Filed under: Education

For most people, "Google" has become synonymous with "search". Heck, Cambridge dictionary lists it as a verb.

But as we all know, Google can do lots more than just search. You've got Gmail, and YouTube, and Maps, and the calculator, and a whole bunch of other Web properties.

While Gmail is enormously popular, not all Google projects fare so well (cough Wave cough). Even most of the search operators for Google itself are confined to the geekier crowd.

One thing Google UK has done to make its service more accessible to the non-geeky crowd is create Things to do. There's no US version at Google.com, but the British one is lots of fun, especially for guys who don't know Google so well.

It's basically a long list of things a normal person might want to do online (no, porn is not represented ... but that doesn't mean you're not normal, don't worry). The lines are couched in informal British English, which makes it all the more amusing. Being a nerd, I knew I could personalize my YouTube channel, but I didn't know I could "glam it up".

The whole page is a JavaScript accordion: Each tip has a + sign next to it. Clicking the line (or the sign) opens up the line, and you get a short YouTube clip demonstrating the feature, or a Search box for the specific service (for example, Google Scholar).

Bottom line: This is a very nice resource for sending to clueless friends who are wondering what sort of things they could use Google for. Saves lots of explaining – and hey, you might even find something that's new for you!

Vision of Humanity is one of the most beautiful and thorough visualizations that I have recently seen.

It's a zoomable Flash world map, which lets you browse and compare a vast number of "peace indicators," such as level of violent crime, access to weapons, jailed population, relations with neighboring countries, and more.

You view a world heat map, which shows where that index is most prevalent. You can zoom in on a specific country and browse through all of its indicators, and you can compare two or more countries.

The site takes all of these indicators and derives a single number, which it calls the "peace index." At a glance, you can basically see which countries are the most peaceful and which ones rank worst on the list.

As per usual with these tools, the tool itself is very impressive, but I cannot say that I fully trust the data. The data comes from an entity that calls itself the Institute for Economics & Peace, which is an incredibly nebulous name. Even reading their About page didn't improve my level of trust in this "institute." There's a Wikipedia entry about them, so they seem to be real. I cannot, however, vouch for the quality of the data.

Still, from a technology/design viewpoint, this is an impressive visualization that I could easily spend a great deal of time with, discovering new (if troubling) facts.

RobinWords is a simple, non-Flash game. It starts you off with one four-letter word (in the screenshot, the game picked "mist").

You then need to come up with another valid four-letter word by changing just one of the letters in the word that the computer provided. You can't shuffle the sequence, either. So, in this case, I changed "mist" to "gist."

Then, it's the computer's turn, and it has to do the same thing that you just did. Turning "gist" into "gift" isn't very hard, so the computer got this one right and bounced the game right back to me.

If the computer uses a word that you're unfamiliar with, you can click the word to go directly to its definition at Dictionary.com (not my favorite dictionary website, but it works).

This is a simple, no-frills brain teaser, and it can be quite fun to play if you like words. It's very nice and fast, and they say a multiplayer version is coming soon – I'm looking forward to that.

You may have noticed we've got our back to school jive on here at Download Squad. We figure it's worth interrupting your usual programming for a week or two -- after all, once the kids are back at school, we're all free to do whatever we like until Christmas! Woohoo!

Still, so that you don't feel completely abandoned, here's a paragraph dedicated to this week's Mozilla news: early builds of Firefox 4 beta 4 (and 5!) are bouncing around on Mozilla's nightly builds site; the Contacts Design Challenge has finished and the winners have been announced -- the concepts are beautiful and well worth checking out; Mozilla wants more people to submit bugs! If you're using a Beta or nightly build of Firefox 4, check this guide on how to use Bugzilla to help out.

Now, here's a list of Firefox add-ons that will look strikingly similar to Lee's list of back to school Chrome extensions.

First up, let me congratulate you on buying an Android smartphone instead of an iPhone. You've just saved a few hundred dollars that could be better spent on beer, bitches/blokes and books. And if you have a little money left after that, you could buy a few Android apps too!

Having said that, most of the apps in this list are free with the option to pay some money if you want bonus features or you want to get rid of the ads. One or two only have paid versions, but there is almost always a free alternative.

I've broken them down into categories -- Study, Recreation and WTF?! -- just for your viewing pleasure.

