honor of the man who brings me out of my cubicle depression each day, I would like to offer 6 of the best sites for Dilbert cartoon comic fans.

First Stop – Dilbert.com

Anyone who follows the Dilbert cartoon comic strip likely already knows that the premier spot on the Internet for Dilbert fans is obviously Dilbert.com. MakeUseOf has highlighted this site for its use of Twitter, and the site feature where you can attempt to mash your own Dilbert cartoon strip. The site offers the popular section that offers the Dilbert strip, the user mashup section and even an animated Dilbert clip. My favorite part of the site is actually Scott Adam’s blog.

His updates are sometimes witty, as you would expect, but he also dives into his own personal career decisions as well as political commentary. It’s a fun read and I encourage any die-hard Dilbert fan out there to follow along with the creator’s blog.

Dilbert Doodles

It’s a one-page section of Google Doodles that Saikat mentioned before, but it’s worth mentioning again. Dilbert Doodles were a series of Dilbert cartoon strips created exclusively for Google.

From Monday through Friday, Google updated the Doodle to reflect the Dilbert office crew trying to come up with the new Google logo. On Friday, the logo itself was the punchline. This series of Google Doodles are obvious collectors items for Dilbert fans.

Ringtales – The Animated Dilbert Podcast

While the comic strip is hilarious, the Dilbert animated cartoon is just as funny. At Ringtales, the collection of free Dilbert podcasts at this site is addictive – I couldn’t stop clicking through them!

Do you want to display the 5-day-a-week Dilbert cartoon podcasts on your own blog? Just click on the Widget menu at the top of the website and you can embed the video on your own website.

Embed the video clips in your blog, myspace page, on Facebook or anywhere else you want to share the wit of Dilbert with all of your friends.

Computer Weekly – Dilbert of the Day

Every day, in addition to checking out my favorite tech blog RSS feeds, I also take a look at the latest articles on Computer Weekly. The online version is where I get my latest fix for computer news. One of my favorite pages that I check out every day is Computer Weekly’s “Dilbert of the Day” comic strip.

You can certainly get your Dilbert fix from Dilbert.com – but if you’re looking to add as much Dilbert as possible to your daily life, this is yet another source to get a great daily fix from one of the premier online computer magazines on the net.

Mozilla Firefox Dilbert Add-on

Of course, if you want to receive your daily comic fix without having to browse to a particular web page, you can add the Dilbert Firefox Add-on. This is a free add-on that adds a small button to your status bar. When you click on it, up pops the strip of the day.

Installation is as easy as clicking and in a few moments and a few more clicks you’ll have Dilbert as part of your Firefox installation – what more could a geek ask for?

Track Your Dilbert Reading With Library Thing

LibraryThing is a very cool organizational website that Aibek covered back when it was in Beta. Now, it’s alive and well – and it features its own Dibert section where you can check out a collection of covers from the various comics, or add the titles of the various Scott Adams books you own to your personal Library collection.

This is a lot of fun to browse, and there’s even a section of LibraryThing for communities and groups. As of this writing, there’s no Dilbert group – so why don’t you start one?

Do you have any other fun Dilbert resources for MUO readers who are fans? Share them in the comments section below!

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Many companies spend a fortune for a complete niche industry analysis. I should know – I used to conduct the research and write up niche industry reports for a company that sold those reports to big businesses. Today, I’d like to share some inside secrets with MakeUseOf readers and reveal the naked truth – you don’t need memberships to special databases or statistics firms to uncover those industry niches, all you need to know is where to look for the information yourself and you can create your own free industry analysis.

Always Start With Your Government

The truth is, almost every government in every nation devotes a great deal of effort and resources to measuring the just about every aspect of society – from how many pounds of potatoes your country produces to the number of people born with specific diseases. Regardless of the industry you’re looking into, the odds are pretty good that there’s a government agency that produced a report on the topic. For example, when I was digging into Real Estate markets, I discovered a report on Mortgage Loans produced by the special “Office of Thrift Supervision” within the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Seriously, there’s such an office. The mortgage loan data they provided (for free, I might add) was exactly what I needed.

The best place to start when you’re creating your free industry analysis is at an online government office listing directory such as my favorite, USA.gov for the U.S. or Direct.gov for the UK. The individual agencies that you’ll find offer their own library chock-full of statistics, charts and detailed demographics that you’ll be hard-pressed to find anywhere else. For an international listing of government agencies around the world, the FDA (of all places) offers a fairly comprehensive list.

Schools and University Studies and Research

It’s almost comical that companies spend so much money for a private corporation to produce a niche analysis on an industry when there’s so much free information available on the Internet. Aside from government agencies, Universities and Colleges from around the world constantly conduct studies and collect data and then publish the results online for free. These are typically published in the form of “white papers.” One of the best way to find these studies is by using Google Scholar, a white paper search engine that will turn up those results for you.

The quality of data that you will find from these results and from the various University research projects are amazing. For example, while researching the real estate market, I uncovered a detailed Harvard study on rental housing.

If you’re looking for data, graphs and charts that uncover industry trends, social demographics and reveal the sort of niche opportunities for your business – you’ve got it all right here. Don’t only search for the larger schools, if you’re interested in your local market, make sure to check on any local studies your local community college or University might have completed – you may be very surprised what you find.

The Pew Research Center

In almost every niche analysis report I’ve ever written, I usually always come back to the Pew Research Center for research. The motto of this organization is, “Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World.” This is no exaggeration, Pew publishes some of the most obscure and eye opening social trends of any research organization I’ve seen.

It’s from Pew that I learned that middle-age women make up the largest demographic of users for online games, or that more teen girls use social networks than boys do. If you want to uncover any niche opportunities for a potential business, this site should be at the top of your bookmarks.

Using Google Trends to Reveal Global Demographics

Now, this article wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t mention the single tool that I’ve used above all others to uncover unique niche opportunities. It goes without saying that the Internet has become an important gauge of public sentiment, and of course since Google Trends reveals “the big picture” for particular keyword searches, then it makes sense that you should be able to use Google Trends to identify industry trends. In a simple example, if you’re thinking of investing in rental properties and becoming a landlord, it stands to reason that you would want the trend of people searching for “apartments for rent” to be rising.

Well, look at that. Google trends reveals that while interest in apartments held pretty steady (aside from the annual fluctuations) from 2004 through 2008, there’s been a sudden upswing in public interest in apartments in 2009 – interesting! With Google trends, you can dig even deeper than this. By copying each annual graph and overlaying them together (using your favorite image editing software), you can also reveal seasonal patterns. In this case doing so would reveal what part of the year more people usually hunt for apartments.

As you can see here, most people are looking for apartments during midsummer, and then that interest tanks as the school year approaches, recovering only at the end of the year. While this particular trend isn’t very shocking, you would be very surprised to see some of the fascinating seasonal trends that Google Trends sometimes reveals within certain industries.

So, whether you’re just curious about the current market for your small business idea, or you’re thinking about opening an enterprise on a much larger scale, just remember that the tools and resources are available on the web so that you can identify those awesome niche opportunities yourself.

Have you ever started your own business? What online tools and resources did you use to research your market? Share your insight in the comments section below.

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Regardless of country or region, one thing holds true for almost every citizen – we admire and appreciate the sacrifices these brave men and women make to keep our families and our homes safe from our enemies and those who would do us harm.

International security is a touchy subject for a lot of folks. There are skirmishes, border disputes and completely senseless attacks against innocent civilians. It’s during these violent moments that we come to appreciate the people who devote their lives to serving the public welfare. There are times when you may appreciate their hard work and sacrifice so much that you want to write soldiers and send them a token of your gratitude, but you simply don’t know where to write to these soldiers with notes of encouragement or gifts of support.

With this in mind, I’d like to offer some excellent online resources that offer the public contact details or online forms where you can find and write to any soldier that you choose.  Because many of these soldiers are often deployed in areas of the world that are isolated – and they miss their homes and families very much – every note of encouragement they receive becomes a godsend.

One more note before we get started – this particular list turned out somewhat westernized. This was not intentional. I searched long and hard for International organizations that foster troop support. Unfortunately it’s difficult to uncover those organizations (at least online) for eastern countries. Even many western countries don’t offer many online services for citizens who are interested in contacting soldiers in duty.

That doesn’t mean the services don’t exist or that these countries don’t care as much about their soldiers, it just means that I couldn’t find them. If you know of a specific organization for your country that helps connect appreciative citizens with the soldiers and forces that protect them, please add that group or organization to the comments below. Thanks!

With that said, let’s get started with five great organizations where you can write to soldiers.

Canada – Check Out the CFPSA First

The Canadians know how to keep the influx of public support for their troops well managed. The government assigned The Canadian Forces Personnel and Family Support Services (CFPSA) to the task of managing public donations to deployed troops. That means if you’re a Canadian citizen, this is the first place to stop if you want to figure out how you can write to Canadian soldiers. They’ve even created an online message board that you can use to show your support – they’ve named it the Morale by Message Board.

At least for now, the Canadian Post actually offers free delivery of mail to deployed troops, and on the page above you can get all of the guidelines for how you can write a letter to “Any Canadian Forces Member” and have it delivered to any member of the Canadian Forces who haven’t received any mail. I must add that just reviewing some of the daily entries from Canadian citizens in the CFPSA message boards makes one realize that Canadians have very good reason to be proud of their country.

Israel – Write to an IDF Soldier

Considering that Israel sits in one of the world’s hottest spots for conflict, posting this next resource could come across as strong Western bias, but in all honesty I searched for soldier-writing resources for Middle Eastern countries and simply couldn’t find any. If you know of any, again please share it in the comments. This is not a vote of support for either side of any Mid-East conflicts, but only a nod to Chabad.org, a well-designed website created to assist Israelis and writing letters to IDF soldiers to boost morale and show their support.

The cool thing about this particular service is that you aren’t submitting your message electronically or even through the mail, this organization promises to “hand deliver” your message of support to an IDF soldier. You can even include you or your family’s picture so that they know you’re a real person and care about their well-being.

Europe – 2 Sites to Lend Moral Support to Troops

Now, while I’m American and I’m proud of the level of U.S. support for her deployed troops, just reviewing some of the websites across the pond I have to say the level of European patriotism easily rivals the U.S. The UK was the most abundant in support websites, but I know there are more organizations out there, and I hope our readers can share them.

For starters, I think probably the most vocal and active group is SOS – short for Support Our Soldiers.

This organization handles arranging for parcels where they will put together a care package for a soldier that you’ve sponsored. The site removes the need for you to try to figure out the sort of things a soldier needs – these folks know – all you need to do is help fund the care package and it gets put together and sent for you. When it comes to writing messages and letters of support, SOS partners with the next organization I’d like to cover, ForcesPenPals.

This site completely automates the process of linking up UK armed forces with the civilian population, serving as a perfect medium for civilians to exchange messages of support to UK troops. It appears that the site also serves as a dating service…interesting!

United States – Send a Care Package to Any Soldier

A couple of years ago, I wrote an online article titled “My Hero.”  The hero that I chose was Sergeant Brian Horn of LaPlata, Maryland. A member of the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Iraq, Brian was well supported by his family and friends while serving in Iraq, but he also noticed that a lot of soldiers didn’t get any mail at all. My choice for Brian as a hero wasn’t so much for his bravery while in harms way (although that was without question), his true heroism started in 2003 when he came up with the idea to start an organization to funnel the overwhelming public support for the troops at home into material support that the deployed troops could actually see for themselves. From this simple concept, AnySoldier was born.

