People say Twitter is a time waster. I think it depends on how you use it. One awesome opportunity to turn this "time waster" into something really useful is to learn to save money on Twitter.

3 Ways to Find the Most Tweeted Deals

The following services work the way we are used to by now: the fresher the deal is and the more votes it gets, the more popular it becomes. Most popular deals end up hitting the front page – that’s the way Digg and Reddit as well as smaller social voting sites work.

CheapTweet, CouponTweet and TweetMeSavings work this way. People submit and up-vote the deals by Tweeting them. Deals are grouped by category and seller name. You can tweet any of them right from the service page.

2 Ways to Take Advantage of Twitter Money-Saving Bots

There are two Twitter bots I am aware of that allow to search and compare prices without even leaving Twitter. TinyMassive works like this: you tweet your product name and include @TinyMassive into the message. In a few seconds you get a public reply containing:

1. Your @Twitter-username;
2. The requested product name;
3. The minimum price found;
4. The link to product search results for more options.

Retrevoq is another similar twitter bot to consider.

3 Money-Saving Accounts You Should Follow

Many of coupon code directories and aggregators are on Twitter already, so keeping track of deals and coupons may be done the Twitter-way. I for one do it the following way:

1. I use Seesmic desktop Twitter app that allows to add and aggregate several Twitter accounts;
2. I create a separate account to follow all my money-saving accounts, and whenever there’s an update, I get a pop-up update: never miss a deal!

Here are a couple of recommended Twitter accounts that daily tweet coupons and deals:

• @CheapStingy (by CheapStingyBargains)
• @WiseBread (by WiseBread.com)
• @BabyCheapskate (by BabyCheapSkate.com)

5 Money-Saving Twitter Hashtags Your Should Track

A Twitter hashtag is the way to organize Tweets by topic. To monitor a hashtag, you can either use a desktop app (like Tweetdeck or Seesmic) or use web-based tools like "What the Hashtag?". The best money-saving hashtags to keep track of are:

• #bargains;
• #coupon;
• #coupons;
• #freebie;
• #freebie

What other interesting ways do you Twitter?  Tell us in the comments!

---
Related Articles at Friedbeef's Tech:

How to Save Ink and Paper When Printing

Charity

Twitter 101: 7 Ways to Make Better Sense of Twitter

3 Ways To Improve Your Cooking With Foodieview

6 Effective Ways to Tweet Directly From Your Browser

There are however, people who embrace hardware limitations, make up for it with incredible composition, and tactful editing, resulting in some incredible shots which put many high end cameras to shame.  Here are 12 awesome iPhone photography resources.

Photo Blogs

These are blogs which take extremely good shots, and are the best examples of what a competent photographer can accomplish on the iPhone.  Check them out to get inspired.

1. iPhone as Art

2. The Mobile Frame

Lomography

These are sites dedicated to the shoot from the hip philosophy of lomography, which encourages lighthearted approaches to candid photography to document everyday life.

3. iPhoneLomo

4. LomoPhone

Awards

5. iPhone Photography Awards

The IPPA is an annual contest which aims to celebrate the creativity of the iPhone users.

6. Photocritic’s 100 Amazing iPhone Photos

This collection of the 100 photos remain one of the best testaments of the iPhone’s capability of producing first class photos.

Flickr Groups

7. Flickr: Photos Taken with an Apple iPhone

With the iPhone now the #1 most widely used device on Flickr, it’s not a surprise iPhone photos have a very strong following, with the aptly named ‘Photos taken with an Apple iPhone’ being the biggest group.

Interviews

The best way to understand iPhone photography is to talk to the people behind the lens, learn about their passion, and what makes them tick.

8. Interview with Ugur Kaner, from "Apple iPhone Photography – Street photography”

9. Interview with Gabriel Sucho from "Microbians – Dreams To Not Forget"

Free Apps

10. 30 Best Free iPhone 3G Photo & Video Applications

This is probably the definitive list of free iPhone photo and video apps currently on the web.

Photo Taking Tips

11. How to squeeze decent photos out of an iPhone by Meg Pickard

Everything from proper techniques to hold your iPhone to composition tips in a single post.