Half.com (by eBay) is one of those sites that should be in every college student's bookmarks. Whether you're buying new textbooks or unloading old ones, Half.com is a pretty hassle-free solution. If you're gearing up to use Half.com this semester, though, you should consider going the Half.com iPhone app route instead of hitting up the traditional Web interface.

Why?

Well, the free iPhone app includes barcode scanning, so you can go shopping at your school bookstore, scan the barcodes of the books that you need, and then pay the cheaper prices that you find on Half.com. It also saves your checkout information, so you can make multiple purchases without having to log in again. You might not need it all year round. Unfortunately, the app isn't set up to handle your seller account, so you'll still have to manage that on the Web, without barcode scanning.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

IdiomDictionary has a killer domain name, because that's exactly what it is: a dictionary for idioms. I have no idea how much the domain cost, but it appears to be quite clean of advertising.

The site claims to explain the meaning of over 5,000 idioms. It does not seem to use an "established" dictionary for the definitions, but the explanations seem to be well written, concise, and authoritative.

Many dictionaries explain idioms, and OneLook lets you search for the idiom directly. But one unique IdiomDictonary feature is the "Nearby Terms" list; it's like a thesaurus just for idioms. So, let's say you have an idiom in mind, but it's a bit too trite or offensive, and you want to go for another, similar idiom. A regular dictionary won't help you out there, but IdiomDictionary will.

On the flip side, the site does not feature a "reverse search." Let's say, for example, that I want to find an idiom that means "very hungry" but does not use the word "hungry" in the actual phrase. Currently, that's something I can't do. It would be a simple feature to add, though, so I hope that this slight omission in functionality will soon be remedied.

I first found (and bought) Editor back when I was editing English text for Gramlee. It's a unique, and pretty amazing, piece of software; its work starts where your spell checker stops. It catches all sorts of potential grammar and usage problems, and its alerts are informative enough for you to learn and make your own judgement call on whether or not you wish to change your text.

Editor is made by Elaine and John Thiesmeyer, who are professors of English and teachers of writing. As you will no doubt notice when using the program, they are indeed English professors and not coders. That means that, back when I was using Editor, it had no support for MS Word at all, and the whole interface was rather antiquated (the history page says that Editor has been under development since 1982). On the other side, the on-screen text and the documentation are a pleasure to read; the writing is far better than that of your run-of-the-mill technical documentation.

In fact, back when I was using it, I cobbled together a set of macros for Word and sent it to Serenity Software for their use as a gift (they were very nice about it). And now, two years later, a new version of the Editor has been released, and it has support for Word (full disclosure: Elaine and John tell me that some of my code is still in there, and they have even credited me in the documentation). The interface is still far from slick, at least according to the screenshot, but the amazing functionality more than makes up for it.

If you do any sort of serious writing, Editor is one fantastic piece of software. Its usage notes and the amount of control that you have over it leave After the Deadline far behind. For some specific examples of the kind of stuff it catches (taken from the product page), keep on reading after the fold.

If you love data visualization, this one's going to blow your mind: I just found an incredible IBM demo, called World Factbook Dashboard.

It basically takes a ton of demographic and economic data (from the CIA World Factbook, I presume) and presents it in several beautiful ways that (mostly) make instant sense.

This is one of those rare cases where screenshots simply would not do, so I rolled up my sleeves and took the World Factbook Dashboard for a whirlwind ten-minute video tour with some really funny moments and lots of interesting facts and figures. Watch it after the jump!

Google has had a "dictionary lookup" feature for a while now -- all you had to do was slap define: before your search term. But they've now made it better, and mostly, made it easier for people to find it: Just search for a "difficult" word, and a definition would pop up as the first result, with quick links to some dictionaries.

What's interesting is that you don't get an instant definition for every word you search for as a single word: it's just the "big words". I would love to see the algorithm they use for deciding when to pop up a definition and when to stay mum.

Touration is a simple to use web app for creating visual tours of your Web pages. If you go to their page and click Show me how it works you'll get a demo tour that would explain the concept in about 10 seconds, but the gist of it is that you get callouts that walk you through page elements, one by one.