Through AnySoldier, you can sort through the database (shown above), filter by branch of armed services if you like, and then choose one of the contact names. The contacts are deployed soldiers who volunteer to deliver letters and care packages to other soldiers in their area who don’t normally receive much word or encouragement from home. Anysoldier remains one of the most well-run “write to soldiers” organizations that I’ve seen on the Internet.

Do you know of any organization that helps citizens support the armed forces? Have you ever tried any of these yourself? Please share your own resources and experiences in the comments section below.

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It was actually writing that article that made me start thinking about other uses for my webcam. Then, as I sat there staring at the cellphone – an old HTC 8125 with just a 1.3 mega pixel camera – I started to wonder if there was a way I could convert this little phone into a portable webcam that could stream video from anywhere in the world where there’s a cellphone data network.

That curiosity and a little bit of Internet research led me to VZOchat, an interesting free online service where you can configure your own video chat account and whenever you’re online you can receive direct video calls from anyone.

So, what does this have to do with turning a Windows Mobile smartphone into a remote webcam? Well, the VZOchat service also offers a mobile version. This means that people can trigger a video conferencing call to your mobile phone, but it also means that you can set up your cellphone anywhere you like, and then fire off a call to the phone from your computer which will enable the streaming video feature of the VZOchat software on your phone!

Want to spy on the room where you accidently “left” your phone? Maybe you want to stream a really cool rock concert to your friends with your cellphone. The potential uses for streaming live video from your cellphone are unlimited. As if that’s not cool enough – there’s one more little feature that VZOchat offers – the ability to embed the video call feature directly into your blog or website so anyone can video chat with you straight from your blog.

I’ll cover each of these features in this article. Let’s get started.

Setting Up Your Own Private Videochat

When you first sign up for your free VZOchat account, you’ll instantly have access to a special web page where you can find your embedded videochat room. You don’t even have to install any software on your PC, only a plugin for your browser so that the videochat room works properly.

Yes, I know I look tired. I’ve been staying up all night writing this article!

Now, VZOchat is actually a video chat community, so if you want to you can set your status as public and let everyone on the social network see your profile and call you. I’m not exactly that much of a social butterfly, so I left that feature disabled – I’m only here for the cool Internet video chat software.

All you have to do to call another user on VZOchat is click “start videochat” and type their name. For my purposes – I want to initiate a video chat with my cellphone, and I want the cellphone to pick up automatically. So step two is setting up the mobile version of VZOchat on your Windows Mobile device (Windows Mobile only).

Setting Up VZOchat As a Cameraphone Webcam

Once you download and install the CAB file to your mobile and you log in using the credentials that you signed up with, you’ll see the following screen on your phone.

At this point, the green bar means that you’re online and ready to send or receive video calls. This means that you can remotely call your phone with your computer, but first you have to tell your phone to automatically pick up the call. Do this by clicking on “Options.”

Most of the settings within options are pretty self-explanatory. Most of the calling features you want to configure are in the “Integration” menu item. When you click on that icon you’ll see the following screen.

As you can see here, you can integrate the software to work with Outlook Mobile and the Today Screen – but what you really want to make sure to click here is the option to “Automatically accept incoming calls.” Once you do this, you’re ready to remotely fire up your cellphone as a remote cameraphone webcam!

To test this, I placed my old Windows Mobile 5 PDA on my kitchen countertop facing a Halloween art project my wife and kids created – a small tree with ghosts hanging on the branches. Running back across the house to my laptop (I seriously ran, I was that excited), I clicked on the green call button and watched as the software initiated the call. Suddenly, the video window changed to a view of what my cellphone was pointed to at that moment.

Now, I should mention a few things about this image. My particular camera is ancient, and a 1.3 mega pixel camera is hardly comparable to the sort of resolution available on most modern smartphones. Secondly, I noticed my image updated about once every 5 seconds or so, which I believe was related to my data upload speed over the cellular data line – and I hardly had a signal in my house. Again, a newer model will most likely perform much better.

Finally, if you do decide to use this technique to convert your cellphone into a cameraphone webcam, make sure you either have an unlimited Internet data plan or your phone is connected to the Internet over Wi-Fi.

Embedding the Video Chat Feature Into Your Blog

Now that we’ve accomplished the first task. I want to show you one more amazingly cool feature with VZOchat that had me smiling from ear to ear – the ability to embed a calling box into your blog or web page so visitors can initiate a video chat with you. Here’s how it works.

When you’re logged into your VZOchat account, click on the “widgets” tab at the top.

Here, you’ll see two options. The first is a neat little VZOchat widget using the iframe tag that lets you embed your profile call gateway into your blog, which I’ve done here on my blog FreeWritingCenter.

Now, the value of just offering such a feature on your blog or website is tremendous. Allow visitors to interact with you directly to discuss a topic you’ve blogged about. Or, maybe you have a tech support website and you could use this feature to let your clients contact you directly video chat right from your web page.

The one drawback with the widget is that when they click on it, it opens a whole different window on VZOchat for your visitor to talk to you. If you want them to stay right at your site, you can use the VZOchat Webclient code instead – and visitors can have a video chat with you right on your own web page.

Here’s me having a chat with myself right on my blog.

After about 10 minutes, I found myself pretty darn boring, so I just hung up on myself. The embedded video chat is still there, as is the sidebar call feature (for now). I’m going to leave it there to chat with MUO readers and others unless I find a better service at some point. If it’s still there and I’m online, go ahead and give me a call and let’s chat!

Can you think of any cool uses for turning your mobile phone into a cameraphone webcam? What about using the service in your blog, or combining the two features so visitors can call you on your mobile? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

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The evolution of this field of graphic design didn’t happen over a very long, extended period – but instead over a couple of decades. In fact, the rapid advancement of computer processing power is primarily what served as a catalyst for the explosion of CGI animation. But what is CGI animation, exactly?

If you’re a computer graphic design artist, this post may not be for you. However, for those of you out there who are curious about this fascinating form of animation – read on for a brief history of the world of animation, and how computers completely transformed the art form.

What Ever Happened to Plain Old Cartoons?

Most of you can likely name at least one or two of your favorite childhood cartoons. Maybe it was Scooby Doo, the Flintstones or even the Jetsons. Maybe you’re a bit younger (or not) and you still enjoy your Saturday morning cartoons.

However, most of the older folks out there probably started noticing that more and more cartoons look just a little bit different – just a little bit more real. What is it about CGI animation that gives the characters and the overall imagery more realism? The answer to that requires some history.

The history of animation is both nostalgic and sad. Many decades ago, animators were traditional artists who drew pictures by hand. Traditional animation consisted of a whole team of animators who would draw and color images on “cels” – transparent sheets that were placed on top of a background image to create a multi-layered frame.

In this way, segments of an image could change from frame to frame without the entire picture being redrawn. You can see an example of layers in the image to the left. The blue arrow points to the background, the green arrow to the layer with two characters, and a red arrow pointing to the third layer with an image of a flying paper airplane. By manipulating the drawings in each layer from frame to frame, animators would create what many adults today remember as the traditional cartoon.

Many movie fans may remember the hype surrounding the digital remastering of old films such as Star Wars, where computer animation was used to digitally enhance the film. The first stages of CGI animation included 2D animation. This simply involved computers doing what animators had been doing for decades – creating multiple frames of images each second in order to generate the visual effect of animation.

The difference in this case was that as the field of computer graphic design advanced, the images gradually became much more advanced than most cartoon animators could manage by hand. The simplest form of this type of animation can be seen in the animated GIF files that became wildly popular on the Internet throughout the late 1990’s.

These images were created by packaging together a series of static images switched from frame to frame by a time delay defined by a control script within the GIF file itself. The time delay on most animated GIFS are pretty long, so it doesn’t provide for very fluid motion, but the concept of “animation” is still there.

The picture below is an example of one such completed animated GIF.

Now, all of this is grade school level compared to the impressive level that 3D CGI animation technology is at today. How did we get from 1990’s computer animation to the sort of iMax 3D cartoons you love to watch? The simple answer is processing power. With today’s amazing CPU processing capabilities, computer animators are now able to create a 3 dimensional “model” to start with.

This model is only somewhat like it’s 2D counterpart, except now computers have the ability to not only modify large parts of a 2 dimensional image as “layers” – they can calculate and modify very small sections of an object within a 3D world. Because of the level of programming and processor power required, this sort of animation was available only to the largest movie production companies who could afford the computer systems.

However, today your own desktop computer can handle it – and there’s even free software like Blender, which Aibek covered in his article on 4 apps for a graphic designer on a budget, and Simon described one of the video games called Yo Frankie! which was created with the Blender engine. I installed the software on my own desktop and within 30 minutes the tutorial taught me how to create the start of a snowman character within a virtual 3D world.

The concept of today’s level of 3D CGI animation is an evolution from basic cartoon animation into a simulated world that seeks to represent realism as accurately as possible. It does this by slicing up the world into the smallest segments possible, and then controlling how those tiny parts of real world objects move, react and change based on the other objects and conditions within that 3D world.

I remember watching The Polar Express when it was first released and thinking to myself how dead the characters looked. When they spoke, their tongues lay still like dead fish and their eyes were often expressionless. I actually thought, at the time, that computers would never be able to realistically simulate the real world, or at least a real person. But, you know what, while researching this article I came across this video of “Emily,” a digitally recreated face of a real actress. I have to say, I was very impressed and I think you will be as well.

What is your take on the current state of the art for CGI animation? Do you think that it will eventually completely replace traditional animation? Share your opinion in the comments section below.

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My requirements were pretty simple. I wanted a little character in the lower right corner of the screen that talks to me and interacts with me when I want it to, and otherwise keeps its trap shut when I don’t. I wanted a little dude that’s helpful and functional, but wouldn’t get in the way when I wanted to click on the screen.

With all of these requirements listed, I struck out in search of a cool application that could accomplish all of these things. Needless to say, I was terribly disappointed for many hours. As my search grew old, I almost gave up. Other than countless websites with viruses or malware doubled as an alleged virtual desktop characters – there was no legitimate application to be found. That is until I landed on the very last link that I found – and then like that I discovered the perfect app, simply called DeskBot. Let me introduce you to my brand new free talking desktop buddy.

DeskBot, The Free Talking Desktop Buddy – It’s For Real

First of all, kudos to Gordon Bell at BellCraft Technologies for developing this cool little app and offering it for free. After installing the base application from the download page and running it, you’ll immediately discover a little blue Genie in the lower right corner of your screen, and you’re presented with the settings window.

The two features you can set up on this first screen are the ability for your character to read any text that you highlight and copy in a digitized voice, and in various intervals (which you can set), your little desktop buddy will tell you the current time. The next few tabs let you configure everything about the character.

The software comes default with the Genie or Merlin, and you can set the voice, the animations, whether a balloon appears when your character talks, and a whole bunch of other customizations. Now, as an aid for those learning to read or elderly who can’t read the small text on the screen, the next “Read” tab is fantastic.

Your desktop buddy is prepared, at any time, to read entire texts out loud for you. Just copy and paste the text into this screen and click on the green “Read” button – and your character comes to life and starts reading to you, complete with a pop-up balloon (if you’ve configured one). Now, the next tab is my favorite part of this little app.

