Home Inventory is a free program for Windows or Mac that lets you create a home inventory complete with product photo and receipt scan. A home inventory is an important protective measure for any home owner, renter, or insurance-policy holder as it can be invaluable in times of disaster to help prove to a claims adjuster that you really did have a 50" wall-mounted plasma TV.
The program is easy to use: create rooms to organize your stuff and then add items to each room. For items, you can add information like purchase price/location, serial number, make, and model. You should also add a picture of the item in your house (not just from the manufacturer website), and a scanned receipt proving you paid for the item.
You can print your entire inventory room by room, export to .csv, or save to the Vault24 service (a secure, offiste backup service offered by the makers of Home Inventory). If, for instance, a fire takes your home (and you've been good and backed up your Home Inventory files offsite), you can make life easy for yourself and the insurance people by providing them a complete, organized inventory of all of your significant belongings.
If you're moving to a new place or just want to reorganize furniture in your current living space, PlanningWiz may be helpful by letting you plan and lay out objects in your rooms. Set your room dimensions (you can choose Imperial or Metric system, but for some reason you can't choose Imperial on the first step) and start selecting furniture pieces to begin experimenting.
You can choose furniture from categories like "child's bedroom," "bathroom," and "kitchen," and you can drag-to-resize the furniture objects to match the dimensions of your existing (or future) objects. PlanningWiz also lets you customize the design with color, text, and dimension guides.
The plan can have a custom scale from 1":1' down to 3/32":1'. Plans can be saved to your free account space, printed, or shared via e-mail.
The Several Journeys of Reemus is a Flash game that is somewhat reminiscent of the 90's Lucasarts games like Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island, and Sam and Max. SJoR has a minimalist point-and-click interface that lacks the obvious verbs like "Use," "Look," and "Pick Up."
The plot is centered around Reemus and his cute, yet melancholy purple-bear sidekick Liam. Reemus, an insect exterminator, is summoned by the local innkeeper to rid his establishment of ants before the prince and his bride-to-be arrive. The objective is to get Reemus and Liam out of each puzzle space, and that is accomplished by interacting with the environment to find a way out.
The game is a bit brief, but the puzzles are entertaining and rather trippy. There are two endings, and original music accompanies the game.
While Greasemonkey, the popular extension for changing the way websites display, might not be currently available via the Firefox 3 addons manager or the Mozilla addons website, you can indeed install a working version from the developer's site. We installed the greasemonkey-0.8.20080609.0.xpi into Firefox 3 RC2 on Mac OS 10.5, and our scripts worked like a charm.
In case you're new to the Greasemonkey realm, here are three scripts to get you going:
Gmail 2.0 Multiple HTML Signatures - allows you to maintain a set of HTML signatures for Gmail that are automatically changed when you select different "From" addresses in your compose mail window. Alternatively, you could use a bookmarklet.
Digg Add Mirrors - adds links to Coral Cache, Duggmirror, Duggback, and Google Cache to Digg stories.
Image Host Redirector - redirects image links directly to image instead of intermediate image host page.
ZAC (Zone for Autistic Children) is a Windows-only web browser designed specifically for children with autism (and other developmental disorders). The browser acts like a sandbox to isolate the children from things like Youtube, lolcats, and NSFW content, while providing access to educational games and resources that are particularly helpful.
ZAC has 5 main sections. It opens with a comforting, screensaver-like aquarium complete with fish, coral, and bubbles. There is a television section that lets the child select from video clips that come from Disney, Sesame Street, Pink Panther, etc.
The games section has a wide array of interactive (and mostly educational) games like Artbot Jr. where we were able to make a dazzling colored picture of a princess. A music area allows children to do things like play virtual instruments and listen to Wiggles songs. A story section rounds out the browser where children can listen to a birdie read nursery rhymes (with interaction) or make a lemonade stand with Elmo.
The ZAC browser is available as a Windows installer or a Windows .exe that requires no install (good for a portable drive).
Rulers is a Swiss Army app for Mac and Windows that combines rulers, a color picker, a magnifier, and screenshot tool into a free utility that even supports multiple monitors. You can customize the rulers' units (pixels, inches, or centimeters), opacity, color, and placement. Line markers can be placed (much like Photoshop) by dragging from a spot on the ruler to a spot on your screen.
The color picker tool provides the hex and RGB codes of the pixel your mouse cursor is currently hovering over, and pressing Ctrl+C or Command+C will copy the hex code to your clipboard. There is a small magnifier in the color picker window as well.
The screenshot tool can either do simple full-screen captures to your clipboard or desktop, or you can create an area with ruler markers and then select one of those areas for a screenshot.
Fuelfrog is a web service for tracking your gas mileage and cost-per-gallon trends which can provide insight into your empty wallet. By adding simple information each time you fill up your car, Fuelfrog will chart that data to provide a gas history.
Fuelfrog accepts updates via its website, but it also can accept data via Twitter direct message. Simply add your Twitter account to your Fuelfrog profile and Twitter the miles since your last fill up, price per gallon, and number of gallons purchased to @fuelfrog.
Someday you'll be able to log in to Fuelfrog and tell your children, "See, back in my day I only paid $4.00 for a gallon of gas!"
Vidnik is a new Mac application that lets you quickly record video from your Mac's iSight camera and then upload it to YouTube. Simply run Vidnik, set your YouTube account username and password, record some video, crop it, add some tags and a description, choose the video category, and then click "Upload."
