hotsheet.com

HotSheet.com is what Yahoo.com use to be - a resource to the best sites on the internet. It's a great place to go to find sites in just about any category.

Websites are nicely grouped into various categories such as News and Sports, Entertainment, finance, home life and more. It's a good way to expand your Internet Horizon. The nice thing is that the list is small and practical so you won't be inundated with lots of links.

hotsheet.com

Description from their site:

Certificate Magic

Certificate Magic is a quick way to create an Online Certificate. Simply select from several popular design choices and then add your text.

CertificateMagic.com

You can use it to create Certificate of Appreciation or Accomplishments for taking your training.

It's also a fun way to lighten the mood - Give a Certificate to someone who just microwaved some popcorn to smell up the entire office. Not working from home today - congratulate them on showing up in the office!

Certificate Magic is a fun way to create Certificates - and it's free!

Check out these Examples

Internet Speed Test

Google has a cool built in Internet Speed Test. Simple go to Google.com and search for Internet Speed Test.

Google's Internet Speed Test

The complete test is actually run by the Measurement Lab (M-Lab). They are a partnership between New America's Open Technology Institute, Google Open Source Research, Princeton University's PlanetLab and other partners.

Speed Limit 700 Mbps

The speed test max out at 700 Mbps, so if you have a really fast bandwidth, your test results will not be accurate. Google Fiber has speeds of 700 Mbps. 1 GB Ethernet, OC-48 Carrier, and 10 GB Ethernet are all faster than 700 Mbps.

Wireless Bandwidth 802.11ac and 802.11ad are faster than 700 Mbps but if you don't have the external bandwidth to handle it, you won't see the difference. These are great if you have home cloud storage.

IFTTT Weather Information

Have you checked out IFTTT yet? It's a cool service that allows communication between Internet services.

From the IFTTT Website:

IFTTT Sample Results

I setup the following rule on August 25, 2016:

This was configured check the temp in Framingham, Massachusetts at 3 pm every day and put the data on Google Sheets.

From that Data, I was able to get the following information:

Average Temperature in Framingham was 58.76 degrees.

Weather Chart

I was also able to create this Weather graph to see how the temp changed throughout the year in Framingham.

Click on image for a larger version.

Setup your IFTTT Chart

On this New Years Eve Weekend, set up your own chart and have it run every day. You don't have to worry about it running. Then next winter you can open up the data and Google and look at the data.

Text-Magic

Text-Magic is a cool website resource to generate cool looking graphics from your text. The website has a lot of different ways customize your design which helps make your design unique. Best yet - It's a free tool!

There are 56 different fonts available - including a large selection of winter styles.

Description from their Website

text-magic.com

Sample Generated Graphics

More Example Graphic

Check out the examples on their site to see the full capabilities of their tool.

EverytimeZone.com

Dealing with multiple time zones can be complicated. When is it morning in London? When is a good time to call Hawaii?

Fortunately there is a good resource to make it easy - EveryTimeZone.com. There slogan is simple: "Never warp your brain with time zone math again."

everytimezone.com

When you load up the site you are shown a chart of current time around the world. It's a great timezone layout that's pretty easy to understand. You can drag the time to see different times on the chart.

Check out the site and definitely bookmark it if you do frequent international communications.

Pattern8

If your looking for good selection of patterns, check out the Pattern8.com site. There are lots of free seamless patterns to select from. These would make great computer backgrounds.

From John Rawsterne, the founder of Pattern8.com:

pattern8.com

What's nice is that you can select a color that you want and then pick a pattern in that color. So if your background looks best in green, you can find all the green patterns that may work for your design. Since these are seamless, there's no limit to the size you need.

John's Been Busy...

John Rawsterne hasn't been active for a while, no new blog post since July 19, 2013, and the last twitter post was May 23, 2016. Who know's how long these sites will stay around. I understand that it's a side project so you update only when you have time to.

I think it's certainly worth checking out to get some design ideas for seamless background. The Santa Hats patterns are great!

Fake Donald Trump Tweet

Hate him or Love him, but Donald Trump is the President of the United States. His use of Twitter, as a method of communications, has typically generated some attention.

Thanks to faketrumptweet.com, now you can pretend that he's tweeting your message. It's a great way to add humor to any situation.

http://faketrumptweet.com

Sample Entries

Some sample tweets to get you thinking about how you could use this idea on Slack or Facebook.