This is where you can configure a variety of greetings that your little buddy will greet you with when your computer first starts up. I have to say, hearing the Microsoft digitized voice saying, “Let’s rock and roll” had me on the floor in stitches laughing. Honestly, the standard voices and characters just don’t cut it for me – they’re way too 1990’s for my taste. Thankfully, the DeskBot download page offers downloads for additional Microsoft Agent characters and voices (including French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish).

To be honest, the default characters remind me too much of those annoying little animated guys in Word and Excel that keep getting in your way. So, searching through the characters, I found the guy I wanted – a bouncer guy wearing the most hilarious bright green suit.

This guy is a riot. When he’s bored he puts on sunglasses, drinks from a soda can and then chucks it off screen (complete with the sound effects of the clinking can).

Your new friend will greet you every time you start up your computer. You can open up entire text files and have your talking desktop buddy dictate the text while you finish other tasks. Your character will let you know the time as often as you like, and even while you’re working and don’t need the help, your little friend will wait patiently, snoozing or sleeping, until you need something.

Deskbot – link

Have you ever made use of any other applications with Microsoft Agent technology? Can you think of any other cool uses for DeskBot? Share your opinions in the comments section below.

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This has been a dream of mine for years, but I’ve always avoided the project because of the costs I assumed were involved. However, writing for MakeUseOf often forces me to think a bit outside the box. How would I accomplish a home security system inexpensively or free?

As an automation engineer, I often have to work with machinery or equipment where a central processor needs to read data from a number of distributed sensors. So, for starters I would distribute “sensors” – both wired and wireless web cams – in and around my property. The question still remains, what central processing software could handle all of those webcams and accomplish the “alert” scenario I want? After doing a lot of digging, I finally found a very cool software application called Active Webcam that lets you do just that.

How to Build a WiFi Home Security System

In this article, I’m going to describe how you can set up a system of security webcams that will alert you to even the slightest intrusion into the space the camera is monitoring. Before we get going, I do need to make it clear that the download link above for Active Webcam is to a free trial version of the software. However, the trial version offers all of the features of the full version, except there’s a small “nag window” in the upper left part of each webcam. If you can tolerate the window (I know I can), then the software is the top free choice for what we need to accomplish.

Recently, MakeUseOf covered similar applications for your webcam, such as Mark’s article on two cool motion sensor applications, and a while back I also outlined how you could use webcams from all around the world to go ghost hunting with your browser. However, what I’m going to describe today is a combination of all of those things. We’re going to create a remote surveillance system that could monitor your home, your camp, your apartment – or all of the above, all at the same time. In essence you can create a giant personal surveillance network without limitations. Sound cool? Let’s roll.

When you first install Active Webcam you’re offered an easy wizard that steps you through setting up your first device.

As you can see even from this first screen – the software has a lot of capabilities. Not only can you capture input from cameras connected directly to your computer, on your home network, or over the Internet – but you can even generate a web page that you could access from anywhere to watch all of your configured cameras.

The next screen of the startup wizard helps you select which type of camera you want to connect to. Keep in mind that if you’ve set up a remote Wi-Fi webcam that has its own IP on your network, you can connect to it directly by selecting “Network IP Camera.”

The next screen in the wizard lets you choose from the three standard methods of broadcasting your captured video. You can stream it all to an external web server, you can turn your PC itself into a web server, or you can upload via FTP. In my case, I’m hoping to receive an email with a nice snapshot of the intruders that I can take over to the police station, so on this step I’ll select “None.” Once you’re past the startup wizard and you’ve set up your first device, go to settings and select “Motion Detection.”

This is the place where we can accomplish the magic. A few things to keep in mind here. First, set the sensitivity to what you want to accomplish. For example, in my case my cameras are sitting in an empty house where nothing should be moving. Setting it to 95% will fire off an email at the slightest movement. However, if you have a small cat or dog in the house, you may want to set it for 75% to 80% so that it ignores smaller movements. The last thing you want is a flurry of hundreds of emails because your cat decided to start playing with the webcam!

You’ll also notice that there’s an impressive array of actions you can take when the camera senses motion. Playing a sound or FTP’ing captured images are standard with most of these motion detection applications – but the one feature that is very cool here is that if you want, the application will not only send you an email, but it can also send an SMS message to your cellphone. Now that’s slick. Of course, in my case I want an email with snapshots of the intruder, so I select “Send Email” and then go into the email settings.

The email settings are very easy. Just configure your SMTP settings and remember to add which email address to send the alert to. You can add multiple ones by using a comma between them. The interval setting will wait before firing off another email when there’s more motion, and you can choose how many snapshots you want the camera to take. During a test run with my single laptop webcam watching for motion, I received the following email.

Okay, so it works – but what about really putting it to good use?

Build a WiFi Internet Surveillance Network

My first thought is a distributed surveillance system where you wire up a webcam at every remote location you want to monitor. This could be your elderly mother’s house, your camp way up north or maybe even your office because you suspect someone’s stealing your favorite multi-colored sticky notes. Whatever the reason, all you need to do is install your webcams with either their own Internet IP, or plugged into an Internet-connected PC running Active Webcam. For my global distributed network test, I visited Opentopia and selected three random webcams from several Universities around the United States.

Now, two of these cameras were obviously monitoring very quiet locations. However, the third webcam on the lower left was a college workshop where students kept walking in and out of the room. So I quickly configured the motion settings as described above, and then waited for one of the three cameras to trigger my alert. Sure enough, within about five minutes, I received my email alert.

I captured three snapshots of this student who had just walked into the room and stood at the table. Just imagine if this was your home or business security system. No need to rewind and review security tape – your wifi surveillance system will automatically capture and store the mugshots, and you’ll know about it instantly over email or your phone!

Can you think of other creative ways to use Active Webcam? Do you know of any other applications that would accomplish the same thing? Share your insight in the comments section below.

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Here on MakeUseOf, I’ve explored several tools you can use to track your finances such as the SimpleD Budget Tracker or Quicken Online. I’ve even offered some of my personal secrets on how to pay down your debt a lot faster by creating a few simple Excel worksheets. While these tools are excellent for tracking your spending habits and trying to figure out where all of your money is going, it isn’t a simple matter to try to plan out and organize future spending – and planning out your spending is what having a good budget is all about.

So, today I’m going to share another powerful, collaborative budgeting tool called BudgetSketch that you can use with your spouse or significant other to make a household budget and plan where your money is going to go in the future.

Make a Household Budget With the Future in Mind

Planning. That’s what every good household budget is about. However, when you’re married or living with someone, it’s also about co-operation and teamwork. You can keep your own private Excel spreadsheet with your facts and figures all you like, but unless everyone in the household is on board with the overall financial plan – you can expect failure.

What I’m going to cover in this article is an impressive collaborative budgeting tool that lets you plan out your spending moving forward, not dwell on the mountains of cash you’ve wasted in the past. The motto of this free software app is to “Get Intentional With Your Money.”  The theory is that instead of reacting to your overspending with guilt, disgust or depression, you instead stand up and make it clear how you intend to spend your money from today moving forward. This software will help you base those intentions on reality.

The first thing you’ll notice when you first sign up for your free account is that you’re offered a very cool, free household budget worksheet in PDF format.

Before you even get started, the makers of this online household budgeting software suggest that you pull together all of your documentation from credit cards and bank statements and fill out this entire spreadsheet with your bills and debt. If you’re clueless at this point, then you might consider using one of the tracking tools I’ve covered earlier.

However, if you know what you spend but you’re not sure how to organize your spending and your savings, then fill out this sheet as best you can and then open up your account.

The first thing you’ll notice is how insanely simple the software is. You just add an expense or income, and use the simple form shown above to describe the amount and when it’s typically due. If there’s no fixed due date, then just estimate. If it’s a credit card bill or car loan, select the debt checkbox.

Once you’ve filled out enough of your income and expenses, you’ll quickly see how this particular household budgeting system works. The bills are laid out for the month in a visual 4-week layout that shows you your weekly income and expenses from week to week.

When you scroll down to the bottom of the screen you’ll find the magic that makes this system work for so many people.  One of the things that the majority of folks fail with a budget is that they create the budget on a monthly basis. However, it’s human nature after receiving a large paycheck to assume that there’s plenty of money for dining out, movies and more.

But, as you can see from the weekly layout above, the software shows you the positive cashflow from week to week. This is an amount that you must have left in the bank at the end of the week or your budget won’t work the following week . As you can see above, week two requires so many expenses (and no income) that the cash flow for that week is far less. Spend too much in week one and you’re in big trouble come week two.

The part of this online application that I like the most is goal planning. When you’re done laying out your household bills and expenses, then you can start adding goals. This could be either paying off debts or saving up for a car or a vacation (or any other dreams you may have).

Each month that you see a positive cash flow, you can click on the “Apply Surplus to Goals” tab, and the system will ask you which goal you’d like to apply your surplus to and what amount. The theory of this particular budgeting system is called a zero balance budget. This means that you outline exactly where every penny is going to go. This can make it difficult to deal with surprises – but then again a financially savvy person should have a goal to save up an “emergency” fund so that surprises like hospital bills or car repairs don’t destroy your budget.

Of course, my favorite part of this online application is that it’s collaborative in nature. Husbands and wives or even college roomates can all throw their heads together and use this software to plan out a solid monthly budget that works for everyone. This online software is the perfect way to make a household budget that everyone can agree on, because the expenses are clear, and so are the goals and dreams that your money is going toward.

Do you know of any other online tools or tricks to collaborate on making a household budget? What methods do you use to plan out your paycheck? Share your experiences and insight in the comment section below.

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In most large corporations, you’ll use professional CAD software, or in smaller companies you may use flowchart software like Visio that aren’t free. But for the individual who’s looking for a high-quality, free alternative there really aren’t a lot of good options.

There are a few that come close, like LucidChart or DIA, the open source alternative to Visio that Karl recently covered. Then of course there are the multitude of mind-mapping apps out there that Kaly and other writers here have covered. However, what I want to share with MakeUseOf readers today is an impressive, professional quality flowchart/mind-mapping application loaded with professional clip-art, images and templates that makes it on par with, or even better than, much of the desktop flowchart software out there. It’s aptly located at Flowchart.com, and that’s also the name of the online application.

It is currently in beta, but you can get a free invite just by submitting your email. The invite came back for me in under a couple of hours. Right now it’s unknown if there’s going to be a scaled down free version of this software, but let’s hope so! Let’s take a closer look at this impressive, online flowchart software.

Don’t Start From Scratch – Use a Template

The first thing you’ll notice when you start up Flowchart.com is that when you start a new flowchart, you’re offered a variety of existing templates to choose from that will get you started without much effort.

As you can see, you can start out with some pretty cool templates like engineering diagrams, mind maps, subject-specific flowcharts, and more.  For the sake of this review, I started out with a blank template. The first thing I noticed was that to the left there are lots of clip-arts and even industry standard symbols to choose from.

There are three areas of the flowchart software that I’d like to point out that you’ll find at the upper left of the application window. In the upper left window, you’ll find the standard symbols, shapes and clip-art organized in easy-to-find subfolders. As you click on a subfolder that that contains the images, you’ll see those displayed in thumbnails in the window below. As you draw your chart in the larger grid-backed design window, you’ll see your design taking shape in the small preview window show here. The large design window is very slick – you can have the images you create “snap to grid” or now, and adding symbols is as easy as grabbing them from the left library and sliding them over to your design area. As an example I’ve designed the start of a diagram for a vacuum pumping system.

As you can see here, when you add a symbol to the design area, you can rotate it and place it wherever you like. In addition, if you click the “M” symbol, you can write a caption for the object as well.

