Find your user manuals online

There will come a time when you have to look up at a user manual for a gadget that you have. Do you always bring the user guide with that digital camera? Or maybe you bought a second hand appliance without its user manual.

If you're having trouble browsing the manufacturer's site for that outdated gadget's manual, you should check out Diplodocs. It is a site where you could download manuals for FREE. They have a very huge list of brands and has manuals for appliances and electronic gadgets. I think it is much easier to get a manual here than from the manufacturer's site.

Get your Giant Obama stickers here!

Barack Obama represents a change we can believe in.

If you truly support Obama in the 2008 US Presidential election, what better way to show it by having these giant Giant Obama Bumper Stickers on your cars, front porch, or wherever it would fit. These are not your ordinary bumper stickers with cute or funny slogans. These are giant no-nonsense Obama stickers that shows the people what you believe in.

It uses the same "see through" material that is used on public buses so you don't have to worry placing it on your car window. Start showing the world that you want change. Get these stickers from obama-bumper-stickers.com.

Get nutritional content of popular foods

Ever wondered how much calories you're gonna get from that Big Mac meal? Counting calories is very useful for those who want to achieve or maintain a certain weight. But not all fast food or restaurants have this info readily available to its customers.

Enter CalorieLab. It is a site where you can search over 70,000 foods and 500 restaurant menus for their nutritional info. That's a lot! Wanna know how much Carb you're gonna get from a particular Krispy Kreme doughnut? Or which part of a KFC chicken gives you the most protein? You could find it at CalorieLab.

Original Recipe Chicken Breast (not Hot and Crispy) has the most protein than other chicken parts by the way.

Looking for the perfect web hosting solution

Recently, I decided to buy my own domain for my personal blog (Calvinshub.com) because I want to move out of Wordpress. After everything is settled, I would start looking for a new web hosting provider.

Have you tried searching Google for web hosting? There are tons of results and you probably won’t know where to start or who to trust. It’s like looking on countless of ads in a phone book with no idea which one to choose.

I found this nifty site that summarizes only the best web hosting providers out there. They are updated so you don’t have to worry about new competitions. They have an award list where you can see only the best for a particular category. Like for example the Best Budget Hosting, Best Blog Hosting, Best e-Commerce Hosting and other types of hosting available.

Webhostrating.com is really a helpful site if you’re on the hunt for the perfect hosting solution that would suit your needs.

Meet Daddy Sproutwell

The Sproutwells is a series of short animated flash clips featuring a family of organic food, mostly lettuce. There's the wife Romania, the daughter Ruby Red and Baby Green. They also have a some sort of pet dog named Phyto who's my favorite character because I think he's an aphid. Anyway on this third episode, Mr. Sproutwell is introduced as Chip and he's a... banana.

So what is the series all about? Well it's a way to promote healthy living as well as healthy rewards by freshfunds.com. By purchasing their products, you get to earn Fresh Funds points to exchange for rewards, bid on their auction or make donations that could change lives. The Wii Fit that's up for bidding looks nice.

Wanna win some extra cash?

Blogsilog is going to have her birthday really soon and to celebrate, she's having a contest where 3 lucky people could win some Paypal cash. 2 winners of $10 each and a winner of $6. It's not much but it's so easy to join. Actually, this post is my entry to her contest.

To view contest details, click here.

By the way, feel free to visit the rest of her blogs:

BLOGSILOG
Cherry’s Comfort Zone
Thinking Out Loud
DigiScrapz: Captured Memories
Buzzy Me
Wishing and Hoping
Fab Finds, Etc.

Good luck in the contest! It's gonna end a minute before September 2 so better hurry!

Scented laptops?

Asus, one of the leading brands when it comes to laptops will be releasing its F6 series that features get this, scents? Yup, the new laptops will come in four beautifully designed motifs and infused with matching scent.

There's a pink one with a floral motif and floral scent.

A black one with graffiti style motif and a musky scent. Aftershave maybe?

A pastel green motif with nature-ish scent. Smells like dew?

Finally a sky blue motif with aquatic scent.

These notebooks comes with a 13.3" display so they would have a huge appeal to students being compact but the specs are something to drool for as well.

