12 posts tagged “tools”

YubNub is a very cool tool.  Either from the YubNub site or, better yet, by adding the YubNub search box to your browser, it's an incredibly versatile way to search the web.

Want to do a Google search for 'turtles'.  Simply type 'g turtles' into the search box.  Want to search imdb for 'Brad Pitt'?  Type 'imdb brad pitt'.  There are literally thousands of commands for searching dictionaries, encyclopedias, maps, images --- all from a simple command line keyword. There are even commands for doing things like displaying multiple pages in one browser window, or creating tiny urls without going to the tiny url site.

'a word' will search Answer.com's dictionary;

'wp word' will search Wikipedia;

'allmusic word' will search AllMusic.

You get the idea. 

What's the 'social' aspect of YubNub?  Users can create their own new commands - thus the thousands of available commands.  I easily created a command called 'vx' that will search Vox posts.

Way cool!

Courtesy of Lifehacker.  Check out the post there for further info.

For all you phone freaks, David Pogue over at the NY Times writes about Grand Central, something I posted about a while back.

Some Voxer posted a while back about LibraryThing.

I checked it out but, for now at least, adding my books seems like a daunting task that I don't have time for.

But for those of you interested in such things, there's an article about LibraryThing in today's Times.  (They wrote about Vox a couple of weeks ago.)

Caught this in a post by lulubird6, and I must say it's a great idea.

Library Elf is a service that lets you keep track of the books you have out of the library, due dates, overdues, items on hold, etc.

You can set it up to email you every day, once a week, several days before your books become due, every day for overdue books, etc.  The emails list all the books you have out, due dates, and hold items that are available.

You don't have to manually enter any data yourself.  Of course you have to have online access to your library, with a PIN (you provide your card number and PIN to the Elf), and not all libraries may support it, but the list of those that do seems quite extensive.

The libraries should probably be doing this themselves, and maybe some do, but mine doesn't.  As a regular library patron, I think this is a unique and useful idea.

Gubb is a new web based list making site.  It's a little less capable than something like Backpack - no image uploads, e.g. - but unlike Backpack, which limits free accounts to five lists, Gubb lets you make an unlimited number of lists for free.  You can share lists, post via email or text, etc.  I'll be checking it out, but it looks like a useful site if you just want to make text lists.  (You have to wonder what the revenue model is here.)

For you IT types out there, Microsoft has just launched  Aggreg8, a Vox/Myspace-like networking site for IT Pros.  Might be interesting.

Well we finally broke down and bought a new vacuum cleaner to replace the old Hoover which was held together by duct tape.  It's called the Eureka Boss 4D.  Looks kinda like one of those Japanese robots, doesn't it?  It's nice to have a vacuum cleaner that actually, you know, picks things up.  And it's bagless so you get to see the dirt and realize how fucking disgusting your house really is.  And they don't call it the 4D for nothing.  It uses Eureka's "four dimensional" cleaning system.  That's right... it actually picks up stuff you haven't spilled yet!

I'm not much of a phone person.  I don't even have a proper cell phone, just one of those pre-paid Tracfones like the drug dealers use on 'The Wire'.

But Grand Central looks pretty damn cool.......

Here's an interesting tip.

A few weeks ago I abandoned Bloglines after a long and happy relationship for the web based version of  Newsgator.  It's not that I was unhappy with Bloglines.  In fact I love it.  The problem was that I couldn't get to it from work. Blocked, I guess.  Not that I... you know... at work or anything.

I began to notice, though, that visiting Newsgator after a few days absence, some of the feeds had a very small number of articles in them.  Slashdot, for example, always had 15 articles, no matter how long it had been since I viewed them.  Turns out that, unlike Bloglines, Newsgator doesn't really aggregate feeds.  If Slashdot's RSS feed has a fixed number of articles (15) that's all you'll ever get to see.  You don't get to see the older stuff.  As Jeff would say, a great big bowl of wrong.

Of course logging into Bloglines after a few days and seeing that you have 12,472 unread articles can be a bit stress inducing.  But I'd rather have the choice to catch up or blow them away myself.

And, miracle of miracles, all of a sudden I can access Bloglines from work.  Not that I... you know.....