Flowchart.com Features and Limitations

Keep in mind that this software is in beta, so you’re bound to find bugs. I find a few minor ones where the pop-up description for some menu items didn’t always work. You can report those bugs by clicking on the “forums” icon in the upper right corner of the application (the conversation icon).

Below this area, you’ll also find the design toolbar where you can draw your own images from scratch using all of the basic shapes you’d expect to find in any drawing application.

Other features offered at the top toolbar – from left to right in the image above – include snap to grid, show/hide rulers, properties & history, preview, script editor, sharing properties, view recorded charts and record charts. One of the coolest features of Flowchart.com is the fact that it’s not only flowchart software, but it’s a collaborative one at that.

When you click on the sharing icon, you’ll be able to get the url for your online flowchart, as well as manage the people allowed to access and edit that flowchart. Finally, when you’re done with your flowchart design, it’ll obviously save in the system as an online flowchart. However, what good is such flowchart software if you can’t store your charts offline and use them elsewhere? To this end, Flowcharts.com offers the ability to export to either a PNG image or a PDF file.

Here you can see the two icons to do that export in the menu bar. I’ve overlaid the actual PNG image displayed in my IrFanView application so you can get an idea of how your design will convert over. The conversion is pretty much an exact representation with your design, and I saw no quality flaws or errors with either exporting to PNG or PDF.

In my personal opinion, this application is one of the best online flowchart applications I’ve seen, however it probably runs neck-and-neck with a lot of the mindmapping apps out there, which are pretty impressive as well. I only hope that when it goes off beta that the application developers are smart enough to provide  scaled-down free version as a promotional offering – and because…well, most of us here at MUO never usually pay for software unless we absolutely have to!

Go ahead and get your invite, try it out and let us know what you think of this app in the comments section below.

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The problem is that most home users of moderate means can’t usually afford the Office package that includes Microsoft Project. The majority of home computer users will have the standard office package, such as the 2007 Home and Student edition which has Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote.

However, at home I also have a number of involved and complicated projects that I’m trying to manage, as does my wife and if you have any teenage kids at home – project management software could help them tremendously with managing their time between homework, school projects, sport events and everything else life dishes out upon a vibrant and busy family. I am very pleased to present a shockingly free and very creative online project management tool called Gantter.

Free Creative Project Management Software Just By Typing a URL

Here’s what blew me away. I’m accustomed to testing dozens of free applications every month, and most of the time you need to at least provide an email address or some other way to identify yourself. Surprisingly, when you first visit the Gantter website, you’ll see yourself instantly staring at what looks like Microsoft Project. The website itself is the application, and once you visit it, you can instantly start creating your own project management file.

For me, such a creative way to use a project management application is like a dream come true. You can create a Microsoft Project compatible file for any project that you’ve got going on. This application lets you save those files (or even PDF exports) onto your USB flash drive. Later, when you want to make changes to your project, just go to any computer, pop in your USB drive and visit Gantter, where you can open that file and modify it however you wish.

It doesn’t matter whether the computer you’re using has MS Project or not. And if you already use MS Project at work? Even better – now you can take your work anywhere with you and edit those MS Project files remotely, whether you’re working on a computer at an Internet Cafe, a library or anywhere else.

I decided that I would finally start writing that novel that I’ve always wanted to get started on but couldn’t because these MakeUseOf article deadlines keep getting in the way – so why not work on my novel while I’m working on a MakeUseOf article? 

My first step was to create my task list for the novel project.

Creating the task list is fast and easy, but the real power of this online application is where you set the predecessors (the work you need to get done before you can start on that task). Just like in MS Project, Gantter automatically schedules out all of your work based on what you need to do and when you need to do it. All you need to think about is one task at a time.

For example, here I’ve clicked on setting up the predecessor for writing the second chapter, which I can start doing the moment the first chapter is done (I don’t need to finish revising the first before I get started on the second.)

Also, on this screen you can add additional notes for this task, as well as assign resources that you’ve configured in the “resources” section of the application. Gantter takes all of this information that you feed it and generates a nice, clear schedule (Gantt chart) for you off to the right side of the screen.

Exploring the software a bit, it’s apparent that this isn’t some cheap, fly-by-night web app – this is a well thought out and very well programmed online application that works fast and efficiently throughout my testing on Firefox and Internet Explorer. The features are many, as you can see from my drilling through the menus.

Saving and Accessing Your Projects

So, what do you do when you’re done planning out your project and you want to save the file? Obviously, you can’t store the data in your account, because you don’t have an account. If you pretend that this application is just like any other desktop application you use, then the answer is simple – just click save!

That’s the beauty of Gantter – it’s like you’re using a desktop application even though you’re using your Internet browser. You can either save the file or export it to MS Project. Saving downloads your file as a “project.xml” file, which you can access later from this same website.

Copy the XML file to your USB drive, and later when you come back to the website (no matter where you are in the world), just click File -> Open and you’ll be able to browse to your USB drive and open up your saved XML file.

Simple. Easy. Convenient. Those are the three words I think about when I use this online application. No sign-up required, no download required and no money required. The application was written by Volodymyr Mazepa, a Ukraine-based IT project manager – one IT manager who clearly knows his stuff. I encourage anyone who uses this application to click on Help -> About and send Volodymyr a hearty thank-you for his excellent work and for offering us this high-quality online application at no cost, a very rare act of kindness these days.

Do you have any online project management apps that you prefer? What do you think of Gantter? Share your opinions in the comments section below.

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For example, if I’ve written an article about something related to the paranormal or related research that I do in that area, I usually promote it from my Twitter account. If the article is about social networking or cool gadgets you can add to Facebook, then I promote those articles on Facebook.

During my research for new and unique applications, I discovered yet another very cool way to promote articles using a form of viral marketing that I’ve not used very often up to now – video promotions.

I’ve never been one to pick up a digital camera and start trying to shoot unforgettable videos for YouTube, maybe because words are my thing and I prefer using them to express myself. However, I recently came across an amazing app called the Article Video Robot, which lets you automatically convert any article into a video with background and foreground images, titles and subtitles and even background music and voice-over audio.

Hard to believe? In this article I’ll show you the process I took to convert my recent article titled “Find a Song Title Just By Humming the Lyrics” into an online video that I can share on Facebook, Blogger or any other social network or website.

Marketing Articles With Videos?

You’ve probably seen those viral marketing videos with dramatic background music and voice-overs that capture your interest and keep you watching? Picture a 30 tor 40 minute movie preview where you’re offered a glimpse of some of the most intriguing highlights of the movie? Well, that’s what this application does for your articles.

Before we get started, there’s one important issue to cover – whether or not this software is really free. Downloading it from CNET it’s labeled as free, and I was able to install and run it without registering or offering any identifying information. With that said, when you run the application you’ll see that it’s powered by ArticleVideoRobot, which offers the same functionality from its website with a limited 14 day trial. As far as I can tell through my testing, this particular application does works for free for anyone, but I can’t promise how long that will last or how long the videos you create will remain active and online. With that said, let’s step through the software and you’ll see why I think it’s very cool.

The first screen you see when you start the app is the ability to automatically convert an EzineArticles article you’ve written into a video – apparently the app is well integrated with that article directory. If you’re not an author there, just click next and you’ll see the screen above. Type in your article title and copy & paste your article text in the field below it. Under this there are a few other fields where you’ll  enter your author name, the category of your article and a link to your website.

Within just a few seconds, your article is automatically converted, and you’ll have the option to view the default version of it, edit the video so that you can customize the backgrounds, images and voice-over audio, or just immediately start distributing the video. In my case, I know that I’ll want to tweak the video a bit, so I opt to edit the video first.

When you click to edit the video, the application launches Internet Explorer and you’re brought to an online video editing wizard that steps you through the process of modifying your article. On this page, I’d suggest selecting to automatically break the article into paragraphs as this creates a sort of slideshow slide for each paragraph. Click on next.

Playing around with this next step, I realized there are two parts. What you see on this page includes the title and subtitle, and these are what get displayed on each “slide”. Keep in mind that for each paragraph you can opt to have a title, a subtitle, an image and/or voice-over. The free version doesn’t allow embedded video clips, but I encourage you to use image because they aren’t displayed in a static fashion – instead they make a cool transition onto and then off of the screen, as does the animated text as well. Make sure these are short one-sentence blurbs that sound intriguing enough to make your audience stick around. For each paragraph you’ll notice the voice-over editing option.

In my opinion, this is the coolest part of the application. The voice-over text is what the audience will hear spoken during that slide. It doesn’t have to match your title and subtitles. You can select from any of the digitized voices, and they’ll read out your text, or, even better, you can click the “Record Voice” tab and record it in your own voice!

When you’re through with the voice-over for each paragraph, the next step is to choose a background image that will display behind your text. This image displays through the entire video and doesn’t change.

The next step was the most fun for me, you can select from a long list of stock background music. The default Halo Theme is pretty cool, but there are a lot of others as well, including country, hip hop, classical and of course a number of excellent dramatic compositions that really capture attention.

When you’re through, go ahead and preview your customized video that offers viewers an impressive preview of your article’s highlights.

When you opt to share your video, you’re offered a list of networks and websites to choose from. The app will either automatically log in (if you provide your credentials) and share it out for you, or you can select from the provided embed code and do it yourself. This is the link to the video I created above in about 15 minutes or so – you can definitely create a much higher quality video from your article if you make the time and effort to do so.

Can you think of any cool ways to make use of this article to video converter? Do you know of any other resources that can do this kind of thing? Share your insight in the comments section below.

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Unfortunately, due to the overwhelming popularity of Ebay, the field isn’t anything like it used to be. I originally had a bit of a niche in the antiques business thanks to my Ebay powerseller account and my trusty and rare mobile internet device, and therefore I had a major advantage over the old-school antique dealers. Today, you’ll find that 20-30% of the people attending antique auctions are now Ebay sellers, and these days everyone has mobile internet access.

Because of the growing competition and difficulty to draw out decent profit from those antique purchases, I turned to buying direct from stores going out of business. These are often auctions as well, but they are a whole different breed. With antique auctions, the people attending are usually there for a very select type of item that was advertised, such as Hummels, Steuben art glass or Waterford for example. At auctions where stores are going out of business, it’s a completely different ballgame. Many specific items are not advertised and when you go, you pretty much get what you get. This is still an area where the technically savvy person can create a very sweet niche for themselves. I eventually turned to writing and editing as a primary form of income – but buying up surplus for cheap is definitely a promising money-making venture. So, let’s get to a few online resources and tools that will give you that competitive advantage.

Buy From Business Liquidation Companies

Before you get into this business, it’s important to understand the various forms of inventory cutbacks businesses go through. Before they’ve gone as far as bankruptcy, many businesses try to save the company by turning excess assets into cash so they can pay down debts. This is called liquidating assets, and there’s an entire industry built on helping companies liquidate their assets – including vehicles, electronics, household goods and more. You name it – it’s probably being liquidated somewhere. The way to make money as a reseller (that’s you), is to buy up huge lots of liquidated assets (surplus) at about 30 to 40 percent under retail. Then, turn around and sell them to your customers at retail (or if you really want to do well – offer 10 to 20 percent discounts to your customers on Ebay or your online store).