• Intel Core2 Duo Processor T9400/P8600/P8400
• DDRII-667/800 DRAM support, up to 4GB
• ATI Mobility Radeon HD3470, external 256MB DDR2 VRAM
• SATA 120/160/250/320GB
• WiFi, webcam, fingerprint scanner
  

There's no price available yet but I hope being scented would not drive it up. So what's next? Dell teaming up with Davidoff to have a Coolwater scent?

Where to search for torrents

A torrent site is a good place to download files, softwares, movies, music albums, etc. However, there are lots of torrent sites out there and sometimes we really don't know which one to use. Good thing there are a few torrent search aggregators that could help you look for a specific file without jumping from one site to another.

Here are the three best torrents search engines that is available so far and the torrent sites that they crawl.

	PizzaTorrent	usniff	Speckly
Mininova	X	X	X
The Pirate Bay	X	X	X
IsoHunt	X	X	X
FullDLS	X		X
Torrent Reactor	X	X	X
myBittorrent	X
NewTorrents	X
Monova	X	X	X
LegitTorrents	X		X
SeedPeer	X	X	X
BTJunkie	X		X
SumoTorrent	X
SuprNova	X
BitTorrent	X	X
Extratorrent	X
Torrentz		X
Vuze			X

As you can see, PizzaTorrent has the most torrent sites to crawl. While this can be good for those hard to find movies, it churns out results slowly.

If I'm to choose, I'd go for usniff.com. It has the best layout and interface among the three and the results are shown pretty fast since it has less sites to crawl. It visits the top 5 popular torrent sites anyway so that's ok.

Speckly is a no frills site that has a "quick peek" feature so you don't have to commit going to the site to see if it's the torrent file that you really want.

Michael V. on the cover of Reader's Digest

If you've seen or received the September 2008 issue of Reader's Digest Asia you may notice who the old person on the cover depicts. If you're a Filipino that is.

Yup, RD Asia's September issue is the "5th annual humor special" and it is just fitting that Michael V. or sometimes known as "Bitoy" is on the cover. The words "Yari Ka" which means Gotcha! that is printed on the cover is Michael V's catchphrase on his gag/humor show Bitoy's Funniest Videos. By the way, did you know that his real name is Beethoven del Valle Bunagan?

Astig.

New magazines on Zinio iPhone Newsreader

If you've been visiting the Zinio iPhone Newsreader, you would notice that some of their free magazines have just been updated with a more recent version. They even added Maxim on their list.

Other magazines include Popular Photography, Saveur, Technology Review, Macworld, Esquire and Reader's Digest. You can view these free magazines using your iPod Touch or iPhone or you can simply tweak your Firefox to act like an iPhone browser.

Go ahead and check them out.

A search engine for games

Everybody knows about GameSpot as being one of the premiere site where you could find info on games for different platforms. Problem I usually encounter with GameSpot is the slow loading time and more often than not, the site is blocked on company firewalls.

So your option aside from Google is to check out other sites such as IGN or GameFaqs. But why not use a search engine that will search other game sites for you?

GamePublic is a games search engines that combines searches from popular gaming sites for you. It crawls the web daily for game updates and are reviewed to ensure the quality of search results. Sites such as GameSpot, GameZone, Eurogamer, Gaming Age, etc are included on its crawl. It churns out results pretty quickly too.

So for your gaming info, use GamePublic.

Got a "6 x 4" tag from Aline

My blogger friend Aline, has nothing to do so she decided to do a meme and tag me with it. Hehehe, it's ok.

So here goes the 6 questions and 4 answers post from me.

1. Four places I go to, over and over:
* Home
* Office
* Church
* In-laws place

2. Four people who e-mail me regularly:
* Our client
* Wordpress (every time there's somebody who comments on my blog)
* SocialSpark (whenever I receive an opp or get paid)
* Hmm... officemates I guess

3. Four of my favorite places to eat:
* Pepper Lunch
* Sbarro
* Tony Roma's
* Home

4. Four places i’d rather be:
* In my bed sleeping
* Club Noah, Palawan
* At a moviehouse
* Olympic Basketball Gym in Beijing

5. Four TV shows I could watch over and over:
* Family Guy
* Mythbusters
* NBA
* Friends

6. Four people I think will respond:
* Berryblitz
* Uhm
* Can't think of anyone else
* Nope... just Berryblitz

If you wanna answer this tag, just copy-paste the 6 questions and replace my answers.