The movies you record are saved as .mov files in ~/Movies/Vidnik so that you can use them for other things as well. You can also drag other movies onto Vidnik for easy upload to YouTube.
Vidnik is a good tool for video bloggers (who want to use YouTube's bandwidth instead of their own), video responses to other YouTube videos, and solo musicians who want to be able to quickly upload performance video.
Chronotron is a trippy puzzle-solving game where your player's movements are recorded and then repeated when you warp back in time. It may sound confusing, but play a level or two and you'll quickly understand.
Basically you move around the level and carry out a set of actions that should ultimately help you collect the circuit board required to "skip" to the next level. The problem is, those actions won't be enough on their own, so you'll have to warp back in time. When you go back in time, your previous movements are replayed, but you can also move independently of those movements to work in tandem with yourself (or multiples of yourself).
Google for educators is a landing spot for classroom resources that incorporate Google products like Google Earth, SketchUp, Maps, and Sky. The site offers everything from simple links to the aforementioned products, to classroom activities for various K-12 grade levels.
There are downloadable PDF posters covering Google search tips for kids, Google Scholar, Book Search, and Google Earth, and there are activities that utilize various media like PDFs, wikis, podcasts, and websites. These activities are organized by grade level: K-5, 6-12, and "all levels."
The Google for educators site also links to their "teacher community" which is a Google group filled with threads about using the many Google offerings in a school classroom.
Logoease is a simple, web-based logo-creation tool that offers basic stock clip-art and fonts. You start by choosing a logo image from a general set of categories, and then you're taken to the main editing screen where you can add text and arrange your logo.
You can add up to five lines of text of various fonts and colors, and you can change options like bold, italics, and font size. Your logo picture can be colored, and objects can be layered with "send to front" or "send to back" functions.
When your logo is finished, you can download a zip file containing a .jpg, .eps, .tiff, and .png of your logo. You'll need to signup for a free account (surprise) to be able to download the logo. When we first tested the site, we got errors when attempting to save our logos; however, the site appears to work properly now.
Posted Apr 29th 2008 12:00PM by Todd Ritter Filed under: Fun
If you're tired of cheery, politically-correct e-cards and want to say it like you mean it, check out Wrongcards' offerings. Their e-cards don't have animated fluffy bunnies or smiling sunflowers, but they do have direct, honest quotes and illustrations covering the obvious topics like birthdays and anniversaries.
For example, send a "get well" card that says what you're really thinking: "Get Well, but if you don't, I'd find it very consoling if you left me your Wii." Or for the confident romantic, try this one: "Obviously this anniversary comes as a surprise...because you should totally have dumped me by now...but whatever..."
Wrongcards has the standard featureset of other e-card sites: send the card to multiple e-mail addresses, add your own custom message to the card, and get notified when someone reads your card.
Launchball is a fun, smart, and polished game courtesy of the Science Museum in London. The game uses a common premise: coax a ball into a goal. The objects you can use to accomplish this task though are based generally on electricity, magnetism, and mechanics.
There are basic shapes like "ski jumps" and ramps, but there are also batteries and steam generators (which also require a water tank and fire) to power magnets and fans. There are switches, springs, cushions, and rubber blocks. Each level provides you with a certain set and quantity of objects to help you get the ball in the goal (not all objects need to be used though).
If you take a few seconds to create a free account, you'll be emailed a code so that you can login at a later time and resume where you left off. Otherwise you have to play through all of the levels each time. There are three main categories of levels: tricky, sneaky, and crafty.
You can even create your own levels and share them. In the "Extras" section, you can play levels that were created by players.
Using an interesting blend of real-world video and cartoon-enemy overlays, ToonCrisis is a fun Flash shooter with an original soundtrack of punk-ish/ska songs to keep you motivated.
The objective is simply to kill the monsters by aiming your laser-shooting hand (which is, of course, in the shape of a gun) at them and clicking the left mouse button. There are different types of enemies including some that don't move but shoot things at you, some that move and take a bunch of shots to kill, and bosses (complete with separate energy meter) that must be beat before moving to the next stage.
The game flow is similar to arcade games like Area 51, Time Crisis, and Virtua Cop in that you walk a bit, kill all the enemies, walk more, kill enemies, defeat boss, repeat.
The NPR Intelligence Squared US (IQ2US) audio podcast is a series of recordings of public debates held in New York focusing on hot-button issues (most specific to the U.S.) like immigration, affirmative action, and global warming. The debates are held in the Oxford-style meaning there are one motion (topic), one moderator, three speakers for the motion, and three speakers against the motion.
Prior to the start of the debate, visitors cast their votes for or against the motion. During the debate, the results of the initial vote are shown, and the visitors vote again at the end of the debate to decide which side "won."
The debates move quickly, and it's nice to learn things in the car on the way to work instead of listening to drunk 30-somethings talk about "news."
The IQ2US series holds five debates in the spring, and five debates in the fall, and is available from the iTunes Store or the NPR website.
Home Inventory is a free program for Windows or Mac that lets you create a home inventory complete with product photo and receipt scan. A home inventory is an important protective measure for any home owner, renter, or insurance-policy holder as it can be invaluable in times of disaster to help prove to a claims adjuster that you really did have a 50" wall-mounted plasma TV.
The Several Journeys of Reemus
ZAC
Rulers
Fuelfrog
Vidnik
Google for educators