Where do you find these liquidations? Online, of course. Go to the surplus inventory section of Business.com and you’ll find a long list of liquidation companies where you can buy pallets of goods. Now, keep in mind we’re talking pallets and truckloads here. These businesses are used to dealing with brick-and-mortar stores that will buy a truckload of these surplus items at a time (which can cost tens of thousands of dollars) – so only take this option if you’re very serious about starting such a business. Startup costs are high – but your potential profit is tremendous, especially in the area of surplus electronics. For example, at that Business.com page, I found Discount Wholesalers, where you can buy pallets of surplus electronics at 35% discounts or more.

A downside to the liquidation industry is that there are also scam artists throughout who will send boxes filled with returns or otherwise non-working items. Just check out any online feedback available on them or check with the Better Business Bureau, but when you do find a legit one – hang on to it and run because not many people have the courage (or money) to invest, so if you do, you’ll be rolling in profits.

Buy Your Products From Auctions

Unless you’re a licensed auctioneer or a liquidation firm, the odds of success by contacting a business directly that’s facing bankruptcy in order to purchase their assets directly is slim to none. The bankruptcy or liquidation process usually involves a law firm that contracts out the asset liquidation to large firms or auction companies.  This article has already covered the liquidation route, but what about buying those “going-out-of-business” goods at auctions? The biggest problem I had when attending auctions is that you had to go to the location and register to buy so you could sit in the audience and hold up your bidding number. Well, with the Internet the world of auction buying has completely changed. You can now sit in your pajamas, in the luxury of your own home, and take part in these auctions live. I’m going to cover the top four resources you can use to locate and take part in these auctions. These are the most effective resources to purchase going-out-of-business merchandise.

The first, and in my opinion the best, live auction website is BidSpotter.com.  When you first go to the site, you’ll see that you can choose from three main auction categories – antiques & collectibles, agriculture & construction and industrial & commercial.

For businesses that are going belly-up, you want to go for industrial & commercial. When you view the listings page, you’ll notice auctions for businesses of all types.

Now, something to keep in mind when you search through these is that just because the auction is for something like a bakery doesn’t mean there won’t be anything useful there. These auctions sell off everything the business used – and many times these are items that are not even related to the particular industry. This is why it’s the best way to get awesome deals – you may be competing with bakery business owners or tool machine shop owners – so when electronics, computers or other items you’re interested in come along, you can bid low and often win. The experience is pretty cool too – it’s like being right there at the auction in person. Here, I am attending a toy auction going on in South Dakota (I live in Maine).

Two tips if you decide to try this. First, call the auction house early and register to bid so you’re ready when the auction starts. Second, don’t take your time when bidding starts – bid fast! There are people sitting around waiting for you, so when you sit there thinking, it gets very annoying for the people who are actually there. Be a courteous online bidder and the auction house will love it when you virtually attend.

There are a couple more sites that also offer live online auctions like this, and by using all of them you’ll increase your chances of finding the going out of business auctions that suit your needs. LiveAuctioneers is the next one, and in my opinion it seems to feature more auction listings than any of the others I’ve seen.

There are a lot of categories and the chances are very good that you’ll find the sort of auction that you’re looking for. All of these are live – just find the scheduled auction and be online when it takes place.  Another one of the best live auction sites to locate bankruptcy auctions is definitely iCollector.com. This is another site with a constantly updated stream of upcoming auctions.

What makes this site special is that you can find auctions from all around the world. For example, at the moment there are live auctions scheduled and listed for Spain, Canada and Switzerland as well. While this particular site is weighted a bit more toward antiques and collectibles, you can find closeout auctions here as well.

Have you ever taken part in a live auction online, or have you ever bought liquidated items to resell before? Share your own experiences and insight in the comments section below.

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So I’m taking this opportunity to share the wisdom that I’ve gained from that experience so that, possibly, I can save the next poor soul the trouble and heartache that I had to suffer through.

Am I being over-dramatic? Maybe. But what you have to understand is that at the very center of my livelihood is the Internet. I earn income, learn and unwind all on the Internet. When I lose that connection to the virtual world – I’m not a happy camper.

Rewind several months to the day when I purchased a new, shiny Sony Vaio laptop. I brought it home, excitedly opened up the box and turned it on, expecting the brand new laptop with a build-in wireless ethernet card to instantly sense my home network and connect almost completely automatically. Unfortunately, it sensed nothing. Many hours later, after an unmentionable amount of coffee consumed, I finally had my new Vista laptop on the Internet and screaming.

To save MUO readers out there who find themselves in this situation countless hours of aggravation, I’d like to offer the most important lessons I learned about Vista during this ordeal. Earlier, Aseem offered applications you can install that will improve your PC performance. However, I’d like to present the top five ways you can tweak Vista itself to get your Internet connection working, and increase your overall Internet speed.

The Most Important Vista Internet Speed Tweaks – Once You Can Connect

New technology is fabulous when it works, but I was quite disgusted to learn that Microsoft implemented IPv6 on Vista and upon install it is set as the default. The silly part is that it simply doesn’t work well with devices that still utilize the IPv4 protocol – and to assume that most home networks are fully upgraded to the IPv6 protocol is a faulty approach to setting defaults.

Many people upgrade their PCs and laptops long before they consider replacing that old outdated router that’s been sitting in the basement for five years and still works perfectly. So, when they bring home that shiny new laptop with Vista installed, guess what – the laptop and the router simply refuse to talk.

So, if you’re unlucky enough to find yourself in this situation – the very first thing you should do before we can even get started speeding up the Internet, is to disable IPv6 so that you can at least get on the Internet in the first place. Here’s how it works.

First, go to Start -> Network -> Network and Sharing Center, and then click on “Manage Network Connections.”

In this screen, you’ll likely have a wireless connection displaying that it can’t connect to any network. Right-click on that icon and select “Properties.”

You’ll discover both IPv6 and IPv4 enabled. Go ahead and uncheck the box for IPv6 and click “OK.” You’ll need to reboot your computer, but afterwards if the protocol incompatibility was your problem (and it very likely was), you’ll find that your computer can now communicate fine with the router. Maybe. There is one other complication Microsoft introduced into Vista just to encourage you that much more to upgrade your router – it’s something called “autotuning,” and it’s also the next Vista tweak.

Vista Connection Tweak #2 – Autotuning

This is another case where the cutting edge technological advances being enabled on Microsoft’s operating system by default is a recipe for disaster for users who have older networks and older network devices (specifically older routers). Vista comes installed and enabled with something called “Receive Window Auto-Tuning.”

On advanced networks, it’s actually a pretty cool technology where the transfer of data is monitored and Vista automatically “tunes” the TCP window field to optimize packet transfer. Older routers simply do not “play nice” when it comes to that kind of window resizing. This spells trouble for home users who don’t know the difference between a packet of data and a packet of sugar. What was Microsoft thinking?

Luckily – there’s a way for you, the home user, to turn this default feature off as well. First, click on “Start” and type “cmd” and right-click on the command icon. You’ll see the following window.

Click on “Run as Administrator.”  Then, in the command box, type “netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=disabled” which will disable autotuning.

Now that you’ve got your new Vista finally communicating with your router (hopefully), you’re ready to tweak Vista even more in order to dramatically boost the Internet speed.

Vista Tweak #3 To Increase Internet Speed – Take Back Your Bandwidth

Another unnecessary default setting that Vista (and actually XP as well) comes with is a 20% “reserve” of your available bandwidth in order to accommodate certain applications like Windows Update. This tweak is a pretty common one most old-school users of XP already know – it’s not at all detrimental and you can immediately gain 20% of your bandwidth back, increasing Internet performance significantly.

This is called the QoS Reserve Bandwidth Limit, and to reduce this on any version of Vista you need to edit the registry.

Go to Start and type “regedit“. You may have to deal with the UAC, unless you’ve read Sharninder’s advice on how to speed up your Vista by turning it off! In Regedit, navigate to “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows”

Right-click on Windows and create a new key called “Psched“, then right click on the right and create a new “DWORD” entry. Name it “NonBestEffortLimit” and set the value to zero to disable reserve bandwidth.

Vista Tweak #4 – Modify Your Browser For Optimum Speed

Believe it or not, not only is your Vista operating system not configured by default to blaze the Internet as fast as possible, but neither is your Internet browser! These instructions include how to increase your browsing speed on Firefox and IE.

First, in Firefox type, “about:config” into the address bar (and ignore any warnings).  In the filter field, type “network” and scroll down to “network.http.pipelining” and set it to TRUE, and set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” from 4 to anything from 8 to 12.

I use Firefox almost exclusively, and this one change increased my page-load time by what felt like a factor of 50%. Of course, there’s a similar tweak for Internet Explorer as well, but you have to edit the registry. As before, go to Start and type “regedit.”

Navigate to “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Internet Settings” and find “MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server” and “MaxConnectionsPerServer.” Set these to at least 10, or a little higher if you would like. You should also see an increase in performance for IE after making this change as well.

Vista Tweak #5 – Increase DNS Cache

This tweak is one that anyone should do anyway, as it can significantly save time while surfing the web, especially if you tend to visit the same sites often. What the DNS cache does is store information retrieved from the nameservers (IP information) so that the next time you visit the same site, your browser doesn’t have to waste time retrieving the same information from the DNS servers.

You can optimize this by increasing the size of your DNS cache.  This is another registry edit – so go back in there (Start and type “regedit“) and navigate to “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Dnscache\Parameters” and then right click on the white space at the right and add four DWORD values: CacheHashTableBucketSize, CacheHashTableSize, MaxCacheEntryTtlLimit and MaxSOACacheEntryTtlLimit.

After checking a list of sites for the optimum setting for these values, the consensus seems to be decimal settings of CacheHashTableBucketSize to 1, CacheHashTableSize to 384, MaxCacheEntryTtlLimit to 64000 and MaxSOACacheEntryTtlLimit to 301.Of course, instead of using those old DNS servers, why not use OpenDNS?  When you’re done making all of the changes above, restart your computer and when it boots back up you’ll find yourself with a Vista PC that screams on the Internet.

Did these Vista tweaks increase your Internet speed? Do you know any other cool tweaks for Vista that work even better? Share your insight in the comments section below.

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Maybe you’ve lost the license that came with your legitimate software package that you paid for. Maybe you want to make a backup copy of your favorite DVD movie, but there’s copy-protection encoded onto the disk. Or maybe you’re just stuck on a popular online game and you want to know if there are any hacks available to level up in the game without the required effort.

Whatever your specific needs or situation – I’m not here to judge. In the field of computers and Internet technologies, just about everything is written in one programming language or another. No programmer is perfect – they all make mistakes. There are back doors, secret codes and vulnerabilities in just about any application you come across. Because of that, if you learn how to hack on your own, or just following the efforts of active hacking communities can provide you with tremendous eye-opening insight into the inner-workings of even your most “trusted” software applications.

Where You Can Go To Learn How To Hack Like a Pro

One thing that’s obvious when you visit the websites where professional hackers hang out – there’s so much about programming that even the most seasoned professional programmers don’t know. Professional hackers are an exceptional, amazing and terrible breed of individuals all packaged into one. While I write this, I realize that I am also describing over half of our readership – you know who you are! These folks take programming to an extreme that’s simply astounding when you see it in action.

While many of us write applications using all of the standard techniques that you learn in programming classes in college, these folks take programming into a realm where there are no rules. They can test all aspects of an application until they find a chink in the armor, and then exploit those vulnerabilities.

