Friedbeef's Tech » Useful Tips

How to share your email address online without getting hit by spam

James Yeang — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 00:09:22 +0000

Put your email address online and you’ll be at the mercy of spam bots and email harvesters. These are automated robots which troll the internet looking to add to their ever growing spam mailing list. So how do you share your email without getting hit?

Scr.im is a free service which helps put a layer of security around a short URL so that spambots will not be able to find your email address easily.

Sharing your email

Simply just type in your email and pick your short URL for easy reference

…Then share it easily across various mediums.

Reading a scr.im email address

When someone clicks on your link, they just have to click on the correct captcha answer…

…and bingo, the email address is displayed.

There you go, simple one click steps to ensure your email is not abused when you put it online.

7 Ways to Track Hot Trends on the Internet

James Yeang — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 01:08:59 +0000

As the Internet progressively moves towards real-time information, the need to know what’s popular right now is becoming increasingly important. Here are the best ways to track trends of all types, so you’ll always be in the know about what’s hot on the Internet.

1. How to track popular Internet video trends

Mag.ma is the definitive source when it comes to tracking what’s hot for Internet videos. It aggregates all the hot videos from sites like YouTube, Vimeo and Daily Motion, takes into account social media buzz, links, positive reviews, how fast views are growing, then and shows you a selection of videos which are up and coming.

Because it tracks chatter from around the web and links to the video as well, using Mag.ma, you’ll usually be able to watch viral videos very early on rather than waiting for it to hit the masses.

2. How to track hot Twitter trends

Trendistic is one of the most visual ways to track Twitter trends out there. What I really like about it is that it helps you understand popular trends, and the tweets that were happening at that particular point in time when the topic became hot. Many other services just show you what’s hot and the current tweets about that topic (you can also get that here), so there is little retrospective understanding about what actually happened when the topic was trending and became viral.

It also offers up some great tools like hourly/weekly/monthly charts, and the ability to embed these charts into your own website.

3. How to track popular search trends

Google Trends Hot List shows you the hottest searches on the web right now. Close to real time, this is probably the single greatest indicator as to what people are searching for now. Google trends of course also allows you to track buzz of any given keyword across time.

Trendy Bing uses Google Trends hot list, but the results are published in Bing instead of Google. The result is a slightly richer experience with videos and photos to complement the search results.

4. How to track popular image trends

Digg Images is my favorite location when I want to find out what images are taking the Internet by storm. While Digg showcases all the most popular content of every genre be it videos/news/tech, the image section is particularly unique as there are few sources online which really capture what images/photos are really popular now.

5. How to track popular news trends

Newsmap is a fantastic visualization tool when it comes to determining what news is hot right now. It aggregates Google News and makes the more popular (the more written about) stories larger and more prominent, so in one glance, you’ll be able to see what’s hot. You can also customize it by topic and location to give you an even more focused look.

6. How to track popular feed subscription trends

Website subscription can be considered the ultimate gauge of reader loyalty. These are people who have signed up and subscribed to your news/blog feed, and want to be notified every time something new comes out. In terms of measuring loyal readers, this measure makes more sense than raw traffic.

Feed Compare is a free way to compare and chart RSS subscription of most websites (if they use feedburner). Just type in the websites you want to compare, choose the timeframe, and just compare away!

7. How to track your email trends

No, there isn’t a service which allows you to track what people are saying on email :) There is however, one called ‘Mail Trends’ which allows you to track what you are saying on Gmail. It allows you to get more insight on key email stats for example:

Distribution of messages by year, month, day, day of week and time of day
The top senders, recipients and mailing lists you’re on.
The distribution of thread lengths and the lists and people that result in the longest threads

Try it, the results may surprise you.

Do you track any other popular trends? Or do you have different ways of tracking them? Tell us in the comments :)

3 Different Ways to Watch the World Cup Online

James Yeang — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 14:40:31 +0000

It’s that special time again. Once every four years, the world is gripped by football fever and this time it’s centered around South Africa. Depending on where you live, this may or may not result in suitable viewing times for live matches, or you may not even have access to these matches without paying exorbitant cable subscription fees. So to help you out, here are some useful resources to help you watch the World Cup online.

How do download full length World Cup matches online

If you wish to keep a copy of your favorite world cup game, mysoccerplace.net gives you the chance to download the entire game from several curate sources within popular download sites like Rapidshare.

How to watch live streaming World Cup matches

Live streaming of World Cup matches are a difficult proposition. If you don’t get them via official sources, they can be notoriously unreliable. Time Soccer offers a useful guide and links to live matches. However, due to the underground and official nature of these streams, some matches will work, and some may not depending on the source. My advice would be to use this resource as the very last resort.