Read magazines online for FREE

Remember Zinio and the trick that allows you to read their magazines for free using an iPhone hack for Firefox? You might notice that the free magazines that they offer are somewhat limited.

If you're looking for other magazines, why not try Mygazines? Their site has lots of user-submitted scans of magazines (both current and old issues) including Maxim, GamePro, Marie Claire and tons of others. Definitely more than what Zinio has to offer. It's quite easy to navigate too and the flash interface used for reading is quite similar to Zinio.

Better hurry since publishers are trying to shut down the site.

Create your own caricature Manga style

There are lots of online cartoon creator out there but Face Your Manga one allows you to create a manga cartoon version of your face. It's pretty easy to use just like creating your own Yahoo! avatar.

Face Your Manga offers a lot of customization from the shape of your face, facial features, hairs, etc. When you're done, just enter your e-mail so the file would be sent to you. I don't know why you can't just download it right then and there. Anyway, I won't bore you with any more details, go ahead and create your own avatar. You could use it on your social networking sites or blogs.

Banzai!! Place your bets!

For those of you who are not familiar with Banzai, it is a Japanese hit TV series that shows funny gags and stunts that you could bet on (not in the real sense of betting) while watching.

For example, they have this Russian Roulette stunt using umbrellas. Remember those short umbrellas where you press a button and it shoots up to its full length? Imagine there are six of them but only one is working. Two guys will compete. They each choose an umbrella one by one and points it to their mouth before pressing the button. As a viewer, you would guess or place your bet on who will be the unlucky one to choose the working umbrella. It's pretty hilarious to see their faces as they slowly fire their umbrella. I really enjoyed watching that show. Too bad our cable operator stopped airing it.

ScreenLife Games is at it again. They launched a new Banzai game. Check it out:

Anyway if you're a fan, then you're in luck cause ScreenLife Games released a Banzai DVD complete with betting pieces so you could actually play it with your friends while laughing your ass off. All players will watch clips from the TV show and will bet with the toy sushi included. Whoever wins all the sushi wins the game.

You can buy the DVD game online and you can even visit Tako's (their octopus mascot) MySpace account.

Betting ends!!

Search for recipes with Five Mushrooms

If you feel that you're getting lots of irrelevant results when you search for recipes in Google, you might want to use Five Mushrooms as your primary recipe search engine.

Five Mushrooms' recipe search will aggregate search results from different food sites such as: allrecipes.com, epicurious.com, foodnetwork.com, food.yahoo.com, cooking.com, cooksrecipes.com, ichef.com, grouprecipes.com, fatfree.com and more. 

Aside from being a recipe search engine, Five Mushrooms is also a pretty informative site for education, research and a community for anyone who likes to cook. If you usually frequent food blogs and recipe sites, you should definitely include Five Mushrooms in your bookmark.

Free substitute for Adobe Illustrator

Almost everyone knows about GIMP, the free open-source graphics application that you can use if you don't want to shell out money for a Photoshop license.

InkScape is another open-source application but for creating and editing vector graphics that also uses the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. It comes in Windows, Mac and Linux versions.

If you can't get your hands on Adobe Illustrator, try InkScape out.

Easy Free Slideshow Maker Online

Now here's a free service from Roxio where you can easily create your own slideshow and send it to your friends or embed it in your site. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to create a snazzy slideshow with Roxio online. You just have to follow the simple instructions on the site. Add, Personalize and Share.

Check out what I was able to do in less than 5 minutes.

Considered as the best basketball player in the world right now, Kobe Bryant is what many basketball fans all over the world look up to. At this point in time, he's at his peak and has matured greatly into the game.

Create your photo slideshow now to share with your friends.

Olympic Senior Executive Chef is a Filipino

Did you know that the one responsible for feeding thousands of athletes, officials and media professionals in the Beijing Olympics is a Filipino?

 

Yup! Ryan Jaranilla is the senior executive chef of the Olympic Catering Services Project of the Athletes’ Village in Beijing. He has an executive chef from Belgium, six sous chef from the US, England and Bulgaria, and 108 Chinese cooks under him to feed 12,000 athletes, 3,000 officials and 7,000 media professionals for the next two weeks.

Even if we don't win any medals, we already have a kitchen gold medalist in Chef Ryan.

