Friedbeef’s Tech

It’s probably the most important image on your computer, so do it justice… Here are 7 useful ways to take your simple desktop wallpaper to the next level!

1. Use Google Calendar as Your Desktop Wallpaper

Want something more useful that just a static image?  Why not use Google Calendar as your backdrop so you can plan the day better?  Here is a set of instructions you can use if you want to try it out.

Go to your Google Calendar  settings.  In the calendar address section.  Choose the HTML option and copy the URL.

In Windows, go to Control panel–> display–> desktop and pick ‘customize desktop’. Choose the ‘web’ tab and click ‘new’ then add the URL for your Google Calendar.

You can also add other URLs to integrate just about any website into your wallpaper!

2. Wallpapr - Search Engine Just For Wallpapers

Using conventional image search engines rarely return results which are good enough for a wallpaper.  WallPapr is a search engine which retrieves wallpaper sized images from Flickr (which contains some of the best images you could ever consider using as a wallpaper).

Every photo it draws from has at least 1024×768 resolution, and clicking on a thumbnail will bring you straight to the photo download page!  Alternatively, you can try searching within this Flickr group specifically setup for Wallpapers

3. Rotate Your Favourite Wallpapers with ‘PowerToys Wallpaper Changer’

PowerToys are additional programs that Windows developers work on after product release.  This one helps to juggle your wallpaper with images on your hard drive so you’ll never get bored with your background!

“Make your computer desktop more dynamic, interactive, useful, and fun. The Wallpaper Changer PowerToy allows your desktop wallpaper to change automatically. It also lets you choose which images to display. Select the folder of images to display as a slide show and set the display interval to change wallpaper every few minutes, hours, or days. “

4. Change up Your Desktop with Flickr Wallpaper Rotator

According to Hitwise, Photo sharing site Flickr is now the 2nd largest photo site behind Photobucket.  No surprise then that it’s an excellent resource for beautiful wallpapers.

Rather than rotate within your own images on the hard drive like the PowerToy mentioned above, ‘Flickr Wallpaper Rotator’ is a piece of freeware that will help your automatically download images from Flickr before rotating your wallpaper.  Just specify tags or a Flickr username, and you’re good to go!

If you’re more of a Google Images fan, a similar application exists for it.

5. Get a Video Wallpaper Using VLC Media Player

One of the key features on Windows Vista Ultimate is Dreamscene.  This utility gives you the ability to have a video as a background.  Slow swimming fishes, what blowing in the wind - whatever your fancy.  If you’re NOT a Windows Vista Ultimate user, the Vista Rewired blog has come up with an excellent tutorial to implement this using our favourite cross-platform player - VLC media player.

6. Implement a Multi Monitor Wallpaper

Windows won’t display your beautiful wallpaper across multiple monitors?  I don’t have a multi-monitor setup at this point, but apparently it’s not very straightforward.

“Not only can you not display separate backgrounds on different displays, but if your displays are different resolution, one of them is going to look either stretched and fugly, or cropped and weird.” - Will from Maximum PC

Fortunately, if you do want to implement a multi-monitor wallpaper, help is at hand in the form of a useful Photoshop template that will fix this.

7. Join a Social Network for Wallpapers with ‘Desktop Nexus’

Take a wallpaper site, add tags, comments, search information, RSS feeds, and a vibrant community - and you’ve changed a 90’s website into a Web 2.0 hub.  Community managed (members have the choice to vote for wallpapers being added), Desktop Nexus is where you want to be if you’re into sharing and obtaining high quality wallpapers.

8. Improve your Productivity with GTD Wallpapers

Let your background give you an incredible productivity boost by defining different sections on your desktop.
Use this excellent layered GTD wallpaper to organize your icons in groups, like the:

• paper area for work stuff
• aluminum plate for personal projects
• wooden desk for yet to be categorized elements, like finished or in-progress downloads.
• post-it for urgent elements

Bonus links: Spice up your desktop the old fashioned way - using nothing but pretty images!

• 30 Nicest Apple, Mac OS and iPod Wallpapers
• Beautiful Vista Wallpapers that didn’t make the final cut
• Collection of Pixel patterns (which you can tile for fancy wallpapers)

What good wallpaper sites do you know of?  Let us know in the comments!

[tags]wallpaper, desktop, images, photos [/tags] 

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Started in 1998, PayPal has become the top online payment system with 100 million account members.  If you have an account with them, here are 5 useful PayPal tools that you should be aware of:

#1 - Calculate your PayPal expenses quickly with P-Calc

Depending on the type of account and business you do with PayPal, it may impose a small charge on received funds.  Although minimal, these charges can be a bit hard to calculate.  P-Calc is a free service which lets you work out all those charges up front - With this, you can better price your products to ensure you reap a certain net amount. 

#2 - Withdraw funds from ANY country with VMI

As with many countries, PayPal, unfortunately does not support Malaysian banks in its system yet.  Hence, there is no direct way to convert your virtual funds into cold hard cash. 

The Virtual Money International ATM card (which I use) is a popular legal workaround to this problem.  It registers your details under a US bank which you can then transfer PayPal funds to.  After which you can withdraw the funds from your local ATM machine.

I’ve been using this for a few months now, and have had no problems thus far.  If you want to know more about how to use this card - check out HongKiat’s great post on this subject.

#3 - Add an extra level of security with a PayPal Security Key

As a service, PayPal is pretty secure, but passwords can fall into the wrong hands all too often! 

Most websites keep your online account safe by only asking for your user name and password to verify your identity.  The PayPal Security Key is a small electronic device that generates a unique security code for your account about every 30 seconds. You use that code to access your account, and to help prevent people that you don’t know from doing the same. It’s like a combination lock for your account, except that the combination always changes.