As we explore the world of hacking, it should be noted that there are two major forms of hacking – we’ll call it “white hat” and “black hat.” The “white hat” hackers call themselves “ethical hackers,” in that they find vulnerabilities and exploits only to make the programming and application communities more secure for everyone. However, there’s a whole other community of hackers who find vulnerabilities to do nothing more than exploit them as much as humanly possible. Now that you know what sort of community you may be entering, let’s get on with the list of top sites where you can learn how to hack.

#1 – CyberXtreme: Hacking and Warez

CyberXtreme is an impressive forum with a significant hacking section, but also entire sections on technology, graphics and even a tech support area. Here you’ll find cracks, secret codes, free download packages (some containing cracked software which may be illegal to download in your area, so be careful). The forum is very protective of its content, so you’ll have to register with a valid email address before you can even get a glimpse of the content that’s on the forums.

The hacking section is very detailed and, as shown above, includes not only free tools and software exploits, but if you want to learn some coding tricks from the resident hacking gurus, just enter the “Coding & Programming” forum and you’ll get your fill. Before long you’ll be writing up your own customized hacking tools!

#2 – EvilZone Hacking Forums

While the name, EvilZone, isn’t exactly the most inviting – it is easily one of the largest forum communities that you’ll find on the subject of hacking. With over 6,500 members and over 100,000 posts (and counting), this community likely has the skills and knowledge to answer any programming question you could possibly have. Just be careful about coming across as a “noob” – these guys don’t handle newcomers with kid gloves, so be careful.

You’d definitely be best off working through the programming and encyclopedia sections first, where you’ll find projects, tutorials and a lot more that will help you become educated and well-versed in hacking techniques and terminology.

#3 – Hack a Day

While I certainly don’t want to offer a nod to any blogs that may be considered competition, you really have to give credit where credit is due when it comes to a particular niche like hacking – and Hack a Day definitely offers an amazing library of information for anyone looking for specific categories like cellphones, GPS or digital cameras. You’ll find all hacks organized by category in the right column.

More than any other site, this particular “hacking” site is very much hardware based, and they redefine the meaning of the word hacking by literally hacking up electronic devices like a Gameboy or a digital camera and completely modifying it. Of course you’ll still find the occasional software hack, such as how to remove the Blackberry download limit.

While I personally don’t find the articles themselves very detailed (as an EE, I like schematics and elaborate descriptions) – but the site makes up for it with video demonstrations throughout.

#4 – Hack In The Box

If any site could be classified as the most comprehensive site to learn how to hack, this would be it. Hack In The Box is more about security and ethical hacking than anything else – and that’s more than obvious reviewing the classes and conferences listed on the main page.

The manage page is an informational portal that includes information from all other areas, including recent forum posts, conference updates, E-zine and news articles and a lot more. To be honest, there’s so much information stuffed on the main page that it’s almost overwhelming.

There’s a lot of material available, but if you’ve so interested in learning how to hack that you wouldn’t mind paying to attend a class or a conference – then this is the place to do it.

#5 – Hack This Site!

As always, saving the best for last – I’d like to introduce Hack This Site! This website is one of the coolest, free programmer training sites where you can learn how to hack accepting one of the challenges.

The site designers offer various “missions,” where you need to figure out the vulnerability of a site and then attempt to use your new-found hacking skills (you’ve carefully studied all of the articles on the site, right?) to hack the web page. Missions include Basic, Realistic, Application, Programming and many others.

If you’re able to figure out how to properly hack any of the most difficult missions on this site, then you’ve definitely earned the title of professional hacker.

Have you ever tried any of the tips offered at any of these websites and do they work? Do you have any good resources of your own for readers to learn how to hack like the pros? Share your insight in the comments section below.

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Here at MakeUseOf, we’ve focused on a number of websites and tools that you can use to find a song by its lyrics, such as Brad’s article on the top 5 sites to find song lyrics online or David’s article on how to find song titles with just a few lyrics you do know. Today, I’d like to cover a very new solution that’s available for the most common scenerio – when you don’t know the title of the song or any of the lyrics, but you can hum or whistle the song just fine!

Voice Recognition Technology Saves The Day

There are a number of cutting edge computer technologies that have always fascinated me, mostly because they represent areas where computers are finally entering into the realm of artificial intelligence. Two of those include image recognition and voice recognition.

While I’ve not followed the state of the art of each field, I’ve always been under the impression that both areas of computer intelligence have a very long way to go. However, what would you say if I told you that I’ve discovered a computer program, an online application to be exact, that you could sing, hum or whistle a tune to and it could accurately guess the title of the song. Images of science fiction movies, where starship crew members seek the help of the ship’s AI computer system come to mind. Well, it’s no longer science fiction – this technology is now a reality at Modomi.

Midomi itself isn’t exactly a very special or unique website. Just like every other website where you can search for and purchase music online, Midomi lets you research music, bands and more. You can watch music videos, listen to music clips or even join the Midomi fan club for any particular music group. However, the true heart of Midomi becomes apparent (and the site absolutely comes alive) when you start becoming “fans” of particular groups. As you enter fan pages, you’ll become aware of a Facebook-like social network of music lovers. As I was browsing through this site, I noticed something rather unique compared to most other music websites. Midomi once again takes advantage of interactive audio by allowing fans to make and upload their own recordings of the music that they’re fans of.

As a fan, you can listen to any of these uploaded recordings. I joined the Green Day fan club and immediately saw user dude34bja’s recording of When I Come Around at the top as the most listened to recording. I clicked on it and was blown away by her fantastic acoustic rendition of the song. You too can record your own version of any of your favorite songs if you click on the “Studio” menu option at the top of the Midomi page.

Record your songs, and if your good enough you’ll very likely develop your own fan base right within the Midomi online community. Get enough votes and you actually appear as a “Midomi star.” In addition to recording music, the Midomi site is just completely integrated with audio at every turn. You can even upload audio comments at the site instead of typing them.

Now, all of this is very cool – but what about the whole reason we came to the site? That little box at the top of the first page that reads, “Click and Sing or Hum.”  Does it really work?  I decided to test the accuracy of this online application by humming Losing My Religion, by R.E.M.  After clicking the text box, the recording began.

I hummed the first 16 seconds or so of part of the song – no words whatsoever – just straight humming. I was absolutely convinced there was no way that this application would be able to recognize the song without a single line of lyrics. When I was done I clicked on “Click to Stop” and waited for the results. This is what came up.

The top “guess” was a perfect match. Unbelievable. I figured it was a fluke – a completely lucky guess, so decided to try it again with a more difficult tune that wasn’t so modern – I went back and hummed the first 15 seconds of “Over the Rainbow,” sung by Judy Garland in the Wizard of Oz. I chose this song because there is absolutely no way I can hum it perfectly in tune. After 15 seconds of forcing the recorder to suffer through my cracking and screeching as I attempted to hum some of the tune, I clicked stop and grinned. No way it’s going to know what that horrid noise was. The following were the results.

I have to say, if anything convinced me – this did. As far as I can tell, you only need to know the general tune of a song – no title and no lyrics required. This amazing little Midomi web app will remind you of the title after just a few seconds of humming. Even better – you can download the app to your iPhone and carry around this little song-title-reminder app with you everywhere. Hard to believe? Visit the site and give it a shot – and let us know in the comments section below whether it blew you away. I know it did for me. Have fun!

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What a question. Just think of the necessary evidence that one would need to produce in order to prove, or disprove, that statement. In fact, what is the question about really? Is it whether a human brain or a computer is faster, or is it which form of information processing is better? Is it even a fair comparison? Today, I’d like to engage MakeUseOf readers into a debate on this subject by first providing my own take – and then asking for yours.

The Question: Does a Human Think Faster Than a Computer?

The question itself represents the fallacy of how people think about computers. When a person uses a computer, if it’s slow then it’s junk. But there are certainly other factors to consider when examining intelligence – what about image recognition, language recognition, multi-tasking capabilities or self-learning and self-healing features?

First, to partially answer the “speed” question we need to examine data transmission. In the Hartford Examiner, writer Joy Casad answers the question, “How fast is a thought” by describing the chemical/biological propagation of “thinking” neurons before getting to the point in the final paragraph – these neurons transmit signals at 0.5 milliseconds. That’s pretty fast!

In 2006, the fastest reported fiber optic transmission rate was 2.56 terabits a second. Okay, but a bit is nothing more than a zero and a one. Well – the current state of the art is the cutting edge subatomic technology created by Stanford researchers representing one bit with 35 electrons, or 35,000,000,000 electrons a millisecond. Due to the fact that axon/neuron electrical transmission depends on the chemical and biological environment it is in, data transmission of one neuron is actually millions of times slower than the fastest electrical transmission rates over copper electrical wire, and even slower compared to fiber optics. Score one for computers.

What About Processing Power?

The question of processing is a tricky one. According to the Top500 list of super computers, the fastest one as of 2009 is the RoadRunner BladeCenter at 12.8 GFlops (floating point operations per second).

A GFlop represents a billion operations per second. Now, you’re thinking of that Monday morning in class when your professor asked you to perform a simple calculation and your mind went blank. You’re ready to chalk up another point to computers, right? Wrong.

While the transmission of electrical impulses may be slower in the brain than over wire, the processing power of the brain is represented by not one, but thousands of processors backed into one major super computer. One example is the retina, which is sort of like your computer web cam, in that it transmits light (images) to the brain for processing. Except the retina itself has its own processing power, sort of like a subprocessor – 100 million neurons packed into a one centimeter by one millimeter space.

This stunning little processor is capable of processing ten images, each of about a million light points, every single second. Not only that, the data isn’t transmitted over a single fiber of nerve cells, but over a cable to the brain made up of a million of these fibers, all transmitting bits of data at the same time in parallel. If you multiply the processing power of this volume of neurons by the overall size of the average 1,500 cubic cm human brain, the overall processing power of the brain is about 100 million, million operations per second. For those of you who are trying to do the math with your super computer brain – that’s over 100,000 times more processing power than today’s cutting-edge super computer.

Image and Language Recognition, Learning and Common Sense

If our brains are such super computers, then why do we feel so dense and so slow sometimes? I don’t know about you, but I’m horrible at doing calculations in my head. The problem is that people think of computers only in terms of how many calculations it can do per second. The truth is, when it comes to intelligence there’s so much more to process than calculations alone. How do you calculate what the tone of someone’s voice implies they are really saying?  How do you calculate the irony of a joke that, when taken literally, makes no sense at all? This is where the true power of the human brain makes itself known.

Have you ever had a friend who was such a genius that they could perform the most astounding calculations in their head, or they could fathom the most complex equations or problems imaginable – yet when faced with the simplest common-sense joke, they just didn’t get it? This is the major difference between a human brain and a computer.

Author Gary Marcus writes, in his book on the human mind that, “The fundamental difference between computers and the human mind is in the basic organization of memory.”

What he means is that a computer organizes information in a logical way. To retrieve data, the computer uses logical storage locations. A human brain, on the other hand, remembers where information is stored based on cues. Those cues are other pieces of information or memories connected to the information you need to retrieve. This means that the human mind can connect an almost unlimited number of concepts in a variety of ways, and then sometimes disconnect or recreate connections based on new information. This allows the human to step outside the boundaries of what has already been learned – leading to new art and new inventions that are the trademark of the human race.

There are a lot of other ways the human mind blows computers away – it can self repair itself, it can produce chemical reactions within its host body to induce instinctive reactions and protect itself from danger, it can handle every last function required to operate the machine of the human body while simultaneously processing information from outside that body, and most importantly it can continue learning and building new connections within that contextual storage array in ways that seem infinite.

