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Cool Websites and Tools [March 24th]

By Aibek, MakeUseOf – March 24, 2010 at 11:31PM

Check out some of the latest MakeUseOf discoveries. All listed websites are FREE (or come with a decent free account option). No trials or buy-to-use craplets. For more cool websites and web app reviews subscribe to MakeUseOf Directory.

List Your Website Here!

 

 CertificateStreet – Certificates and awards are symbols of achievement and are often needed to encourage students and participants. CertificateStreet has hundreds of certificate templates for different categories ranging from sports and school to business and relationships. Read more: CertificateStreet: Get Free Printable Award Certificates.

 

 Spreaker – It’s simple: what Justin.tv and uStream are to television, Spreaker is to radio. If you want to broadcast your own online radio show, you can do so in only a few clicks and if you want to browse radio streams from around the country, it’s as simple as pressing “play”. Read more: Spreaker: Broadcast Your Own Online Radio Show.

 

 

 FlightRadar24 – Ever wondered how many planes come into or fly out of an airport at any given time? Now you can see it live with FlightRadar. It is a cool tool based on Google Maps that shows live air traffic in Europe. Each flight is indicated by a small plane icon and airports are indicated with a small blue x symbol. Read more: FlightRadar24: Watch Live Air Traffic In Europe.

 

 

 Media.io – Music is stored in a variety of formats and this can be annoying if you have music in one format and a digital audio player that can only play another. If you’re looking to convert audio but don’t want to install a dedicated program to do so, Media.io is the web tool you’ve been looking for. Read more: Media.io: Easy Audio to MP3, WAV, OGG, WMA, M4A, MP4 and AAC Converter.

 

 

 PopSciArchives – Popular Science is an American magazine that has been published every month since 1872 featuring news about scientific developments and new technologies. If you are a fan of Popular Science or of history for that matter, you’ll love this web resource. It contains complete archives of the popular science magazine online going back to 1872. Read more: PopSciArchives: Browse Complete Archives Of Popular Science Magazine Online.

 

List Your Website Here!

These are just half of the websites that we discovered in the last couple of days. If you want us to send you daily round-ups of all cool websites we come across, leave your email here. Or follow us via RSS feed.

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5 Essential WordPress Plugins & Services for Business Blogs

By Jonathan Bennett, MakeUseOf – March 24, 2010 at 07:31PM

Business BlogCreating a WordPress blog for your business can be a great way to keep in touch with your customers and increase interest in your product(s). For some people, their blog is their whole business.

Making a successful blog may seem like a daunting task. There are millions of blogs out there and it may seem impossible at first to stand out. The major thing that will help your blog stand out is the content you provide. It needs to be useful for your visitors. But besides that, there are free services and business plugins for WordPress to help you along the way.

We’ll take a look at five of the essentials for WordPress business blogs.

Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools is an essential service to help with your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. Google wants your site to be Google-friendly and their tools will help you.

Getting started is simple. Log in with a free Google account (register for one if needed) and go to Google Webmaster Tools. Google will ask you to verify you are the site owner by adding a meta tag to your homepage or uploading a HTML file.

Google Webmaster Tools

Once verified, you’ll have access to information about your site, such as which keywords are ranked the best on Google and tips on how to improve your site.

Google XML Sitemap

A sitemap is a XML format that will help Google (and other search engines) index and crawl your site efficiently. WordPress plugin author Arne Brachhold has created a great plugin for this specific purpose called Google XML Sitemaps. This plugin is freely available for download from the WordPress download page or from WordPress’s built-in plugin finder.

To access the plugin finder, log into your WordPress site. On the left hand menu, find the Plugins header and click “Add New“.

Google Sitemap Submit

After installation, select XML-Sitemap from the left-hand Settings menu and click the link to generate your first sitemap. When finished, your sitemap is available at https://your-blog.com/sitemap.xml. You can then log into your Google Webmaster Tools (from above) and submit your sitemap.