12. Taking fantastic photos with an iPhone : An conversation with Sion Fullana

Sion Fullana is a recognized iPhone photographer who loves street photography, and shoots mostly in New York, all taken by iPhone.

Shameless plug: Do also check out my own iPhone photo blog :)

What do you think of the iPhone camera?  Do you have more sites and tips to share?  Tell us in the comments!

---
Related Articles at Friedbeef's Tech:

How to Crop Round Corners on Pictures

How to Turn Your Phone into a WiFi HotSpot

Top 5 URL Shorteners and How They Help You

Top 10 Best Places to Get Free Books (Part 2)

How to Watch Real Media without Installing Real Media Player

If you’re one of over 100 million people around the world who has had a delightful taste of the wonderful, magical world of Anime, you’d know it can be rather difficult to find legit media to satisfy our insatiable appetite for cute, cuddly characters with unrealistically large eyes.  This fact has been compounded with the legal clampdowns on previously reliable websites like AnimeSuki and Crunchyroll. As an avid otaku, yours truly has found some totally free ways to find manga (Japanese comics) for your reading pleasure.

1. How to Read Free Manga Online

The easiest way to get a hold of your favourite manga is to read it straight from the Web. There are tons of sites which host manga pages, but only a handful of them provide reliable loading times during rush hours and a diverse library of enjoyable reads. My personal favourite is OneManga.com, which has a simple interface for short loading times and boasts high quality scans. On the off chance that it somehow fails your expectations, you can try MangaFox.com too. These two sites should be more than enough.

2. How to Download Manga to your Computer

If you desire to store an entire collection of manga, and have the disk space to do so, then you can download manga straight into your computer. You’ll want to look for sites which don’t require a registration to download, as you may want to flick back and forth to determine which has the better quality scan. Some useful places to keep in mind are NarutoChuushin.com, MangaShare.com and Bleach7.com. Their interface may take some getting used to, but be patient, it’s worth it.

3. How to Read Untranslated Manga Scans

RAW scans are original manga scans which haven’t been translated yet. If you know Japanese, you can consider these scans as they have the advantage of appearing sooner than translated copies.  Some places you can find RAW manga scans are MangaShare.com and VeryManga.com. Bleach7.com offers RAWs too, but only for Bleach.

4. How to Read Manga in Different Languages

Not a native speaker of English? Don’t understand Japanese? Well, don’t worry, as there is manga in just about any language you can think of! I’ve seen Bleach and Naruto in Spanish, German, Chinese and even Bahasa Malaysia, and who knows how many other languages there might be out there! Click here to see for yourself!

5. How to Use Youtube to Read Manga

Who knew that Youtube could be used for reading manga? The tremendously popular video-sharing site has even evolved to accommodate us manga fans! The quality for most of the scans is readable, and the loading time is pretty fast too considering they’re static pages. If you can’t keep up with the playing speed, just pause the video and drag the play bar to whatever page you want to read. For some unknown reason, these scans can sometimes appear earlier than their counterparts on well-known manga sites! Go figure!  Here are a few good channels to start you off with.

This post was written by Aaron Pek.  Want to write for this blog?  Just contact me!

How do you get your manga fix?  Tell us in the comments!

---
Related Articles at Friedbeef's Tech:

How to Listen to Wikipedia on your iPod

How to Quickly Email Interesting Web Pages To Yourself

6 Innovative Ways to Save Trees Online

How to Summarize Reviews Quickly

7 Incredibly Speedy Ways to Read Web Pages Faster

Have you sometimes wondered how much longer conventional TV would be useful to us? It just dawned upon me 3 days ago that was the first time I switched on the TV in 2 months! Don’t get me wrong but I do watch TV shows and movies, it’s just that not on TV. In this era of media streaming and user created content, TV pales in comparison because of:

1. Fixed airtime. We don’t like missing any episodes or rushing somewhere where there is a TV just to watch a programme (although that can be fun but very impractical most of the time)
2. Loads of advertisements, regardless paid or free TV
3. Can’t watch on demand (we like freedom to watch anything anytime, don’t we? Anyone without Tivo or the likes will share this notion)
4. Fixed programming. We only get to watch what is being broadcasted.

