FunTastic Links - Cool, Fun and Useful WebSite Links Showcase

Showing posts with label useful. Show all posts

Become the handy man (or woman) you always dreamed, FixIt Club

This website deserves a review, and a very positive one. Basically, there you can find info on how to fix just about anything we have at home. Most of the problems we have in our house appliances and furniture are always the same and can be easily repaired, without spending a buck on tools or professional technicians, sometimes we just don't know how. The guides are very practical and accompanied by some useful pictures, and range from a television repair to a garage door reapir, a faucet repair, or even a small engine repair... Pretty much everything.

No registration required

[Go FixIt]

Quick free and fancy flash charts - Rich Chart Live

This tool is probably not something you will use often, but is always a good idea to keep it under your tool belt. The idea of creating fancy flash charts with astonishing effects is to have them embedded somewhere like on a website, a multimedia presentation or work report among others. The charts are created in just a couple of steps, and the data is inserted directly on the generator app, after that, you have the option to download the chart as a offline flash application, publish it to powerpoint or embed it in a blog or website using the html code provided. You can even save it in their servers for later reuse or rework. Another great example of the web 2.0 power...

No registration required

[go create a chart]

And since I had no better ideas for an example, here's a chart showing the number of comments and ratings of the latest ten posts in this blog at the time of this writing, being number one the last one. Roll your mouse over the chart to view the post title or click the bars to go directly to the post.

What about an online library? I mean, a real library with virtual books... Scribd

Imagine youtube, but for books... Scribd works just like that, users upload books, which stay available for other users to read. Just like that. Thing is, only original writings should be submited, truth is (and this is a small secret) pretty much everything is available for online reading there, from a recipe book to the latest "something for dummies", or the hottest novel of the moment. Registered users can download the books in pdf or plain text, and documents can be uploaded using almost any printable format like Word docs, PDF files or powerpoints. My guess is that if and when this website becomes publicly noticed, there will be some kind of censorship, like it happened with youtube, but for now is free and up for everyone. Have fun putting your readings up to date...

No registration required
Registered users can upload and download documents

[Go on and read a book]

Review your projects, work in a collaborative environment

First of all a confession. When I started this blog, I wasn't expecting to find some many cool and useful websites. I already have a very long website list to review and post about. This one is other of the awesome pearls I've found. In ReviewBasics, you can post your latest project whether is a website, a powerpoint presentation or a new banner ad, anything that could go digital. Then you simply invite people to review your material, and they can post comments, draw small signs with comments on your website screenshot for example, and many other things. As an example, suppose you were reviewing this blog and you don't like the scrat toon, you can make an arrow pointing to it, saying something like "I don't like the creepy look in his face". You can also use it as a project management tool, where two or more persons will work on the same project simultaneously. Really really nice...

Registration required

[ReviewBasics]

If you would like to review this blog, as an experiment, just post your email in a comment and I'll be glad to invite you to review it.

From the beggining to the end. Build your timeline or map...

This is an awesome tool, you can build timelines, embeding images, videos, links, a description, etc, and then show it up as a timeline, a list, a flipbook, or even a map, if you provide locations within the events. I can see a huge list of probable uses for this tool, including to use as a navigation aid in websites. Check my exemple bellow, I created a funtastic timeline, and I'm presenting it as a flipbook, then you can navigate by all the posts, and click on a link to go directly to the post. You can create a private timeline with the growth of your son, with fotos and videos, and show it to your family, or your wedding, or your career in some sport... Imagination is the limit. Enjoy.

Registration required
Aditional features available uppon a subscription

[build up your timelines]

Here's the funtastic timeline

Hernani C. on Dipity.

A new desktop to go. Take a look at g.ho.st

This one is for everyone that occasionally, or even on a daily basis, use public computers. Have you ever dreamed on having the same environment, the same files, the same bookmarks or even the same software everywhere you go? You could do that with a pen drive and portable software, but you become dependant on the pen and on the security policies of the cybercafe or school or wherever the computer is. I present you g.ho.st, total freedom for the public computer surfer. G.ho.st is a web based desktop, with free file storage, free email (yourname@g.ho.st), lots of software like a browser, an email client, a productivity suite or even games, all of this accessible from any flash enabled browser, which is almost 100% of browsers. Use it on firefox and press F11 to go full screen, and you wont even notice that you're running flash application inside a browser. It also offers a lite version for quick access, such as if you are only looking for some bookmark to show to some friend. As a final note, I must say that it looks like that g.ho.st developers are very active and adding new functionalities almost daily, and they also did a very good job on integreting third party web applications, like facebook or myspace, or even googledocs and many others.

Registration required

[Go g.ho.st]

Wanna listen to some music? Accuradio, the next generation radio

This is a must for all the music fans. It's a must for me at least. Accuradio offers thousands of musical genres and subgenres to choose from, from simply rock or jazz, to "Alternative 90s" or "Hiptronica". We can simply select one and start listening, or build our own chanel. Musics play randomly, but always with some logic. You have great control over the station your listening. You can pause and resume, skip musics or ban that band that pisses you off from playing. All the info about the musics playing is available to, what makes accuradio great to meet new stuff.

No registration needed

[Go listen to music]

Or try one of my favorite chanels

[All I want to do is rock]

Become a skilled computer graphic artist - Splashup, online graphical suite

Photoshop is expensive and not very friendly. The Gimp is free, but it really annoys me with all that floating panes over my desktop. But now you have Splashup. Yes, finally I can finally stop my restless sleeping nights... Or maybe I'm exaggerating. Anyway, splashup is an online flash application with advanced graphical editing capabilities, ans is also surprisingly very easy to use. Maybe the adobe guys should learn something with splashup fellows...

Optional registration, but not required

[Go splashup]

I've made my own Andy Warhol type picture using Uncle Bill's photo.

Let's Cuil for the funtastic links - Cuil.com latest "future google killer"

Hum, a fresh new search engine... They claim to be better than Google, and I must admit that all the searches I've tried gave-me satisfactory results. I won't say better, but different... The latest "future google killer" is here with a ultra sophisticated web search concept. They have the looks, so give them a try, they worthy of it.

No registration required

[go Cuil]

I've written an article about Cuil on Helium (Which ranked N. 1 :-D ) under the discussion Does Cuil.com poses a real threat to Google. I voted for the NO side, click to read.

PS. Cuil is an Irish word pronounced "cool", which is undoubtedly favorite word...

Urban Dictionary

Having trouble understanding your neighbour or your nephew? Check the urban dictionary, and maybe they have an explanation for you...

This is a collaborative dictionary of common slang.

No registration required
Registered users can add their own definitions

[Urban Dictionary]

This one is easy, but I love the definition:

air quote

In conversation, the dual flexing of the index and middle finger of both hands, to signify the presence of scare quotes. Used ad nauseam by 'pretentious' and ostensibly 'intelligent' university students, to advertise their 'superior morals' and 'erudition'.

Using air quotes in this example is, like, so 'post-modern'.

by user omaxc at UrbanDictionary

Internet Archive Wayback Machine - How's this for a start?

You'll have to take a look for yourselves, type in a domain name of any website and browse it exactly how it was at any given date since it's existence. One of my personal favorites...

No registration required

[Wayback Machine]

Someone made a google photo biography using this tool (it was me in fact), check it here.

By the way, did you know facebook looked like the screenshot below somewhere in year 2000?