How to watch World Cup videos online

There are several easy ways to . First of all there’s the official FIFA website. It’s pretty good, and well organized, but the long advertisements within video is irritating. Also, because this is supposed to be an international site, the videos do not have commentary on them, which can be a bit of a let down when it comes to watching goal highlights.

101 Great Goals is another excellent resource for videos. Each video stems for a well written football blog entry which gives you an excellent preamble of the video you can then click through to watch.

Other football sites like FootyTube, SoccerClips, and Mighty Football are great video resources as well, providing highlights, goals and other interesting World Cup related videos.

Do you know any other good World Cup video sites? Share them with us in the comments :)

8 Places to Get Free Stock Photos

James Yeang — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 00:59:32 +0000

It really doesn’t matter what your website or blog is about, nothing makes it look nicer than really good, professional quality photographs. Unfortunately, professional level photographs can sometimes be downright expensive. Luckily, like most everything else, beautiful looking stock photos can be found for free on the internet. You just need to know where to look. So, that being said, let’s take a look at 8 places to get free stock photos for your website.

1. Stock.XCHNG

The self-proclaimed leader in free stock photos online. They may, however, be right about that. With around 400,000 photos available they do have one of the larger databases of free stock photos. If you wish to download something you need to have an account, but signup is free. There are minimal restrictions on the use of their photos and they only request that you leave a comment thanking the photographer and letting them know where it was used.

2. Unprofound

Started in 2001 by a guy named Jim as a way to share his excess photos online with people who may be interested, unprofound.com has grown to a database of several thousand. Although not one of the larger places, it is one of the more interesting. Totally free to use – no signup is required, nothing required for download. Searchable database by both tag and color. Yes, you can search by color.

3. Morgue File

Slang for a file of old newspaper clippings or photos in journalism circles, ‘morguefile’ has a large database of free photos. While accounts can be created, they are not necessary. An interesting feature at Morgue File is the ability to crop a photo, reduce the size, and create a code to insert on your website that would display the photo, yet allow it to remain hosted at Morgue File. Of course, this creates a link for them, but such is the price to pay.

4. Photo Rogue

Although one of the smaller databases with just over 600 images at this time, Photo Rogue is unique in that it allows visitors to request specific photos. Need a picture of a dew-covered spider web? Check. Photo of a house at a specific address in Santa Cruz, CA? Got it. Although there is no guarantee of your particular request being fulfilled, no other free stock photo site on the Internet is offering this.

5. Open Photo

Searchable by category and individual tags, openphoto.net offers numerous photos for free. Most follow the Creative Commons model of distribution which is fairly wide open but should be read and checked out for every photo. Offers ready-made code for crediting the photographer and the ability to link directly to the image.

6. Free Media Goo

Offering completely free images, freemediagoo.com has a lot of images but not an overwhelming amount. A little difficult to determine what links were to their images and what links were to advertisements. Main benefit is the images don’t even require a credit or acknowledgement. Also offering free audio, free flash media, free textures and free video footage.

7. Free Range Stock

With several thousand images of their own and more on top of that submitted from users, Free Rang Stock has a fair selection of searchable photos and textures. An account is required, but it is free as well.

8. Every Stock Photo

A different take on the free stock photo site, everystockphoto.com is a searchable database made up of several other companies listing stock photos, some of which are listed above. Aiming to be a stock photo search engine as opposed to a stock photo site in and of itself, you will still need to sign into the different websites where the picture is found.

This post was guest-written by Melissa Tamura who blogs at Zen College Life.

How to Backup Facebook : 3 Free and Useful Tools

James Yeang — Sun, 30 May 2010 19:34:08 +0000

What if one day, Facebook accidently deleted or banned your account for some reason or another? What if a new social network comes along, and Facebook got shut down? What if you decided to close your Facebook account, but don’t want to lose all the data you’ve placed there? These scenarios may be highly unlikely, but they are very possible indeed.

Everything you put on Facebook resides there. All your status updates, links, photos, notes – everything. So, just like it’s good practice to backup your hard disk, it’s also good practice to have a plan ready to backup Facebook in case something bad goes down. Here are 3 free tools you can take a look at to ensure your data stays safe.

1. How to backup Facebook to your hard disk

Fancy recreating Facebook on your laotop? ArchiveFacebook is a Firefox addon which allows you to save content from Facebook directly to your hard drive and view them exactly the same way you currently view them on Facebook. It does take some time to process though, because it will try to do a full-backup everytime – but it’s still very comprehensive, and extremely useful.