Currently only available in the US, it is being offered at a heavily subsidized price of USD$5.00 (waived for business accounts) - with replacement units being offered at the same price.  A small amount to pay for guaranteed safe transactions. 

#4 - Allow people to PayPal money to you from your blog

Steve Pavlina is one of the best known bloggers writing about personal development.  What he revealed was that donations made up a significant portion of his online income.

“My second biggest income stream is actually donations.  My average donation is about $10, and I?ve received a number of $100 donations too.  It only took me about an hour to set this up via PayPal.  So even if your content is free like mine, give your visitors a means to voluntarily contribute if they wish.  It?s win-win.

If you?re going to request donations, then really request donations.  Don?t put up a barely visible ?Donate? link and pray for the best.” - Steve Pavlina

Want to easily place PayPal donation link in your site?  There are a few easy ways to go about this…

• Go to PayPal and set up a standard checkout system - this is painful as the guide for the ‘easy’ standard checkout is 126 pages long.
• Try out Wordpress widgets by Patrick Chia or Supriyadi which allows you to have an easy donation widget in your sidebar
• Try out the popular ‘Buy me a beer’ Wordpress plugin which asks for donations, but is phrased differently.

#5 -  Settle meal tabs with the PayPal Facebook app

Looking for an easier way to get your friends to pay you back? PayPal for Facebook lets you request money from your friends with just a few clicks.  Currently released and still under heavy development for new features, it’s one of the more useful Facebook apps to have around. 

Bonus Tip: Filter Paypal imposters from your email for free with Iconix anti Phishing tools. 

[tags]paypal, donate, paypal security key, vmi, virtual money [/tags]

Do you use any Paypal tools?  Let us know what you think in the poll and comments below!

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A quick check on my spam folder would reveal a good number of emails advertising quick fixes for higher education.  It is a great pity that this happens so often as it does tend to mar the reputation of professional institutions who are indeed serious about provide proper education online.

EarnMyDegree.com is one such site which offers such packages, and we’re going to have a look at their offerings as well as get a quick overview of online education as a whole.

How receptive are employers to online degrees?

Depending on who you ask, here are some quick numbers from Wikipedia about the perceived quality of online degrees in America.

• 100% - employers who responded felt that distance education program graduates performed better on the job as a result of their degree (as compared to their previous performance)
• 55% - percent of employers preferred who traditional degrees over online ones
• 41% - percent of employers who would give “equal consideration” to both types of degrees

In a nutshell, you probably won’t be wasting your time going to an online institution, but there is still a slight bias towards traditional degrees.  This would probably differ based on the field of study - You’d have to imagine courses which involve a lot of group and lab work probably would not work as well in an online environment.

How good are online schools?

The lack of long-standing authoritative metrics is no doubt a problem when developing credibility for an online degree.  Many of the metrics which work for ranking traditional degrees do not work for online universities, causing most of them to be unranked in traditional lists.  There are rankings for online institutions alone, but there is no authoritative list which combines BOTH traditional and online universities.

Here is an evaluation of EarnMyDegree.com’s featured universities - both in the traditional sense as defined by USNews, and online rank as defined by OEDB.  The site offers many more universities, but this was a list which they placed most prominently on their site.

It’s important to keep in mind that in the below list - ‘unranked’ does not mean ‘ranked too poorly to count’ - It just means that it was not taken into consideration.

• American InterContinental University (AIU) - Unranked in traditional rankings, 3rd in online rankings
• University of Phoenix - Unranked in both traditional, 15th in online rankings
• Capella University - Unranked in traditional rankings, 4th in online rankings
• Florida Metropolitan University (FMU) - Unranked in traditional rankings, 2nd in online rankings
• Liberty University - Ranked as a 4th tier traditional university, unranked in online rankings

…and that’s a headache.  If a university is ranked #2 online, but UNRANKED in the traditional sense, how good is it?  When cross-referencing both the USNews and OEDB list I only found ONE link between the two:

• ‘Post University’ - Which was ranked #7 for Online Universities, but was a 4th Tier university on the traditional list (this university is not featured on EarnMyDegree.com).

To sum it up, coming to a conclusion on the relative quality of education is very difficult given the current resources which are publicly available.  Whatever little evidence we have seems to point us to this:

• Traditional universities do not focus on full-time online degrees as a means of expansion via the Internet
• Online universities are may be ranked poorly in a traditional list, even if they rank well among other online universities although…
• The gap between the Top 3 online universities and the other universities on the OEDB list are significantly large, meaning that those at the top of this list may be significantly better than those ranked 4 and below

Should you bother with an online degree?

Before you make that decision - here are a few things to keep in mind:

1. Make sure your program is accredited in your country.  No point graduating from a program which no one recognizes.  Do the relevant checks with authorities.
2. A poor traditional university is just as bad as a poor online university.  The same can be said of a good one.  Don’t pick a university using a brick-and-mortar vs online argument.
3. Going back to the study cited at the beginning of this article, just about all employers felt that getting a degree, online or not - it did make a difference to performance.
4. You will probably get better access to higher paying jobs if you get a degree.  U.S. Department of Commerce has determined that people with Bachelor degrees take home over 98% more lifetime pay, and over 170% for Masters degrees.

EarnMyDegree.com is a good way to get access to many online institutions, so if you do decide to pursue this option - it is as good a place as any to start.  Also check out their helpful tips in their learning center at the bottom of page.

If you didn’t have a degree, would YOU enroll in an Online University?  Help us answer the quick poll below and/or leave a comment to let us know your thoughts on the matter!

Disclaimer: EarnMyDegree.com has paid me to review their service, and to give an honest opinion. Please note that all opinions expressed in this post are completely my own, and have not been influenced by EarnMyDegree.com in any way.

[tags]online university, education, college [/tags]

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