I have been using the internet for my “TV watching” pleasure for a while now and I’d like to share with you where I go to watch and discover new shows.

1. How to watch South Park Online

SouthPark Studios has the best collection of Southpark on the web. The whole 13 seasons in full episodes are there. The episodes are uploaded promptly, a day after it’s official airtime in the US, if I’m not mistaken. There might be ads in the episodes but other times not.

The quality is overall very good although not HD. What makes this site special are the bonus materials, songs and clips downloads, as well as news and materials not available elsewhere.

2. How to watch Family Guy online

Familyguyx.net has the entire series online – season 1-7. The site doesn’t host any videos but is rather like a very nice directory of all the episodes of the show including the synopsis. Every episode has at least one working link so the streaming speed and quality depends heavily on where the video is hosted. If one is slow, try the other. I find the full collection of episodes very nice but it’s just that pop-ups and ads are hard to miss when visiting this site.

3. How to watch full-length shows on Youtube

Has made moves to tap into Hulu.com’s market, providing full-length episodes of professionally made TV shows. CBS has joined youtube in this direction. The drawback is that only old TV shows (which still have its charms) are available for viewing.

If you’re a big fan of Star Trek, Beverly Hill 90210 (the original) or MacGuyver, you’re in luck. It’s bummer that viewers from certain countries are unable to view the channel due to “copyright restrictions”. Fret not, simply download and install hotspotshield and you’ll see the channel in its full glory.

4. How to make a catalog of 2 million shows at your disposal

This is one of my favourites. It’s a big catalogue with links to good quality streaming hosts. SurfTheChannel doesn’t host any content but rather serves as a link to numerous hosts. Some videos even have links to purchase on iTunes. This site has almost 2 million links in its database. It’ll keep one busy for a while.

5. How to watch MTV productions online

If you’re a music fan, you’ve got to love this site. Loads of music videos, photos, mobile downloads. What is interesting is also the fact that full episodes of MTV productions are also available online for viewing. You can even watch the 2009 Movie Awards including behind the scenes. I used to watch MTV on satellite, now I watch it free :)

6. How to watch Warner Bros TV series online

If you’re a fan of One Tree Hill, Friends, Gilmore Girls, Buffy, Angel among many others, this site is definitely for you. Full episodes are available for viewing but the episodes might be shuffled depending on series.  TheWB.com is currently only available for U.S. viewers (surprise!) but with Hotspot Shield , you’re good to go ;)

7. How to watch any random show when you feel like having a “lucky dip”

Once in a while, we get bored of our usual series and feel like something totally different but not quite sure what to watch.  Google videos claims to contain millions of videos and they’re all uncategorized. So you’ll never know what you’ll find (in a good way).

Unlike youtube, google videos has anything from short clips up to full length shows of longer than 1 hour. On top of that, it also features and recommends similar videos hosted by external sites – aha! I have watched video short clips up to full-length documentaries on that site. I also find the video quality better than youtube. Try your luck!

8. How to turn your computer into your PVR

If you are an internet and TV addict but don’t have a TiVo or any PVR (like me), you’d love what I’m going to tell you. Introducing Ted, which can be your PVR, utilizing Bit Torrent technology. It doesn’t download but rather works as a scheduler and a torrent hunter for your torrent client

You can even schedule download prior to an episode’s airtime, and Ted will search numerous sites to look for healthy torrents, checks out the information and airtime of new episodes or shows, then ask your torrent client to download it – automatically.

9. How to expand your knowledge without reading and still appears flawlessly knowledgeable

In case you’re into documentaries, also check out topdocumentaryfilms.com. This site contains commercially produced documentaries hosted mainly on google videos. What I like about this site is that it has properly-written introduction and synopsis about every film like an article, just to get your interest to grow. When you’re convinced to watch, he video plays in the middle of the article, which is kind of cool.