In short, the answer to the question “Does a human think faster than a computer?” is yes. And it can also do a whole lot more than that.

Geeks out there – weigh in with your opinion in the comments section below!

Image Credits: cbowns

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The truth is, the Internet and its various technologies offer paranormal and conspiracy enthusiasts with a lot of useful tools for not only connecting with others who share the same interests, but also for conducting the research itself.

The field of Ufology is no different. While there are certainly a number of kooks and crazies hanging around, there is a also a very large community of researchers who diligently investigate and catalog UFO encounters from around the world. In an effort to help unite all of those efforts, and to offer you the reader with a page to bookmark that has all of those resources in one place, I would like to present the top 8 websites where you can read about the latest UFO sightings from around the world.

Tracking The Latest UFO Sightings on Google Maps

When I first found this website, I thought it was a joke. When you visit UFOmaps, you’ll discover a fascinating Google map view with images of flying saucers (representing the latest UFO sightings) spread over the entire map. The sheer number of sightings for each particular year is pretty surprising, but it’s also important to keep in mind that a lot of these sightings are very likely situations where the person reporting saw something terrestrial and just didn’t know what they were looking at.

The cool thing about this resource is that unlike most of the other database sites for the latest UFO sightings, this one offers a graphical representation of those sightings and you can click on any of them to read more about the sighting.

If you click on “Read full report,” you’ll find that most of these sightings come from the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC), which is a major UFO reporting center and a great resource for data. Unfortunately, while you may find a few sightings across the world, the bulk of the reports come from the United States.

The Biggest UFO Research Organizations

Speaking of NUFORC, they also offer an excellent text-based database search that you can use to dig through many years of sightings reported to them by regular folks just like you.

Peter Davenport is the current NUFORC director and he has done a magnificent job with the design of this main page through the years. When I first became interested in Ufology, I used to just browse through the NUFORC database archives for the latest UFO sightings in my area.  Of course, if you’ve actually seen an object in the sky that you can’t explain – click on the report form and file your own report!

There are also a few other major UFO centers that you’ll want to check out if you’re interested in the latest UFO sighting reports and information – the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) and Mutual UFO Network (MUFON). These organizations strive to scientifically examine the phenomenon within a field where scams, hoaxes and con artists are par for the course.

Research Resources for Both Historic Events and Latest UFO Sightings

While the big guys listed above are certainly some of the best resources for current UFO information, there are also some newer or more obscure resources that I’d like to share. A very new UFO database is the JTC UFO database – a user-driven collection of research including newspaper clippings, photos and much more.

What makes this collection so interesting is that you’ll find historic cases dating back to the 1700’s and 1800’s, drawn from resources such as Jacques Vallee’s Passport to Magonia. Sifting through these sightings is a very intriguing experience.

UFOInfo is another great resource – not so much because of its website but because of two specific sections – the Magonia Database and the Humanoid Sighting Listing compiled by Robert Rosales. The Magonia Database is a complete listing of cases that Vallee compiled from throughout an entire century.

The collection is exhaustive and each specific sighting lists the location and about a paragraph worth of details about the event.  The Humanoid Sighting Listings span from 1000BC (seriously) all the way up to 2009 and beyond. Before you laugh, go in and read one or two stories. Many of them read like terrifying ghost stories, and they are especially creepy because the witness insists the story is true.

Doing Some Serious Research

If you are interested in getting down into the volumes of cases that exist throughout the literature, the resources I’m about to offer below represent the lions share of what you’ll find anywhere else. The first site is the BlueBookArchive.

For readers who don’t know – Project Blue Book is the infamous multi-year Air Force study into the phenomenon of UFO sightings. While a large majority of the cases studied by the Air Force were explained away, there remains a good bulk of cases that defy explanation. For years these documents were all archived away in paper form, but now thanks to the efforts of the Fund for UFO Research (FUFOR), Project 1947 and other groups, you can now explore the 50,000+ documents through this free online search tool.

Browse or search the archives yourself and learn why so many of the people involved in the Blue Book research eventually became heavily involved in the civilian Ufology efforts after the Air Force shut down the study.

Finally, getting back to conducting research on the latest UFO sightings, one website that deserves mention simply for the sheer bravery of the man running it is the UK based PRUFOS police sighting database. This website is run by Gary Heseltine of the British Transport Police, and through this website he offers police a level of security and safety in reporting their own UFO sighting without fear or ridicule or losing their job.

With the reports offered on this site, Gary provides complete listings of both historical cases and modern cases. By providing cases studies of sightings involving police officers, this particular police officer hopes to elevate the public respect for witnesses of these strange events, and in effect bring a bit of credibility for all UFO witnesses.

Have you ever experienced a UFO? Are you a UFO enthusiast and have your own favorite research tools or resources? Share your opinion in the comments section below.

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I’ve previously written a couple of articles here about Facebook, such as the controversial method on how to view private Facebook profiles, or how to email mobile photos to your Facebook account. However, in addition to those tips, there are other codes and features that aren’t immediately obvious to most users – so I wanted to provide a list of the top 6 of my favorite Facebook “hack” codes and tips to other Facebook enthusiasts out there.

#1 – The Konami Code Lens Flare Hack

This is a rather silly hack, but if you’re visiting friends who may not be very computer savvy – this is a very easy way to impress them with your hacking skills. Borrow their computer (or bring your laptop), log into your Facebook account, and then on the computer keyboard just type the following key sequence of arrows and letters exactly: UP-UP-DOWN-DOWN-LEFT-RIGHT-LEFT-RIGHT-B-A-<Enter>

Then, click around on your Facebook page, or scroll up and down the page (this seems to work best), and you’ll discover a pretty cool display of lens flare effects.

Oddly, the effect isn’t horribly annoying because it disappears pretty quickly when you really need it to. It isn’t the most impressive hack though, because it’s probably the most common one mentioned across the net – but it’s still kind of cool and fun to play around with.

#2 – Aye, Make Yer Profile a Pirate’s Page You Landlubber!

The second profile hack is also one of the easiest to implement. Facebook offers users the ability to transform their Facebook pages into any language that they like. If you scroll down to the lower left corner of your profile page, you’ll see your current language setting. Click on this, and you’ll have a list of all languages available to you. Notice the English Pirate option?

Ahoy matey – yer now a Cap’n! Now as you go through your profile page you’ll notice some pretty hilarious pirate variations.

Now, the wall is the Plank, your profile is the Cap’n’s Log, and you can now either click a post as pleasin’ to me eye (like) or blabber t’yer mates (comment).  It certainly removes the “boring” factor from your old standard Facebook pages.

#3 – Upside Down Status Updates

If you’ve been on Facebook long enough, you’ve probably noticed a few people posting upside down status updates. They sure do think they’re clever don’t they?!  Yes, you too can be the envy of all of your friends and family by posting your updates so that people have to look silly by tilting their heads upside down so they can read it.

Most of the people you’ve seen doing this have likely installed a Facebook app just to do so. However, I dislike installing apps because you always have to provide permissions to those applications to access your profile. A better approach is to use the free online application at FlipText to generate your upside down status update.

Simply copy the upside down text from the lower text box, paste it into your Facebook status box and post!

#4 – Download Complete Photo Collections From Your Friends’ Profiles

If you have a lot of friends on Facebook, you may not have the time to keep up with all of the new family photos they’ve posted – but you are very interested in them and would love to have them stored in your own private photo collection to review later. Well, thanks to a very cool FireFox plug-in called FacePAD, you can do just that. The add-on is awesome, and I would recommend that anyone with the resources to do so should send in a contribution to Arthur Sabintsev for his efforts.

After you install the FacePad plug-in, make sure you select Tools->Add-Ons, and configure the options for FacePad so it has your correct Facebook language. Then, all you have to do is go to your friend’s photo albums, right-click on the title and select “Download Album With FacePAD.”  That’s right, you’re not downloading a single picture – but an entire album.

Once you do, FacePad downloads every single image within that album into the download folder you’ve configured in FireFox. Don’t forget to organize all of those photos using JetPhoto, as recommended earlier by Jeffry.

#5 – Schedule Facebook Status Updates With Sendible

Do you like to keep your Facebook profile active, but you’re coming down with a cold and may be offline for a few days?  Maybe you’re taking a trip and won’t be anywhere near a computer for a week. Or maybe you’ll be playing hooky from work and traveling, but you want your colleagues and boss to think you’re stuck at home sick. Accomplish any of these wishes by using Sendible to schedule your Facebook status updates. This is an application Daniel covered earlier, so check out his article for more details.

But for Facebook specifically, once you sign up with Sendible, just click on Facebook and provide your Facebook login details. Sendible connects directly with your Facebook account. The, under “New Messages” click on “Status Updates“.

On the next page you can schedule out as many updates as you’d like! This service is awesome – and you can distribute scheduled updates to a number of social networks including MySpace, Blogger, Twitter and more.

#6 – Hide Your Online Status From Certain People

Look, don’t feel bad about it. When I first joined Facebook I left my online status wide open. After a couple of weeks of getting inundated with nonstop chat requests, I simply turned off my online status completely. Problem solved. Except, there really were certain people I wouldn’t mind hearing from – is it really fair for a few chatterbox buddies to ruin your chances for communicating with everyone? Well, there is a way for you to selectively block your online status from certain people.

All you have to do is open up your chat icon in the lower right corner of your Facebook display, click on Friend Lists, and create a new list called “BlockList.” Make sure after you create it that it’s configured under “Display these lists in Chat.”

Now, all you have to do is either click “edit” and add the friends you want to block, or if they’re already online, just click their name and drag them under this new list. Once you’ve got everyone there who you want to block from see your online status, hover your mouse over the green dot to the right and click on “Go Offline.” Now, you appear offline to only those certain friends.

Facebook, unlike MySpace, is not really easy to tweak – which is actually a good thing. Gone are the days of those horrid eye-bleeding pages with pink flashing backgrounds and instant music that you can’t turn off. However, the tweaks and plug-ins in the list above offer at least a few ways to customize your Facebook account and usage to suit your life and your personality.

How do you use Facebook? Are there any hacks or add-ons not offered here that you especially like to use? Share them in the comments section below!

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It became very clear to me that Facebook was not your high school teenage fad. I found folks from my old home town – some of them well into retirement age – happily posting status updates about their daily activities, struggles, joys and thoughts. This, I thought to myself (and still do), is something that’s going to have major social ramifications. I’m not really sure what they are going to be, but the proliferation of Facebook throughout the world and throughout most industries completely fascinates me.

However, there is this one little thing that absolutely annoyed me about Facebook. You have to go to the site, do the Facebook login, and keep it open in order to receive status updates, notices or alerts about what’s going on. Sure, you could configure your profile to send notifications to your email address, but then you have to constantly check your email – and who wants an email box completely spammed by Facebook notifications? So, after buying a new PC with Windows Vista installed – complete with neat desktop sidebar applications – I started looking for a way to do the Facebook login automatically and receive instant status updates directly to my desktop, without having to log into Facebook all the time.

During that search, I discovered two perfect free Facebook login tools – the Facebook Sidebar Gadget, and MyFacebook. Just to save you some time – I opted for MyFacebook because it offered more interactive features. If you’d rather go for that, scroll down to the MyFacebook section. However, I also wanted to review the Facebook Gadget as well – and since that’s the one I tried first, I’ve reviewed it first.

Automatic Facebook Login With The Sidebar Gadget

For widgets and applications that automatically connect to your Facebook account, you need to acquire and configure a special number that gives that application “permission” to check your Facebook account for you. When you download the gadget and click on the file to install it, it’ll place the gadget on your sidebar as shown here.

