Extras
6 Handy (Web-Based) Tools For Gardeners That You’ve Never Heard Of
Gardening is the hobby of many. It requires patience and knowledge; when you plant seeds, you need to take constantly care of them and be patient while they blossom into flowers.
If you are a gardener or planning to take up gardening as a hobby, check out the following online resources. These websites will provide you with various gardening practices, tips, and advices that will definitely help you out.
You are welcome if you want to share more tools for gardeners that our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter.
MyPlantID
This free to use website will help you identify plants. If you find an unknown plant somewhere and would like to plant it in your garden, you can use MyPlantID to find the plant’s name. this can be done entering the plant’s location and leaf properties or by uploading an image and having the site’s members identify the plant for you.
GardenPlanner
If you are going to rearrange your garden, this website is a perfect tool to visualize what the end result will look like. You get a grid onto which you can drag and drop various garden elements: paving, paths, fences, trees, shrubs, flowers, ponds, fountains, etc. The final image can be printed out in high quality.
GardenPuzzle
GardenPuzzle is another garden planner but it offers a more 3-dimensional look. You can upload a picture of your garden and then place the plants on the site in the picture. It can be useful in getting an idea of how the plants will go with the rest of the garden.
Pest and Disease Detective
Not only do you have to take care of a plant’s nourishment but you also have to fend off pests and diseases the plants might be prone to. This website can help you identify the diseases and pest infecting your garden’s plants. You can see how to prevent and control each of the diseases and pests.
SproutRobot
Planting seeds on the right time is crucial to a plant’s successful growth. Use this website to find when is the best time to plant certain plants according to your location.
iBotanika
Just like Facebook is a social network for friends and family, iBotanika is a social network for gardening enthusiasts. Instead of a wall you get ‘Greenhouse’ on which you add plants and record their health, maintenance, environment, and location.
eType: Auto-Complete Words, Spell Check & Translation Tool (1000 Invites)
Many freeware typing tutor programs can help increase your typing speed and accuracy. But if you want a simple application that guesses which word you are about to type and automatically fills in the letters, then eType is what you need.
eType is a freeware currently in its beta. The downloadable app is compatible with Windows and sized at almost 5 MB. Installation is quite standard and you will have it up and running in no time.
Once the program has been installed, you can have it run in the background as an icon in your system tray. You can right click on the icon and enable / disable eType’s function.
So what exactly does eType do?
eType monitors your typing activity in any application. Whether you are using notepad, Microsoft Word, typing in your web browser, chatting, or doing any other typing activity, eType will be monitoring what you type. As soon as you type in a few letters, word suggestions will pop up in a floating window. From this floating window you can select the word you wanted to use. A word can be selected by pressing ENTER or SPACE or clicking on the word. You can choose to skip the word selection by pressing the ESC key. To revert to typing the old way, you can always disable eType from its system tray icon.
By completing a user’s words eType will help many computer users who want to type fast and save time.
eType is a freeware program and currently in beta. There are 1000 instant beta invites exclusively available for SmashingApps readers. You can get eType from http://www.etype.com/v.aspx?id=smashingapps
We do not need anything in return but would appreciate a lot if you can guys can spread the word and tweet it.
7 Tools And Applications To Help You Save Electrical Power
Leaving our appliances on while we are not using them is a terrible waste of electrical power. There are parts of the world that do not have electricity at all; we should do our part to respect the resources we have and save them whenever / wherever we can.
Below you will find a list of 7 tools to prevent wasting electrical power. I believe that each entry in the list serves a useful purpose; read about each one and choose the one (or more than one) that suits you best.
If you want to share more tools that can Save Electrical Power so please comment about them below. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at smashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter.
1. MonitorOff
MonitorOff is a freeware application that lets a user fully control when his / her monitor turns off. CRT monitors in particular take up a lot of power. The operating system usually has built in time durations for the screensaver to begin or for the monitor to turn off. But these settings will take a little longer to reach; with MonitorOff we can access / modify al time durations and even setup hotkeys. The application is for Windows and sized at nearly 400KB. Click here to get MonitorOff.
2. SetPower
SetPower is a unique power management application for Windows that lets us set three different power plans: Balanced, Power Saver, and High Performance. We can edit the details of these plans (such as when the monitor will turn off) as well as assign the times when these plans will come into effect. For different hours of the day, we can assign our computer with different plans, according to our usage. Click here to get SetPower.