Twitter Tools

Twitter has proven itself to be a useful way of communicating with clients and customers for businesses. It’s a great way to promote new products, share the latest news, answer questions and get feedback. If you would like to show your tweets in a sidebar on your business blog and seamlessly integrate Twitter with WordPress, there’s a great plugin called Twitter Tools by Alex King that will let you do that.

Download the plugin here or use WordPress’s built-in plugin finder. After installation, go to your Settings and then Twitter Tools to complete the setup. You will need to enter your Twitter username and password.

Twitter Tools

To add the sidebar in the admin area, go to Design and then Widgets. From here you can add the Twitter Tools widget to your sidebar with a simple drag and drop move. You may want to change the title to something other than “Twitter Tools”, like “Our Tweets” or “Twitter News“.

Cforms II

When you’re running an online business, making it easy for your customers to communicate with you is a must. Having a contact email listed on your site will work, but it’s more professional and convenient to provide a contact form. One of the easiest ways to build a contact form is with the Cforms II business plugin for WordPress by Oliver Seidel.

After downloading and installing the plugin, go into the configuration. The plugin has a thorough set of documentation to walk you through the creation of your form.

Cforms II

As shown in the screenshot above, you’re able to easily add new fields. After creating your form, be sure to verify your email settings are correct. Go to the “Admin Email Options” in the configuration and double-check that the “from” and “admin” email addresses matches what you set up in your blog originally. You can then choose to add the Cforms II button to your toolbar, which will let you easily click and add the form to whatever pages you want.

WP Super Cache

As your audience grows, you may find that you need to start thinking more about optimizing your site for heavy loads, especially if your site ever becomes popular because of a site like YouTube or Digg. Without optimization your site could likely run slow or even crash completely.

The WP Super Cache plugin can help you prevent any slowdown problems and it’s a good thing to set up BEFORE your site hits the big time. Note: You need to have mod_rewrite enabled on your server to use this plugin. If you’re unsure if you have it, please ask your web host.

WP Super Cache

To get started, download the WP Super Cache plugin, upload it to your plugins folder, and activate it. Then go to “Settings | WP Super Cache“, and set the plugin status to ON. After that, scroll down the page and click “Update mod_rewrite rules“. Now as you visit your site, WP Super Cache will begin to cache pages and this will help them load faster.

If you notice any strange behavior on your site, or some other plugins not working correctly, it is possible they may not be fully compatible with WP Super Cache. In this case, you can occasionally choose to “Delete Cache” in the Cache Contents section of the WP Super Cache configuration, or you may need to uninstall the plugin completely. If so, then there are some other plugins like “WP Cache” that you could try instead, but chances are WP Super Cache will work great for you.

Have you tried any of these business plugins for WordPress before? Do you have any other recommendations for anyone with a business blog? Please leave us a comment and let us know!

Image credit: remedix

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It’s Just Cool: Garage Door Photo Tarpaulins

By Gordon DeWitte, Toolmonger – March 24, 2010 at 01:51PM

The Now That’s Nifty blog reports on photo tarpaulins from the German company Style Your Garage. These tarps are giant flexible photos designed for “up-and-over” garage doors, and they attach with Velcro. They have a variety of themes ranging from vehicles to landscapes to animals and more. Some of my favorites are the jet plane

Italy

and, for those with double garage doors, the dump truck.

If you don’t want to do your garage door, the company also has similar products for standard doors and windows. Prices are $225 for the single-door garage versions, and $439 and up for the double-door and triple-door garage versions. The single-door “motif of the week” is $185.

Style-Your-Garage [Manufacturer’s Site]

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A Short Guide To Open-Source And Similar Licenses

By Cameron Chapman, Smashing Magazine Feed – March 24, 2010 at 07:01AM

Smashing-magazine-advertisement in A Short Guide To Open-Source And Similar Licenses
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Many developers and designers want to release their work into the world as open-source projects. They want others to be able to build on and share their code. The open-source community is vibrant because of this. Open-source software is available for virtually any application you could think of. Most designers use open-source software or code on a regular basis (WordPress, Drupal and many other CMS’ are open source).

