Need a Mother's Day card in a hurry? We're here to help.
These cards were written by F5 guy Dan Conover and designed by F5 page designer Rodolfo Larios. Simply pick the card you like, double-click on it to open it full-size, and then select "Save Image As" to download it to your computer. Print them out, fold them and personalize them for your Mom.
The F5 Signature Squirrel: Rodolfo's squirrel pages get lots of attention, so he just had to add this one to the list.
In this week's second episode on the Friday 5 Channel on Vimeo, here's a piece about how rising property values along Upper King Street may be contributing to a migration of artists, entrepreneurs and creative types to the southern edge of North Charleston.
In the first of two additions this week to the Friday 5 Channel on Vimeo, I provide a How-To guide to fixing a flat bicycle tire. I know a little bit about this procedure, too: Until I upgraded to Armadillo tires on the Trek SU-100 that I ride to work, I was fixing two flats a month on average. That's because I live in the North Central neighborhood, and for whatever reason the city seldom gets around to cleaning Upper-Upper King Street.
I don't give a demonstration of how to remove the rear wheel, partly because there are so many ways that chains and shifters can be set up, but also because it's just kind of annoying compared to removing the front wheel.
And yes, if you're in a big hurry you can strip the tire off the rim, remove the tube, patch the puncture, re-inflate and go -- all without taking the wheel off. But that' kinda like showing off for most of us.
I know this is kind of basic for some people, but here's the truth: I was in my 40s before I fixed my first flat, and people pay good money every day to have a bike mechanic fix their flats. You can do this.
This week's section is devoted entirely to rounding up the best cool Web apps, free downloads, useful sites and sweet programs, all with an eye toward providing you with ways to improve your life -- in both cyberspace andmeatspace.
Of course there's always more stuff than you get fit into a newspaper page, even when you leave out every third word like "cool" and "nifty." So here's a more complete list of cool, nifty stuff, broken down by categories. And of course, this being the Web, everything is linked.
I began this list on April 10 over at my personal blog, so this list includes some suggestions from readers there. Now: What would you add? What would you replace?
THE BIGGIES(regardless of category)
Firefox: Without a doubt the best browser I've ever used.
Twitter: I was slow to pick this up, and it's hard to explain to people why it's valuable. Now I get it.
Facebook: MySpace could have been
Facebook, if it wasn't the worst software platform imaginable run by
one of the world's most evil media companies. Facebook has had its
ethical lapses and false moves, but it's still a great way to organize
group activities on the fly. It's what teenagers use instead of email.
Gmail: If I can ever get my
act together and switch over the Gmail, my digital life should get
better. Unfortunately, my email life is in disarray and has been for a
year, and so I've been slow to utilize my SECOND Gmail account.
Thunderbird: A great Mozilla replacement for MS Outloo... a Microsoft product so evil I can't speak it's cursed name.
Skype: I used this for doing overseas interviews and it was great, but I haven't used it since.
Snitter: "Snook's Twitter" runs on AIR and provides a cool, free, standalone Twitter interface.
Tweetpeek: This thing is just great. You can build a page that displays Tweets by all the people you follow. Also has a much more useful embedded widget.
Statcounter: Free site stats, just works, very detailed.
Utterz: A handy way of getting
audio posts onto your site. The Utterz people see their product more as
an audio social site. I see it as a very smart way to get reports
online from a "dumb" phone.
Vizu: Set up your own polls and display them on your site.
BROWSING
Stumbleupon: I don't have
the time to explore Stumble the way I'd like. But there are moments
when it's almost magical: You push the Stumble button and something
great and unexpected appears on your screen.
Flock: This specialized version of Firefox is built for people who use lots of social media services . I'd tried it before and didn't "get it," but new-media whiz Don D. Lewis of Mount Pleasant gave me a demo and made me a convert. Here's Don: "What I like about it is the ability to have your Twitter, Facebook,
Flickr, Gmail and other automated feeds available as a sidebar. Using
Flock allows me to browse the web while not missing real-time updates
from the above social media sites...Flock does not have all the "plug-ins" that are available under
Firefox, but I'm not a big extensions user anyway. Because the
underlying code is essentially Firefox, I've not seen the need to
upgrade to the latest Firefox release....Flock has traditionally been more stable than Firefox, but I've not
tried the new Firefox 3.0 version. Like the say, "your mileage may
vary".
Del.icio.us: The long-time champion folksonomy tagging service.
ZigTag: I love this tagging service. It's still being developed, but it's a great bridge between taxonomies and folksonomies.
