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Filed under: Fun, Web, Humor

Cornify: ruin any website, unicorn-and-rainbow style


I honestly didn't know what to make of Cornify at first. It's a bookmarklet that you can click on -- repeatedly -- to add sparkly unicorn and rainbow graphics to the page you're currently viewing. Cornify is a horrifying abomination, a crime against web design, a throwback to the days when the web was covered in animated GIFs, and actually really satisfying to use.

Rewind. Yes, Cornify is kind of fun. I like it for the same reason people pay actual money to own a Staples EasyButton. Sure, it's corny, but you can just hit the thing as hard as you want when you get angry, and it's a great way to blow off steam. Cornify is even better, though, because instead of hitting a button, you can hit the website that made you mad in the first place. Hit it with unicorns. Once you've calmed down, you can reload the page to de-Cornify it and move on with your life.

Filed under: Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Productivity, Web services, Freeware, How-Tos, Unix, Browsers

Speed up browsing on low-speed connections with Toonel.net

Toonel.netIf you frequently find yourself browsing on a low-bandwidth connection, you can potentially speed up your browsing experience by using the compressing proxy server at Toonel.net. The concept is simple: install their application on your computer (versions are available for Windows, Mac, Linux, Sun Solaris, and even Windows Mobile and Symbian), then set your proxy settings to point to your localhost IP address on port 8080 (127.0.0.1:8080). Once you do, all of your web traffic is routed through Toonel.net's server, which compresses it before it gets to you.

The compression used is lossless, which is required to ensure the pages show up as expected, though there are image-specific options that allow you to change the compression that is applied to JPEG and GIF images. This is likely only worthwhile on a very slow network, since it takes the server a bit of time to recompress images before your browser can download them, but could be handy on a struggling network.

I wouldn't recommend running Toonel.net full-time, or even at all if you're always on a broadband connection, but if you find yourself struggling with a lack of bandwidth, this is a great trick to have in your back pocket.

[via TechRadar]

Filed under: Design, Fun, Internet, Web services

GIFTube, welcome back to the 90's internet style

giftubeRemember that craze back in the early days of the internet? The early 90's. You remember, the time when the animated gif was a cult phenomenon? Well, like pogs, they are back.

Move over YouTube, GIFTube is your one stop shop for everything animated gif. Users upload and share their creations or findings to make their MySpace pages, websites and blogs as flashy as they can through the provided web 2.0 embed code. Have a snazzy GIF or something saved from the internets early days? Submit it for entry into the directory. But please, do us all a favor and just browse the site, do not use these on your website. Thanks!

It seems that the new age of animated GIF's drops the flashy text and symbols in favor of some questionable adult GIF's on this site. So browse the GIF library at your own discretion.

Filed under: Design, Developer, Internet, Photo, Utilities, Windows, Shareware

Trout's GIF Optimizer

Trout's GIF OptimizerIf you're always looking for ways to speed up your website, you might want to consider looking at those bloated GIF files you've got all over the place. Often, simply optimizing your GIF image files can result in the biggest file size reduction in your website, and therefore the biggest speed gain, particularly for users with slower web connections.

While GIF optimization is present in the expensive commercial image manipulation packages like Photoshop, often image editing applications neglect to include GIF optimization functionality. Luckily, there's a free download that will do the trick for you: Trout's GIF Optimizer.

Trout's GIF Optimizer will automatically optimize your GIF images in a lossless manner, as well as offer the option to reduce the color depth of your images to see if even smaller sizes can be achieved with as little adverse affect to the original image as possible.

Trout's GIF Optimizer is donationware.

Gickr: Create animated GIFs online

GickrGickr is a cool web app that lets you quickly created animated GIFs without leaving the comfort of your web browser. Gickr has two modes: The first mode lets you grab frames for your animation directly from Flickr. Just enter a Flickr username and/or tag and your pictures will pop up, then you can include the ones you want to include in the animation. The second mode lets you upload images from your hard drive. The options are simple and few--you can choose the size of the resulting image from a drop-down and you can pick a speed from "Slow" to "Blasting." Gickr's main purpose is to create simple slideshows rather than sophisticated animations, so you're not able to control looping or change the order of the frames. Refreshingly, Glickr doesn't require registration or anything like that. Take a look after the jump to see a quick animation I put together in Glickr.

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Featured Time Waster

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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