Opensourceubuntu in A Short Guide To Open-Source And Similar Licenses

But many developers and designers don’t have a clear picture of what the different open-source licenses really mean. What rights are they relinquishing when they choose an open-source license? Without knowing exactly what the licenses mean and how they’re best applied, developers can’t make informed decisions about which is best for their work.

[By the way, what was the last time you visited our sister site Noupe? Subscribe to Noupe’s feed for more inspirational and design-related articles.]

What Is Licensing?

A lot of confusion is out there about what exactly licensing means. When you license your work, you’re not giving away any of your rights. You still hold the original copyright (or patent if you have one) on that work. What a license does is grant specific permissions for others to use that work.

Licensing is a great alternative to just releasing your work into the public domain or granting permissions on a case-by-case basis. By releasing into the public domain, you relinquish any copyright, and no one is obligated to list you as the original author or contributor. In the latter case, you may end up spending more time dealing with individual permissions than designing or developing.

Open-source licenses make it easy for others to contribute to a project without having to seek special permission. It also protects you as the original creator, making sure you at least get some credit for your contributions. It also helps to prevent others from claiming your work as their own.

GNU General Public License

The GNU General Public Licence (GPL) is probably one of the most commonly used licenses for open-source projects. The GPL grants and guarantees a wide range of rights to developers who work on open-source projects. Basically, it allows users to legally copy, distribute and modify software. This means you can:

  • Copy the software.
    Copy it onto your own servers, your client’s servers, your own computer, pretty much anywhere you want. There’s no limit to the number of copies you can make.
  • Distribute the software however you want.
    Provide a download link on your website. Put the software on a bunch of thumb drives and give them away. Print out the source code and throw it from the rooftops (please don’t, though, because that would waste a lot of paper and make a mess).
  • Charge a fee to distribute the software.
    If you want to charge someone to provide the software, set it up on their website or do anything else related to it, you can do so. But, you must give them a copy of the GNU GPL, which basically tells them that they could probably get the software elsewhere for free. Best to be up front about that, and about why you’re charging them.
  • Make whatever modifications to the software you want.
    If you want to add or remove functionality, go ahead. If you want to use a portion of the code in another project, you can. The only catch is that the other project must also be released under the GPL.

Please note that it is very important to see source and binaries distribution as two very different things. Also, there are issues and restrictions with some licenses when used with applications released under “each other”. You can dive into more details in the detailed article Practical Guide to GPL Compliance (via @PierreJoye). To use the GPL, you have to include certain information in the software’s code, along with a copy of the license.

GNU Lesser General Public License

You should be aware of another GNU license: the Lesser General Public Licence (LGPL). It grants fewer rights to a work than the standard GPL. Generally, the LGPL is appropriate for libraries that want to allow linking from non-GPL and non-open-source software. Because the GPL requires that other software with parts of licensed code to also be licensed under the GPL, developers cannot use GPL-licensed code for paid and proprietary software. The LGPL negates this by not requiring other projects with parts of the code to be similarly licensed.

BSD License

BSD licenses represent a family of permissive free software licenses that have fewer restrictions on distribution compared to other free software licenses such as the GNU General Public License. Among different versions of the license two versons are particularly important: the New BSD License/Modified BSD License, and the Simplified BSD License/FreeBSD License. Both have been verified as GPL-compatible free software licenses, and have been accepted as open source licenses by the Open Source Initiative.

The New BSD License (”3-clause license”) allows unlimited redistribution for any purpose as long as its copyright notices and the license’s disclaimers of warranty are maintained. The license also contains a clause restricting use of the names of contributors for endorsement of a derived work without specific permission. The primary difference between the New BSD License and the Simplified BSD license is that the latter omits the non-endorsement clause.

MIT License

The MIT License is the shortest and probably broadest of all the popular open-source licenses. Its terms are very loose and more permissive than most other licenses. The basic provision of the license (minus the information that it is provided without warranty, which comprises the final paragraph) is as follows:

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

What this means is that:

  • You can use, copy and modify the software however you want. No one can prevent you from using it on any project, from copying it however many times you want and in whatever format you like, or from changing it however you want.
  • You can give the software away for free or sell it. You have no restrictions on how to distribute it.
  • The only restriction is that it be accompanied by the license agreement.