When you click on “Login” the app automatically opens to your Facebook page, where you’ll need to do the regular Facebook login if you haven’t already. There, you’ll see this window.

Just click “Get login code for” and on the next screen click “Generate” and you’ll finally receive the magical “one-time” code to provide your gadget so that it can automatically do your Facebook login for you automatically.

Copy the code, and then go back to your desktop sidebar and click on the little “wrench” icon to the right of it. When you do that, the window will pop-up for you to enter your super-secret Facebook code.

Enter in the code, and now you’ll never have to do another manual Facebook login in your life.

The gadget displays your profile picture as well as your current status, and small icons and associated values next to them for how many pokes, events, friend requests, inbox messages, notifications, invitations, and group requests!  This is all fine and dandy, but I have one problem with the gadget. You don’t actually receive any realtime information from Facebook, it only provides you with the number of each item, and when you click on the little icon, it opens up a browser and takes you to that specific Facebook page. This is cool – but what if you just want to keep an eye on what your friends are up to without having to open up your browser?

In order to accomplish this task, I went back to Windows Live Gallery and downloaded the other Facebook sidebar gadget called MyFacebook.

Automatic Facebook Login With MyFacebook

When you download and install this sidebar gadget, the first thing you’ll see is the same request for the Facebook code. You’ll need to obtain the code the same way as described above.

Just click on the link and go through the same steps – click “Get Login Code” and then “Generate.” Copy the code and then go back to the gadget and click on the “wrench” icon. You’ll notice that in this case, the form looks just a bit different.

These additional fields are required because this particular gadget has more functionality than the one above. It will automatically provide you with your friends’ latest status updates and picture gallery photos (if you want). I’m not really interested in the albums, but I do want the friend updates. If you only want your “notifications,” but not specific content from your friends’ walls, you need to find the notification feed. Not sure where to find it? Just click on the link above where it says “you can get the feed url from here.”  You’ll be taken to a notifications page. Scroll down and on the right you’ll see “Your Notifications” – click on it.

This will take you to the actual RSS feed page for all of your notifications. All you have to do is copy the URL and paste it into the form on your sidebar gadget.

Now, getting your friend feed is much easier. In the sidebar gadget, just click on “click this link to enable Friends feed,” and then click “Allow Access” on the Facebook page that comes up – it doesn’t get much simpler than that.

The setup is similar to the previous gadget, except now that you have a real-time scrolling update of your friends’ status, the app feels much more interactive and always connected. Now, you can instantly update your own status, or you can just glance to the right and read the status updates of the latest few friends – and you don’t have to set foot inside any browser to do it!

Again – the links to these two apps are MyFacebook (my favorite), or Facebook Sidebar Gadget if that’s what you prefer.

Did you find either of these sidebar gadgets useful? Do you know of any other great social networking Vista sidebar gadgets? Share your insight in the comments section below.

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When I got my first apartment, it was the same way, but I had the opportunity to plan out more than one room. Unfortunately, the Internet was still in its infancy, and computer software that could generate floor plans were very expensive.

Today, students, apartment renters and home owners now have a very cool web app called FloorPlanner, where you can create a floor plan and place all of your furniture, appliances and more with one simple online application.

Create Any Floor Plan With FloorPlanner

Anthony briefly mentioned FloorPlanner in his article on 3 floor design services, and of course there’s always PlanningWiz, mentioned before at MakeUseOf.  But I wanted to dig a littler further into FloorPlanner to show you how functional and useful this particular web app can be when you’re moving into a new place and simply want to get a look at different ways you could arrange the furniture.

The 3D feature of this application alone makes it well worth a try – why spend all day pushing your furniture around the house when you can get a virtual look at your room set up the way you want it? Don’t like it – then try something else by clicking the mouse!

With the free account, you get access to one “house” but you’re not limited to the number of times you can delete and recreate the floor plan, so this application is a perfect scratch-pad for trying out different room designs.  If you’ve ever played the Sims series of video games, this will definitely feel like you’re playing the game.

You have access to different construction “items” such as walls, windows, doors and more – but you also have access to a long list of furniture and other items such as a couch, television set and even plants.

Each item has enough design choices that you can make your floor plan fairly detailed. The library contains 14 categories from including office, plants, garden objects and even people. You can simply drag and drop the item into your floor plan wherever you like. In this case I’m simulating the design of a dorm room with one door, so first I draw out the four walls and place the door.

You’ll notice, as you create your design, that while you’re drawing out walls or placing windows and doors, the app shows you the exact dimensions in either feet or meters (you can select your choice of units).

Once you’re done building the structural floor plan (this can get even more elaborate if you’re laying out an entire house), then you’re finally ready to start decorating! Now you can start choosing from the room items provided throughout the item library, rather than the construction items you’ve been using up until now.

Controls on the left side of the display screen, reminiscent of the controls on Google Maps, allow you to pan in all directions as well as zooming in and out. Here, you can see that I’ve designed a very retro-sheek layout with authentic leopard skin rug, big screen TV and a stylish mushroom bedside lamp. Yes, that’s a banana plant in the corner – stop laughing.

Now, in my opinion the absolute coolest part of this entire application is that when you click the little “3D” button in the upper right hand corner, the entire display mode changes over to a 3-dimensional representation of the floor plan you’ve just created – complete with little bitty animation on the television screen, how cool is that?

You can rotate the entire design simply by holding the mouse button and sliding the mouse around in any direction. View the room from any angle you like just to see how the layout will actually look in real life. Sometimes, setting up a room works great in your head until you start placing furniture and realize that it won’t work because certain furniture blocks a door or a window.

While the “export to picture” feature is unfortunately disabled in the free account, you still can share your designs with others on the web. Just click on “My Account” and go to your Dashboard. When you click on the green icon under “Actions” the screen above will come up, which provides you with links that you can send to your family and friends, or an iframe script that you can use to embed the design directly on your blog!

Have you ever used any floor plan design applications? Would you use one like this just to try out different room designs? Share your opinion in the comments section below.

FloorPlanner

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If a kid is especially skilled at leveling up in specific popular MMOG’s, or has a natural skill at creating virtual items, clothes or acquiring virtual “toys” (you’d be absolutely amazed what kids can do online today), then your own kid stands the chance to earn some pretty good money. In fact, should they spend several hours a day focused on this “job,” they could probably make almost as much as you do! Don’t believe it? I recently wrote an article about how teens can make money online by writing articles or writing programs for clients, but in this article I’d like to introduce you to the brave new frontier known as the virtual marketplace.

#1 – How Kids Can Make Money Online With Account Leveling

Do your kids spend countless hours playing popular multiplayer online games? Or maybe you don’t allow them to, but they constantly beg for more time for gaming? Or, on a more personal level, maybe you are one of those kids who love online gaming but your parents are constantly hounding you about getting off Halo or Second Life and telling you to find a job with all of that “spare time” you’ve got to play games.

Well, I’m here to offer all of the kids of a world with a powerful bargaining chip. What if gaming could be a job? What if you could earn more by leveling up in World of Warcraft than you could by flipping burgers are your local Burger King? This could be one of the most remarkable ways for kids to make money. Well I’m here to show you how that’s actually possible – depending on your particular skills within the virtual world.

Starting with the most popular MMOG site, World Of Warcraft, it’s not difficult to recognize how quickly such a community can turn into a dream opportunity for entrepreneurs. You’ve got a huge community of folks all working toward achieving similar goals. Some folks are much better at it than others, and excel much faster. In fact, there are some gamers who can level up on games like WoW or Halo to crazy levels in just a matter of hours. They know what to do, where to go and how to get it done.

Other people like to socialize, spend hours just roaming around and performing occasional quests. One thing mostly all MMOG players have in common is an envy for the “top echelon” of levels, and a common respect for those gamers who’ve made it there. This envy creates a marketplace by principle of “supply and demand.”  The demand for having an account that’s at a high, powerful level – and a low supply because of the difficulty and skill required in getting there. This gives skilled gamers an edge in a growing niche market.

If you want proof that there’s such a marketplace that even exists, just take a look at BuyMMOAccounts, one of the more popular places online to buy and sell WorldOfWarcraft accounts. Sure, some of these levels are amazing and not exactly easy, but you can be sure that if someone will pay almost $200 for a top account, they’ll be willing to pay you $50 to $100 for an account that gets them past all of the boring and annoying newbie levels that new players have to suffer through. There are people willing to invest in bypassing those levels, and you could use your gaming skills to offer them that valuable product that they desire. While WoW is the most popular for buying and selling accounts, almost every single MMOG out there creates its own marketplace. Play4Uber is a good example of a place where you can enter six such marketplaces to peddle your high-level accounts.

Play4Uber includes a section for WoW (both US and EU), GuildWars, Lord of the Rings Online, Final Fantasy XI and Eve Online. These are only two sample websites in a growing sea of sites that are popping up and offering you, the expert gamer, an opportunity to earn some awesome cash from those skills that you’ve developed during those late-night, Red Bull fueled gaming sessions.

#2 – Making Money With Special Items

If you or your kid is not so much a “leveling-up” sort of gamer, but you instead prefer participating in virtual worlds where items are earned, created, bought and sold in much the same way they are in the real world, then there are also money making opportunities for you too. In particular, the world of Second Life is seriously transforming what it means to be working online.This represents one of the coolest ways for kids to make money virtually.

At first, Second Life was a huge online community that was mostly just a novelty. But, as that community grew and the user base exploded, opportunities also grew for savvy and creative virtual entrepreneurs. Second Life offers users a creative and very flexible design tool where users can build their own items, from amazing cars to clothing to jewelry and more. Scripting is included so creators can incorporate functionality and behavior to those items. Rare, customized items are very much a status symbol within this virtual world – and they are rapidly increasing in demand and value. The place where you sell your items are most commonly right there in the virtual world. Blogs and forums throughout the Internet discuss the amazing items within their favorite niche, which you can find and buy on Second Life, such as this UK blog called “Music Thing.”

People actively spend their time designing item after item, and place them up for sale in their virtual Second Life store. Think kids can’t do something like this? Well then you may not be aware of Teen Second Life.

#3 – Raking In The Cash With Toddler Games Too

Most of the virtual income opportunities I’ve discussed in this article are focused on older kids, usually teens, who are now pros at games like Halo or World of Warcraft. But, what about those little ones who’ve grown tired of their Webkinz account (or should we say their Webkinz mansion) that they’ve spent several years building up. You’ve spent lots of cash buying those little stuffed animals and collecting codes, and your little kid spent hours playing games and collecting cool Webkinz items for their Webkinz home. Is there a way for your child to rake in a little cash for all of that effort? You bet there is – help them sell their Webkinz home.

Searching Craigslist for Webkinz accounts or Webkinz homes turns up an entire marketplace for Webkinz, and if your kid is especially adept at turning that $5 to $10 Webkinz code that comes with a stuffed animal into a sweet $50+ sale in a few days, that’s a nice wad of cash for their piggy bank!

It’s a whole new world online, and getting a “real job” just doesn’t mean what it used to. There are now virtual jobs that pay more than real jobs in most communities, and letting your kids explore the virtual world as an entrepreneur (rather than just as a gamer) will teach them business and marketing skills that they’d probably never otherwise learn.

Do you think online gaming is a growing market opportunity? Have you ever sold gaming items or accounts for real cash? Share your experience in the comments section below!

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