"tools" via groundhogdad
Previously mentioned SMS reminder service Kwiry can now add DVDs to your Netflix queue, products to your Amazon wishlist, and tasks to your calendar via text message.
We've previously described online mega-merchant Amazon.com as a nearly universal wish list center, but now it really can be. Drag the Universal Wish List bookmarklet into your browser toolbar, and you can add any web page—most usefully, of course, pages of products not offered through Amazon—to your Amazon wish list. Whether you use the lists as a holding place for future self-bought gadgets or actual suggestions to gift-buyers, it's a pretty handy capture tool for multi-purchase projects, brainstorming, or just sending an easy-to-grasp link to relatives.
Google used to be a great tool for researchers, but then it got swarmed by billions of links from companies trying to sell you something. Clearing your way through all this information can be (and often is) counterproductive.
Enter RefSeek, an “academic” search engine, that launched today in beta. Simpler than Google even in appearance, RefSeek does not claim to offer more results than Google; instead, it strips any results not related to science, research and academia. It’s different from Google Scholar, which only indexes articles from scientific publications; it’s a fairly standard web search, only without all the commercial stuff. It claims to be indexing over one billion documents, including web pages, books, encyclopedias, journals, and newspapers.
In practice, this means that no matter what you’re searching for you’ll get a lot more results from .edu and .org sites as well as various online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia and Answers.com. It sounds simple enough, and the examples provided, such as “RNA” or “Carbon Nanotubes” yield good results, but does it work better than Google in the long run?
The answer is, as it so often is when you try to compete with the almighty Google, yes and no. To test it out I had to find some search terms that could be a topic for an academic paper and are at the same time very popular. Search for “80ies movies” was a flop; Google’s results were solid, bringing me a bunch of sites dedicated to exactly this topic. Surprisingly, RefSeek gave priority to BitTorrent sites like Mininova, which is precisely the opposite of what I’d expect.
On searches for terms such as “film noir” or simply “football“, RefSeek returned solid results, but besides giving a bit more weight to various .edu sites, I cannot say they were significantly better or more “academic” than Google’s.
Finally, a search for “flowers” (which was admittedly recommended by RefSeek) revealed RefSeek’s true strength. While Google almost exclusively returned links to florists, RefSeek brought me links about botany, which is probably what you’d want if you’re researching this topic.
All in all, RefSeek is worth a try. Although it’s not always successful in weeding out unneeded links from its results, it nearly always brought me a lot of relevant links. Unfortunately for RefSeek, once you start thinking from a scientist, student, or a researcher’s standpoint, Google - surprisingly - doesn’t fare all that bad, either.
---
Related Articles at Mashable | All That's New on the Web:
Dumb Find: Topical Search
Flickr Live Feeds Now Included in Yahoo Image Search
Farecast Live Search: Officially Part of the Microsoft Family
Google Releases Custom Search Business Edition
Yahoo Changes Questionable Sponsored Search Policy. Can Anyone Tell?
Bebo Partners with Yahoo Search: Acquisition Imminent?
Clusty Search Goes Mobile
Most websites issue some sort of cookie to keep track of you during your visit or when you come back again. Sometimes you’d rather have more privacy on certain sites: that’s one reason why Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 will include a “privacy mode” to keep your private browsing…private.
Until then, there are plenty of tools for managing your cookies in Firefox. Here are 15 Firefox extensions for managing cookies that will allow you to totally disable cookies, allow some, and even build a whitelist.
Tell us in the comments how you choose to manage your cookies.
Cookie Disabling
Cookie Monster - Allows you to set a rule to block all cookies or just set temporary rules for various sites.
CookieSafe - CookieSafe allows you to disable, temporarily enable or always allow cookies from most sites on the Web by just using a button on your status bar.
CS Lite - A scaled down, simplified version of CS Lite that aims to be more stable and easier for anyone to use.
Distrust - Removes all the cookies collected during a Web browsing session as soon as you close the browser.
Stealther - Besides disabling cookies for certain surfing sessions, Stealther will also disable your browsing history, recently closed tab history and more.
Cookie Management
Add & Edit Cookies - Allows you to edit both session and saved cookies.
Cookie Button - After you set your default cookie permissions in the options menu, the cookie button appears on the address bar and will allow you to change the settings on a site by site basis.
Cookie Whitelist With Buttons - Gives you a whitelist for all cookie issuing sites. Use the buttons in the status bar to temporarily accept cookies from the site you are on, or click the add button to quickly add the current site to your list.
CookieCuller - A very straightforward extension that allows you to delete any unwanted cookies and keep the others.
CookieMan Context - Allows you to access a context menu for your cookies via the options privacy menu. It will allow you to search for desired sites, right click on the site name and quickly change your cookie options.
CookieSwap - A nice extension that will allow you to swap cookies so you can be logged into multiple email accounts at once. For Web designers, it will allow you to act like different visitors for site testing.
Extended Cookie Manager - Extended Cookie Manager will inform you via the status bar if a cookie was received from a site and then will notify you if it was blocked, allowed, or allowed only for the current session.