10. How to grow your love for conspiracy theories online

Freedocumentaries.org on the other hand, contains more controversial types of documentaries. The site has a good-sized catalog of various interests and well-written short description for every show. If you like the film well enough, there is also a link to buy the original DVD.  Unlike topdocumentaries.com, the videos are hosted on youtube, so they are broken in parts for every show, which I find very annoying. Well, we can’t have it all, can we?

This post was written by Jenny Kok who blogs about Mac related matters at Made On Mac.  Want to write for this blog?  Become a paid writer for Friedbeef’s Tech today!

What sites do you use to get your online TV fix?  Tell us in the comments!

---
Related Articles at Friedbeef's Tech:

Your Input Pretty Please

Top 5 Essential Video Converters You Shouldn’t Miss

5 Steps to Effective RSS Management

How to Find Out Another Blog’s Feedburner Count – Even if They Don’t Display It

Want RSS in Outlook? Use RSS Popper

Twitter is already a social networking phenomena in its own right and every other person who has an active online presence also seems to be tweeting.  Rather than posting directly on twitter.com’s default web interface, here are 6 ways to become a quicker and more effective tweeter, just by tweaking your web browser.

1. How to tweet URLs and post to del.icio.us with one click

 Bigtweet allows you to share websites you visit by clicking a bookmarklet which automatically puts the URL which you’re currently browsing into your tweet and shortens it for you.  It also posts to del.icio.us and/or Ping.fm so you can even share the URL easily across other social networks.

2. How to tweet URLs and enter contests at the same time

Much like BigTweet, TwitThis also automatically puts the URL which you’re currently browsing into your tweet and shortens it for you.  The unique spin here is that you’re able to enter contests as well, which allow you to tweet and win cool prizes at the same time like iPhones and Kindles.

3. How to tweet even faster

With Twitlet, one can tweet just by hitting a bookmarklet on your browser.  No installation, no browser extensions, just a simple bookmark, and a window pops up where you put in your dose of 140 characters without having to load twitter.  It’s really one of the quickest ways to tweet from a browser.  No sign-up required.

4. How to tweet directly from the Firefox address bar

Twitterbar is a Firefox add-on that allows anyone to post tweets fright from the address bar! Just type in any text you want and press the tweet button. Also convenient for tweeting URLs, in which you just have to press the tweet button.

5. How to integrate Twitter into your Firefox sidebar

Self-proclaimed ‘best twitter addon for Firefox’, Twitbin allows users to do anything Twitter-related (send/receive updates, messages etc.) right from the Firefox sidebar. Pretty handy if you are sidebar junkie.

6. How to share links and track them on Twitter

If you use the Bit.ly sidebar to post links to Twitter, Facebook, and Gmail, you’ll also be able to see how popular the link is on bit.ly by being able to track the clicks it gets.  You’ll also be able to read all existing twitter and friendfeed conversations surrounding the link you’re sharing.

This post was jointly written by Chan Huey Hoong and James Yeang

What tips do you have for Twitter productivity? Tell us in the comments!

---
Related Articles at Friedbeef's Tech:

How to Quickly Email Interesting Web Pages To Yourself

13 Ways to Save Money Using Twitter

How Sit at Your Desk and Take up Astronomy

Twitter 101: 7 Ways to Make Better Sense of Twitter

How To Sign Up And Avoid Email Spam… ( Ipoo.org )

Do you spend too much time fighting spam on your blog, and not enough time writing meaningful content?  Here are 5 techniques which will help you in your effort to keep spammers at bay.

1. How to help literacy and fight spam at the same time

About 200 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read correctly by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher.  If you sign up for free with reCAPTCHA, every time someone leaves a comment and deciphers a CAPTCHA, you’re helping to make a positive contribution towards literacy. 

2. How to protect your comments from spam

If you’re running Wordpress, Akismet is the spam filter which is installed by default, and I’m a pretty big fan of the service.  How it works is that when a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your site it is submitted to the Akismet web service which runs hundreds of tests on the comment to determine if it should automatically be flagged as spam. 

While a certain measure of spam still does manage to get through, it is constantly evolving and improving.  Also, you can argue that a bit of spam falling through the cracks is always better than false positives with legit comments being flagged as spam.  To date, more than 700,000 spam comments have been caught on my site alone. 

