Dec 18

Take Screenshots in Firefox

Posted in: Firefox Extensions, Freeware, Screenshots, Software, Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on October 30, 2007 by CyberNet.

Fireshot for Firefox
Click to Enlarge

We take a lot of screenshots in a day’s time, and a good majority of them are of websites being displayed within our browser. Instead of needing to use an external application to snap the screenshots why not get an extension for Firefox that includes an incredible editor!

Fireshot is a relatively large extension (in terms of filesize) for Firefox that has just about everything you need. With it you can capture an entire website, including the area that you need to scroll to see, or you can just have it capture what you’re currently viewing.

After a screenshot has been captured you’ll be able to annotate the screenshot, crop it, and even blur/gray out an area. In the screenshot that I took above I had applied the blur and grayed out effects to the area around the article’s body in an effort to make the article itself standout.

After you’re done with a screenshot you can save it to your computer (PNG, JPEG, or BMP formats), copy it to the clipboard, email it, or send it to an external image editor.

Fireshot Homepage
Fireshot Video Demonstration
[via Mozilla Links]

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Dec 18

Mahalo Opens-Up, More Like Wikipedia…

Posted in: Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on June 02, 2008 by CyberNet.

mahalo.pngIt looks as though Mahalo is opening up a bit more and taking advantage of all of the knowledge and writing talent that is out there. A recent change now allows all registered users to contribute to the site by creating and editing pages. Previously, only chosen, paid editors were given the right to do this. In the year or so since they’ve launched, they have managed to write over 50,000 different pages but now this change will allow for many, many more pages to be written. In other words, Mahalo is definitely taking advantage of the public to help their site grow. For that reason, it reminds us of Wikipedia, but there are some differences which Jason Calacanis points out.

Calacanis who is quite well-known around the web, particularly for co-founding Weblogs, Inc., and founded Mahalo says:

Now, it’s not going to be as freewheeling as Wikipedia day one. We’ve got three major differences:

1. You have to register and be logged in to edit a Guide Note. This is a major throttle on people contributing since the signup process takes a couple of minutes and an email address.

2. Our staff is going to check every edit made and confirm it is correct. We have three full-time folks on this right now and our expectation is we will only get 10-50 editors per day.

3. You can edit your own pages, or a page about your company. Our thinking is since we’re checking all the facts that’s an OK thing to do. (Wikipedia does not let you edit your own page).

It’ll definitely take some time and effort for their staff to check every edit that has been made, but this will generally keep the information on Mahalo accurate, something that Wikipedia has had a hard time with. The only problem we could see Mahalo having is something that one commenter mentioned as “revision control” on hot topics. “Edit Wars” could easily break out in which case Calacanis says, “if there is an edit war we will come in and manage it by requiring folks to use their real names, debate the issue in public, and with some editorial intelligence applied. Similar to the Wikipedia style, but with real names and more brains.”

The only criticism we have is that Mahalo is “for-profit” while Wikipedia is non-profit. Those who are passionate about making knowledge available to the public may be more willing to provide it to Wikipedia instead. Regardless, this is an interesting route for Mahalo to take, and one that could help them grow tremendously.

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Dec 09

Sign up for the Firefox Companion for eBay

Posted in: Mozilla, Software, Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on April 16, 2007 by CyberNet.

Firefox_ebay

If you use eBay and Firefox frequently, you have an opportunity to get in on “Firefox Companion for eBay,” a new alpha test program.

Recently, eBay has made an effort to make advancements and improvements with their service while Firefox has been putting major effort into securing as much of the market as possible. They’re teaming up to offer both eBay and Firefox users the best of both worlds.

Back in March when the alpha version of Adobe Apollo was released, it was stated that eBay was working to take advantage of Apollo to bring in a better experience for their users, and a demo showed just what eBay was working on. It was nice to see that eBay was taking advantage of new technology that could make their user’s experience that much better. 

Firefox’s efforts have focused on teaming up with major companies.  Most recently, Firefox teamed up with Kodak to offer an image-sharing feature where users can drag and drop image files from their hard drives to the Firefox window, and then they can be published on Kodak’s gallery site.