They also offer a demo of the editor, which is really simple to use -- which is a large part of its appeal. Simply click a page element and create a rich-text callout for it; that's all there is to it. You can also add floating "dialog boxes" (i.e, explanations not directly related to any one page element), or "groups". Groups are basically callouts which highlight arbitrary sections of the page and not just one image or piece of text.

Note that this is a page tour, rather than a site tour. I think it can come in handy for sites with complex visual layouts or for web apps which pack loads of functionality onto a single page.

I recently wrote about a utility called Keyboard Leds which puts a small icon in your system tray showing keyboard LED status, for systems which do not have actual keyboards LEDs (or have tiny ones).

Commenter Lonnie McClure pointed out a very handy built-in Windows accessibility feature, which does the same job, but uses sound instead of images. It's called Toggle Keys, and it makes a short "chirp" when you hit Num Lock, Scroll Lock or Caps Lock, and a different chirp when you hit any of them again to turn it off. While this doesn't let you track their current status, it does let you prevent accidental activation and easily see if your press just turned the function on or off (because the sound is different).

What I like about this solution is that it doesn't add yet another system tray icon (I have 22 of those, at present), and that it's built right into Windows so it doesn't require an additional install. There are two ways to turn it on:

Keyboard shortcut: By default, just press and hold Num Lock for five seconds. You should then hear a chirp, which means the feauture is on. When you want to turn it back off, press and hold Num Lock for five seconds again.

Via the Control Panel: (In Windows 7) Go to Control Panel > Ease of Access Center > Make the keyboard easier to use > check Turn on Toggle Keys.

Thanks, Lonnie!

Some instruments are fine to play on your own. For example, if you play the piano, I think it doesn't get boring very quickly. But some instruments can get really boring when you practice by your own, like the bass guitar. It's a great instrument, but I think it can be less than engaging to practice for hours on end.

Boredom aside, sometimes it's important to practice alongside something other than a metronome. For those cases, ChordPulse seems like a very handy solution. The program has a free and a paid version. I tried the free option, of course. You pick a simple chord progression, click a musical style, and let it play.

You can easily change each chord in the progression, change the BPM, and the relative volume of the drum, bass and piano chords. The GUI seems carefully thought out. All in all, it's a pretty neat music application.

DokuWiki is one of those "I can't believe we've never covered it!" tools. It's not new; it's not cutting-edge. It's solid, and tested, and it's been around for years, and it is one of the best Wiki systems on the planet, in my opinion.

DokuWiki is great for content sites where you have one editor and the rest of the world just reads the wiki; it's also great for collaborative wikis, and there was a time when my own personal site ran DokuWiki, too.

I've been working with DokuWiki for years now, and have deployed and managed it several times. Just so you could see how customizable the layout can be – here is the official DokuWiki page, and here is an installation I customized.

In a nutshell, you can customize everything. There are templates you can download and very easily install, but you can also make your own very easily. There is a great plugin system, too: to install a plugin, you just feed its URL into a box, and click Install. That's it; your DokuWiki installation would download it, unzip it and install it.

There are plugins for everything, from new syntax, to making your wiki into a blog, to managing access rights in a different way, to changing navigation ... in short, just about anything really. And as a wiki system, it is far simpler than MediaWiki (the stuff Wikipedia runs on).

Bottom line: Highly recommended; simple, elegant, free, and has an active community. What's not to like?

Calcmoolator is a very neat collection of task-specific calculators, with a cute bovine mascot. The site provides an enormous number of calculators, like "Auto Lease vs. Buy", "Tip Calculator" (shown above), "Canadian Mortage", and even "Cost of a Baby" (a weird one, but it must come in handy for some people).

The site looks very clean. Once you enter all of the variables and hit Calculate you get a human-readable result, such as "One baby will cost you $4,284.00 for one year". You can then click the Summary tab and get a tabular result ("One Year Costs: $4,284.00").

Since the site is so numerically-oriented, it should not come as a surprise that they offer a Calculator Stats page which shows a list of all of the calculators they offer, sorted by popularity, with a nice pie-chart on top. You can also search for a specific calculator from that page.

One notable omission is any sort of health-related calculation. I mean, calories vs. food, how long it would take me to lose X pounds, anything like that – not on this site.

There are also iPhone and iPad versions of the site, which is good because it seems to be a very handy tool when you're out and about.