• Happy Birthday [Some Names]! It's going to be a Tremendous Day
• Ok, Now What?
• Great Party. Had a Lot of Fun.
• [ Company Name ] party? It'll be Yuge!
• What the Covfefe are you talking about?

Quozio

Quozio is a fast way to turn words into graphics. It's really easy to transform a simple quote into an image. Very useful when your spending time in a chat room and you want to highlight a quote that fits the moment.

There are 37 designs to make your message stand out. The whole purpose of Quozio is to quickly convert text to graphics as quickly as possible. Once it looks good, simply drag the image to the desktop and then apply it to Slack, Email, Facebook or Twitter.

From their website

Quozio.com

The nice thing about Quozio is they offer a Bookmarklet to make it super easy to create quotes. Bookmarklets are an easy way to create interactive bookmarks (See my post from earlier this year for how bookmarklet works. )

Quite simply Quozio is the fastest way to transform a simple quote to an eye-catching graphic.

Sample Content

Ultimatest Grocery List

There are lots of great list apps to help people shop smart - particularly when it comes to the weekly grocery shopping. We use AnyList (iOS App), which is a great tool to share any type of list.

The only problem with this list Apps is understanding basic fundamentals; Do you need Trash Bags, Cleaning Supplies. Things that your not thinking about when your planning the weekly grocery shopping.

Usually you don't think about some items until you walk down the aisle and see it in the grocery store. This makes grocery shopping not so effective. If there was only a way to help think of these items.

Ultimatest Grocery List

Ultimatest List to the Rescue

That's why having the Ultimatest List is awesome. You can use the list to get a better understanding of what you may need to get at the store. Simply print it out, and use it as a reference guide as your

From their Website:

The shopping list is a great compliment to any electronic list program your using now. If your not using anything, then use the list as it's been constantly updated by thousands of people that use it every day.

Printable Calendars on TimeAndDate.com

It's that time of year, time to start thinking about making next year's Calendar. Thankfully the folks at TimeandDate.com make the process really easy. They have a great widget that helps you create all sorts of different calendar types. Simply design your calendar then download the results.

This is useful for event planning and software release scheduling.

Create Printable PDF Calendars

You can open up the PDF in Affinity Designer and other programs and add enhance the calendar even more.

There's a lot of other cool Date/Time utilities over at TimeandDate.com:

• Date Duration Calculator: Days between two dates
• Distance Calculator - How far is it?
• Solar & Lunar Eclipses Worldwide
• Sunrise and sunset times in Boston
• World Temperatures -- Hottest/Coldest City in the World right now.

The "Make Your Own" calendar is the most popular thing that I use the site for.

COLOURlovers

Finding good matching colors is tricky, especially if you're looking for colors for the holidays such as Thanksgiving and Christmas. COLOURlovers is a great site to find the perfect color for any occasion.

Description from their site:

COLOURlovers

There's color help for just about anything:

• Haunted Mansion
• Boston
• Apple Logo
• Fall Carnival

Drag and drop the image into Affinity Photo and you can create your own Swatch set from the colors. Just use the Color Picker Tool and build your custom Swatch Set. Check out this video by Affinity on how to do it.

Cloud Convert

CloudConvert is a powerful way to convert files from one type to another. It's very convenient and you don't have to install any software on your computer.

This site has been handy when I wanted to:

• Convert a Movie to GIF
• Convert an Apple Live picture to GIF
• Convert a PDF document to ebook

Website Description

CloudConvert supports the conversion between more than 200 different audio, video, document, ebook, archive, image, spreadsheet and presentation formats.

There is no need to install any software on your computer! Upload your files to CloudConvert and we will do the job for you. Don't worry, your files are safe and only you can access them. They will be deleted again as soon as your conversion is finished.

Most conversion types support advanced options, for example setting the codecs of audio/video files. Also, we support batch converting and folder monitoring!

Free and Subscription Plans

The free plan allows you to convert 25 minutes per day. Think of a conversion minute as the amount of time that you spend on the site. Larger files will take longer to convert, so plan your time according.

If you plan on using CloudConvert a lot, there are a couple of Package plans available. You can purchase a block of time, or commit to a certain amount of time every month.

The block of time is useful when your converting a whole bunch of files and don't want to make a long term commitment.

Graphic Badges

Mozilla created a website called openbadges.me where people can design and Issue Open Badges. You can use the free online generator to create a badge for your website or blog. Badges also make great picture overlays.

It does take a bit of time to learn all the functionality of the online editor. Once you get it, making badges will be easy to do any time you need one.

openbadges.me

Website Description