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Boring Friday? Make Paper Airplanes.
Tyler Cipriani Posted

Is it just me, or are Fridays the longest, most boring, punishing, and brutal work day ever? Just me? Ok….well…ANYWAY, why spend your day working when you could be making (or listening to) paper airplanes? The one pictured above is the lecture dart, to me, creative names for paper airplanes are almost as important as how well a plane flies; the world is about marketing, after all. Check out the Online Paper Airplane Museum I found on MAKE.

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My Favorite Bookmarklets
Tyler Cipriani Posted

Bookmarklets — I’ve heard the word. I never really cared about them; just one more thing online that I’m not interested in. This was my opinion before I actually knew what bookmarklets were. Now I know, bookmarklets are tiny bits of javascript that you bookmark to add functionality to your browser. It sounds pointless, but when you find some useful bookmarklets, you’ll see a point. Added bonus? Finally use your Firefox bookmark toolbar for good instead of evil. Before I get started on my list you might want to check out a useful screencast on using bookmarklets.

  • TinyURL - click this bookmark to create a tiny url for the page that you are currently viewing.
  • BugMeNot - click this to open a window with a username and password for the site that you’re currently viewing.
  • Wikipedia lookup - highlight some text, click this bookmarklet and it automagically searches for the highlighted text in wikipedia.
  • Google Translate - Translates the page you’re view to english (google translate can also be used as a proxy to view restricted pages)
  • IMDb - highlight the plain-text title of the movie you want to lookup on IMDb and click the bookmarklet
  • Oxford English Dictionary - highlight work and click for definition
  • Ebay - highlight item name and click bookmarklet
That about does it for my list of favorites. Check out this much longer list from Smashing Magazine.

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Write uʍop ǝpısdn
Tyler Cipriani Posted

» Write uʍop ǝpısdn

Cool little webpage which can ǝsɹǝʌǝɹ whatever text you type into it, not only horizontally but also vertically. It got 6357 Diggs; therefore, it is beloved and you will love it.

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Wayback Machine Fun
Tyler Cipriani Posted

Most people on the internet have some favorite website that isn’t around anymore. Some people on the internet - me for instance - know where to find that website. If your website was popular enough, chances are it got archived and can now be found with the Wayback Machine (I believe it was invented by a Mr.Peabody, however, this fact is, as yet, unsubstantiated).
The website I miss most in this world is currently working via the Wayback Machine. I am refering to every guitarist’s favorite website: OLGA.
online guitar archive olga
Not only is ole OLGA up, you can still get some tabs from it. You can download any tab you want and, from there, simply open it with Notepad++, not just Windows default notepad, things’ll look all weird. Anyway, this discovery made me pee a little when I found it, so I thought I’d share it.
Also, you can use the Wayback Machine to laugh at old incarnations of your favorite websites. Such as Google from December 2nd, 1998 where under the link titled Google! Logos I found a bitchin’ logo.
.
Anyway, playing is for pleasure so have some fun and play around with the Wayback Machine. See if you can find some other old school website that still works, if you do, share it with *balloontoablimp via email or in my shout box (I’ve already tried using audiogalaxy [doesn’t work], original MP3.com [doesn’t work] and singingfish.com [also, not working] - by ‘not working’ I mean that their services no longer work, not the website itself).
EL FIN.

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Veoh for the Blogger Out-of-the-Know
Tyler Cipriani Posted

So, for an in-the-know, pop-culture savy, finger-on-the-pulse-of-the-zeitgeist, hyphenated-word-(over-)using, tech blogger I’m pretty out-of-the-know. I just got turned on to a website called veoh by alexa traffic’s top 100 sites in the US (it was #71 actually). I just started using the site tonight and so far I’m diggin’ it. I really don’t think it’s necessary, however, to download the veoh player when you can watch any video from the site online full-screen. TV on-demand online, I just love it so darn much.

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Navigate Your Computer the Easy Way
Tyler Cipriani Posted

Keyboard shortcuts are the ish nizzle, they speed up your computing, they simplify navigation, they’re old school. If you can’t navigate your filesystem/computer without touching your mouse, then you aren’t as cool as me, and that’s the straight dope. I’m writing this because I saw an article today on the lifehacker website about mastering the windows key. All the article really was was this video. Actually, the video was kind of inaccurate. Sure, it’s true that you use Windows Key+Pause/Break key to bring up System Properties, but what if you don’t have a combo pause/break key? Well, if you’re using XP you use WINDOWS_KEY+Pause and if you’re using windows vista you use WINDOWS_KEY+break.
Another thing about keyboard shortcuts is that you can make a keyboard shortcut for any program (or shortcut to a program) on your desktop by: (1) Right-clicking the icon (2) Clicking properties (3) clicking inside the shortcut input field and (4) pressing the key that you want to use in conjunction with Ctrl and Alt for your shortcut (i.e. if I were to click in the shortcut input box and press, “f” the shortcut to bring up the program would be “Ctrl+Alt+f”).
To learn more interesting shortcuts please check out the following:

  1. Windows XP Keyboard Shortcuts
  2. Windows Vista Keyboard Shortcuts
  3. Ubuntu Linux Keyboard Shortcuts [via the Only Ubuntu Linux Blog]
  4. Firefox, Opera, and IE Keyboard Shortcuts

So that about wraps this little post up. If you have any favorite shortcuts, dear reader, that you’d like to share, post them in my shoutbox, or email them to me.

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The Meraki Solar Powered WiFi Kit
Tyler Cipriani Posted

So, if you know me (which you don't; DON'T ACT LIKE YOU KNOW ME!) you know that I loves me some WiFi. I'm constantly setting up an encryption key on my router without looking to see if I can crack it, I enjoy building little antennas or cantennas to see how far down the street I can get before I lose my signal, basically I'm a geek with a penchant for WiFi. As such, I really want this, what this is is a solar-powered WiFi kit. It's built for the outdoors and is supposed to increase wireless connectivity range about 700 feet (which means I could probably hop on Watermark Books' connection down the street). Plus it's solar powered so no need for any extra wiring and it's saving the enviroment (score one for the dolphins, I guess). So if you want to wire me some cash or just send one of these bad boys straight to me, then feel free. As a side note I'm also a huge fan of the wireless products over at Pasadena Networks.

Link (via Thoughts From the Sidelines)

I recovered this article from my old blog via the Internet Archive. If you found this article useful or entertaining (or even if you didn’t) consider donating to the Internet Archive