AVG Free: I love this virus protection utility. I upgraded to the pro version more out of loyalty than necessity.
TRAVEL
Google Maps: Great resource for all sorts of travel-related tasks.
Google Earth: This was cool
when it first came out, but it's gotten better as users around the
world add more information. Restaurants? Wi-fi hubs? If you're in a new
city with a laptop and you've got Google Earth, you're oriented.
Seatguru: Some online travel
services let you pick your seat. But what good is that if you don't
know what the best seats are? If you know the airline and the type of
plane, Seatguru tells you where the best seats are located in that
model with that airline's seating configuration. Then book-away.
PRODUCTIVITY
PortableApps: If you use
multiple computers, or occasionally log-in on someone else's machine,
you need this suite of programs. The portable Firefox is reason enough
to get this on your Flash drive.
OpenOffice: The ultimate cross-platform productivity suite. And it's free.
Ta-da Lists: I make to-do
lists almost every day. This lets me share those lists with other
people who just wish I'd shut up and have a beer or something.
Gethuman: User-submitted procedures for getting to a human being on various companies' robotic phone directories.
BUY & SELL
Craigslist: Most people
know about the classified ads function of Craigslist. My favorite part
is the "Missed Connections" section. Sometimes stupid, often banal,
these messages to the cosmos are sometimes wistful and poetic and
yearning and sublime. But I digress.
Zillow: How much is your house worth? Interesting question. How much is your NEIGHBOR'S house worth? More interesting.
Swapagift: In theory, this is a
site where you can swap a gift certificate from a place you DON'T want
to shop for a certificate to a place where you DO. But it's a GREAT
place to buy discounted cards when you know you're headed to a
particular store. Right now I can get $200 of Cabela's merchandise for
$180. Good deal if I'm buying outdoor gear.
CafePress: This is the online insta-business store most online store people use. And it's good and it works.
Zazzle: This is the online insta-business store really artistic people use. And it's good and it works. Take your pick.
Shopzilla: Compare prices for things before you buy.
VIDEO & AUDIO & IMAGE
Media Converter: You wanna get something out of a bad file format and into into something you can use? Use this. Free, but ad-supported.
Magic's Video Downloader
(FF add-on): Doesn't work on all sites, but works on some big ones you
visit frequently (YouTube, baby). When it recognizes media it can grab,
the browser icon lights up. Click it and the file downloads. Great when
you want to mashup a viral YouTube vid.
iTunes: The DRM is super-evil, but it's a great piece of software, particularly if you like podcasts/vodcasts.
SoundTaxi: I tend to buy cheap MP3 players, so I need a way to get
my iTunes MP4 music into a playable format. SoundTaxi does this for
cheap (price has gone up $5 to $20).
Current.com: It's the video-sharing site and community with a direct link to TV, which makes it an interesting place.
YouTube: Yes, the codec is crappy. Yes, it's a big mess. But it's the public square of the modern age.
Blip: They're trying to be a portal to
Web video that's part of a series. The specificity of the mission makes
it cool. You don't upload to Blip. You audition for Blip.
Vimeo: I like Vimeo a lot. It's my primary video hosting site.
Pandora: Lastfm.com is supposed to be good, too, but I really dig the "Music Genome Project" guts of Pandora.
MusicBrainz: Other people
swear by this as a download that will sniff out the metadata for your
messed up and disorganized digital music library. I haven't been able
to successfully test it yet. There are multiple products you can try.
FoxyTunes: This is a Firefox add-on that lets you play audio CDs from your browser. Duh.
Internet Archive:
There's so much stuff here, but this is where I go to get ironic stock
video footage and nab audio I can use in my edits. It's (almost all)
public domain or CC licensed stuff. Be sure to check out the AV Geeks collection.
The GIMP: This is the standard image processor for people who don't want to pay for Photoshop. It's free, open-source tech, and it's basically a no-cost killer for cheap image processors. Comes with a portable version, and I keep mine on a Flash drive.
Photoshop Express (BETA): Adobe now has an online version of its industry-standard image processor. You wanna bet this thing gives the start-ups that currently occupy the online-imaging space nothing but trouble?
Gickr.com: I love clever animated GIF files. Give Gickr up to 10 images and it turns them into an animated file for you to download and use.
Google SMS:
A did a Friday piece a while back on cool things you can do with your
phone. Everybody ought to have these functions programmed into their
cellphone. It's not perfect (I never could get it to deliver the Tar
Heel's win in the Sweet 16 while I was off-grid), but this set of
functions essentially extends Search to your "dumb" phone. For Free.