The MIT License is the least restrictive license out there. It basically says that anyone can do whatever they want with the licensed material, as long as it’s accompanied by the license.

Apache License

The Apache License, Version 2.0, grants a number of rights to users. These rights can be applied to both copyrights and patents. Because some licenses can be applied only to copyrights and not patents, this flexibility would be an obvious factor in a patent developer’s choice of license (read this article on How Stuff Works for an explanation of the difference).

Here are some more details on what the Apache License allows:

  • Rights are perpetual.
    Once they’ve been granted, you can continue to use them forever.
  • Rights are worldwide.
    If the rights are granted in one country, then they’re granted in all countries. For example, if you’re in the US and the original license was granted in India, you’re not prevented from using the code under the license.
  • Rights are granted for no fee or royalty.
    Not only will you not be charged any kind of up-front usage fee, but you will not be charged fees on a per-usage or any other basis either.
  • Rights are non-exclusive.
    You can use the licensed work, and so can anyone else.
  • Rights are irrevocable.
    No one can take these rights away once they’re granted. In other words, you don’t need to worry that down the road, when you’ve created some awesome derivative of the licensed code, someone will swoop in and say, “Sorry, you can’t use this code anymore.” (A clause in the license states that if you sue someone over patent infringement on anything under this license, then your license is terminated, but that only applies to patented work, and as long as you don’t sue anyone over the work, you won’t have to worry about it.)

Redistributing code also has special requirements, mostly pertaining to giving proper credit to those who have worked on the code and to maintaining the same license.

Creative Commons

Creative Commons (CC) licenses aren’t quite open-source licenses, but they are commonly used for design projects. A wide variety of CC licenses is available, each granting certain rights. A CC license has four basic parts, which can be enacted individually or in combination. Here’s an overview of the parts:

  • Attribution
    The author must be attributed as the creator of the work. Beyond that, the work can be modified, distributed, copied and otherwise used.
  • Share Alike
    The work can be modified, distributed and so forth, but only under the same CC license.
  • Non-Commercial
    The work can be modified, distributed and so on, but not for commercial purposes. The language about what constitutes “commercial” is a bit vague (no express definition is provided), so you may want to clarify this in your own projects. For example, some might interpret “non-commercial” as simply meaning that you can’t sell the work. Others might take it to mean that you can’t even put the work on a website that has advertising. Still others might consider something is “commercial” only if it makes a profit.
  • No Derivative Works
    This means you can copy and distribute the licensed work, but you can’t modify it in any way or create work based on the original.

As mentioned, these parts of the CC license terms can be combined. The most restrictive license would be the “Attribution, Non-Commercial, No Derivatives” license, which means that you can freely share the work, but not change it or charge for it, and you must attribute it to the creator. This is a good license to get your work out there but still maintain more or less complete control over how it is used. The least restrictive would be the “Attribution” license, which means that as long as people credit you, they can do whatever they like with the work.

CC licenses are used more for design work than development, but nothing bars you from using it for the latter. Just be aware of exactly what is and is not covered under each part.

Further Resources

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The Complete Guide to Fixing Google Contacts [Annoyances]

By Kevin Purdy, Lifehacker – March 23, 2010 at 08:00PM

The Complete Guide to Fixing Google ContactsGoogle Contacts needs to get better. Google and Gmail devotees regularly deal with duplicate contacts, sync abnormalities, over-stuffed contact groups, and other problems. Here are our best methods for fixing those annoyances yourself until Google does for real.

Photo by sidewalk flying.

Let’s be clear: We love how Google Contacts functions as a centralized database of email addresses, phone numbers, birthdays, mailing addresses, IM handles, and much more for our various Google services. Our readers generally dig it, too, though not without complaints about its sometimes unpredictable nature. What I’m aiming to do in this post is detail how Google Contacts works (it’s probably not how you’d expect), explain some fixes for common Contacts annoyances, help you clean up and organize your Contacts, and point out the proper way to sync Google Contacts to your various devices.