Firecookie - Works with Firebug to create cookies, delete them, edit, see all of the current cookies for a site and more.
HttpFox - You can monitor all of the traffic between your browser and a given website, including what cookies it is delivering and receiving.
View Cookies - Adds a tab in the Page Info area so you can easily view what cookies are on your system.
---
Related Articles at Mashable | All That's New on the Web:
Another 16 Firefox Add-ons For Web Designers
Mozilla to Go Mobile, Launch Firefox for Cell Phones
New Del.icio.us Add-on Released, Jives With Firefox 3
Firefox Campus Edition Launches
Firefox is Dead, Long Live Opera?
Firefox Extension Contest is On & Poppin’
Kanoodle to Pay Publishers for Cookies - But is it Wise?
This post is part of Mashable’s Startup Review series, which highlights great unsung startups. The series is made possible by Sun Startup Essentials.
Company Name
20-Word Description:
JobBite helps people share reviews and salary information for specific employers and jobs anonymously, with no registration or cost.
CEO’s Pitch
Though there are many websites where one can find salary details and other workplace information about employers, JobBite makes things easier by allowing anyone to utilize the site anonymously, without fee or registration.
Job seekers often see only a one-sided message provided by their potential employer. JobBite can help provide a more balanced perspective by making difficult to obtain information, such as company culture available.
Taking a new job is a huge step for most people. My goal is to help provide everyone with a transparent look into their potential company and job so that they may make the most educated career decision.
Mashable’s Take
Austin-based JobBite isn’t alone in the sector of the Web reserved by job and workplace review sites and repositories. There are venues such as JobVent, JobExpose, and The Work Review which also cater to individuals looking to dish details on their corporate experiences. They talk the talk around the family dinner table, after all. Forums online are really a natural extension of that today.
The immediate appeal of JobBite with regard to its competitors is the simplicity of the service. It’s very elementary in design. There’s truly no excess to speak of. The structure of it is so easy to understand that there’s almost no use in spending time to describe it. Visit the place and you’ll know it inside out in a matter of seconds. Minimalism is clearly the theme here.
As far as details are concerned, specifications for a salary rating and descriptions of office culture are provided, as well as the basics like the timeframe of employment, company location, and the main fields in which to make your case one way or another.
Yes, if you like your Web services as easy to handle as a knife and fork, and you would prefer to keep the matter of workplace reviews as anonymous as they are informative, JobBite seems one of the most sensible candidates for the task we’ve yet seen. Of course, the service doesn’t have much of a leg up on similar engines, mainly due to its relative youth. But if you think you might enjoy having your words carry a bit more prominence, so to speak, rather than seeing them lost among dozens or hundreds of other rants and raves, it’s a decent place to go.
Not that it matters much in the grand scheme of things. Let’s remember, these company reviews showcase no authorship. Yet, from the perspective as an employee or ex-employee wishing to make a statement, JobBite is as good a place as any to offer your contribution. Depending on your way with words, an entry may take you a half-minute or a half-hour’s worth of time. But it’s doubtful you’ll find a platform that makes the process so effortless.
Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.
Sponsored By: Sun Startup Essentials
Writing bibliographies is one of the most irritating, not to mention time-consuming, parts of writing papers. MLA? APA? Chicago? Turabian? Does the publisher come first, or the year? Is it a comma here, or a period? There’s just too much to do wrong.
Well, that’s exactly why you shouldn’t leave it to yourself. Leave it to the Web! There are two great resources out there that make writing your bibliography a piece of cake.
BibMe: I use BibMe every time I write a paper, and it’s a lifesaver. Use it to look up an author, title, publication, website, journal, movie, and just about anything you can think of. BibMe gets as much information out of you as you’ve got, and then puts it into the “My Bibliography” section of the page you’re working on. You can change among four basic formats, as well as download your bibliography to Word or save it to your account. The site works great with no signup, but to save bibliographies (if you’re doing it as you go- a good idea) you’ll have to create a free account.
EasyBib: EasyBib is really useful if you’re citing a particular article, or introduction, or some small part of a film- it’s better for those stickler professors. It works much the same, asking you to fill in all the information you know: who wrote it? What’s it called? Is there a volume number? Once you give it the info, it finds what you’re looking for. It’s not as attractive as BibMe, but is more option-rich, letting you choose from a huge number of publications to site (a map? Who needs to cite a map?). It only works with APA and MLA formats, but will also let you export to Word and view the bibliographies online. To save your bibliographies is a free registration, but to do a number of other things, like citation help and footnotes, it’ll cost you $8/year.
Both of these are great tools, particularly combined with Amazon. The way I use these two sites is to go to Amazon, find my book (it’s better at figuring me out than either of the other two sites), and then enter the ISBN number into BibMe or EasyBib. You’re sure to get the right information this way, and it works just as well. For things other than books, this isn’t as helpful, but it’s great when it works.
