visualistchallenge.com/
Every once in a while it helps to play games to keep from being stressed out. A simple game of match play is a good way to stay focus and keep the mind sharp.
The visualchallenge.com has a simple match game - 16 cards. To test your skills. The website can track your progress and you can see if you can beat your previous game. It's a lot of fun and a good way to break down some downtime.
If your really good you can try the "expert mode" with 60 cards. I would recommend starting slow.
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Random Car Generator
Recently I have been getting a surge of "Dealer Processing" phone calls, trying to sell me, extended car warranties. No Matter What I do or say they keep calling back. Now, thanks to the Random Car Generator, I can play around with them more with a different car every time they call.Website Description
You have stumbled upon the random car generator. This free online tool allows you to generate as many (or as few) random cars as you desire. Doing so is as easy as pie. Simply choose the number of cars you'd like to be randomly generated, click on the button and they will automatically appear for you. While there are many reasons you may want to use this tool, here are some of the more common ways people use it.
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MLB Simulator
This year has been a tough year for Baseball fans, it looks like it will be another month before the games resume to some level of normalcy.
WhatifSports.com has a cool Baseball Simulator that allows you to get into the game. You can put teams against each other to see who would win the games.
Ever wondered what would happen if the 2004 Red Sox played against the 2019 Washington Nationals? What would the pitching be like? How about if you switched between home-field advantage? You can now find out which one is the better team.
Website Description
SimMatchup Baseball is where those age old debates get answered: The 1927 New York Yankees or the 1975 Big Red Machine -- who wins? Alex Rodriguez versus Sandy Koufax -- does he go yard or whiff in our sim game?
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SVG Icons
Finding good website icons can be hard. You want good icons for social media and other objects. You also don't want to spend a ton of money on something that you're just going to use for one time.
VisualPharm, part of the icon8 family, is here to help. They have a huge collection of icons available for free. These icons are in SVG format, which basically means that they will scale very nicely no matter how small or large that you make them.
The only requirement they have is to put a link someplace on the page back to icon8.
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Clipping Magic
A couple of years ago, I blogged about the remove.bg tool, an online service which made it really easy to remove people from backgrounds.
It's a good tool, but it only dealt with people's faces. What if you wanted to remove backgrounds from other objects? Plus you couldn't do any editing to fix up the removal tool.
Clipping Magic does a great job with removing the background and offers a lot of more. If you using the remove.bg tool, you should upgrade to Clipping Magic.
http://www.cryan.com/daily/2020/ClippingMagic.jpg
Clipping Magic Editor
The Clipping Magic Editor gives the user the power to determine what additional areas that I want to be removed from the picture.
Tools Available:
- Keep Tool - Used the bush to fix areas that were removed.
- Remove Tool - Remove additional areas.
- Hair Tool - Clipping Magic Exclusive! Keep those hair bits in the picture.
- Eraser - Removed any Keep/Remove touch ups that you did. This doesn't impact the removal that was done via AI.
- Scalpel Tool - Manually adjust the clip on any image in spots where the edges are too faint or noisy to use the Keep or Remove Tool.
Note: You can toggle between the Keep and Remove tool with the spacebar. Great way to do fine editing without having to keep going to the top menu.
Subscription Service
Clipping Magic isn't free. There are three plans to choose from and pricing starts at $3.99 a month. So for about the cost of a fancy coffee at Starbucks, you can get 15 credits a month. That is you can remove the background to 15 images.
If you don't use all the monthly credits they do carry over to the next month.
Good for Various Users
Clipping Magic is great for various reasons:
- eBay and Etsy Sellers - Make your product stand out more without a background!
- Bloggers - Create awesome graphic for your blog!
- Graphic Designers - Make your life easier without having to use complex path editing in PhotoShop or Affinity Photo. The amount of time you save will be worth the subscription fee.
- Video Editors - Add better overlay images to your videos.
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Milanote
There are lots of different ways to organize ideas. To that end, there are a lot of different applications that help you sort out your ideas.
