Picture this. You saw this cool concert video in YouTube and you want to share it on your blog. The problem is, you don't want your readers to go through the boring first few minutes of the video. Fortunately, there's a way to do this.
Splicd is an online service that allows you to embed YouTube videos with a specified start and end time. Pretty neat tool actually. Now your readers won't have to suffer watching that boring interview but they can head straight to the action.
I love playing Bingo. It’s just an easy game to learn and quite enjoyable as well. I remember when I was a kid that we use to play Bingo with our cousins during parties. It was a nice way to keep us kids entertained while the grown-ups are busy chatting among themselves. It’s also a staple game during Christmas parties at school as a way to dispose party prizes.
But how do you teach kids or at least entice them to learn how to play Bingo at an early age?
Screenlife Games has the solution to that. From the makers of Scene It, they bring us the Disney DVD Bingo. This DVD game lets kids learn numbers, colors and matching skills with their favorite characters from Disney.
The Disney Bingo includes a DVD, 6 double-sided Bingo cards and 150 Bingo chips. There are also movie clips on the DVD from different Disney films that can bring a twist to the game. For example, if a Peter Pan clip is shown and at the end of it a GREEN screen appears, you can place a chip on any green space on your card.
This Disney DVD Bingo is a sure hit during weekly game nights to share some family bonding with the kids. Get this game at Amazon.com or Drugstore.com and enjoy the moment with the kids.
Here's a real cool and green innovation for an mp3 player. The Eco Media Player Revolution doesn't need any batteries. What it does need is some cranking to allow its dynamo to power the device. Yup, it has a built-in hand crank that would give you around 45 minutes of music for every minute of winding. Talk about music on demand.
The Eco Media Player Revolution can play most music formats (MP3, OGG, ACC, WMA) and video (MP4, WMV, AVI) although it's not that advisable considering it's small screen. It also has a built in FM radio and recorder. It has 4GB worth of internal memory and an SD card slot if you want another extra 4GB and connects via USB.
Another cool thing about this player is its ability to power up cell phones in case you don't have your charger with you or nowhere near sockets.
This thing costs about $240 though which is certainly expensive for an mp3 player.
SocialSpark has been good to me when it was still new, but lately I'm having problems with its service. I'm not talking about difficulties getting opportunities since it is expected as more and more users sign up. I could use more opps that offers more than $5 though. Hehehe.
These are what I'm complaining about:
So that's what's bothering me regarding SS. Are you a SocialSparker too? Encountering any problems with them?
Here's another contest. This time, the winner will get a year's worth of his choice of domain name from GoDaddy.com. My other site, Calvin's Hub just turned one and I would like to celebrate it by giving away a free domain name.
If you're stuck with a
It's so easy to join so what are you waiting for? The contest ends on Oct. 1, 10 PM Manila time.
My Precious Niche just turned one and the owner Eds is holding a contest where you could win some Paypal money. Just comment on her posts on her sites and you could win as much as $30 on your Paypal.
The contest will end on Oct. 27 so it's still a long way to go. Visit her post for more information on the contest details. Good luck!
Downloaded an attached file from your e-mail but your anti-virus somehow did not alert you of any problem? Since not all anti-virus provide 100% detection, you can't be so sure that the file is clean. What you can do however, is use an online virus scanner.
Virus Total is an online scanning service where you upload your file and they will scan it using a number of popular Anti-virus engines out there. This saves you time from going to one AV site to another to use their online scanning service. They will test your file using AV engines of popular companies such as Avast, AVG, Avira, Norton, Kapersky, F-Secure, McAfee, Trend Micro, etc.
I suggest you bookmark this site if you find yourself dealing with questionable files most of the time.
What do you think are weird medical conditions? Maybe the werewolf condition we've seen in Ripley's Believe it or Not and CSI? Or how about the girl who's allergic to sunlight?
Here are 4 people with unbelievable medical conditions. It's just an excerpt from Oddee.com where the original list has 10.
1. Man who doesn't feel cold
Dutchman Wim Hof, also known as the Iceman, is the man that swam under ice, and stood in bins filled with ice. He climbed the Mt. Blanc in shorts in the icy cold, harvested world records and always stands for new challenges.
Scientists can't really explain it, but the 48-year-old Dutchman is able to withstand, and even thrive, in temperatures that could be fatal to the average person.
2. The boy who couldn't sleep
Rhett Lamb is often cranky like any other 3-year-old toddler, but there’s one thing that makes him completely different: he has a rare medical condition in which he can’t sleep a wink.