Whenever you use a source, put it into one of these two sites. That way, there’s no risk of losing the information, or losing your source. These two sites are both repositories for storing your information, and for making sure you don’t lose points for not citing “See Spot Run” correctly.
If you have an extra minute, please fill out our reader survey to help us improve your Gearfire experience.Interested in student productivity? Gearfire is looking for part-time writers!
There’s a new application in town for those who want a simple approach to maintaining their appointments: Deadline. They boast of being “the simplest calendar ever made,” though a variety of features are already in place or being planned.
After signing up for a free account, you’ll get a web interface with a box to type. Put in something like “Feed the cat next week” and it will strip off the “next week” part, parse it to get the date, and make the rest the text of your reminder. Then it adds it to the rest of your reminders on the web page. A search box lets you find reminders with particular text, and brighter white is used to highlight the more immediate tasks.
Other features of Deadline include reminders via email or Jabber-based IM, the ability to set reminders by sending email to a personalized Deadline address, and a mobile user interface. For the future, they’re planning an iPhone application, customization, and an API, among other things.
I found Deadline easy to use, though its parsing of English was less full-featured than I’d like (”in a year”, for example, seems to be giving the wrong results). It’ll pop up a box for direct date entry if it doesn’t see any date at all in your entry. Overall, Deadline has less functionality than the most similar service I know, I Want Sandy, but Deadline’s user interface is easier to navigate if you just want to track dates.
Many web workers avoid the cost of Microsoft Office productivity applications by using alternatives, including hosted applications online such as Google Docs and Zoho’s applications. Even if you’ve already settled on some Office alternatives for core productivity applications such as word processing and spreadsheets, though, it’s worth looking at some of the free applications found in open source productivity suites.
Even if you only favor some of the adjunct applications in them, they may complement your main applications very well.
We’ve written about the OpenOffice.org open source productivity suite before, which is out in a new version 3.0. It’s not perfect, and not perfectly compatible with Microsoft Office, but has its attractions. If you’ve avoided trying it because you already have core productivity applications such as a word processor and a database that you favor, you may still want to look into the other free applications that come with the suite.
Draw is a Microsoft Visio-like diagram drawing application in OpenOffice, Math is a tool for creating and working with mathematical formulas, and Impress is for building presentations. You can launch any or all of these applications on their own, and you may find they complement your core applications.
Today on the OStatic blog, we covered a fork of OpenOffice called Go-oo, which is for Windows and Linux. It’s a lighter, faster version of the suite, but has the same programs. There are also some attractions to the Go-oo versions that are not found in OpenOffice.
For example, the Calc spreadsheet in Go-oo supports VBA macros very smoothly, so you may find that an Excel spreadsheet macro that chokes in OpenOffice will run smoothly with Go-oo. Go-oo also has under-the-hood extras such as improved support for Microsoft binary files. The best way to get a feel for its compatibility with Microsoft Office files is to simply import a number of them. The biggest benefit to Go-oo over OpenOffice, though, is speed, especially at loading applications.
It’s a mistake to assume that the attraction of a software suite is necessarily the whole suite–the sum of all the parts. For diagrams, math, compatibility with Excel, and more reasons, some of the parts in these open source suites may benefit you.
With your BitTorrent addiction in full swing, you've filled hard drives with media but can't seem to figure out how to burn any of the videos you downloaded to a DVD. Sound familiar? It's a common problem, and there was a time that it didn't have many simple (or free) solutions. Luckily that's no longer the case, and today we're taking a look at two dead simple solutions for burning virtually any video to a DVD you can pop into your DVD player and enjoy.
DVD Flick
First and foremost, there's DVD Flick, a free, open-source application that supports over 45 different file formats, includes subtitle support, and makes creating a DVD from most common (and even uncommon) video files a breeze. I detailed how to burn almost any video file to a playable DVD with DVD Flick almost two years ago now, but the app is better than ever. Since I last wrote it up, DVD Flick has added support for creating custom menu screens and has pushed out a load of bug fixes.
Free DVD Creator
If DVD Flick isn't your thing, then check out Free DVD Creator. It's not open source like DVD Flick (we do love our FOSS), but it's still free, and it offers most of the same features as DVD Flick.
Also like DVD Flick, the Free DVD Creator wizard is dead simple to use. First select the movies you want to burn and arrange them in the order you'd like them to playback and appear on the DVD menu. On the next screen, you can completely customize your DVD menu screen. Once you've made it that far, just start burning. Free DVD Creator (like DVD Flick) will handle all of the file conversions necessary, then write the DVD-ready video to a DVD complete with your custom menu.
If you have trouble with the one step convert-and-burn (when I tested it, Free DVD Creator created the DVD but didn't immediately burn), just re-open Free DVD Creator and this time select Video DVD Burner instead of Create Video DVD. Then just point the Burner at the VIDEO_TS folder that Free DVD Creator made the first time around (by default it's located at C:\DVDTemp\ and hit Burn. That worked for me without a hitch.
Got a favorite tool for burning your various videos to DVD? Whether we mentioned it above or not, let's hear more about your tool-of-choice in the comments.