The latest team-up between Firefox and eBay will be used to “help build a faster, safer auction experience,” and will help Firefox users manage auctions right from their browser.

Mozilla is definitely smart for joining with major companies to help promote Firefox. Both eBay and Kodak will end up promoting Firefox because it works well with their services. Non-Firefox users in turn will be enticed to try out Firefox to see how their favorite services work with it.

We’ve contacted Mozilla to get in on their reviewer’s program, and once we do we’ll give you an update on how this add-on/extension works.

If you’d like to sign up for the Firefox Companion for eBay alpha test program, click here.

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Dec 05

Generate Icons For Your Email Address

Posted in: Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on July 09, 2006 by CyberNet.

GMail  
 

Have you ever wanted to have cool icons for your email address to use in forums and such? Well, this is the place to do it. They will generate your icon based upon your email provider. I gave examples of GMail.com and Live.com above but there is a large list of providers that they have.

Not only do they give you the image but they will also host it! They give you a URL that you can copy and paste wherever you would like the image to appear. This is quite a clever idea!

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Dec 04

View Whole Magazines for Free

Posted in: iPhone, Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on June 07, 2008 by CyberNet.

Zinio iPhone Newsreader.pngFree digital issues of several popular magazines are available via www.zinio.com/iphone for free to iPhone users and those using Safari who change the user agent in their browser to “Mobile Safari 1.1.3-iPhone.” It’s also available to Firefox users who change their user agent accordingly. They’re not no-name brands of magazines either. Here’s a quick run-through of the full magazines that they offer as listed on the Zinio site:

  • U.S. News & World Report
  • Playboy
  • Saveur
  • Popular Photography
  • Men’s Health
  • Kiplinger’s
  • Popular Mechanics
  • Penthouse
  • Viv
  • Car and Driver
  • PC Magazine
  • Elle
  • Technology Review
  • Outside
  • Macworld UK
  • Esquire UK
  • NME
  • Macworld
  • Lonely Planet
  • Reader’s Digest

The only thing you have to do is enter in an email address which then subscribes you to their mailing list, and you’ll be able to view the full digital issues of the above listed magazines. When you choose a magazine, you’ll be able to scroll through the pages (they recommend landscape mode) and then tap on a page you want to view in a larger version.

To take advantage of this, on your iPhone just navigate to www.zinio.com/iphone. In case you don’t have an iPhone but you’re using Safari and want to take advantage of this, here’s how you change the User Agent:

  1. Open Safari and go to preferences
  2. Click the Advanced tab and check the box that says “show develop menu in menu bar”
  3. Go up to the Develop Menu > User Agent > Mobile Safari 1.1.3 – iPhone
  4. Navigate to www.zinio.com/iphone and start enjoying the magazines!

We knew about this for a couple of weeks now but decided not to write about it right away just in case it was something that was done by mistake. It’s still around though, so it may be here to stay…

Source: Gizmodo

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Dec 01

It’s Official, Zooomr is Live!

Posted in: Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on July 19, 2006 by CyberNet.

Zooomr
 

It is official, Zooomr is Live! The launch of Zooomr 2.0 was set back a few days due to a DOS attack which we reported about on Saturday. They battled the attack and stated that they expected that “this attack will only make us better, stronger, and more evasive to attacks and ill-willed individuals.” With that behind them, they have launched Zooomr 2.0!

If you haven’t checked out Zooomr already, go take a peak. They describe it as a way to explore the information inside of photos. One example of exploring the info inside of a photo is their “Geo Tagged” feature. The geo tagged feature allows you to tag a photo with a very specific geographic location. There are lots of other great elements to Zooomr that gives users the chance to “Experieince The World Through Photos” as their motto states.

The guys over at Zooomr have done a great job of communicating and interacting with the blogging community. Each time we’ve written about Zooomr we’ve had a visit from Kristopher Tate leaving a comment. It’s obvious they’ve put a lot of work into this release and have done a good job keeping the public informed. Congrats to Zooomr!