Milanote is great tool to help you organize your thoughts into various visual boards. There are 19 different board categories to help you organize your ideas. There's a board for Writing, Students, Startups, Project Management, Marketing, Graphic Design and so much more.
Website Description
Milanote is an easy-to-use tool to organize your ideas and projects into visual boards. It the tool for organizing creative projects.
Five Reasons Why Milanote is Worth Checking Out
You can upload Animated Gifs, Video and Audio files to bring your board to a whole new level.
Use Milanote for Sprint Retrospective. Each team member can add Emotions on ideas captured in the sprint. Capture ideas and come away with an action plan for the next sprint.
Create MoodBoards! This is where you create the visual and style direction of a project. Great way to start a retrospective or project. Get everyone to involve with adding pictures on how they feel about the current state of the project.
Plan your week with a team board. Know when things are going to happen and who's working on what. It's certainly an interesting way to manage your team.
There is a Free plan with 100 notes, images, or links. You can upgrade to the Professional plan for unlimited storage for only $9.99 a month.
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visme.co
There a lot of websites that are provide online desktop publishing made easy. Visme.co is another company to check out.
They offer Presentations, Infographics, Documents, Printable, Web Graphics, Social Graphics, and more. Perfect for anyone with a Blog that is looking to add content and promote it.
Many of the designs are free, but if you want more power you can sign up for the Individual standard plan for $14/month billed annually.
Website Description
Visme is an all-in-one content creation tool empowering individuals and organizations to quickly create and share beautiful content they can be proud of in the form of engaging presentations, infographics, documents, videos, and graphics â€" with little to no design skills.
Made for non-designers but still powerful enough for graphic designers, Visme combines simplicity, flexibility, and interactive features within a single platform, giving users everything they need within an easy-to-use online interface.
One of the things I like about Visme.co is that you can use animation in your graphics, and they have a large collection.
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Personal Daily Planner
With a lot of people working from home, it can be difficult to plan out your day. One way to help is a daily planner and the On Planners is a great resource to start.
Pick out a Daily Planner that works for you and every morning fill out the schedule what people have going on. This way everyone knows when to be quiet during meetings. In addition, you'll know when Internet bandwidth might be busy - so people can stop Netflix watching.
There's a lot of good planners on OnPlanners and there's certainly a good planner for your needs.
Website Description
For those who love handwriting and prefer analog tools over digital devices, we suggest that you try to start planning your life, work and time using simple daily planners and daily agendas. However, often it’s not that easy to find the planner that totally meets your needs and helps you achieve your goals easily. It’s not necessary to look for a planner even though you want to plan your day with pen and paper.
Because there is a better solution: printable planner templates. Here you can find more than 10 printable daily planners. All available in PDF. Sorry, no template excel here. Because we believe in the power of handwriting.
Planner templates work well for tracking your everyday meetings, events and reminders about the important dates, upcoming holidays and birthdays.
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Inspirobot.me
In these crazy time we need a little inspiration. InspiroBot is a good way to get some inspiration.
Some of the inspiration is a bit weird, for example, I got one that simply says, "Cut Your Hair." But a few clicks on the 'Generate' button shows some interesting thoughts. You get a quote on a graphic that can easily be shared on your favorite social network.
Worst case, you can use this as a Facebook post to lighten up the mood.
About the InspiroBot
I am an artificial intelligence dedicated to generating unlimited amounts of unique inspirational quotes for endless enrichment of pointless human existence.
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US Debt Clock
The United States debt problem is a well known problem. The Families First Coronavirus Response Act is sure to add to the National Dept.
The USDebtClock.org is a great site to see how much the US debt is growing. The page may look overwhelming because there's a lot going on, but it's a good way to get an understanding of the impact the debt has on every American.
Website Description
The Purpose of US Debt Clock.org is to inform the public of the financial condition of the United States of America. We are dedicated to bringing to the public the most accurate up-to-date debt information possible. The numbers are laid out in such a way to give a complete real-time snapshot of the country's balance sheet. Although the numbers involved are enormous, it is still easy to see the relative balance between wealth generated and wealth consumed.
