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Drew Olanoff

- http://www.drewolanoff.com

Filed under: Games, web 2.0, Humor

Time Waster - Fast140 aka "How Badly and Fastly can you type?"


So you think you can type fast, eh?

Not soooooooo fast. Here comes Fast140.

What is it you ask? Well, it recycles tweets from Twitter and turns them into a speed typing game. No longer will you be testing your speed to mundane and correctly spelled sentences like "The dog ran quickly.", now you get stuck with winners like the one pictured above.

Uhhh, I'm sorry what? I have to type........."Hero" by Enrique Iglesias? YES, I did. Ugh! Now that's a time waster my friends. And I loved every damn second of it.

This gem of an app comes via Philip Kaplan, aka "Pud", the fellow who brought us ummm....Effed Company. I can say Effed, right? I got the inside scoop by pinging him on Twitter naturally:

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Filed under: Internet, Macintosh, Web services, Apple, iPhone, web 2.0

iPhone App Tracker - What's on Yours?

iPhone - What's on Yours?The Lockergnome brand and Chris Pirillo know their technology, and now they're opening the doors up to a new iPhone App tracking site just for you and run by you.

The idea is similar to Digg in that you can submit iPhone apps and people can vote them up or down, giving you a nice community snapshot of what app is performing, and what app isn't at any given time.

It also has implications for when new apps come out, and you want to be the first kid at school to get it.

Sure, you can read reviews in the Apple Store, but you don't get the full story like you do on a site with simplicity and ease of use.

It's rough around the edges but the idea seems clear. Submit, rate, and interact. But the difference here is that it's so granular and dedicated solely to iPhone Apps.

Chris gave us the early link to the Apple App Tracker too, and we'd like to see one for PC apps and maybe even Linux distributions. Since he can build communities, it'll be interesting to see how big of a community pops up around this new venture.

Filed under: Internet, Utilities, Productivity, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Simple but powerful Drivepricing helps calculate gas costs

Drive PricingSometimes the best web services are the simplest ones. Drivepricing lets you calculate the cost of gas for your road trip.

With gas prices so high its nice to be able to know how much to put in the piggy bank to save up for the trips you have coming up this summer.

So when you're going to visit grandma in Albany from Philly, you can drop your gas mileage in there and get an estimated cost of what you're going to have to beg her for so you can get home.

Even if you don't know your gas mileage they have a link to FuelEconomy.gov for you. Drop your zipcode in there, start address, end address, the type of gas you use (which is a great feature) and whether its a round trip or not.

After a few seconds of loading, booya there you have it. Price per gallon and cost for trip.

Filed under: Design, Fun, Games, Macintosh, Apple

She's a Brick.....Smith - Lego Modeling for your Mac

BricksmithWho doesn't like Legos?

Bricksmith brings Lego building to your Mac. And in a big way. Sorry PC folks, Mac only.

When we say a big way, we mean this isn't just a drag and drop of lego parts, this is full modeling. You don't have to have a degree to do it, but you definitely have to have some time on your hands....but the payoff could be awesomesauce.

This sucker is like Photoshop for lego designs.

You have thousands of parts to choose from, some of which we've never seen in our lego pails.

There's a full color palette, copy/paste/undo, drag and drop modeling and more.

Best part is, you don't have to step on them in your bare feet in the middle of the night!

We used it for 5 minutes and it hurt our heads, but we bet you can come up with something great. Take a screenshot and put the link to it in the comments.

[via chris pirillo]

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Productivity, Web services, web 2.0

So you want to build a PC, eh? PCIncubator is here to help

PCIncubatorPCIncubator aims to help you find the right parts at the right prices to build your dream PC.

We've all built a PC at some point. It's fun, isn't it? Pick our your case, the mother board, memory, GI Joe Stickers.

What?

The pain in the neck part of the process is finding the right parts that you need and not paying too much for them...or buying really crappy parts as a default because you don't want to break the bank.

The parts are all out there, the internet is vast, but PCIncubator keeps tabs on the stuff that you need, the prices that are right, and does so very nicely if we may say.

They use NewEgg which is the geek chic place to shop for parts. They also keep a price history of all items so you can wait for prices to go back down if they go up. It's kind of like shopping for airline tickets. It also gives you that Dell and Apple builder feel

Once you've picked your perfect PC parts, you can toss them all into a NewEgg cart and away you go!

Too bad that you can't get Windows XP anymore :(

Please let us know in the comments if you have found this site helpful.

1 + 1 = 4? Wait....Ecalc please

Some of us aren't good with numbers. The whole addition, subtraction, division, it's just not our forte. Sure Windows and Macs have built in calculators but we're web people so we need something on the web to make us not feel like we're totally mathstupid. Ecalc to the rescue. It's not just any calculator though. It's pretty and webified. They also have a scientific calculator for those who are ...

Time Waster: Launch your hog over the hedges

Launching stuff is cool, and doing so in a flash game online is even cooler. VivaLaGames brings us a new Time Waster with "HedgeHog Launch". The premise is simple, you go through a series of days and launch HedgeHogs with a nice launcher gear, much like you would water balloons. Except these aren't balloons, these are dangerous little beasts called HedgeHogs. it's not quite Sonic, but we think ...

Noise of the white variety, right on the webernets

Have you ever been working somewhere and needed to focus on what you were doing, writing, saying, but there was too much ambient noise around you? You know, peoples iPods crankin' or chitter chatter chattin'. SimplyNoise is about to become your best friend. At desk jobs (ewwww), they sometimes pump in "White noise" to push out sound and give you a bit more privacy, but you can't control how much ...

Mozilla Firefox breaks non-existent world record - nobody cares

Remember, that whole Firefox download day thing that we got so amped up about? Us too. Remember when their servers screwed the pooch for most of "Download Day"? Us too. How about that vulnerability that affected all 8 zillion of us who downloaded version 3? Yep, we remember that too. Now you can put all those rough memories behind and sleep easy. Today, Mozilla "officially" announced setting the ...

Make your own Mario masterpiece with Mario Paint Composer

Mario Paint Composer lets you do what you know you've wanted to do all of your life...compose music in the key of Super Mario. You'll remember this from the Super NES days, but everything is way more fun on the computer. This baby is free and it's available for Windows AND Mac and it comes from unFun games. Yay. Don't have any music writing chops? No problem, neither do we. It makes fun noises and ...

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Graveyard Shift - zombie-busting Time Waster

With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet. They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...

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