Rhett is awake nearly 24 hours a day, and his condition has baffled his parents and doctors for years. They took clock shifts watching his every sleep-deprived mood to determine what ailed the young boy.
3. The girl who only eats tic tacs
Meet Natalie Cooper, a 17-year-old teenager who has a mystery illness that makes her sick every time she eats anything. Well, almost anything. She can eat one thing that doesn’t make her sick: Tic tac mint!
For reasons that doctors are unable to explain, Tic tacs are the only thing she can stomach, meaning she has to get the rest of her sustenance from a specially formulated feed through a tube.
4. The girl who is allergic to water
Teenager Ashleigh Morris can't go swimming, soak in a hot bath or enjoy a shower after a stressful day's work - she's allergic to water. Even sweating brings the 19-year-old out in a painful rash.
Ashleigh, from Melbourne, Australia, is allergic to water of any temperature, a condition she's lived with since she was 14. She suffers from an extremely rare skin disorder called Aquagenic Urticaria - so unusual that only a handful of cases are documented worldwide.
Interesting huh? Be sure to check out Oddee.com for the whole list. They also have lots of other REALLY interesting articles.
Printing online articles can be tricky unless the site also offers print-friendly version of their articles. Or you could just copy things and paste it to your Word document and print from there.
But if you don't want to go that route, you might want to check out PrintWhatYouLike.com. Just enter the URL of the article you want to print and start editing it online without signing up or installing anything. You can begin by removing the ads, menus, comments or just select the article and isolate it from the other page elements. You can even change the font type or size if the original doesn't suit you.
Hope they could also provide a print preview so you'd know how many pages it would require. Other than that, it's a nice way for printing online material.
With the number of laptops we have available today, sometimes manufacturers are having difficulty getting a nice piece of the market. Colored laptops are now common and so aree with fingerprint scanner or facial recognition.
To separate themselves from others, here are two upcoming laptops that might appeal to those who are conscious about their health.
Samsung NC10 with its Anti Bacterial Keyboard
We all know that there are countless of germs living in your keyboard. From crumbs, dust, dead skin, boogers, hair, the keyboard is probably dirtier than a toilet seat.
Samsung knew that and developed the Silver Nano Technology which they put on the NC10's keyboard to make it anti bacterial. They simply sprinkled nano-sized silver ion powder on the keyboard to make it impossible for bacteria to live. They didn't mention though if those powder will eventually wear out and for how long.
Asus N50 with its built-in Air Ionizer
Find yourself always using your laptop in outdoor cafes or coffee shops but can't bear the cigarette smoke that is usually present in such places?
Well you might want to replace or somehow trade in that laptop with an Asus N50. This nice piece of laptop has a built-in Air Ionizer ready to clean the air around you. Hmm, I don't know how effective will that be since ionizers usually comes with a purifier to trap those harmful particles in the air. Might be better if you just get yourself a USB air purifier.
Not sure how these healthy options will drive the price of the laptops but for me, those features are nothing really amazing.
Would you buy such devices for their health benefits?
Back in college, I remember helping my professor push around a bulky contraption called an overhead projector. Fast forward a couple of years, it was upgraded to a less bulkier portable projector that looked like a huge briefcase that can launch nuclear missiles. And it was still heavy! Now we got lighter ones here at the office but back then I was thinking of something that you could easily carry with you all the time.
Thanks to 3M, a pocket projector was made into a reality. The MPro110 mini projector is a device that can fit in your palm and project images up to about 11 inches across. It doesn't have the numerous buttons found on the usual projectors, just a scroll wheel that allows you to focus. It has a VGA input for laptops and a composite video jack for your iPods, PSP or other portable media players.
Is that just awesome? I can turn off the lights in a meeting room on our office and have my own mini-theater with this projector, an iPod and a set of portable speakers. It's coming out soon with a price tag of $359.
Picture this, you sit down to have breakfast and in front of you is the weather report or a headlines. The problem is it is not printed on paper but on the french toast that you're about to eat.
Yup! The Scan Toaster toasts text or pictures onto your bread. This design was a finalist on the Electrolux Design Lab competition which focused on creating appliances for the future iGeneration. This toaster/printer is just the size of a slim external CD writer that connects to your PC via USB. It downloads materials from your PC to print on your toast.
Cool huh? Print your report on one side and spread some peanut butter on the other side then watch your dog literally eat your homework.