If you’re already using this, and want to try something else, good alternatives worth considering include Defensio and Bad Behavior. 

3. How to avoid email spam from your site’s contact form

Aptly named the ‘Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form’, this contact form has been widely touted as one of the most secure blog contact forms around.  Easy to style, simple to implement, and easy for readers to use, it offers 16 different countermeasures to help provide a secure experience for your readers.

4. How to detect if your content is being used for a splog

Splogs or spam blogs, and automated sites which scrape content from others and re-post the material as their own in order to earn money.  To fight this, run the ‘Digital Fingerprint’ Wordpress plugin, which will place a small digital fingerprint into blog posts. The fingerprint is only visible in the RSS feed, not on the website itself so it’s hardly noticeable.  From here, you’ll be able to track down where your stolen posts are popping up, and try to shut them down.

5. How to display your email address on your blog without exposing it to spammers

Openly display your email address and email harvesters will collect it, and place it on spam lists.  One easy way to avoid this, is to display your email ID as an image.  My preferred service is Nexodyne Email Icon Generator which generates a nice little image like this.

For more traditional looking images that blend in better with your site, you can try email2image, or emailcover which adds an extra layer of protection by displaying your email CAPTCHA style!

Do you take active steps to fight spam on your blog?  Tell us in the comments!

---
Related Articles at Friedbeef's Tech:

4 Easy Ways to Decode a TinyURL

6 Innovative Ways to Save Trees Online

How To Sign Up And Avoid Email Spam… ( Ipoo.org )

Implementing Categories in Blogger

How to Change the World. One Gift at a Time

Tired of boring daily work? Why not try some other (fun) ways to earn a little bit of money? You won’t need any special skills or resources: just a bit of free time to earn some cash daily. 

1. How to Earn Money from Your Pictures

ShareAPic pays you cash if you are good at sharing your pics uploaded to the service; the details:

• Get paid $0.22 per 1000 pic views;
• Pay out within 30 days
• Payments via PayPal
• Alternative prizes: gift certificates from Amazon and eLuxury

2. How to Earn Money With Your Knowledge

JustAnswer pays its experts for answers the provide to the random user.

• Earn 50% (25% if you are new) of what a customer is offering for an answer;
• Payout threshold: $20
• Payments via PayPal

3. How to Earn Money with Online Coupons

Buxr offers you the way to earn money by sharing online coupons and deals. If you found a great deal, share it on Buxr, create compelling title and description and hope the community will find it useful.

• Daily prizes: $10 and monthly prizes: over $100
• Alternative prizes: mugs.

4. How to Earn Money by Participating in Social Networks

MyLot is a social media community that pays its members for being active: participating in discussions, sharing photos, refer friends, etc.

• Payment threshold $10
• Payments via PayPal

5. How to Earn Money by Completing Simple Tasks

Amazon Mechanical Turk pays you money for completing "HITs" – Human Intelligence Tasks – simple tasks which are either impossible to do for a machine or work as a machine enhancer (a good example of such a task is Google image labeler which helps to improve Google image search).

Sample HITs: answer the question "Are these two products the same?" or complete the easy task: "Find the item number for the product in this image."

• Rates depend on hits;
• Payments via Amazon Payments account

This is a guest post by Ann Smarty, who does SEO and Internet Marketing when she’s not writing for blogs-named-after-food.  Want to write for Friedbeef’s Tech and share your tips with thousands of people?  Drop me a line.  We’re looking for paid regulars, as well as guest appearances.

---
Related Articles at Friedbeef's Tech:

Make Money with Domain Names : 10 Steps to Success (Part 2)

13 Ways to Save Money Using Twitter

How to Attach and Save Files Faster

A Blast From The Past… 5 Useful Web Services

How to Turn Windows Explorer into a Powerhouse

Philanthropy is a now common among the world’s super-rich, with big money being donated for many global causes. The rest of us that do not belong to the wealthy elite can also do a part in helping the world – by putting our idle CPU resources to good use!

These distributed computing projects simulate supercomputers by harnessing the combined processing power of PCs worldwide, in order to crunch huge amounts of data.  They don’t have any impact on performance either as they only run when the computer is idle.