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Dec 01

Aviary: Edit and Create Images on the Fly

Posted in: Photos, photoshop, Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on March 03, 2008 by CyberNet.

Thanks to Max, we received an invite to try out Aviary. It’s a suite of web-based applications for “people who create.” When I say a suite of applications, I mean it.  In all, they offer (well, eventually they’ll offer) 18 different applications that each have their own purpose and function. “From image editing to typography to music to 3D to video, we have a tool for artists of all genres” their site reads. At this point they only have the Phoenix application available which is their take on a web-based image editor, so we decided to put it to the test.

aviary 2

Phoenix allows you to start from scratch and create an image or load an existing file to edit as you please. By starting from scratch, you get to decide the width and height you want the image to be and you can also select a background color. Phoenix is no Photoshop, but they do have quite a few great features which include:

  • Create Layers (this is a must for most image editors)
  • View history (as you would in other photo editing programs)
  • Filters (like blur, emboss, etc)
  • Transform option to distort, transform, rotate, and flip an image
  • and much more…

My first impression was that it looked like a nice and clean desktop application. They really did a great job with the design and interface. The menus they offer are exactly what you’d expect from any desktop application which makes it natural to use. While most online image editors are enough to satisfy only the basic users, Phoenix has enough features to satisfy semi-pro users.

aviary

Now, as we mentioned, Phoenix is only one of 18 different applications that make-up Aviary. At this time, the others aren’t available, but they have listed all of them and what they will do. Here what we’ll see in the future (all apps are named after birds to go along with their “Aviary” theme):

  • Toucan -color swatches and palettes creator
  • Peacock – computer algorithm-based pattern generator
  • Raven – vector editor
  • Hummingbird – 3D Modeler and skinner
  • Myna – audio editor
  • Roc – music generator
  • Starling – video editor
  • Owl – desktop publishing layout editor
  • Penguin – word processing software geared towards creative writers
  • Pigeon – painting simulator
  • Tern – terrain generator
  • Horus – font editor
  • Woodpecker – smart image resizer using seam carving
  • Rookery – a free unlimited distributed file system network that anyone can connect to and store data in.  It also powers their file search engine
  • Hawk – digital content marketplace
  • Crane – custom image product creator
  • Eagle – a smart online application that can identify complex data about an image based on the pixel patterns

One of the first things I noticed when I signed in to the service is that it has a social side to it if you want. You can save your favorite artists and share your images.

Five Invites to Give Away!

The team over at Aviary has a lot of work ahead of them, but it could potentially be amazing once they’re done.  At this time, it is available on an invite-only basis. We have five invites to give away so be one of the first five people to comment and you’ll receive an invite! Just be sure to include your email address in the proper field when you leave your comment otherwise we will not be able to get an invite sent to you.

Thanks for the tip and invite Max!

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Dec 01

UTube.com Decides To Sue Google’s YouTube…Why?

Posted in: Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on November 03, 2006 by CyberNet.

YouTube If you were the owner of a company called UTube and had possession of UTube.com what would you do? Well, the current owners are trying to promote their used tube mills that they are selling. However, the site has gained a ranking of 13,000 on Alexa because of the similar name to YouTube.com. Looking at the chart shows that their traffic just continues to grow.

CNet.com posted an article the other day explaining how UTube.com went from receiving 1,500 visitors a month to over 2 million. So the owners decided to sue YouTube:

The lawsuit asks that YouTube stop using the youtube.com domain name or reimburse Universal Tube for the cost of establishing a new corporate identity.

“We were there first–by 10 years. Now I see a potential re-branding that could take years to complete,” Girkins said. “I’m not the kind of person who looks for lawsuits, but my business is being threatened by this situation.”

Heck, this isn’t a time for rebranding…this is when you should partner up with someone to create a useful site! If you’re getting nearly 70,000 visitors a day then I’m sure you could get a lot of returning visitors if you design something useful. I definitely wouldn’t be suing instead I would be embracing.