Net-talking toaster to burn news onto bread
We all know that kids enjoy playing Guitar Hero on their consoles but this 8-year old doesn't want to play with the little plastic guitar. Instead, Yuto Miyazawa uses a real electric guitar... and he really knows what he's doing! Check out this video.
Think it's fake? He's listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the youngest professional guitarist. This kid is a phenomenon! I can't even do those kind of fretting in Guitar Hero.
I bet you tried searching Google using your name or your friend's name at one point. Problem there is that the results are kinda broad. If you want to filter your results to just social networking sites, business listings, blogs or news, you might want to check out iSearch.
Although not that effective especially if the person doesn't spend a lot of time online, you might be surprised with some of the results. I typed in my colleague's name and we found a few results but one has his current place of employment. He didn't know how that piece of info got into the net.
iSearch is really helpful to look for a person's account on different social networking sites. You can search by name, screen name or phone number although good luck on getting relevant results on the last two. For more personal details, you can have the option to pay them for that service. Online PI? It's more geared towards people living in the US since you can also search by city or state.
Give it a whirl and see if you can locate your long lost friend's myspace account on the net.
Microsoft recently unveiled its latest and most advanced tracking technology called BlueTrack. Tracking in terms of mice I mean. They're boasting that their mice with the BlueTrack technology is better compared to the leading laser and optical mice around.
Explanation for the geeks, its large, blue beam and specular optics architecture, in conjunction with a Microsoft-designed image sensor and proprietary pixel geometry, generates a high-contrast picture of the mousing surface that allows exceptional tracking accuracy.
For the not so geeks, it can function properly even on difficult surfaces such as granite countertops, carpets, or even on that airport bench. This is great for laptop owners who usually use their laptop in bed. Too bad it still won't work on glass or mirrored surfaces.
Right now, the technology is only available to Microsoft products. We'll have to wait if other brands such as Genius or Logitech will have something like it. The big question is, will you pay $99 (Explorer Mouse) or $79 (Explorer Mini Mouse) if your optical mouse is working just fine?
I host all my files that I share in this blog on Ziddu. A few days ago, their site was reported as an attack site by Google. And because of this, Firefox 3 users were not able to access the site and the files hosted there warning them that the site is suspicious and might damage your PC.
I contacted the people of Ziddu and it's a good thing that they're already aware of the problem. It seems that one of their 3rd party advertisers is the culprit but their engineers already fixed it. I guess they should be more careful now on the advertiser codes that they're letting in on their system.
It's nice that Google saw the problem beforehand and that newer browsers have the ability to warn their users. I'm just happy that Ziddu's back to normal now so we can go back to earning a few cash.
If you ever find yourself dealing with Word documents most of the time, chances are there will be an instance when it might get corrupted. Maybe its because of sudden power outage or maybe copying of the file over the network or from another drive got interrupted.
Before you panic, why not try a FREE tool that can help you salvage that corrupted file? Repair My Word is designed to recover text from damage or corrupted .doc files. It can repair files from Microsoft Word 6.0, Word 95, 97, 2000, XP and 2003. Sorry no .docx yet. Just open the corrupted file, preview the contents then save the text as a new Word file.
It's a pretty nifty tool that you might want to store in the "for future reference" part of your brain in case you find yourself with a corrupted Word file on a different day.
I've been to a lot of blogs especially Asian bloggers (mostly Malasyian and Singaporean) and one thing I noticed is that Nuffnang keeps popping up on their posts. They talk about how good the income they get from it. Nuffnang is a localized online advertising company. Sorta like Google Adsense but the advertisers choose which blog they want to put their advertisement which is pretty good for niche blogs. The payout is quite decent too.
Well, Nuffnang came to the Philippines last month and they are building up the blogger base. Afterwards, they'll be focusing more on advertisers. It's pretty easy to join and be approved. Once you're in, you only need to add the script of their ad placeholder on your blog and that's it.
One of the cool things they have is the Nuffnang Glitterati which is a club where all members are eligible to join. Once you're a Glitterati member, you'll get other earning opportunities such as doing advertorials or joining their contests.
Right now Nuffnang Philippines is still new but you don't want to be left out once things pick up.
Sure your MS Paint loads fast and all but do you ever get frustrated that it could only do so much? Like maybe keep your bored nephew preoccupied? MS Paint is one of the worthless crap that Windows installs on your PC. I can't even use it to crop images without pasting it in a new document.
