FreePoverty.com - Knowing Helps...

WATER, WATER, EVERYWHERE?

See how many cups of water you can donate by testing your knowledge about the world. Each correct answer means we will be donating 10 cups of water on your behalf. The number of cups of water donated on your behalf depends on how accurate your answer is. Once you have located one city or landmark, another location will be shown to you.

You may play the game however many times you wish. Of course, the more you play and the more you are correct, the greater difference you will make with your donation. If your answer is correct, 10 cups of water will be donated. The further away you are from the location, the number of cups will decrease. If your answer is nowhere near the exact location, no cups of water will be donated. Therefore by playing this game, not only are you doing a good deed for others, but you are also gaining knowledge for yourself. Good luck, and have some fun -- it feels good to help someone!


FACTS ON POVERTY

Every day, at least 30,000 people around the world die from poverty; most of whom are under five years of age. They die because they are undernourished, and do not have enough food or water to survive. More than 800 million people go hungry every day. This is 13% of the world population. How can you help? By playing this game on FreePoverty.com, each answer you get correct, 10 cups of water will be donated. Somewhere in the world, someone will receive it. And it will make a difference to their day.


WHY WATER?

70% of a human being is made up of water. Water is the second most essential element for survival, after oxygen. Over one billion people in the world do not have access to clean drinking water; hence, causing them to develop deadly diseases. Moreover, without water, the brain is not able to function properly. One cup of water can make difference to someone's day. FreePoverty allows you to donate as many cups of water as you can to save millions of people.


MORE INFORMATION ABOUT FreePoverty.com

FreePoverty intends to do the same, and they want you to contribute. By testing your basic knowledge on their map, each correct answer means you will be donating 10 cups of water. FreePoverty chose water as their primary source of donation, because it is something that all human beings need to survive. Around the world, there are too many people who don't have access to clean drinking water; thus causing various illnesses. With your contribution, FreePoverty may be one drop closer to ending poverty and making the world a better place.

Cool Tool: MeetInBetween.Us

"Okay, I'll meet you half-way there..."
Simple problem, simple (yet sophisticated) solution. I was doing my morning surfing and reading tweets on my Twitter [Follow me @ptamaro] and I saw a tweet by @kyleplacy with the URL for MeetInBetween.Us and decided to check it out. I'm really glad I did because this is a really helpful app that takes two locations and finds a central location to meet, and presents you with places to meet by category.

How does it work?
For example, I want to meet my friend from Providence, RI for coffee next week so I type that location in and then type Boston, MA as my second location. I'm presented with Sharon, MA as the central location and categories like food, coffee, bar, hotel, mall, etc. and then it gives you places to meet based on the topic you choose. Simple, huh? It also gives you directions on how to get there from each starting location. In addition. it gives you a a nice short link to the map and location so you can share it with the other person.

Results, plain and simple.
How about coffee at the Starbucks at 5 Post Office Sq #5 in Sharon, MA on Wednesday evening around eight? Let me know if that works for you, either way... I'll have a Triple Espresso with one sugar please! :-D

My First Posterous Post

I don't have a lot of time at the moment (I'm actually eating my lunch), but I figured I should really give Posterous a post and get an idea of how it works since it's been a few days since I first signed-up. I got the link from Graham in a tweet (follow imjustcreative, you'll learn stuff).

Wow! Posterous is really awesome. What a brilliant idea...

Posterous — The place to post everything. Just email us. Dead simple blog by email.

The user interface is really simple yet sophisticated and intuitive — this app begs to be used, I just wish I had something worthwhile to post and more time to mess around with it. Post Videos, MP3s, photos, random ramblings you want to get out of your head — no setup or signup — whatever you send 'em they'll just gobble it up and post it for you.

I'm just minutes into it, and I love it already! This is a good example of a great User Experience. It's just that simple. :-)

» Get yours at www.posterous.com

Posted by email from ptamaro's posterous

Review: MeeID - An Online Business Card

A few weeks ago, I stumbled across this neat little nugget web application called MeeID which is kinda like an online business card (for lack of a better description). It's so simple to use, it's free, and it's design is really lovable.

This is an extremely brief review because the application is just so simple and straightforward — and the design is very clean and intuitive. There's just not much to it, but it does what it does very well. All you need to do is sign-up for a free account, add your avatar or a photo, and then add some links... You can also add "favorites" or search for people and even get a random MeeID from the 1284 people who currently have a MeeID. It's cool...

There are lots of things that you can do with MeeID if you let your imagination flow. If you need some ideas to get your imagination going, the application's author Bronson Taylor has put a list of some ideas of what you can do with MeeID together for you.

Here's my MeeID in case you want to see another example.