2. How to backup Facebook photo albums

Whether you’re trying to backup your own albums, or trying to easily grab a friend’s album for offline viewing, FacePAD is a Firefox addon which allows you to download entire Facebook albums with a click of a button. You can also do this for fan pages and event pages as well.

3. How to backup Facebook to the cloud

Backupify is an amazing service which caters to backing up multiple services – Facebook being one of them. Using Facebook connect, Backupify will regularly save all your photos, friends lists, events, links, notes, and statuses to the cloud. The free version of Backupify can handle up to 2GB of storage.

Everything is stored on an S3 Amazon server and their privacy policy clearly states that any data you store on Backupify is yours, and they claim no right to it, nor do they look, sell, nor analyze it. Also, if you’re extra ~~paranoid~~ conscious about safety, it can allow you to hook up your own S3 Amazon server instead of using theirs.

Would you backup Facebook? Tell us in the comments :)

4 Cool File Extension Tricks For Windows

James Yeang — Sun, 16 May 2010 16:17:15 +0000

File extensions may be part and parcel of everyday life when dealing with Windows, but here are a few tricks you can try, in order to make them much more manageable.

1. How to identify what any particular file extension does

At any given point of time, your system would have many different files with a myriad of file extensions. You’re probably familiar with the common ones like TXT for text files or EXE for executable program files. There are times however when a virus scanner or even Windows itself may ask you about a certain file type. Either that, or you’re looking through your registry and you come across all kinds of different files which are loaded up. In both cases, you probably don’t know what these files do.

So, here’s what you do. Use FILExt, a file extension dictionary which allows you look up any file extension (It currently has more than 50,000 records on file), and it shows you what type of programs typically use the file extension, and also provides a link to the company who makes the said programs, so you can follow-up with further investigation should you choose to do so.

Another cool part about FILExt is it also comes with a Google Desktop Gadget which allows you to submit your registry information to them and you can get a full text report made available to you.

2. How to give Windows Explorer a file extension column

Wait, doesn’t Windows Explorer ALREADY come with a file extension column? No, not really. What it really does is it allows you to sort files by type. This small 50kb DLL tool from XRayz Software allows you to add the extra extension column just like what you see in the picture below. Useful if you ever need this level of granular sorting.

3. How to build your own file extension icons

Icon Generator is a free Adobe Air tool which allows you to quickly and elegantly style and create cool shiny looking icons to be used as file extensions.

4. Where to find really cool file extension icons

Smashing Magazine, my favorite website for all things design has one of the best round-ups for file extension icons in town. Check out their post on 35 really incredible free icon sets. It’s a classic resource with tons of excellent places to get utterly gorgeous looking file icons.

Do you have any cool file extension tips to share? Tell us in the comments :)

Get a Better Rapidshare / Megaupload Experience : 4 Step-By-Step Methods

James Yeang — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 07:45:52 +0000

Both Rapidshare and Megaupload are incredibly popular sites to download content from, but they can be a bit tricky to navigate, find and download what you’re actually looking for. Here are 4 ways that should help you move faster and get a better experience.

1. How to find files on Rapidshare / Megaupload

While the inbuilt search for these content sites (eg. Megaupload) are notoriously poor, third party search sites do the job fairly well. FileFab, FunFail, Crawlrapidshare and Megauploadbot are three useful search engines that specialize in digging out results from these sites.

2. How to check if the Rapidshare / Megaupload links are working

Once you’ve found what you’re looking for, the next thing you need to be wary about is if the link is still working. Many of these links may be broken or have been taken down for one reason or another, but may still show up in search results. The Cavern Links Checker is a free Greasemonkey script which works in Firefox.

What it does is, it detects links on a webpage from content downloading sites like Megaupload & Rapidshare and color codes them green or red depending on whether they are live or not.

3. How to skip all the unnecessary pages when downloading from Rapidshare / Megaupload

Next, once you’ve determined which link you want to click-through, here’s how you save time. Most download sites force you to click through ad-laden pages and wait for countdowns if you don’t have a premium account. Skipscreen is a powerful Firefox extension with a strong proposition. It allows you to skip unnecessary pages on sites like Rapidshare, Megaupload, zShare, Mediafire, and more. Watch the short video below for a cool demo.

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4. How to control your download speed so you can surf while downloading from Rapidshare / Megaupload

Once you’re downloading something, there is sometimes a tendency to have that download session eat up all the bandwidth available. This is fine if you’re not at your desk, but if you want to use the net at the same time, you may want to consider using JDownloader.

