Interesting Uses of Camera Mobile Phones To Stay Productive

Interesting Uses of Camera Mobile Phones To Stay Productive

Interesting Uses of Camera Mobile Phones To Stay Productive
http://www.labnol.org/gadgets/phones/creative-ways-of-using-digital-camera-mobile-phones/2030/


http://www.labnol.org/gadgets/phones/creative-ways-of-using-digital-camera-mobile-phones/2030/

Some creative and productive uses of camera mobile phones (and digital cameras):

Computer Screen Capture
- You can use the Mobile Phone cameras for capturing screenshots of
error messages that popup while you are reinstalling a copy of Windows
or modifying some BIOS settings. In situations like the dreaded Blue
Screen, Print-Screen key is useless but any phone-cam will get the job
done.

Remember Dates - Some time back, I had gone to a
nursery school for submitting the admission form of my son. I don’t
remember the exact date now but luckily, I had snapped a picture of the
school and so that date is automatically stored with the image.

Cable Connections
- Before removing the cables from your home theatre system, gaming
console or the computer, it is a good idea to capture the connections
with your phone camera. Then you won’t have problems plugging the
cables again in the right ports as the pictures will show you “what
goes where”.

Use Mobile Phone as a Web Camera - There are some
free utilities that will convert your mobile phone camera into a web
cam for your computer. You can use the web camera via a USB cable or
wirelessly through Bluetooth.

Car Parking
- Most shopping malls here have huge underground parking but there
aren’t any signboards so it gets tough to locate the car. So when you
park the car, just look towards the escalator (or the exit door) and
take a picture or record some video. This will save lot of effort (and
time) when you return with all those heavy shopping bags.

Scan Printed Documents - Mobile phone camera can
work as scanners for capturing clippings of text from newspapers,
library books and printed magazines. Just photograph the page and use a
service like Qipit or ScanR that extract the text out of pictures taken
with a mobile phone. (See “Use Mobile Phone as a Scanner“)

Replace Paper and Pen - Your wife has prepared a
long list of items that you are supposed to pick from the grocery
story. Why tear down that paper from the diary or put extra pressure on
your memory - just click. You can also use the camera phone for
capturing information written on whiteboards, subway maps and notice
boards.

Google Maps and Directions - You are traveling and
need the driving directions from Google Maps onto your mobile phone. If
your phone has no Internet or you are not too sure how to transfer data
from computer to the phone, just open Google Maps, press F11 for full
screen and click with your phone.

Rent A Car - If you are taking a car on rent,
capture all the areas with dents and scratches so that you don’t run
into a dispute when returning the car to the agent. Thanks CraftyGirl.

Security Weapon
- Before you board a taxi in some unknown place, take a picture of the
license plate and driver details that are generally written near the
passenger seat. Email the picture to your spouse or friend as a
security measure.

Shopping Alone - If you are in a store shopping
without your spouse, get his/her opinion on the stuff you are about to
purchase by emailing pictures though your phone. A word of caution here
- some shop owners may consider your action as “digital shoplifting”
and this may lead to an embarrassing situation.

As a Mirror - When you are about to reach the
party, take a self-picture with your mobile phone to make sure that
that makeup and hair style is in perfect condition.

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STRESS-BUSTING TIPS : Body Sense Natural Diet

STRESS-BUSTING TIPS : Body Sense Natural Diet

Breathing is a powerful de-stressing tool. Several times per day,
breathe in through your nose and fill your lungs with air until your abdomen
rises. Then slowly exhale from your mouth until your lungs are empty.
Repeat this five times.


• Get eight hours of sleep every night and try to sleep until 7:30 in the
morning.

• Learning to say no when you have too much to humanly accomplish in
one day is important to healthy adrenals.

• Have the family share the household workload. Doing chores together
can be fun.

• Eat plenty of vegetables every day.

• Smile. This chapter will teach you how to purge negative emotions.

• Get help in dealing with grief. The loss of a loved one, a divorce, or the
loss of a job all produce grief. Immune suppression is the result when
grief is not dealt with.

• Carpe diem—seize the day—and live it to the fullest. Don’t worry so
much about tomorrow.

• Believe in yourself. Negative self-talk and continually doubting your abil-
ities will hamper your body’s ability to heal.

• Notice the beauty around you. Smell the flowers, watch the sunset, and
listen to the wind.

• Love your family and friends and be forgiving.

• Be good to yourself. Most of us are our own worst enemies. We focus on
our weaknesses and minimize our strengths. Wake up each day and tell
yourself you are a good and useful person.

• Do the things you have always wanted to do. Learn to water ski, sing in
a choir, write a book, tell stories to your grandchildren, walk, garden—
whatever makes you happy.

• Seek your spiritual side. This effort does not have to be religious, although
those with strong religious beliefs generally live at peace and feel pro-
tected. Most of us believe in something greater than ourselves, a spiritual
power that offers solace and helps us find the quiet place within.