1. How to help detect intelligent life outside earth

SETI@home stands for the Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence – a project that attempts to detect intelligent life forms in outer space by means of analyzing radio signals. Intelligent life-forms are presumed to use radio waves as a means of communication, and detection of these weak signals coming from outer space may signify the existence of such entities.

2. How to help discover a cure for AIDS

FightAids@home is a distributed computing project that aims to increase understanding of AIDS and HIV. CPU resources are used to calculate the millions of protein structures for a possible AIDS cure, as well as advancing knowledge in the structural biology of AIDS.

3. How to help predict climate changes

Climateprediction.net utilizes the power of individual home computers to help fine tune and reduce uncertainties in current climate prediction models. You may help make climate prediction more accurate by being part of this project!

4. How to help physicists understand the origins of the universe

LHC@home is a newly-formed project to help process the raw data collected at the Large Hadron Collider. The calculations done will help scientists and physicists figure out what goes on in a particle accelerator and ultimately leading to true understanding of our universe’s creation.

5. How to help advance the field of artificial intelligence

Artificial Intelligence System seeks to advance development in artificial intelligence by increasing the understanding of our brain. Using combined computing powers, the system simulates the billions of neurons in a human brain, and uses these data to come up with sophisticated artificial intelligence models.

6. How to help create better rice

Nutritious Rice for The World aims to help farmers breed better rice with pest-resistant and high yield properties. By simulating the protein strains of rice, it is hoped that better rice breeds can be produced to help undeveloped or food-deprived nations.

7. How to help develop a cleaner energy source

The Clean Energy Project simulates millions of molecule structures in order to come up with new materials that may play important roles in developing alternative energy sources. From organic photovoltaic to conducting polymers, every distributed computer plays a role in finding the molecular structures of these materials.

8. How to help render 3D animations

3D renderings take up considerable computing resources – and BURP, short for Big and Ugly Rendering Project, aims to create a network of computers to aid in rendering of sophisticated 3D animations. Who knows, you might be helping in the creation of the next Shrek.

9. How to help discover the next Armageddon

Orbit@home monitors the impact hazard that may be caused by near-earth objects. Be the first to know of any asteroids or objects that might hit Earth!

Which one of the above projects do you feel most strongly about?  Tell us in the comments!

The author of this post, Chan Huey Hoong is a regular writer at Friedbeef’s Tech, check out his artistic endeavors on his blog.

---
Related Articles at Friedbeef's Tech:

3 Questions Answered About Social Entrepreneurship on the Web

Web 2.0 – Where the Machine is Us/ing Us

3 Ways to Save The World Using Your Computer: Go Greener Today

10×10 News – Visual Information Project

Open Source Goodness For Office Use (PDF Creator, Filezilla)

The rates of rainforest destruction are 2.4 acres per second, 149 acres per minute, 214,000 acres per day and 78 million acres per year.  Just to put things in perspective, as you read this sentence, an area the size of 78 Olympic sized swimming pools would have been cut down.

To solve the problem of deforestation, we need to do all we can and here are 6 easy ways you can get involved as every little bit helps.

1. How to plant trees by searching the web

Imagine searching the web and saving the planet at the same time.  Ecocho is a free service, and it’s one of the easiest ways people can change everyday behaviour to make a positive impact on the environment.  For every 1000 searches that users make on ecocho.com, five trees will be grown to offset carbon pollution emissions.  Switching to ecocho.com doesn’t alter or slow your search as search results directly from Yahoo!

2. How to plant trees for $1

Part of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), plantabillion.org is a website which seeks to make funding for tree planting as easy as possible.  Simply put, every dollar you put into the site results in a single tree being planted. 

3. How to turn deserts into forests

Tree-Nation is planting trees in the desert to combat desertification and land degradation. This process will have many positive environmental and humanitarian effects.  This site allows you to sponsor a tree, where not only will your tree be planted, but it will benefit the local community from its produce (gum, fruits, alimentation, medicines, etc).  You’ll also be able to follow your tree as it grows through photos on the site.