Google Shines On With Chrome

Google just released their new "One box for everything" browser called Chrome. The name is a direct reference to the term used to describe a desktop software application's interface elements. The name also implies "shiny and new" which it definitely is. The current beta is only available for Windows users, and unfortunately the Mac and Linux versions are not out yet and it's not clear when they'll hit the street.

Do We Need Another Browser, But Why?
Google's goal and concept for Chrome was that, "spend much of our time working inside a browser" and the "web gets better with more options and innovation." They also wanted to "completely rethink the browser" and create "a modern platform for web pages and applications." Let's see what develops in the near future, but so far things are impressive.

It's Got That Creamy Goodness
All the code is open source, and they've "used components from Apple's WebKit and Mozilla's Firefox" and under the hood they built V8, a more powerful JavaScript engine which should keep even extremely complex web apps in control. That said, Chrome is blazing FAST! It's also CSS3 capable, so users will have a better overall experience. The interface is kinda Microsoft Vista looking and very simple which makes it easy to use since there are only a limited number of features so far. Some of the features are: DNS pre-fetching, gears, phishing & malware protection, dynamic tabs, and "incognito mode" (ala Safari?). There's also a cool little feature called "Task Manager" where you type about:memory in the location bar to see the current memory usage for your browsers... Looks like Firefox is a RAM hog with all my Add-ons, extensions and plugins installed. You can see the full list of features and video explanations on their features page.

Give Google Chrome a try...
Download Google Chrome »

Geeky Stuff &mdash Get Your Geek On
Here are some fun things you can do already, remember this is just an initial beta release! I'm sure the folks at Google have lots of cool stuff on the way.

• Highlight some text or page elements and right-mouse-click and choose "Inspect element" to see a developer inspector (Firebug-like) which allows you to see the DOM and mess with it, and you can dock/un-dock to the window or view it in a tab, and do some other nifty things... [This is an awesome feature]


• Type about:memory in the location bar to see your memory use.


• Find more helpful info on GChrome here or get more GChrome developer info here.


• Type about:version in the location to get your current installed version of GChrome.


• Or, check the version "About Google Chrome" from the wrench menu, and it'll even tell you if your installed version is up to date.

Or make your Firefox new and shiny with this:
Chromifox 1.0rc2 Theme

...another blatant rip-off of another default theme from another great open source web browser! This time, the target is Google Chrome, or more specifically Chromium, the open source project behind it. The clean lines, slick layout, and compact style of Chromium were the points of inspiration for this theme. Chromifox offers a coat of Chrome for Firefox.

Your Flicks on Flickr

If you haven't noticed yet, Flickr rolled out their video functionality on Monday and it's flickrliscious.

You can now upload and share your videos on Flickr in much the same way you share your photos. This makes total sense since "slices of life" aren't always captured in a single photo, and because just about everyone has a digital camera these days — and video is becoming far more ubiquitous than it was years ago.

Your videos can be an AVI, MPEG or MOV format and they are limited to 90 seconds and/or a maximum file size of 150 Mb. So far, you can add comments to the videos, captions, geotags, and set privacy restrictions. The Flickr blog also mentions the ability to add "video" as a content type and additional moderation "safety levels" to your pool contributions. Here's the Flickr video FAQ with all the basic info in case you still have questions.

But wait, there's more...

At the end of Heather's post, she mentions that "...we’re doubling the size of photos that can be uploaded — 20MB per photo for pro members and 10MB per photo for members with free accounts" which is great for those folks with mondo mega-pixel cameras. If you haven't "gone Pro" then you really ought to and I strongly recommend it (It's still just US$24 bucks per year)!

Here's more info...
» Flickr Help: Free Accounts, Upgrading & Gifts

Cool Tool: Diagram Designer

I recently needed a free “Visio-like tool” to do some diagrams for our latest project at work, but I don't have Visio, and I don't love using it either. Like most Microsoft tools, Visio's got way too many unnecessary bells and whistles which force you to learn the tool rather than get the task at hand done quickly. I like Graffle, but someone's "borrowing" the iMac I had on my desk so that wasn't an option either.

I did some quick searching and found this little gem, Diagram Designer 1.19 by MeeSoft, on TuCows.com (TuCows Diagram Designer product review/download).

Seek and find. This is a great freeware tool to "create flowcharts, diagrams and slide shows", and other vector stuff. It's light weight at 1.28 Mb, simple and easy to use -- and makes quick work of day-to-day grunt stuff.

The downside is it's Windows only (98 / NT / 2k / Me / XP / 2003 / Vista) no Mac or Linux. Also it saves the vectors in it's ".ddd" file format which I haven't seen before. But, you can import/export your work to other formats like: WMF, EMF, BMP, JPEG, PNG, MNG, ICO, GIF and PCX. It even has user submitted template palettes. Also, Mr. Vinther has released a previous version to Open Source.

» meesoft.logicnet.dk

I got great results -- and I got the job done quickly, so I figured it makes sense to share it. Let me know what you think.