(Source: with permission from Lorna Vanderhaeghe, Healthy Immunity:
Scientifically Proven Natural : LORNA R. VANDERHAEGHE, B.SC )

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The Best Free Web Apps for 2008

The Best Free Web Apps for 2008

The Best Free Web Apps for 2008

let’s looks at some useful web applications that really made an impact. All these apps are available online for free and require no installation.




let’s looks at some useful web applications that really made an impact. All these apps are available online for free and require no installation.

1. Zamzar – Your cell phone records video in 3gp format but Windows Media Player cannot play these files. Your client has sent a document in Office 2007 format but you don’t have the software to read it. What you therefore need is Zamzar, an online service that can convert images, videos, audio and documents from one format to another without downloading any software.

2. Spypig – This is an email tracking service that will send you a notification as soon as someone opens your email. SpyPig works with web based email (like Gmail, Yahoo!) as well as desktop email clients like Outlook and Thunderbird.

3. Photoshop.com – This is like a light version of Adobe Photoshop that’s both free and requires no installation. You also get 2GB of storage space for saving those editing photographs online plus there’s a mobile version of Photoshop.com available for Windows Mobile.

4. Sumo Paint - While image editing apps like Photoshop Express or Picnik offer almost everything to edit your photographs online, a limitation with these tools is that you cannot use them to create new images from scratch. That’s where Sumo Paint enters the frame.

5. Skydrive – This is an online storage service from Microsoft where you can store files, photos and documents forever for free. You get 25 GB of storage space and the size limit per file is 50 MB.

6. Wakoopa – You have seen social networks for senior citizens, for women, for pets, for toddlers and so on but Wakoopa is different - it’s a social network for software. The service tracks software and web apps that you frequently use and then recommends other software programs that are popular in your social circle.

7. Screen Toaster - You can record all your on-screen activity with Screen Toaster without downloading any software. When you hit the Stop button, the recorded video clip with auto-upload to the web and the quality is pretty good. See some more online screencasting apps.

8. Posterous – Posterous may look like another Tumblr style micro-blogging platform but it’s actually the best cross-publishing platform on the web. You can use the service to write blog posts, publish photos, uploaded video or even send tweets - all through a simple email message.

9. Truveo – Not exactly a web app but this search engine from AOL lets you find and play videos from all over the web including YouTube, MySpace, Metacafe, Blip.tv and other video sharing sites. Truveo also indexes video clips from news and entertainment websites.

10. Joongel - If you can’t find the information you’re looking for on Google, use Joongel as it will help you search other web properties from one convenient interface. Joongel works with blogs, images, social websites and more.

11. Iterasi – Web pages change frequently and some of your favorite websites may not even exist after few months. Iterasi will help you save an exact copy of web pages in a click so even if the original website goes down, you’ll still have all the stuff to read.

12. RescueTime - This will help you understand how you spend your time on the computer and the Internet. There’s no need for you to enter any data manually as all time tracking is done behind-the-scenes automatically.

13. Ping.fm - This service lets you interact with blogging sites and social networks through SMS, IM clients, desktop apps or the good old-email. Just send a message to ping.fm and your current status will be updated simultaneously across all the different social networks.

14. Meebo – If you have friends using multiple IM clients, you’ll find Meebo pretty useful. This is a web based IM client that lets you connect with friends on Google Talk, Facebook, Yahoo! Messenger and other popular IM clients from a central location without downloading anything.

15. Animoto – Slideshows are boring so Animoto turns your pictures into very interesting videos (or should I say movie trailers). The final video is produced in widescreen format and the quality is extremely impressive.

16. InstaCalc - This is an interesting mix of an calculator and a spreadsheet application much better than your default Windows calculator. Instacalc also supports unit conversion and you can embed the calculations in web pages while maintaining the interactivity.

17. Live Mesh – Mesh is a must-have service for people who work across multiple computers. Just add some folders to Mesh from one computer and access that content from anywhere else. Other than cloud storage, Mesh also offers remote desktop capabilities with copy-paste support. Also see comparison of Mesh with Live Sync.

And here is the rest of it.

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7 Incredibly Useful Tools for Evaluating a Web Design

n effective web design is one in which your users are able to find information quickly and in a logical fashion.

Do they visit the content you want them to visit? Are they looking in the right places of your web page? Are you able to keep your user’s attention, or do they just leave quickly?

It’s not just about the content either. If your design loads slowly - or if moving from one section to another takes a long time - it affects the user’s experience.


7 Incredibly Useful Tools for Evaluating a Web Design

An effective web design is one in which your users are able to find information quickly and in a logical fashion.

Do they visit the content you want them to visit? Are they looking in the right places of your web page? Are you able to keep your user’s attention, or do they just leave quickly?