3. AppliancesEnergyUse
AppliancesEnergyUse lists the power input of almost 50 household appliances. By finding out how much power we are using simultaneously we can see if we are wasting energy. We can also set a personal power goal for ourselves and vow to never cross that wattage at a given time. Whether or not we are crossing our goal can then be determined by AppliancesEnergyUse. Click here to visit AppliancesEnergyUse.
4. Edison
Edison is an installable application for Windows. It offers the same features as SetPower, with multiple power schemes that can set to be implemented on different times of the day. An additional feature of the application is its ability to estimate the power we are saving and use the electrical unit price to calculate our savings. We can enter our own price was more accurate results. Click here to get Edison.
5. HomeEnergySaver
HomeEnergySaver is a free to use website that lets us answer a few question to learn our electrical power usage pattern. It then suggests ways in which we can reduce our power usage. We can view the report of each of these suggestions and see how much each would cost. Click here to visit HomeEnergySaver.
6. Microsoft Hohm
Hohm is Microsoft’s version of HomeEnergySaver. It requires users to have a Windows Live ID to register for an account before visitors can use the site’s services. Once the account is formed, we answer elaborate questions so that Hohm can fully understand our power usage patterns. We are then presented with suggestions of how we can cut back on our electrical power usage. Using Hohm’s service is free but restricted to users in the US. Click here to visit Hohm.
7. FuelCharts
FuelCharts is a free to use website. We can use the site to enter our electricity bills’ amounts over a two years’ period. Bar graphs are created of each bill. These bars provide us with a good enough comparison of our last year’s energy usage and this year’s energy usage. We can change electricity with anything we like (oil, biodiesel, etc.) and achieve an energy comparison for various resources. Click here to visit FuelCharts.
StickyBits: Attach Unlimited Content to Barcodes On Any Product (iPhone + Android)
Computer users share content in multiple ways. In addition to emails, file hosting sites, and social networking websites, there are other innovative ways being created to share stuff with your friends. One such new innovative sharing technique makes use of barcodes on products.
Barcodes have unique patterns to them that can act as a code. This code can be used to store any information and then be provided as a key to access that information. This is what Stickybits takes advantage of.
Stickybits is a free application for iPhones and Android-running smartphones. Imagine uploading a file on the web and giving its URL to your friends so that they can download the file. Stickybits lets users scan or print barcodes to attach information to them. This information can be in any form; you could attach a video to the barcode, a text file, photos, etc. When other people will scan the barcode using their Stickybits app, they will be able to see all that is attached with the code.
According to Developers:
What is stickybits?
stickybits allows people to attach digital content to barcodes. When those barcodes are scanned (via our iPhone or Android apps), you’ll see all the content that has been attached. What makes us unique is that all this is done in a social and fully open read/write way.
What does that exactly mean?
Imagine putting a barcode on your business card that when scanned showed your resume. Or put a stickybits sticker into a birthday card and record a personal video. Then when your friend scans it, they’ll see the video. Take that one step further and have all your friends attach videos to the same card. You’ll also get notified when it gets scanned.
It doesn’t just stop there. Something unique and strange is happening with the barcodes all around you. People are scanning soda cans, cereal boxes, beer bottles, etc. and adding digital content to them. Since each unique product shares a barcode, little communities are popping up around each of these products.
You probably had not thought that barcodes could be used as keys for our information – that is exactly what makes Stickybits so unique. On a box of a cooking ingredient, the barcode could have many recipes attached to it. A user could attach a detailed résumé to a custom barcode and then print that barcode on each of his business cards. These are only few of the endless possibilities of Stickybits.
Click here to visit Stickybits’ website . Get Stickybits for iPhone or Android.
Supercharge Your Google Reader & Read Your Feeds In Style With FeedSquares (Chrome Extension)
To read updates on the Blogger pages I am following, I use Google Reader. If you are unfamiliar with Reader, it is Google’s service that lets us read any Atom and RSS feed online or offline. Every since its main release in September 2007, it has been tried out many Google users and is now quite popular. This is what the Reader interface normally looks like:
Although I am happy with the convenience that Reader provides (the ability to read all our Atom plus RSS reads on a single dashboard) I feel that Reader’s interface could be revamped and made more visually appealing. One tool that achieves this is FeedSquares.
FeedSquares is a great browser extension for Google Chrome. The first change made by FeedSquare is the addition of a pink icon to Chrome’s address bar.