Read more:
Olympic Lock-In
Filipino is Beijing Olympic Village Top Chef

Ultimate Flirting Championship

Picture this. You walk into a bar and you spot this gorgeous chick with her friends from afar. Suddenly for some unknown psychic reason, both your eyes met and made contact. You gave her the "look" with your piercing eyes and she just blushed and averted her eyes. You instantly knew that she's somewhat interested in you so you began to approach her with a boost in confidence just because you started it out with a certain "look".

You might think that this type of flirting only happens in movies but giving someone your "flirty look" and with the right confidence, you might just pull it off yourself. Of course, being gorgeous, wearing nice clothes or driving an expensive car, or being a celebrity or just plain popular will make it much easier.

If you still can't muster that confidence, try playing the Ultimate Flirting Championship and win the "Victory Hair". This is an online game sponsored by Extreme Style by VO5 where you can be a judge or a contestant. If you're a judge, you get to ask the questions and choose which girl gives you the best answer. If you're a contestant, be prepared to match the flirty questions with your witty answers. At least even if you do poorly you won't feel the pain of being rejected or worst, get slapped.

Tiled backgrounds for your site

If you want to customize your site's background with a tiled design, you might want to check out BgPatterns.

It is another online application where you can create your own tiled background by choosing from a collection of images, textures and colors. You can also adjust the canvas and image size and the orientation of your image along with other customizations.

Once you're satisfied, just click the Download button to get your file. The site is quite simple but it does its job pretty well. Try it out!

A huge collection of Web 2.0 design tutorials

If you enjoy creating your design elements from scratch or want to learn how they did those awesome web 2.0 designs, you have to check out these huge list of tutorials.

Smashing magazine has compiled over 65 tutorials, references and resources to inspire you to create web 2.0 style designs. Most of the tutorials are for Photoshop and Illustrator but they are quite easy to follow. From logos, backgrounds, to text effects, somethings bound to catch your eye.

Philippine All Stars, Hip Hop World Champions again

The Philippine All Stars bested dancers from other 32 other countries by winning the 2008 Hip Hop World Championship in Las Vegas, Nevada last Sunday (Aug. 3). If you're not aware, they also won the same competition in 2006.

They danced perfectly and their choreography is really amazing. Keep an eye out on the 40th second mark of their performance.



Wow. Even judges MC Hammer and Shane Sparks have high praises for our Pinoy dancers. Congratulations guys for making our nation proud! Keep it up and win again next year!

Read more: Philippine All Stars wins 2008 World Hip Hop championship

Need a color scheme helper?

Problem with web or CSS designers (or any designer) is figuring out or visualizing what color combination to use for their project. What color should I use for the header text, content text, links, banner background, etc. Of course you can check out other sites and copy their color scheme but you really don't want to let people think that you just copied the design.

Here's a nice site that can help you decide what color works in harmony for a specific color that you choose. With Genopal's online tool, you can select your dominant color (usually it's the site/text background) and it will generate a suitable color scheme for it. If you're not happy with it, there are sliders that you can adjust to see another set of colors. You can also click on the colors to get their HEX values which is perfect for editing that style sheet on your blog.

The online tool is free but they are also selling it as an offline application or a plugin for Photoshop.

How to treat Carpal Tunnel Syndrome easily

It is common belief that Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is caused by too much time with the computer using the keyboard and mouse. Well, there's no really clinical data to prove that. It may be a factor but CTS is most likely due to a congenital predisposition where the carpal tunnel is smaller than that of other people. A person with small carpal tunnel will most likely have his median nerve compressed whenever the surrounding tendons get irritated. This will bring pain, numbness and weakness in the hand and wrist.

How can you tell if you have CTS?

A person with CTS will sense burning, tingling or itching numbness in the palm of the hand especially the thumb, index and middle fingers (gamers who uses the mouse alot perhaps?). As it progresses, grip strength may decrease and it will be difficult to perform a fist or grasp small objects. Then if left untreated, the muscles at the base of the thumb may waste away.

So how can you treat it?

It is better to have it treated as early as possible. Drugs are prescribed to ease the pain and treat the symptoms. However, prolong use of drugs may render them inefficient as the condition progress. Before you have to opt for surgery, try treating it the natural way. The IMAK SmartGlove is a convenient and economical way to provide carpal tunnel relief by increasing blood circulation and positioning your wrist correctly.