Sure they may not be the computer type of people, but pay someone a few thousand dollars to make a nice site and you’ll probably make that back in the first few days from advertisements. The first idea that popped into my mind was to create a Digg-like site for YouTube videos…it would almost be an instant success! You wouldn’t even have to host the videos because YouTube will take care of that for you. 😉

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Nov 26

CyberNotes: Get Product Reviews from the “Experts”

Posted in: CyberNotes, Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on August 09, 2008 by CyberNet.

CyberNotes
Weekend Website

Back in December, we introduced you to a site called ConsumerSearch, an online publisher and aggregator of consumer product reviews and search. We talked about the benefits of putting the time into reading reviews before you buy including time saved and money better spent. It’s definitely a great site worth checking out if you like researching potential purchases. To add to ConsumerSearch we were recently introduced to another great site called alaTest. AlaTest is all about reviews, but they take a different route for providing you with information you need before you buy.

alatest.png

What is alaTest?

alaTest is different from some product review sites in that they do not focus on collecting reviews directly from the consumer (they do offer these though). Instead they provide you with “professional” reviews. When we say professional, think magazines and blogs like PC World or PC Magazine. They say that they have about 600 sources and after looking through them, we’d say they are pretty reliable as well.

Their list of sources can be found here. When you go to view them, you’ll notice that there’s a “Country” drop-down list. They gather sources from various countries, so you can view which ones they use from where you live. For example, they’ve got a lengthy list of sources from the United Kingdom as well as Germany, and smaller lists for countries like Portugal and Finland. The nice thing is that other countries are represented among the mix of reviews which isn’t something we always see.

Topics They Cover

alaTest obviously caters to reviews of electronics because when you visit the site, you’ll see the following categories across the top menu bar:

  • Photography
  • Electronics
  • Phones
  • Computers
  • Games
  • more…

Under the “more” section is where you’re going to find categories like home appliances, home & garden, health & beauty, sports & outdoors, books & magazines, and more.

Searching for Reviews

Ryan has been itching to get a Digital SLR Camera so I thought I’d perform a search for just that (although he won’t be getting one for a while…). Up at the top of every alaTest page is a box for searching. You can always just click on one of the categories up at the top as well – in this case I’d click on Photography and then select the specific type of camera I was looking to review.

alaTest makes it easy to narrow your results with a whole box of options towards the top of the screen. I could narrow my results by the following:

  • Brand
  • alaScore
  • Price
  • Optical Zoom
  • Resolution
  • LCD Screen Size
  • Camera Flash
  • Type

If I knew I wanted to buy a Nikon, I could narrow my search to only Nikons. If I wanted a camera that fell into a certain price range, I could narrow my search by that. All I’d have to do is drag the left price tab upwards to increase the starting price, and drag the right price tab downwards to lower the ending price.

alasearch.png

What the Review Includes

Once you perform a search, you’ll see a list of results that match your criteria. From there you can sort by a few different things including the alaScore (this is a score between 0-100), product name, experts level, and price. By default it is sorted by the alaScore.

One of the top ranked reviews for my search was the Nikon D60. Clicking on it will provide you will all of the reviews that they collected. Examples of sources for this particular result, just so you can get an idea, included CNET.com, DigitalCameraInfo.com, and PC World. Not only can you read the expert reviews, but many products also have user reviews that you can sift through as well.

If there are multiple products you would like to view side-by-side to compare, you can do that as well. Just look for the boxes under each item that say “compare,” check them, and then click compare up at the top.

alatest results-1.png

What we like about the reviews:

Not all reviews, but many, do include the date that the review took place which is handy. I don’t know about you, but I like to know how recent these reviews are. Another nice thing about the reviews is that they tend to include something that is good about the product (shown with a plus-sign) followed by an area of improvement (shown with a negative-sign).

alatest review page.png

Additional features we like:

  • The option to watch video reviews of the product
  • How they outline key features
  • How they show a list of price comparisons from various companies that you can buy from

Wrapping it up…

If you are in need of product reviews for anything, but particularly electronics, don’t waste your time going from site to site trying to round them all up. Just head to alaTest, perform your search, and sift through all of the reviews collected into one location.