Wikipedia: It's not controversial because it's not perfect (it isn't). It's controversial because it's so simple and so revolutionary.
Zabasearch: This is a pretty good look-up for hard-to-find people. Many of the results lead to pay services.
I Want To: The ultimate
"find an app to do it" page. Ugly as hell, but the place to go if you
need a currency calculator, or list of disposable e-mail providers, etc.
Church Sign Generator: The original and best. Write your own church sign message and post it as a Jpeg.
CNet: It's a site, not an app, but
it's so useful when you're buying tech that it might as well be its own
category. Which is why Techcrunch can kiss my ass.
Bombay TV: You get
to write three subtitles for a Bollywood film clip, so it's very fun.
I'd like it better if I could figure out how to embed it.
Free graphing paper generator:
I use this every week. Why buy a pad of graphing paper when you just
need a couple sheets? Plus you can make the graphing area precisely the
size you want.
Second Life. I know this could
go under other categories, and there are other Virtual Worlds to
consider. But I'm putting it here kinda like YouTube is under video.
It's the biggest, baddest VW on the block. Membership is free, so you
can explore before you decide to plop down some cash for Linden Dollars.
USER-RECOMMENDED STUFF Here's a list of recommendations from Charleston blogger Matthew Williams:
Looking for a quickie April Fool's prank... or just sly, remorseless revenge for one?
Try this: Turn your victim's computer keyboard into utter gibberish.
We tested this one at Friday 5 Labs last week, and it actually works. Try it on your own computer before you set out to prank your computer-using friends. It's annoying, for sure, and if your victim is compu-phobic in the slightest it's likely to cause a major meltdown. But it's also easily reversed, and will cause no permanent harm.
I've been mowing grass on the cheap since the Ford administration, which means I've brought home some epically cruddy lawnmowers. Some I got for free and nursed back to "health." Others I bought and then couldn't give away. I've had mowers that went BANG and then fell forever silent, power-assisted mowers with bad attitudes, mowers with strange wheel-base set-ups and mowers with what could best be described as perpetual head-colds.
And what have I learned from all this? Two things:
Change your oil once a year;
The hand file you use to sharpen your mower blade is properly referred to as a "bastard" file. This has something to do with the pattern on the file itself. Seriously.
This week's Friday 5 is meant to help you get your lawnmower ready for the grass-growing season ahead, but I'm a guy who learns better by watching than reading. Which is why my wife Janet and I went out and produced these videos to help you through your pre-season lawnmower tune-up -- we figured that if regular people could witness a dork like me doing a tune-up, they'd feel more confident about doing it themselves.
And that will save you money.
Also, because we figured some of you would only want to see instructionals on specific tasks, I've broken the video up into five shorter chapters, too (ed note: video links will follow as these are posted):
With the thought that most of us like to get out and take the occasional road trip, we prepared our list of five great South Carolina battles from the Revolutionary War outside of the Lowcountry.
This doesn't necessarily mean these were the most significant battles -- the slaughter of the patriots at the Battle of the Waxhaws, for instance, had a profound psychological affect on the course of the war -- but not every battlefield has been preserved and opened to the public.
Be sure to click the "View Larger Map," above, and if you don't see all the sites at once, zoom out to get the full picture.
Unless you had a great scoutmaster or spent some time in the military, odds are you never learned this little trick for converting routes on a map to a measurable, straight-line distance. I say that because of all the people I've shown this trick, none of them had ever heard of it before.
And it works -- an easy, reliable way to figure out the distance from Point A to Point B.
Picking five cool things to do with your phone was a fun project (I'll post the link here after it's published on Friday), but there were multiple cool things that didn't make the cut.
Put an audio clip on your blog: If I go out and buy a new data contract for my obsolete Nokia, I'd be able to e-mail posts and photos to this blog and have them show up like magic. Personally, I think all reporters should have that capability now, since you never know when you'll bump into spot news. But I digress.
But let's say you're wandering around and you spot something you want to add to your site right away. My answer: Utterz, a free service that lets you record audio posts for your site. Utterz is also a community for people who want to -- in essence -- trade voice mails.
While I find that prospect less than enticing, the Utterz interface is relatively simple and the pieces that connect it to standard blogging platforms seem to work fine. I've got the number saved on my phone, and if I'm riding around and I notice something (a church sign, the Ron Paul blimp, etc.), I'll just get off the bike and make the call. Bingo: A quick audio post.