This a free desktop tool which allows you access to all sorts of advanced functions like multiple parallel download streams, captcha recognition, and best of all, speed caps on your downloading, so you can go full speed when you’re away, and take it down a notch when you’re using the computer at the same time.

Bonus Link: How to manually preview Rapidshare files

5 Online Barcode Generators

James Yeang — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 19:46:56 +0000

Barcodes are machine readable codes which contain data (usually about other products). If you want to quickly come up with a barcode or a more advanced QR code, here are 5 free online barcode generators you can try out.

1. How to create a basic barcode

Barcodes Inc. provides a free service that can be used to generate individual barcodes or called via URL’s to include inline PNG or JPEG images directly into your documents. You’ll also be able to embed links of the barcode into your website or forum.

2. How to generate QR codes

QR codes are 2D barcodes which can hold much more data than a normal barcode. While there are many QR generators out there, Delivr QR Code Generator is one of the better ones with a lot of customized features available, like a built-in URL shortener, and the ability to generate really nice PDF flyers with your QR code on it as well.

3. How to generate specialized barcodes like ISBNs

With the ability to produce ISBNs, UPCs, and EANs and any other barcode you can think of, the Terry Burton Online Barcode Generator is one of the most extensive barcode generators when it comes to variety. Not exactly the most user friendly or pretty looking website but it really gets the job done especially with specialized barcodes like ISBNs for books.

4. How to generate multi-colored barcodes

Barcodes Generator allows you to tweak certain aesthetics when you create your barcodes like font sizes and color. Not exactly very functional, but certainly makes for a better looking barcode.

5. How to batch generate QR codes for Wikipedia

Semapedia.org is a non-profit project whose goal is to connect the physical world with relevant knowledge from Wikipedia. What they do is to create a redirection to Wikipedia to provide a mobile version of your requested article. Here you can easily create PDF flyers of these URLs and you can even process them 8 at a go. All for the sake of bringing together education on the mobile phone – and the real world.

Do you use barcodes? Tell us about it in the comments :)

5 Methods to Find and Discover Related Sites

James Yeang — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 18:00:44 +0000

Whether you’re doing research on any given topic, or just want to discover new websites which are similar to your favorite one – here are 5 free and useful ways to find and discover related websites.

1. How to find websites which Google thinks are alike

If you add “related:” to your search term, Google will return sites which are related to your query. For example, “related:friedbeef.com” would return sites which are similiar to friedbeef.com. Note there can be no space between the "related:" and the web page url.

2. How to find related sites based on what other people visit

Alexa, the service which provides free website information works through a toolbar which tracks all your browser traffic.

By tracking users across websites, Alexa is able to come up with a list of related sites fairly accurately, as they can deduce relationships between Web sites based on visit patterns. All you need to do is search for any website and click on the ‘related links’ tab.

3. How to find related sites based on community votes

Siteslike is a service which provides you related sites, and also allows you to vote and determine how similar those sites really are, so you can help others in the future.

4. How to use Google trends to determine related sites

Just like Alexa, Google Trends for websites also tracks web browsing patterns and can determine what sites are related based on what people have visited. The advantage here is that you can also filter results by country and get a more granulated result.

5. The most convenient way to find related websites

Among all the items described in this post, Similar Site Search provided the best and most relevant results during testing.

Not only does it give the most accurate results, it also gives each site a score citing how relevant it is. For convenience it also comes with a firefox extension and a bookmarklet as well, so all similar site searches can be done on the fly. Highly recommended.

Do you search for related websites? Tell us about it in the comments :)

How to Sleep Better: 7 Free Tools to Get a Good Night’s Rest

James Yeang — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 06:36:56 +0000

Getting a good night’s sleep can be incredibly elusive for many people out there. While you’ve probably read many articles on how to sleep better, here are several free tools you can try out, which will help you get a good rest.

1. How to automatically adjust the brightness of your screen to help you sleep better

Without going too much into medical jargon, it’s well known fact that melatonin helps you get sleepy, and is production is inhibited by light. That’s why many articles out there discourage the use of the computer just before you go to bed because of the brightness of the screen.

F.lux is an amazing free tool which sits in the background (with a very tiny memory footprint) which plays with your screen settings to match the time of the day. It will make your computer screen look like the room you’re in, all the time.

When the sun sets, it makes your computer look like your indoor lights. In the morning, it makes things look like sunlight again. Tell f.lux what kind of lighting you have, and where you live. Then forget about it. F.lux will do the rest, automatically. Highly recommended.

2. How to track your sleeping patterns easily

Yawnlog is a cool website where you can set targets and track your sleep-cycles so you understand your sleeping patterns and relevant activity. If you keep up with it for a few weeks, you may just understand what type of activities cause you sleeping problems, and how much sleep you’re missing from it as a result.