Thanks for the tip Jack of all Trades!

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Nov 26

CyberNotes: A Look at Wikimedia Foundation Projects

Posted in: CyberNotes, Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on August 02, 2008 by CyberNet.

CyberNotes
Weekend Website

When you think of the Wikimedia Foundation, what comes to mind? For us it’s immediately Wikipedia and Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales who started the foundation. It’s based in San Francisco, and the foundation operates several wiki projects including the ever-so-popular Wikipedia. Wikipedia is obviously the most popular site that’s part of the foundation, but there are other projects that are gaining some ground. Today we’ll be taking a look at some of the Wikimedia Foundation Projects that are currently going on, aside from their most popular, Wikipedia. They include: Wikiversity, Wikiquote, Wiki Books, and Wikispecies.

Wikiversity

Wikiversity is a place to go when you want to find educational types of resources. For educators, there’s nothing better than free learning materials and activities. There are two main goals of the site:

  1. Create and host a range of free-content, and multilingual learning materials/resources for all age groups in all languages
  2. Host scholarly/learning projects and communities that support these materials

At this point Wikiversity is available in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Greek, and other languages will be added in the future. It launched back in August of 2006.

By visiting the homepage, you’ll gain a wealth of knowledge just from taking a look at some of the information they have featured.

wikiversity.png

One area of the site we recommend visiting is the Featured Content Section where you can explore featured content. They provide a tour for it which helps you come across information you may not have discovered otherwise. You can find it here.

Wikiquote

For those of you who like quotes, Wikiquote is going to be one of those pages that you’ll want to bookmark. It’s a free online collection of quotes from various people and in various languages. Within the quotes you may find links to Wikipedia for more information on a certain topic, which is nice.

Each day they have a quote of the day displayed on the Main Page, and then they also have a page for each month where you can view “quotes of the day” from each day in the month. In the left sidebar under the “navigation” section you’ll notice a random page link (as with all other Wiki sites). Clicking it will provide you with a random page with quotes.

One area of the site we recommend visiting is their TV Shows section. Here you’ll find lists of quotes for various TV shows. For an example, we clicked on the Big Bang Theory section and it pulled up quotes from the show organized by which episode it came from. Some shows have quite a few more quotes than others.

wikiquote.png

Wikibooks

Some of you may not have known that Wikbooks even exists yet it’s been around since the Summer of 2003. The purpose of Wikibooks is to provide a place for the creation of free content textbooks and annotated texts that, like other wikis, anybody can edit. (Source)

Out of all of the different Wiki’s, this is the one we were least familiar with so we turned to none other than Wikipedia to learn more about it. We were wondering if all content was new and specific only to Wikibooks or not, and we found our answer. They say, “While some books are original, other began as text copied over from other sources of free content textbooks found on the Internet.”

The one downside to Wikibooks is the fact that the content is written and edited by volunteers which means you may come across incomplete books. The other issue is quality. Not every book you come across would be considered quality content.

Despite these criticisms, they must be doing something right because they have over 30,495 pages of content that people have written. Searching and browsing through content is easy because they break things down into categories, subjects, alphabetically, by the Dewey Decimal classification, and by the Library of Congress classification.

wikibooks.png

Wikispecies

Now this is one we didn’t even know existed, probably because we’ve never really had a use for it. Wikispecies, like the other wiki-based projects we included today, is free and includes a wealth of information. In this particular situation, it’s a wealth of information about species. I guess you could say Wikispecies isn’t for your average joe, and instead is more focused towards those in the science field.

It’s been around only since 2004, but it has grown pretty steadily since. They say they cover Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Bacteria, Archaea, Protista and all other forms of life. Since 2004 they have been able to collect 143,657 “taxonomic articles.”

If Science is your forte and you’re wanting to learn more about all of the various species, Wikispecies is for you.

Wikispecies.png

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