When this pink icon is clicked, a page like this is opened in a new Chrome tab:
The squares represent each blog / feed we are following or subscribed to (excluding the square titled TOP PICKS, ABOUT US, Rocket in-Bottle, and Friend’s Shared Items). By clicking on any square of a blog / feed, we open its feed beneath these squares (see image below).
The feeds are listed from newest to oldest (the newest is left most). Clicking on any feed opens it quickly in a pop up window right there, above our feed-line.
Blog entries can easily be read in this pop up window. In case we want to head on over to the post’s original link, we can click on its title in the pop up window (marked in the red region in the image above).
When combined with FeedSquares, Google Reader is a wonderful service that provides its users with a great online reading experience. Click here to get FeedSquares for your Chrome.
Aggregating and Sharing Web Links Made Easy With BagTheWeb
We can find content online on any subject; the internet has everything we are looking for. The information is usually distributed over a number of sources.
Suppose we want to view all of Coldplay’s videos; there is no single URL that will have all the videos; we will need to visit multiple URLs. To share the videos, we will need to share all those URLs. The same can be applied to any other thing we are looking for – we will need to visit multiple URLs.
After finding the URLs we are looking for, what if there was a way to store them in a ‘bag’ and label the bag accordingly? Say we store all those video URLs in a virtual bag and label the bag “Coldplay’s Videos.” The next time we need to view or share those videos, all we need to do is share the bag instead of the individual URLs.
BagTheWeb does exactly that.
BagTheWeb is a free to use website that lets users create virtual bags and store URLs in it. More than simply storing the address of the webpages we add, the site lets our bag actually use those URLs. In the abovementioned example, our videos bag will actually be an online video playlist. Depending on the nature of the URLs we add, we can aggregate online profiles, share expertise, recommend stuff, build a trip guide, promote a cause, prepare a discussion, organize a meeting, capture an event, or connect a community.
We start BagTheWeb by creating a free account.
Setting up our profile is optional. We can leave the profile details fields empty and skip to creating our bag.
After adding URLs to our bag and choosing how those URLs will be used, we can publish the bag to be findable to any internet user. We can also share our bags on our social networking accounts.
BagTheWeb is a wonderful idea and a unique way to share online content. I predict this site will become very popular very soon.
Click here to visit BagTheWeb.
Highlight & Annotate Any Web Page Before Sharing With Webklipper
Suppose you just finished reading a hilarious comic strip online. To share this strip with your friends, you can deploy the URL of the comic on your social networking account. Adding any comments with the ‘share’ will only indicate what you felt about the strip as a whole. If you want to specify which part of the strip you liked you cannot do so without going into great details.
What we need is a commenting tool that lets us add comments to webpages themselves. Our comments can be placed right next to the webpage area the comment is referring to. That way our contacts can read a part of the webpage and find out immediately what we thought about it. It can also be a way to highlight the most funny / interesting part of a webpage which our contacts can skip to.
To perform exactly such type of website commenting, Webklipper was created.
Webklipper is a free to use website that performs all the functions I have outlined above. We start using the service by adding the URL of the website we want to share in the assigned box on Webklipper’s homepage.
Once the URL has been entered, we click on the “Klip It” button. Consequently that URL is opened with a menu bar displayed at its bottom. This menu bar enables commenting.
From the left, the first option in the menu bar is to highlight any text on the webpage. We do this by selecting a piece of text, then clicking the “Highlight” button; this action gives the selected text a yellow background.
The second button lets us add comments to any part of the webpage. Comments boxes can be resized and repositioned to suit our purpose. Our changes are saved as we make them.
Webklipper has already generated a new URL where we are making all these changes. Clicking on the “Share” button lets us share this URL either by entering the email addresses of our contacts or by sharing the URL on our Twitter / Facebook accounts.
Apart from adding comments to websites, Webklipper also lets users create simple webpages that include text. This can be done via the “Create Your Own Page” tab on Webklipper’s homepage.
The resultant webpage includes no advertisements, just the simple text we enter. Changes can be made to this webpage using Webklipper’s comments bar; after making our changes we can share the URL using the same “Share” button.
For users who plan to use Webklipper regularly, the site’s browser addons will prove to be a very useful tool.
The browser addons come for Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer 8; with these addons installed, adding comments to any open webpage becomes only a mouse click away.
Overall, Webklipper is a unique concept and a wonderful new way to share online content. Click here to visit the site.