Although you may look silly wearing gloves at the office, it is still better than dealing with the pain.

Is your gym dirty?

How many times do you workout on a gym? Did you know that a gym is one of the places where germs, bacteria and virus thrive? Working out is good for your body but if you often get sick after a nice workout then you might want to consider the following factors:

Gym equipment

A couple of years ago, a study in Clinical Journal of Sports Medicine found rhinoviruses on 63% of the gym equipment in fitness centers that they tested. Rhinovirus is the culprit for the common cold and they discovered that weight equipments are more contaminated significantly than aerobics equipment. Problem with this virus is that even after the equipments are disinfected twice daily, it didn't do anything to lower the count.

So what could you do? Try to avoid touching your face between sets (touching your towel and wiping your face is just the same). Use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer as often as you can.

Weight-lifting gloves

A Japanese study in 2004 found that staph bacteria bind strongly to polyester which is the material commonly used in gloves. Crap. To think that I never washed my gloves. After a set, weightlifters tend do wipe their face with their germ-infected gloved hands and that could easily transfer the bacteria to your body.

So what could you do? You can throw those gloves away and lift weights with your bare hands. It would help strengthen your grip and forearm anyway. Just make sure to use hand sanitizer before and after you use those weights.

Actually, there's no sure-fire way to protect yourself from germs when working out on a gym without wearing biohazard suits. Just boost up your immunity and avoid going to the gym when you're feeling under the weather.

Source: Men's Health

Make fun of your photos

If you want to have fun with your photos but don't know have the mad Photoshop skillz to do it, you might wanna check out PhotoFunia. It is a FREE online service where you can choose from a number of cool and fun effects that you can apply on your photos.

Just pick an effect and upload the photo that you want to apply it to. It's that easy. Go try it out now and make fun of your friend's photos.

If you can't get enough of it, there are some more different effects available on Dumpr.

Thanks to Aline for this sharing this.

Perfect Travel Companion

People loves to travel and those of you who travel a lot will probably have experienced being stuck inside a cold airplane cabin for hours. Without any coat, jacket or some sort of blanket, it's going be a pretty uncomfortable ride. If you're lucky, you can ask for a blanket from the flight attendant but it will sometimes have a weird smell or you don't know when the last time it was cleaned.

If you're the type of traveler who is particular on personal hygiene, then you better consider having a Cabin Cuddler. The Cabin Cuddler is a lightweight 6-in-1 travel blanket and pillow that you could easily bring with you every time you travel so you won't have to worry about using dirty pillows. It features a blanket that has a contour-cut to cover every inch of your body. It also has an inflatable pillow and a patented pocket to keep your feet warm. If you're not using it, it can be folded into a tote bag that you can hang onto your luggage.

So if you're traveling to a warm place or a tropical country, feel free to wear shorts and shirts without worrying about the cold trip. Just bring your Cabin Cuddler. You can even use it if you're just gonna stay over someone else's place.

Esquire magazine to use e-paper

Remember the newspapers and posters in Harry Potter's world where the pictures are moving and the text is constantly changing? Well, it's going to happen in our world soon.

Esquire magazine will be releasing a limited number of a version of its August issue that uses electronic-ink-display for its cover on mid-September. Esquire's deputy editor Peter Griffin (not from Family Guy) says that we can expect an animated cover where the order of the words will change and images will turn on and off.

The battery-powered cover won't be thick and stiff but flexible and just comparable to heavy magazine stock.

Being the first magazine to enter the digital age and having only 100,000 copies, it will be a collector's item so better grab one if you can and auction it off eBay.

- From Gina Hughes of Yahoo Tech

My earnings with SocialSpark so far

SocialSpark is one of those services that pays you to write reviews or buzz for their advertisers out there. I joined them late last April and I recently checked how much they've paid me so far. I just want to share to you that you could really make good money with such sites:

The image shows that I can cash out $73 and am still owed $54. Not bad for some extra money.

I joined other PPP sites too but this is the one where I earned the most. Smorty was short-lived and SponsoredReviews requires a high page rank so not much opportunities. But with SocialSpark and its sister PayPerPost, they give you opportunity based on your RealRank which is their own way of tracking your site's traffic.

I'm not saying you should jump into these kinds of online money making schemes right away. If you care about your Google Pagerank, think hard before you start selling links and doing paid reviews.