blocklayer.com
Useful site with all sorts of design calculation ideas.
BlockLayer.com is great place to go to get all your printable diagram templates. Then have templates for everything imaginable, there's Gable Roof Framing Plans, Deck & Floor Board Spacing & Gap Calculator, Angle Calculator, Posts and Rails - Spacing and Material and so much more.
Yes, they also have Graphic Paper and printable rulers.
There are 140 different designs to pick from. Lots of good choices, and certainly a good site to bookmark for when you need designs with calculated settings.
PermalinkThanksgiving Menu Maker
Helpful to make your Thanksgiving a bit different this year.
Thanksgiving is coming up, and it's time to start the early planning the biggest meal of the year.
You may have a traditional meal planned out or you may want to experiment this year with something new.
Checkout the Food 52's Automagic Thanksgiving Menu Maker. It's a great place that breaks down all the main parts of the meal - Such as the Meat, Stuffing, Potatoes, drinks and so much more.
It's a good place to look for ideas on what to bring to a Thanksgiving invite. (The Perfect Cheese Ball looks good!)
Website Description
Answer a few questions, Select your own recipes, Come away with a custom Thanksgiving menu (plus all the tips you need to start.)
https://food52.com/thanksgiving/menu-maker
PermalinkSprout Social Image Layout
Cool tool to upload the proper size images where you need it.
Nowadays you need to change your images so they look good on computers and mobile. Mobile users like to see images as a reverse landscape.
One source to help to create the proper image for different layouts is Spout Social. You can create sizes for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Linked In, Pinterest, YouTube or any custom layout.
Website Description
Landscape is a powerful image resizing tool designed to help social media marketers, content creators, and business owners develop a standout presence in an increasingly visual social world. Our tool offers social media professionals an efficient way to produce multiple image sizes optimized for social media profiles, messages, and campaigns - ultimately giving them more time to focus on what matters most: fostering engagement and authentic conversations through social.
https://sproutsocial.com/landscape
PermalinkDriveMeInsane.com
Control the lights and send a message on this webcam
One of the first Internet Webcams was at the University of Cambridge looking at the coffee pot to see if it was empty. That was 1991.
We have come a long way.
Today you can view just about anything on webcam. One of the funny ones is the "Drive Me Insane" by Paul Mathis. You can turn on/off lights, and display messages on the computer screen.
Website Description
This site allows you to use home automation to have fun at someone else's expense. Turn on the lights, play with the sign, and get visual feedback on all of it. And yes, it's all real. Time:07:08 Current Insanity Level: 9840.30%
PermalinkSpace Type Generator
Create Cool graphics with your text
The Space Type Generator is a cool website where your phrase can look like animated art.
There are 8 main categories to select from: Cylinder, Field, Stripes, Coil, Flag, Morisawa, Cascade, and Ribbon. Within each style, you have the option to change the presets and style.
The person behind this is Kiel Mutschelknaus, who also runs kiel.com. He's a very talented artist, and I highly recommend checking out his page and Space Type Generators.
https://spacetypegenerator.com
Sample Design
haveibeenpwned.com
See if your personal email is in the open
Just about every week you hear about a major database breach where hackers are stealing personal data.
A couple of years ago, Troy Hunt put together a website to see if your email address has been compromised in a data breach. Making it easy to see if your "personal" email is accessible to hackers.
Website Description
This site came about after what was, at the time, the largest ever single breach of customer accounts ??? Adobe. I often did a post-breach analysis of user credentials and kept finding the same accounts exposed over and over again, often with the same passwords which then put the victims at further risk of their other accounts being compromised.
The FAQs page goes into a lot more detail, but all the data on this site comes from "breaches" where data is exposed to persons that should not have been able to view it.
Why Check Your Email?
If you use your personal email for logins, then it might be useful to check the database. Especially if you use the same password through most accounts.
I checked some old work emails, and I was surprised they were in the database. I know that it doesn't belong to anyone else because the company isn't in business anymore.
PermalinkPhotoVisi
A great online collage tool with lots of templates
Creating Collage can be tricky. If you don't have the right template - it can look boring and lose the appeal of the pictures. Thankfully there are sites online that can make it easy to combine photos.
One site to consider is Photovisi. as they have a lot of design options to pick from. In fact, there are more than 250 designs to choose from. Thankfully there are broken into 19 categories, so you can search for the design that works best for you.