Also nice to know: When my first attempts at using the service didn't work because of my own mistake, someone from Utterz noticed, then left a comment for me to help me through the problem. Didn't even have to ask for help. Tell people what you're doing via Twitter: I did a Twitter piece for F5 some weeks ago, and Tweeting has gone on to become part of my daily life (follow me at http://twitter.com/xarker).
There isn't much time in my life for sitting around doing nothing, but every now and then I have to go to the DMV, or wait for something. And that's when this feature comes in handy.
I can use SMS to send a Tweet, and I often do. It's not as fast as Tweeting via keyboard, though, so I tend to reserve it for out-of-pocket times.
If I'm REALLY geeking out, I can record an Utterz message and have that appear in my Twitter stream, but I haven't figured out why I'd want to do that. I may do it anyway. Just because. New features that could convince you to upgrade: Sometimes you wonder whether gadgety features are worth anything. But as the Web matures and phone OS become more sophisticated, there are reasons to consider bumping yourself up to a more fully featured phone.
For instance, as nice as it is to know that I can text my location to Google and find my way out of a jam, I'd be a lot better off if I could receive a map. And your camera phone doesn't really become a useful appliance until you can post photos to the Web from anywhere.
Why worry about sending and receiving video on your phone? Because of Qikcasting.
I hate to think of myself as being nothing but a shill for Robert Scoble, but the people who make higher-end cell phones really need to pay this guy some money. He's singlehandedly raised Qik's profile with his live-streaming of tech events, and in doing so he's made me re-think my cheapskate attitude toward my phone.
The bulk of the Southeastern Wildlife Exposition flock descends on the peninsula today, beginning a three-day habitation that will fill hotels, block traffic and make our historic city just a bit more colorful. To help you make the most of this great event, we’ve prepared this weekend field guide to help you identify the various species of SEWE participants. Can you spot all five?
Serious Collectors Altus ars optimus Habitat: Upscale neighborhoods in Charlotte, Raleigh, Greenville, Columbia and Atlanta. Can also be spied around country clubs, yachting facilities, expensive restaurants and galas. Migratory plumage: Males sport blue blazers and khaki slacks for their annual SEWE migration; females are typically more brightly colored, but may molt as many as three times a day, depending on changes in environment and temperature. Comments: Like many apex predators, Serious Collectors observe their targets with an unhurried air, then descend decisively. Though fearsome, they are surprisingly sensitive to small changes in their environment and may become quickly annoyed.
Big Game Hunters Bellua interimo Habitat: Most split time between seasonal urban dens and remote wildernesses in both North America and Africa. Migratory plumage: Both males and females of this species are khaki-colored, further distinguished by broad-brimmed hats, epaulets, firm jaws and determined, steely gazes. Comments: Do not show fear in their presence, stay downwind of them whenever possible and never, under any circumstances, offer one a clean shot at you.
Dog People Canis populus Habitat: Urban centers, suburbs, rural areas, big cities, small towns, open savannahs, deep woods, coastal plains, foothills, high mountains. Everywhere, basically. Migratory plumage: Though migratory Dog People resemble native Dog People, experienced SEWE watchers look for these signs: 1. “My Border Collie is Smarter Than Your Honors Student” bumper stickers; 2. “I (heart) My Boykin Spaniel” T-shirts; 3. Typically accompanied by one or more Labrador Retrievers. Comments: Dog People are the friendliest SEWE species and most seem to interact well with children, but don’t approach them suddenly, as they can become highly protective.
True Sportsmen Panton interimo piscis Habitat: Suburbs, small towns and rural areas, typically located within minutes of a shooting range, hunting preserve or fishing area. Migratory plumage: Camouflage shirts; camouflage pants; camouflage hats; camouflage footwear; camouflage jackets; camouflage vehicles; camouflage lingerie. And black sunglasses. Note: A common subspecies wears only RealTree. Comments: Organizers have never gotten an accurate count of how many True Sportsmen attend the event because so many are mistaken for foliage.
Interior Decorators Perficio pingo sollicitus Habitat: Suburbs and small towns. Migratory plumage: Though they resemble some common local fauna, Interior Decorators migrate, graze and hunt in packs, occasionally accompanied by Bored Spouses, a symbiont species. Comments: Interior Decorators are easy to attract. Wander alertly through expo crowds calling out “Oh how fabulous! Oh how fabulous!” or, alternately: “Those colors will go perfectly with your couch!” Alternate your calls to avoid sounding tacky.
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