It also has a social element which allows you to share your sleep and track how other people are sleeping.

3. How to use white noise to help you sleep

If you took all of the tones and frequencies that a human could hear and combined them together, you would have white noise. The result is simple static sound which in many cases aids sleep because the brain can tune it out quite easily as background noise, and it masks other sounds.

My favorite place to get white noise is SimplyNoise, a cool online tool which allows you to choose the type and intensity of white noise. On top of that, it lets you download free MP3s as well so you can enjoy gapless playback offline or on your iPod .

4. How to get relaxing zen ambient loops to help you sleep

Zendesk FM3 Buddha Machine Wall is a web based tool which provides some extremely relaxing ambient sounds. You can even combine together to make the perfect relaxation zen loop for you to relax. Think of it as a web version of the extremely successful transistor radio toy launched in 2005

5. Where to read some supertips on how to sleep better

Here are some extremely good reading blogposts how to get a good night’s rest. Tech tools are good, but works even better when supplemented with these techniques.

6. How to use your iPhone to help you sleep better

Well, it goes without saying that there’s an app for this problem :) Custom Sounds of Nature Lite is a soothing free iPhone app which allows you to listen to some ambient noise to help you relax.

7. How to generate ambient sounds using a Mac to help you sleep better

dlooch is a free Mac OSX dashboard app which generates evolving ambient sounds. This means that you won’t be looping the same sounds over and over again, but instead have them sound as natural as possible.

Do you have any sleeping tips? Share them with us in the comments :)

Online Photo Collages : 3 Easy Ways to Create Them

James Yeang — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 14:45:27 +0000

If you have a whole bunch of photos to share, it may be easier or even more fun to pull them altogether into a neat little collage. Here are 3 online tools which work directly from your browser, all free – which will help you do just that.

1. How to make collages with the photos on your PC

Photovisi is a free online service which allows you to pick one of many collage template and then launches an in-browser interface where you can quickly add pictures.

My favorite part about this service is that it you don’t need to upload entire photos (which can take very long if your photos are high-res) in order to make it work. It is intelligent enough to create and use thumbnails from your pictures on-the-fly so that adding pictures from your computer is incredibly speedy. No installation or registration needed.

2. How to make collages with photos already online

Shape Collage takes photos found on any webpage and instantly turns it into a collage. The beauty of this is that it you don’t need to point it to Flickr or particular photo site for it to work. Just point it to ANY site, and it will crawl the page and make use of the pictures. Plus, you get to make all kinds of interesting shapes for collages.

There’s also a free desktop edition which allows you to play with your pictures offline.

3. How to edit photos and make simple collages online

Picture2Life is a free service which allows you to make simple edits to your photos before you collage them. Available on multiple platforms, it has a facebook as well as a made for iPhone interface, and a Firefox extension so you can collage from wherever you feel most comfortable.

Do you create photo collages online? Tell us about it in the comments

9 Ways to Recycle Gadgets: A Head to Head Comparison

James Yeang — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 16:21:59 +0000

It is estimated that unwanted electronics represents 1.9 to 2.2 million tons in the US alone. The majority of these products, about 1.5 to 1.9 million tons, were discarded in landfills with only 345,000 to 379,000 tons recycled. The end result isn’t pretty. E-waste is toxic and 40% of heavy metals – such as lead, mercury, cadmium – in our landfills comes from the disposal of electronic equipment.

Here are 9 cool web services which pay you for trading in your phone (or other old gadgets) you have lying around. In order to help you pick one, we did a head to head acid test by picking 3 phones and comparing payouts from trading in each phone, from each site.

The Acid Test

1 high end: iPhone 3G (2nd Gen) 16GB
1 mid range: Blackberry Curve 8310
1 low end: Nokia 1110

All slightly used but good working condition. All carrier unlocked. All with the box and everything that comes with it (chargers, manuals, cables etc)

1. How to get the best trade-in deals quickly: BuyMyTronics

BuyMyTronics first started of as BuyMyBrokeniPod.com several years ago when we first wrote about them a couple of years ago. Since then they’ve gone from strength to strength and have expanded to cover all forms of consumer electronics and they have one the highest payouts around.

It has a brilliant search-as-you-type interface which makes it absolutely a breeze to find whatever you’re looking for and the payout rates are among the best. I guess a good testament to how their service is, is that if you go back to that old post we did 2 years ago, all the other services we wrote about have shut down, while BuyMyTronics now turns over a million dollars in revenue, and have expanded into multiple categories (all that while being 100% windmill powered too).