US Debt Clock
Find out how much the US Debt is growing
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.
Coronavirus COVID-19 Dashboard
Watch the numbers change on this popular interactive 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.
https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html
Corona Virus in Numbers
Quick way to get the latest stats on the Corona Virus
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.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
World Time Buddy
Quickly find the GMT time for meeting invites.
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.
https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/
defkey.com
Keyboard Shortcuts reference guide.
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.
PermalinkSnow Day Calculator
Use this fairly accurate calculator to see if there's going to be a snow day tomorrow.
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.
https://www.snowdaycalculator.com/calculator.php
Chmod Calculator tool
Chmod Calculator tool is useful to getting the right permission settings
Setting UNIX permissions on file and folders are important. If it's not part of your everyday job you're likely to forget the difference between chmod 777 and chmod 755.
Thankfully the Chmod Calculator tool is available. The site provides an easy way to properly write the syntax of the permission that you want to set.
Website Description
Chmod calculator allows you to quickly generate permissions in numerical and symbolic formats. All extra options are included (recursive, sticky, etc). You???ll be ready to copy paste your chmod command into your terminal in seconds.
Aspect Ratio Calculator
Make sure that your images are the right size.
Aspect Ratio is critical to making sure that your image looks good no matter how it displays. The 16:9 format is the most common format for images on the web.
One way to know that your using the right ratio size is the Aspect Calculator. It's a simple tool that can help make sure that your blog or social media post will look good.
Website Description
This little tool will help you calculate aspect ratios and dimensions for your videos or images. This can also be used to check if you are working at the correct resolution.
Aspect Ratio of 16:9 ("Sixteen-by-Nine" and "Sixteen-to-Nine") which is also known as High Definition (HD) became a leading aspect ratio since the start of the 21st century. It is the international standard format of HDTV, non-HD digital television and analog widescreen television PALplus. Today many digital video cameras have the capability to record in High Definition format, and it is the only widescreen aspect ratio natively supported by the DVD standard.
https://aspectratiocalculator.com/16-9.html
SVG Calendar Templates
Great Calendar to get you started to plan events and holidays
This time of the year people are updating calendars for events and holidays. It's hard to find a decent calendar to use as a template.
Mensch Mesch put together a website that generates a calendar in three formats - Block, Horizontal and Vertical. These are available in Scalable Vector Graphics format, which means these can be created and edited with any text editor, they are scalable and can be printed with high quality at any resolution.
Website Description
With my free SVG Calendar Tool you can create different types of SVG Calendar Templates (Scalable Vector Graphic) for all Affinity products.
https://svg-tools.mensch-mesch.com/calendar/
I like the block format as it's a good starting point for recurring event format.
PermalinkWhatTheFont
Quick find the Font Name on any Graphic
Have you ever encountered a font and wondered what it was? Wouldn't it be great to use it in your design?
WhatTheFont takes the guesswork out of figuring out the font. Simply upload an image with the font and in a few seconds, you'll get the best matching font. You can then buy the font right away.
Website Description
How it works: WhatTheFont uses deep learning to search our collection of over 133,000 font styles and find the best match for the fonts in your photo. It even works with connected scripts and when there???s more than one font in an image. Just upload an image, click the font you want to identify, then check out the results.
For best results, upload a good quality image, and make sure the text is horizontal. We???ll detect the text in the image automatically, then you can click the font you want. You can draw a manual crop box if you want, but be sure that you only draw it around one line of text.
Happy font hunting!
https://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/
Some Tips
For the best results, use a high-quality scan of the font.
If you don't want to buy the font, you can always Google the font family name and see if anyone may have a free version available.
However, If you're going to use the font for business, you should purchase it.
There are other websites that offer similar services, but what WhatTheFont better is that they have a very large database to select from.
PermalinkAbout
I will highlight a fun Internet site every Saturday. The basic premise is to highlight sites that I regularly visit for a variety of reasons. All site recommendations are mine and are unsponsored. By highlighting these websites, I hope to provide value to those who may not know of the sites or who might be interested in visiting the sites. I also want to share the sites that I find valuable in the hopes that others will find them just as beneficial.
Check out all the blog posts.
Schedule
| Saturday | Internet Tools |
| Sunday | Open Topic |
| Monday | Media Monday |
| Tuesday | QA |
| Wednesday | New England |
| Thursday | Gluten Free |
| Friday | Macintosh |