Stuck With Some Windows Error? Microsoft One Click Fix It Tool Can Detect & Repair
Windows computer users come across new situations often. Amateur computer users are completely baffled when a problem occurs; at times certain computer problems even leave the most experience computer user clueless. Calling technical support for our computers is not always helpful especially because the technician cannot see actually what our computer problem is.
Microsoft has finally recognized this extremely problematic issue and created a solution for it. The solution has been appropriately titled “Fix It.”
Fix It is a freeware solution by Microsoft that installs into your computer. It acts as an automatic troubleshooter that contains solutions to numerous problems commonly experience by Windows Vista and Windows 7 users. The list of supported operating systems includes Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows Server (2003 + 2008).
The installer we download is sized at 450KB which proceed with the remaining download. When our main download file has been obtained, the installation of Fix It asks us to specify the troubleshooters we would like installed.
Each entry contains a checkbox and an arrow in front of it. The arrow presents a description of that current troubleshooter. The best decision would be to select all troubleshooters and click on the Next button.
While the program’s installation proceeds we are asked if we would like to join the Microsoft Fix It Center Online.
Creating a free account there is advisable and can be a great help in case Fix It fails to successfully solves our Windows issue. An online account can be created using our Windows Live ID.
Whether you create an online account or not, you will still be able to use Fix It once the installation completes. Upon running the application for the first time you will be greeted with an introductory message.
The main Fix It window will list of problems.
Suppose your Windows Vista Aero features are broken and not performing as they are supposed to. Simply click on the RUN button in front of the appropriate troubleshooter.
The troubleshooter asks to automatically detect and fix the problem or automatically detect the problem but leave the decision of fixes to you.
Either way, our problem is automatically detected.
In case a problem exists, this troubleshooter finds it and either automatically fixes it or provides us with an option to fix it.
Microsoft Fix It is a great freeware release which will serve amateur and professional computer users alike. Get the application by clicking here.
3 Really Useful And Informative Educational Websites
Today we are listing here 3 Really Useful And Informative Educational Websites. I hope these sites can help you to find and search the useful information you would love to know. All of them are huge sites and full of information.
You are welcome if you want to share more useful websites that are worth checking and we have missed here and you think our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter as well.
Read Print is a free online books library for students, teachers, and the classic enthusiast. This is an amazing website with over 8,000 online books by 3,500 authors at your fingertips.
Webopedia is a free online dictionary for words, phrases and abbreviations that are related to computer and Internet technology. Webopedia provides easy-to-understand definitions in plain language, avoiding the use of heavy jargon when possible so that the site is accessible to users with a wide range of computer knowledge.
Google For Educators support teachers in their efforts to empower students and expand the frontiers of human knowledge. They’ve assembled the useful information and wonderful tools that you can find there.
Discover The Best World Heritage Sites In 3D With Vizerra
Vizerra is a free software which allows you to visit famous historical and architectural monuments from your home. You will have an opportunity to go for a virtual walk through incredibly precise 3D models of the best landmarks in the world.
This is first of its kind 3D educational software application. It combines high quality 3D locations, full editorial description for every location, a fully functional map service all in one software application.
Vizerra client application has three main functions. First, it’s an interactive world map where the places available for visiting are marked. Second, it’s a virtual encyclopedia which contains information on locations and regions available for download. And, there are 3D models which enable you to explore the landmarks by yourself or with the help of a virtual guide.
Why is Vizerra.com useful for end users?
The project Vizerra.com is absolutely irreplaceable if you want to:
- Distract your mind from the daily routine, take a break and relax, walk through precise virtual copies of the best sights of the world;
- Know something new about the world, and obtain the information in a relaxed, easygoing manner;
- Get your child interested in history, geography, architecture and art.
Who will benefit from Vizerra?
- School children who will learn history and geography while wandering through the virtual world.
- Parents whose children will study with pleasure.
- Educational institutions which will be able to plan the course of lessons on the grounds of interactive models of world landmarks.
- Travelers who will be able to see the places of future destinations beforehand, and to choose new interesting destinations.
- Publishers of tourist guides which will help tourists to choose their destinations.
- City halls and tourist councils which will be able to use our product to draw attention to local tourist attractions.
- All people who are interested in 3D development and world-famous landmarks.
What does Vizerra allow?
- Browsing 3D models of landmarks from all sides.
- Access to interesting information about objects, provided by leading museums and art history specialists.
- Visiting the most interesting locations with the aid of a video guide.
- Plunging into the atmosphere of the place of your choice with the help of photo-realistic graphics and rich sound effects.