It’s not just about the content either. If your design loads slowly - or if moving from one section to another takes a long time - it affects the user’s experience.

These things can be the make-or-break factors between a user clicking on a link to find more information, or the back button to find it elsewhere.


Some things to consider:
Are important information being seen by the user?
Are the navigation and action items intuitive?
Is the user being directed to sections in a logical manner?
Does the web page load quickly enough to not turn away the user?
If you’re interested in analyzing and optimizing your page layout - here’s some extremely useful tools that you can use to help.


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Blueprint CSS framework :Incorporating

Blueprint CSS framework :Incorporating

What does Blueprint do?


Incorporating Blueprint CSS into your workflow

What does Blueprint do?
Blueprint's core feature set is as follows:

1. It performs a mass reset of browser default styles.
2. It sets up sensible defaults for typography, including font families, header sizes, paragraph styles, list styles, a baseline grid, and more. It does all of this with relative sizes, so that it scales well in any browser.
3. It gives you a methodology to use for customizable layout grids. Any number of columns and widths you can dream up is easily achievable.
4. It provides a sensible default print stylesheet.
5. It does all of these things in ways that work elegantly in most browsers your visitors are likely to be using, including Internet Explorer 6 and 7.

It's important to understand that all elements are override-able. Blueprint doesn't set out to be a stand-alone stylesheet for your site. Rather, it's a set of base styles you, the designer, can build on top of, override, or nix completely (by adding your own stylesheet(s) in addition to the ones Blueprint provides).

Think of it like this: building a design with CSS is like having a bucket full of melted plastic to work with. Building with Blueprint as your base is like having a set of Legos—but you still also have that melted plastic if you need it.

The grid
Blueprint's crown jewel is its grid-building tools. By default, Blueprint's grids.css file sets up a 950px wide grid of 24 columns, each 30 pixels wide with 10 pixel gutters. This grid is likely to be flexible enough for most of your needs.

However, the grid is fully customizable. If you need more or less columns or a wider or narrower total width, you'll want to use the Blueprint Grid CSS Generator tool. It not only provides a replacement grids.css file, but it also creates a grid.png image file for use as a background image during development—very handy for making sure everything lines up properly. The grid generator is a key piece to the framework, even if it's technically a third-party tool. Without it, Blueprint is limiting and controlling, forcing designers to use a single layout grid. With it, designers have endless freedom.

Incorporating BlueprintCSS into your workflow
If you intend to use Blueprint to build a design, it's best to decide this before you start working in Photoshop (or your design tool of choice). You can retrofit a design with Blueprint HTML and CSS, but it's much simpler to plan it from the beginning.

The designer will want to hit the afore-mentioned grid generator tool to come up with the exact number of columns, gutter size, and total width they're going to use. They should save the exported grid.css. Then, they can set up a Photoshop document with guides replicating this column structure.

At Blue Flavor, the designer may or may not be the same person that ends up building the HTML and CSS templates. When the designer hands off their finished comps to theHTML/CSS template author, he/she should make sure to also include the associated grid.css and let the template author know about the guides in the comp.

Tips, tricks, and best practices
When using Blueprint, it's really important to read all of the included CSS and fully understand what everything does and how it works before you dive in too deeply. If you don't, you're likely to miss really important elements, such as the .border, .colborder, .box, and .hide classes.

Also, don't be fooled by the grid documentation's suggestion to use div elements for all column units. You can apply the .column class to any element. For example, if you're using the default grid and you want a bar across the top of the page that includes your logo on the left and your navigation on the right, you can add class="column span-12" to an h1 and a ul, rather than making unnecessary divs.

Use multiple .container divs to create "rows" in your layout. Your header may be one container, your content may be another, and your footer may be yet another. Or, you may have many more. Don't think can only have one container.

Remember that you don't need to use all of the pieces of Blueprint CSS. For example, if you're not doing a grid-based layout, you may not need grid.css. But, reset.css and typography.css may still be useful to you.

And finally: don't ever edit Blueprint's files! A much better practice is to include your own stylesheet and override Blueprint. Editing Blueprint's CSS files will make upgrading to the latest version of the framework much more difficult. Keep your work separate from the framework.

http://blueflavor.com/blog/2007/oct/24/blueprint-css-101/


http://www.blueprintcss.org/tests/parts/sample.html
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Prototyping Website Structure A Must Watch VIDEO !

Starting a Prototype

Every web development project starts with different initial input. Sometimes an existing website is to be redesigned. Sometimes there's a detailed Request For Proposal, and sometimes there's a sitemap. Sitemaps are my enemy. They're such illusionists. They're so limited in how they define categories and relationships between pages. They fall far short of communicating the details of the pages themselves. Building a website based on a sitemap is insanity.





Grayscreen Prototyping video by Newfangled Web Factory.



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