4. How to plant trees by playing quiz games

JogoGreen is fun and easy way for people to learn more about being environmentally friendly, and actually make a difference at the same time.  When you answer 10 questions correctly, they have enough advertising revenue to plant one tree!  This movement has so far resulted in more than 100,000 trees being planted.

5. How to plant trees – in real life

If you’re looking for online resources on tree planting, look no further than WikiHow’s incredibly comprehensive guide.  This has everything you can imagine to support your tree planting exploits including many photos and videos to make things clearer.

6. How to cut down less trees

There are two ways you can take on deforestation.  Plant more trees, and reduce usage of paper.  If you’re looking to save paper, do check out this post on 3 eco-friendly ways to save ink and paper.  The more effective your printing becomes, the less tress you affect.

Would you help plant a tree?  Tell us in the comments!

---
Related Articles at Friedbeef's Tech:

7 Ways to Save the World Using Your Desktop

How to Attach and Save Files Faster

How to Save Ink and Paper When Printing

A Blast From The Past… 5 Useful Web Services

3 Ways to Save The World Using Your Computer: Go Greener Today

A lot of fresh foods do not come with expiration dates.  Even packed foods with expiration dates have different shelf lives once opened and kept in the fridge.  So what’s the best way to track how long food should be kept around to eat? 

Try going to StillTasty and you’ll find all your answers there.  StillTasty is a free service which lets you drill down to different food types like meat, vegetables, and dairy and check out how long they can really last, as well as plenty of tips on how to keep food fresh.

It even breaks down expiration times by storage methods so you know how long food can last in a refrigerator or freezer.  Fried beef for example, would last 3-4 days in proper refrigeration :) 

What are some of your favorite food sites?  Tell us in the comments!

---
Related Articles at Friedbeef's Tech:

3 Ways To Improve Your Cooking With Foodieview

3 Video Recipe Websites That Sizzle

Drop a Comment, Help the Poor

Web Resources to Help You Think Out of the Box

In Transition…

Describing how small an object is can be difficult at times.  If you’re the type of person who thinks that seeing is believing, then you’ll find Pective very useful.  Pective is a free web service which helps show you pictures of objects scaled to actual size on your screen.  Now you can have an actual idea of size rather than trying to visualize it.  Of course this would work best for objects which are smaller than your screen :)

For other cool sizing and measurement tools check out our write-up on SizeEasy, and SensibleUnits.

Would you use a web sizing tool?  Tell us in the comments!

---
Related Articles at Friedbeef's Tech:

5 Image Resizing Tools to Die For

How Nano is Your IPod?

How to Get More Out of Firefox

How to Save Your Eyes from Your Screen (Part 1)

10×10 News – Visual Information Project

Is the web page you want to visit down?  Rather than constantly hitting the refresh button in vain, try Dingitsup – a free service which lets you know via email, twitter, or SMS when it gets back up again.  Now you can go about your daily life in peace knowing that you’ll be notified when you can access the website.

To top it off – you can monitor as many pages as you like, and you don’t even need to register for the service. Just tell it the page you want to track, and how you want to be notified and you’re done!

Dingitsup also tracks websites going down, so you can hook it up to your own blog/website to get instant notification when something goes wrong. 

What do you do when the site you want to visit is down?  Tell us in the comments!

---
Related Articles at Friedbeef's Tech:

How to Find Out Who is Hosting ANY Website

5 of the Most Useful Email Notifiers You’ll Ever Find

The Hottest Social Network of 2007 – Get FREE Pownce Invites

How to Find Out Another Blog’s Feedburner Count – Even if They Don’t Display It

How to Set Website Specific Text Sizes

Miss a really important soccer game?  Do a quick search on YouTube and you’ll find that it’s really difficult to find quality highlight reels of specific games.  Either you’ll find an older game, or worse – fake videos which don’t display any highlights at all.

So where do you watch free soccer highlights?  SoTube is a blog that aggregates online videos of key matches according to timeline so the most recent matches appear on the front page.  This makes things really easy to find. 

Major games from the English Premier League, Spanish La Liga, and Italian Serie A are covered on this blog, so most of your soccer / football needs would be well taken care of.