Now if I could only remember where I left my cup of coffee...

:-|

It's ALL about the USER, right?

I just stumbled across an interesting article (Yahoo! News) that seems to focus on the issue of the importance of UX (User Experience) and customer satisfaction. Take a gander at the article and see what you think...

> > > Yahoo edges Google in user satisfaction survey

The article is proof-positive that these days attending to the user experience is critical to product success and user adoption. User satisfaction and a positive user experience can separate your product from it's competition, give you immediate as well as long-term advantages in the race towards success, and build a strong foundation for customer loyalty.

I use both Yahoo! and Google's products, and I feel there are benefits to both. I am loyal to, and use both both of them daily -- but for different reasons. Which is better? For me it depends on what you're trying to achieve. I think Google's better from the stand-point that they have a "suite of tools" that work together well. I can get a lot done in a short amount of time using my "Google apps". Whereas, I prefer the look and feel of Yahoo!'s email client, but the general process-flows are kludgey and tend to drag because of their onslaught of advertising. Both Yahoo! and Google tools tend to pop me into far too many windows. Google's got a far better account creation flow, and the process is simple, painless -- and it works. Yahoo!'s account creation can be painful. I recently tried to help my daughter set-up a Flickr account (owned by Yahoo!) so we could share photos, but we were left scratching our heads trying to figure out why we weren't able to do so (we kept getting errors), and we were left with a less-than-optimal user experience.

It's becoming increasingly clear that a positive user experience can be an obvious differentiator when traveling the road to product adoption and long-term success. Customer satisfaction can also have a direct effect on the bottom-line.

Ultimately, it's all about the user. What are your thoughts?

Cool Stuff Reviews - Products & Services: ScrapBlog, Verizon, and DirecTV

ScrapBlog is Scrap-a-licious!
This ScrapBlog tool is just amazing. You can assemble artwork, photos, or anything else into slideshows and mess with this little gem for hours. Flash 9 required, but worth the upgrade.

You can set permissions, create an rss feed, blast emails to share with contacts. Tools include crop, add link, edit photo, shadow, grid and more. The Scrapblog application also comes with some backgrounds, stickers, text, frames, and shapes -- and you can add more as you need them. Just get some photos and get started!

• Check out a scrapblog of some of my work
  
  
• http://www.scrapblog.com
  Sign up, and make your own!
  

Verizon Quick Review:
By the way I switched my ISP to Verizon in August and its great. I get 15Mbs. bandwidth via fiber and its fast -- this old machine can't really take full advantage of it though. The install was free, but they had to put the dish on my roof rather than the side of the house to get the best angle to the satellite. I'll check it when I clean the gutters in the Fall and Spring. So far, I'm really happy with the service and it's a little cheaper than my previous ISP.

• my Verizon site

DirecTV Quick Review:
I also get DirecTV and its really good, unless the weather's rotten. I'm not as impressed about the NFL Sunday Ticket as I thought I'd be because it seems like I'm not getting as many games as I should (sometimes the games are "not in my area" or something). Having
the "mix" channels is cool too because you get to see small screens of the most popular channels being watched for several categories: Kids Mix, Sports Mix, and the News Mix for example. You can switch the audio for the screen you want to listen to, and select the channel from there.

New Tools

I've finally spent a little time with some new tools, etc.

I've been messing around with some new software tools lately and figured i'd share.

GIMPshop - GIMP hack

This is a nice idea -- tweak The GIMP to be more like Photoshop. I gave it the old college try, and yes it's better (multiple documents vs. single, palettes and names match better, etc.) but it isn't close enough for me yet. At the end of the day it just come down to price, what's the overall cost of not using best of breed, and how many hoops do you want to jump through just to get through the day?

* try GIMPshop

Project Management

This one seems promising. I feel like we've got so much going on that it makes sense to use something to help me manage it all in terms of
project work. I was never great with MS Project, but this open source tool seems to give it a good run...

* try OpenWorkbench

TWiki Firefox extension

I'm using this one now. Mike D. just showed me this one and it seems to make the wiki blogging experience a little better/easier... I'm a
horrible typer these days (i used to type 45 words/min), so for me it helps. It's a TWiki toolbar and context menu for Firefox (i'm currently using Firefox 1.5.0.1 and it works) and it's definitely worth a spin.

* try Twiki Firefox Extension Add-On

...and more

Blog and feed aggregation solution
http://www.blogbridge.com/

Web 2.0 API Reference
http://www.programmableweb.com/apis

Maya on Linux - but budget and time restricts me...
http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS3183634666.html
I'd love to play with SoftImage too... Blender is just a little too left-brain for me.

From Don S.:
"By a good margin, Adobe Photoshop is the one application that most people want ported to Linux"
http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS2844646285.html

16 Feb 2006