Photovisi has templates for YouTube Channels as well as Facebook covers.
Photovisi is free to check out - even the editor is free. However, if you want to remove the watermark it cost $4.99 a month. Which isn't a bad price if you do a lot of collages.
Website Description
Making photo collages with our easy to use editing tool is the simplest way to get stunning results. Giving you total freedom over the way your photos are displayed by cropping, resizing or adding effects to them.
With our unique photo editing tools it's never been easier to create great-looking photos. We got you covered with filters, frames, stickers and tons of other image editing capabilities!
Sample Designs
Clothesline Layout Example
Inkblots Layout Example
ezgif.com
Convert MOVs to Gif super easy
Animated Gifs are all the rage, and there's no better place to create and touch up GIfs than ezgif.com. It's the one stop shop for all your basic GIF editing.
I like to use their optimize feature to better compress GIF files that have been created using different applications.
Website Description
Ezgif.com is simple online GIF maker and toolset for basic animated GIF editing. Here you can create, resize, crop, reverse, optimize, and apply some effects to gifs.
Sample GIF Images
Here's a couple of images that I converted from H.264 to GIF:
Boston's MBTA Commuter Rail. Using ezgif.com I was able to convert the original 2.9 MB MOV file to the 732 K GIF
This Movie was 1.8 MB, but using ezgif.com I was able to get it down to 652k.
Spot the International Space Station
Find out when you can see the space station from your home
NASA has a cool site that shows you when you can expect to see the International Space Station. This is a fun thing to look for when you know when it appears.
You enter in your street address and the site will tell you when and where to look up at the sky.
Website Description
Watch the International Space Station pass overhead from several thousand worldwide locations. It is the third brightest object in the sky and easy to spot if you know when to look up.
Visible to the naked eye, it looks like a fast-moving plane only much higher and traveling thousands of miles an hour faster!
https://spotthestation.nasa.gov/home.cfm
Bonus Video
Did you know that there's a live video feed from a camera on the International Space Station? If you time it right, and the camera is pointing in the right direction, you may see your area from Space!
Check out the Live ISS Stream video cam and see the view from the International Space Station.
Next time the International Space Station is over your house, check out the video feed from the space station. Miss the live feed? Don't worry there's a 6-hour replace video available.
PermalinkBrowser Information
Getting detail information on what the world gets from your browser.
Getting Browser information from an external source is a good way to learn what information your browser is sending. It's a good way to learn your external IP and what features might be enabled.
MyBrowserInfo.com is a great site that makes it quick and easy to get information about your browser settings. I like it because it can tell me the User Language, which some sites use to determine if they need to display information related to Canada's Anti-Spam Law.
Website Description
MyBrowserInfo.com is the fastest and easiest way to determine your IP address and information about your Web browser.
Browser Information List
Here's the things that MyBrowserInfo.com can find out:
Operating System, Platform, Internet Browser, Beta Version, Connection Speed, Restrictive Firewall, Local Date/Time, Language, System Language, User Language, Popups Blocked, SSL Support, SSL Enabled, Style Sheet Support, Supports Tables, Table Cell BG Colors, Table Cell BG Images, CDF Support, Color Depth, Supports GZip, Supports Cookies, Cookies Enabled, Supports JavaScript, JavaScript Enabled, JavaScript Version, JavaScript Build, Supports VBScript, Supports ActiveX, ActiveX Enabled, Supports Java, Java Enabled, Java Vendor, Java Version, MS JVM Build, Supports DHTML, Supports Uploads, Supports Frames, Gecko Engine, Screen Dimensions, Browser Dimensions, Supports IFrames, Images Enabled, PNG Support, XML Support, MS XML Parser, Background Sounds, Supports MouseOver, Windows Installer, .NET CLR Installed, MS Media Player, Apple QuickTime, RealPlayer, Adobe Acrobat, Adobe SVG Viewer, Macromedia Flash, Macromedia Director, Macromedia Authorware, Citrix, iPIX Image Viewer, Crystal Reports, Viewpoint, Autodesk MapGuide, NetMeeting Build, Using PDA, WAP Support, Proxy Connection, Font Smoothing, Font Sizing, IE Text Size, Fonts Installed
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.
Blog Schedule
Saturday | Internet Tools |
Sunday | Open Topic |
Monday | Media Monday |
Tuesday | QA |
Wednesday | SnagIt |
Thursday | BBEdit |
Friday | Macintosh |