Do you watch sports highlights online?  Tell us where you do it in the comments!

---
Related Articles at Friedbeef's Tech:

7 Ways To A Better World Cup Experience

7 Incredibly Speedy Ways to Read Web Pages Faster

How to Turn a Video File (DivX, AVI etc) into a DVD

How Sit at Your Desk and Take up Astronomy

How to Watch BBC News & Bloomberg For Free

With so many good T-shirt sites on the net like Threadless and BustedTees, it can be hard to lay out your options when you want to buy a new T-shirt.  Teenormous is a free search engine which indexes the web for T-shirts, and allows you to search and filter down T-shirts by keyword, price, color, and gender.  All results come with a little picture preview of the item so you know what you’re getting.  Truly a geeky way to go shopping :)

Thanks for the tip MusingT

---
Related Articles at Friedbeef's Tech:

How to Find Any Sound Instantly

Top 5 Ways to Attain Perfect Color Coordination

7 Creative Ways to Get the Perfect Domain Name

How Nano is Your IPod?

Chart Templates – How to Choose the Perfect One Every Time

With the huge holiday shopping period ahead of us, saving has become a particularly hot topic; and with looming economic crisis and undefined gas prices, shipping is the first thing you probably want to save on. So let’s look at some useful (and what’s more free!) online tools that can help you manage and save on shipping your holiday presents.

1. How to find retailers offering free shipping coupons

 FreeShipping.org lists all retailers offering free shipping coupons. You can browse coupons by category or by the retailer’s name and also spot soon-to-expire or newest codes. The site reports to have more than 850 retailers in various categories with some prominent retailers like Target and Toys R us.

2.  How to find cheap items to qualify for free shipping on Amazon

Certain items at Amazon.com qualify for free shipping, but sometimes purchase fall short of the minimum $25 needed to receive the free shipping. Just enter the amount you need to get free shipping on Filleritem, to see a list of products that will get you the free shipping.. The site also offers a FireFox extension or Greasemonkey script that "will add a link to filleritem from Amazon.com when you are short of the free shipping limit".

3. How to do online shopping with free shipping

Pricegrabber has a separate section for products with free shipping option. You can browse the site by category or just use the keyword-based search to find items that can be shipped for free. What’s more you can compare these product prices and thus save twice: by paying nothing for shipping and choosing a cheaper option. You can also browse through the product reviews and ratings, set the price alerts and add products to your list to manage your holiday purchases.

4. How to estimate shipping charges for delivery

 Shippingsidekick.com is a great web-based tool helping you avoid any shipping surprises. Fill in the online form: input "from" and "to" zip code, package size, declared value, etc and the site will estimate your shipping charges and compare them across various carriers. What’s more, the site offers some great informational resources, like shipping tips and advice, info on international shipping, etc.  Currently only works within the US.

5. How to compare different courier charges

ShipGooder.com is another shipping cost calculator that will help you choose the best shipping option. With it you can compare prices of express shipping, ground shipping by various services and based on the route you specify. What’s more, you can see the route on map, export all shipping options to Excel or bookmark the page for further reference.  Currently only works within the US.

6. How to let people bid for the the cheapest rates to ship for you

uShip is "an online shipping marketplace that connects customers with Transportation Service Providers to make shipping more affordable and efficient". Essentially, that’s a free (can be paid for urgent and featured listings) online auction where you create an account, post your shipment details, and let service providers bid for the privilege to ship your item. The listing takes no more than 10 minutes to post (if you are also creating an account); you can also choose bid-alerting methods (email message, phone call, text messages).

What are your thoughts on shipping?  Let us know in the comments!

This is a guest post by Ann Smarty, an Internet Marketer and SEO consultant.  Want to guest post or write for Friedbeef’s Tech?  Drop me a line :)

---
Related Articles at Friedbeef's Tech:

How to Find the Perfect T-shirt

12 Geeky Techniques to Stop Yourself Slacking Off

Manager Tools Wins Podcast Awards!

How to Edit, Merge, Split and Convert PDF Files

3 del.icio.us Tools That Will Make Your Mouth Water