All the debt clocks on the site are updated continuously to the most precise calculations, using complex formulas and exacting standards, and the values displayed arc verified from the best sources available.
https://www.usdebtclock.org/index.html
The page has lots of useful data:
- A "time machine" to see what the debt looked like this year in history.
- Check the debt for individual states.
- The latest Official Unemployed and Actual Unemployed.
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Coronavirus COVID-19 Dashboard
The "official" dashboard that the Center for Disease Control and the World Health Organization uses is the one at the Johns Hopkins University (JHU). It's a simple one-page view of how fast the virus is spreading throughout the world.
You can view the World View or select a particular country to monitor the numbers. As soon as local officials report update the page automatically gets updated.
Website Description
In response to this ongoing public health emergency, we developed an interactive web-based dashboard (static snapshot shown above) hosted by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University, to visualize and track reported cases in real-time. The dashboard first shared publicly on January 22, illustrates the location and number of confirmed COVID-19 cases, deaths, and recoveries for all affected countries. It was developed to provide researchers, public health authorities and the general public with a user-friendly tool to track the outbreak as it unfolds. Further, all the data collected and displayed is made freely available, initially as google sheets, now in a GitHub repository, along with the feature layers of the dashboard, which are now included in the ESRI Living Atlas.
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Corona Virus in Numbers
Corona Virus is big news. There are all sorts of places that are giving the latest numbers. One good place that I found was WorldoMeter.
The website offers a page-at-a-glance view of the important Corona Virus numbers. You can see the detail Confirmed Cases and Deaths by Country, Territory, or Conveyance.
It's a useful site to see where the tough spots and see if the social distancing is helping to flat the curve in certain areas.
Website Description
Worldometer is run by an international team of developers, researchers, and volunteers with the goal of making world statistics available in a thought-provoking and time relevant format to a wide audience around the world. Worldometer is owned by Dadax, an independent company. We have no political, governmental, or corporate affiliation.
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World Time Buddy
Recently the United States has the start of Daylight Savings Time. This caused some issues with Outlook as some of my weekly meetings that were set up in other parts of the world were now off. I need a way to let people know the current time in Boston.
I used worldtimebuddy.com to let people know what the current time in Boston was - relative to GMT. It's so much easier for other countries to figure out the time when its compared to the GMT.
worldtimebuddy.com is easy to use and make figuring out the whole GMT time so much easier. I just used the slider to figure out the meeting time and how it relates to GMT.
Website Description
World Time Buddy (WTB) is a convenient world clock, a time zone converter, and an online meeting scheduler. It's one of the best online productivity tools for those often finding themselves traveling, in flights, in online meetings or just calling friends and family abroad.
Carefully thought out design lets it effortlessly compares multiple time zones at a glance, plans conference calls, webinars, international phone calls, and web meetings. It also aids with business travel & tracking of market hours.
WTB was born out of frustration with existing world clock apps, online meetings, and time conversion tools. Most of them have given up on providing quality business tools and on delighting their users.
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defkey.com
Keyboard shortcuts are a good way to be more productive in any application. It can get tricky to remember all the different shortcuts that are available in every application.
defkey.com makes finding keyboard shortcuts simple. It'a a great site to search for popular applications and to learn about all the popular shortcuts. The nice thing too is that you can also discover what applications share similar keyboard shortcuts, such as Shift-Enter.
Website Description
Find all keyboard shortcuts and tips and more about technology on DefKey.com
The article section has some great content and certainly worth reading up on personal productivity and the latest internet tips and tricks.
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Snow Day Calculator
The weather in New England has been too bad for schools. Boston Public Schools has had only one school day calculation during this 2019-2020 season.
The season isn't over yet.
Use this calculator to predict if your school is going to be closed tomorrow because of snow. We have found it to be pretty accurate before any major announcement is made.
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