Google Image Labler

Google has a new beta tool that lets anyone help label random images by use of a fun little game where you are matched up with a random buddy and you as a team pick out terms for the image, when you both match terms the image goes away and a new one is presented. You are assigned points for using terms that are more descriptive, and say the image was a of someone on a sailboat in the water, you would have certain restricted words such as: boat, sailboat, water. You would have to say maybe vessel, yacht, and sailor. Check it out here, or by doing any image search.

Try to beat your friends with a game that helps everybody at the same time by helping Google label their images.

Give Opera A Chance

Pretty much everybody knows that I'm a big proponent of Firefox, the extensions just make it the best browser out there. Having that said, I decided to give Opera a second try. I tried it once a year or two ago and it wasn't very feature packed and didn't support add ons. This time around was (is) a much better experience! Pretty much any extension you love from Firefox (or you wish Firefox could have) is actually built right into Opera.

• RSS support. An awesome reader in fact.
• Ad blocking with selective blocking capabilities.
• Advanced pop-up blocker that only blocks unwanted pop-ups.
• Widgets like on iGoogle. This is an AMAZING feature! I have my Pandora player, weather, Google Maps!!!, etc... these can be accessed anytime, not just from a webpage.
• Mouse gestures
• Notes for marking up webpages for future review
• Smart auto-fill
• Skin flexibility
• Downloader that works like DownThemAll!
• Mail and chat built in. Which is awesome because you can sync your Opera browsers on multiple computers so your mail and chat goes with you wherever you go!

The more I use Opera the more I like it, it's getting dangerously close to making me switch it over as my default browser, which is a big deal.

Amazon Kindle

Amazon, of all companies, released a portable eBook called Kindle reader today. From first glance I'm not really a fan of its design, mainly because of screen size. The feature set though, is far beyond impressive. You'll have to check it out at its Amazon product page (linked above), where else right?

Although the product is a little odd shaped and designed, the feature set of the Kindle is impressive enough to more than overcome the downfalls of the hardware. Built in WiFi for access to all of your favorite blogs, that update all day long! Also you can purchase subscriptions to most major newspapers and journals and have them delivered each morning before they even hit the newsstands. Access to wikipedia via WiFi and a built in dictionary for any concept or word you might be misunderstanding. Check out the Amazon page linked above for a full feature set.

iTunes Sleep Timer

If you're like me, you enjoy listening to music when you go to sleep from time to time. The only problem is iTunes doesn't have a sleep timer function, which is weird given that its predominantly a stereo for most college students. Anyways, here's how you can add sleep timer functionality right into iTunes without downloading any extra applications:

For this you'll need an application called Script editor, you will have it in your applications folder inside a folder called Applescript, unless you were trying to save space one day and threw it out, any script editor will do for this very small task though if you did trash it.

1. Create a folder called “Scripts” in the “Users/you/Library/iTunes/” directory.
2. Open the Script Editor located in “Applications/AppleScript/” folder.
3. Type the following code:

Tell application “iTunes”
Delay 3600
Quit
End tell

*note that you can change the delay time to any other time in seconds.
**also note that you can change the "Quit" to "Pause" if you like.
4. In the File> Save As… menu save the script as a application, deselecting the Startup Screen and Stay Open options. Save it to your newly created “Scripts” folder with whatever name you want.
5. Open up iTunes. You’ll see a new menu that will give you access to all your iTunes AppleScripts.
The only issue with this little trick is that once you tell iTunes to start a script it won't let you do anything within the program until the script is done. So if you change your mind, you'll have to force quit iTunes.

Time Machine Backs Up Too Often!

So if you have an old machine like me (1.0GHz PPC PowerBook G4), then you've probably noticed that your computer can run pretty sluggish at times. If you look at your active processes you'll most likely see a process called “mds” taking up around 100MB of ram about once every hour for 10 minutes or so. That's time machine looking at your system to see what's changed. Well it just so happens that this interval can quite easily be changed from 3600 seconds (every hour) to anything you want. I switched mine to 14,400 seconds (4 hours for those of you non-math people). This simple act of making my system backup less often is great on my processor and ram!

Here's how you do it:
Navigate to: /System/Library/LaunchDaemons. There you'll find a file named com.apple.backupd-auto.plist. Copy this file to your desktop and then open it with any text editor (or Apple plist editor if you have it!) and look for this section:

Change the 3600 number to some other time interval in seconds, Save and quit, then replace this file back into the LaunchDaemons folder, you'll need to be an admin. Restart your machine you'll have a new Time Machine's backup interval!

Leopard Dock Themes Made Easy

There's actually a pretty large collection of awesome Leopard dock themes out there that are wicked easy to install and enjoy. Check out LeopardDocks and see what fits you best! Also, download the app at the top of the page called “Change Dock,” it'll be a big help and just makes the process much less stressful. here's a quick look at the first few themes at LeopardDocks.com:

MenuCalendarClock

I have always wanted for Apple to implement a feature to the menubar that almost every Linux distribution has had for years, a calendar when you click on the time, not just the date. Well this awesome little app does one better, it lets you view and add new events to your iCal calendars! Plus, do you use the to do's in Mail or iCal? They are now integrated right into this clock replacement app. Give it a look, it's awesome, doesn't use hardly any system resources, after all it is just a clock most of the time.

As you can see the clock at the top right with the iCal logo is MenuCalendarClock. You can set a key to automatically make the calendar come out and in if you like, or just click on it. If you click on the list icon at the bottom your to do's will come up and you can check them off as you complete them. When you hover over a date scheduled in your calendar (colored blue) a small text tip bubble comes up to tell you what's scheduled, if you double click on a date it will open iCal to that date!

Dock Separators

I did post a while ago on how to keep your dock clean and in categories using little dock separators. Well now that Leopard has a new dock those old separators don't really look good anymore... I've made a new version based on the “Railroad” divider between the apps and stacks. Check it out on my Goodies page!

Replacing a Notebook Hard Drive

The hard drive in my PowerBook died a few days ago and the first thought in my head was, “Oh man... now I'm gonna have to shell out 350 bucks to apple to replace my drive and be without my computer for a week.” Then I thought to myself, I wonder how hard it could really be?

Well, I decided to check with my good friends over at iFixit and they had a great step-by-step guide with pictures on how to get to the hard drive. The short of it... a new 160GB Seagate drive and 24+ screws in little Sobe caps later and I'm inside my laptop, scared I might break something.

Well, that looks daunting huh? Well, it wasn't too bad... just a lot of steadyness and being static-free.

After I replaced the hard drive (bottom left in the picture), I restarted onto the Leopard disc and chose the restore from backup option. This lets you restore a system from a backup, such as time machine.

It actually lets you choose any saved state to restore from. I chose the most recent backup version. Nevertheless it took around 4 hours to transfer the 70 GB from my backup drive. Now everything is EXACTLY the way it was before my drive stopped working!

Google At The Pump!

How awesome would it be to be able to stop at a gas station when you're lost and immediately know where you are and with a few taps, you'd know how to get where you're going? Sounds too good to be true huh? Well Google and pump maker Gilbarco Veeder-Root have announced a partnership that will bring driving directions, local search, and coupons to over 3,500 internet enabled gas pumps by next month!

Now you can just stop at the station and print out directions to yoru next location, how convenient? You'll never be embarrassed asking for directions again!

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