If you want a free and light image editing software, you might want to use Paint.Net. It has all the features you wish MS Paint had. Layers, Gradients, Special Effects, Bezier curves, Clone stamp and more. Even Microsoft is considering replacing its own Paint with Paint.Net.
It's only a 1.6MB download but requires at least .Net Framework 2.0 that you probably already have installed.
For productivity, creating shortcut keys are pretty handy like what I do with Ctrl-Shift-C to open up my calculator or Ctrl-Shift-N for my notepad. But sometimes, with all those Windows pre-defined shortcuts, it's hard to find a simple combination of keystrokes.
A solution to this is to use your mouse instead to create gestures to perform simple tasks. With gMote, you can record mouse strokes and assign them to open your applications, control your browser and other tasks you often find yourself repeating.
You can use the middle-mouse button or the left or right-mouse button in combination with a key (like Shift or Ctrl). You can also limit those gestures to a certain application so you don't have to worry about it when playing a computer game.
gMote is a pretty small program and is FREE to use.
We all know that US sites offers the best deals for online purchases with their holiday sales and free US shipping promos. However, how can Filipinos or those living outside the US take advantage of those great deals?
If you buy from different sites, those international shipping fees will surely add up. Besides, not all US sites allow international shipping although you can still purchase them and have a friend living in the US ship it to you. But that’s quite a hassle for you or your friend and some sites do not even accept international billing address.
A solution to this is Access USA’s International Package Forwarding. Here’s how it works, Access USA will give you an exclusive international address to use when shopping online. When they receive your merchandise, you can choose if they will send it to you right away or wait for your signal in case you still have other purchases on the way. By consolidating your items, you will save money from international shipping fees.
If your international credit card is not accepted by the merchant, you can use their Personal Shopper service that allows you to shop with their company credit card, company check or PayPal account. Nice huh?
Now you can also participate on those big online Fourth of the July and Christmas sales just like any US resident. Sign up at MyUS.com website and check out their rates then start shopping.
If you often find yourself having trouble using the computer in the dark and do not really want to turn on the lights or open the curtains, an illuminated keyboard can be just what you need. Even if you can type without looking at the keyboard, sometimes you still have to look at it just to make sure your fingers are on the right keys before typing.
Logitech just released an Illuminated Keyboard and I must say it looked really sleek! The backlighted keys are laser-etched so you don't have to worry scraping it off. It has an ultra-thin profile and a transparent frame that would look good on any desktop. It features PerfectStroke key system so that every keystroke is silent and fluid. The soft-touch palm rest is just a bonus to ensure comfotability when typing.
The only thing wrong that I see is the missing Insert key just above the Delete key. For some reason, they made the Del key larger and removed the Ins key. So how much does it cost? $80 (around Php3600).
Will you buy an $80 keyboard if you can get an ordinary one for around $4? Even if you keep on replacing that cheap keyboard if the letters wear off it would still be less expensive. Hehehe.
It's been quite awhile now but the cool manga avatar creating site FaceYourManga is still down. I wrote about this site mid-August but didn't have a lot of time to play with it. A lot of my friends are asking me what happened to the site. Maybe they're doing some upgrades? Or is it because of the traffic they've been getting that the server bogged down?
According to this traffic graph from Alexa, the site experienced a very, very huge spike of traffic around late August. That's when we started encountering Page cannot be displayed when we visit the site.
Sigh. It's been almost two weeks now. I hope they'd be back online real soon.
While copying some PSP games on a neighbor's PSP, I didn't notice that his memory stick had a virus that infected my PC. Funny thing is that my updated AVG anti-virus was not able to detect it. I just noticed an unusual process running on my task manager called bar311.exe.
If you wanna know if your machine is infected, check your Task Manager (right click on your Windows toolbar > Task Manager) for any of these processes:
Fortunately, it's quite easy to remove this thing manually. Here's how:
1. First, end the process of any of the three files (above) from the Task Manager.
2. Start > Run > type regedit to access your registry
3. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon and look for the Userinit entry. Delete bar311.exe from that entry. A healthy Userinit should look like this:
4. Still in the registry, go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\ Command Processor and delete the autorun entry ("autorun"="c:\Windows\pc-off.bat").
5. To remove the virus files, make sure that you can view hidden and system files. In your Windows Explorer window, go to Tools > Folder Options. In the View tab, your setting should be like this:
6. Go to C:\Windows and delete the ff. files:
7. To see if you successfully removed the virus, restart your PC and check your task manager again.
That's it. Please let me know if you're having trouble with my instructions by leaving a comment and I'll try my best to help you out.
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