How Google Contacts Works

You don’t actually need a Gmail account to use Google Contacts, but Gmail is normally where most users start using Contacts. If you use nearly any kind of Google service, Google has probably set up a Contacts section for you, which you can visit at google.com/contacts and start tinkering with.

If you’re using Google Apps with a particular domain, your Contacts page can usually be found at google.com/contacts/a/sitename.com/, replacing sitename.com with your own organization’s URL. Google Contacts acts a bit differently inside an Apps account, and can cause some stress when used alongside a “personal” Gmail account—but we’ll get to that in a bit. Take some time to get familiar with the web interface, and learn what you can and can’t do in it. It is always, always the primary place to fix problems and negotiate sync issues with your various apps and devices—make a change here, and it’s the only way to ensure it will (probably) stick.

Google’s Help section for Contacts doesn’t get nearly nitty-gritty enough, but a read-through does provide a few pointers. The most helpful explainer is about Default contact groups, which really explains the five contact groups that you can’t delete, rename, or change, and the one contact group that drives a lot of office app veterans nuts:

  • All Contacts: Just what it sounds like—this is a list of everyone you’ve composed an email to, or replied to, from this Google/Gmail account. If you’re using an Android phone or the Google Voice service, you’ll also see people you’ve called (more than once?) show up here. You don’t have a lot of say in the matter as to who goes into All Contacts, but if it ever feels like just too much information stashed away about your email, there are nuclear options, detailed below in “Fixes.”
  • My Contacts: Google automatically populates this group, and you can’t delete it or manage who automatically goes into it, though you can manually add or remove individuals from it, as noted below. Contacts in this group tend to rank higher in Gmail’s auto-completing address function, and in other Google apps, whenever you start typing.
  • Your Friends, Family, and Coworkers: Default groups, created by Google, and you can’t delete them. If Google Contacts was very, very smart about which contacts it created, which contacts it let into My Contacts, and how it syncs up and eliminates duplications between all your accounts, desktop apps, and devices that can access it, this would be the end of this post. We soldier on, though, because there are many other points to discuss.
  • Any group you create on your own: Create your own group, and Google won’t automatically shove people or fake names/numbers into it, and if you’ve got the right kind of phone or syncing app, you can make that your primary “People I Actually Correspond With” list. Highly recommended.

We’ll get to the fixes and tweaks first, and then list some syncing tools that might help you connect Google Contacts in a better way to all your communication outlets.

Fixes

The Complete Guide to Fixing Google ContactsRemove contacts from My Contacts: My Contacts should only contain people who you would actually email, on your own, to update, ask something of, or chat real friendly-like. It can, occasionally, get cluttered up with people you might have had one lengthy exchange with, but never plan to email again—a Craigslist buyer, perhaps.

To remove one or more people from My Contacts, scroll or search to find them, select them from the My Contacts list, then hit the Groups button and select the “Remove from: My Contacts” option. No guarantees they won’t go back there if you get into a real discussion by email or phone, but for most users, it’s not all that painful to do an occasional My Contacts purge.

The Complete Guide to Fixing Google ContactsRemove contacts from chat (or add one in): Two solutions. The first is to mouse over their name in your Gmail chat list, click the “Video & More” button in their name box. From that drop-down, you can set their names to always or never appear, block them, or let Google/Gmail decide when you’ve been chatting frequently enough to warrant a prime spot.

If a contact isn’t in your chat list and you want them there, search out their contact name from the search box at the top of the chat list, mouse over the name result, and do the same kind of chat selection from the “Video & More” menu.

The Complete Guide to Fixing Google ContactsStop new contacts from appearing in Chat: The second, going-forward solution. From Gmail’s Settings panel, head to the Chat section, and to the right of “Auto-add suggested contacts,” select the “Only allow people …” option. (Last two tips via Download Squad)

Remove Contacts from Google Wave: You do so, according to The Complete Guide to Google Wave, by removing them from Google Contacts.

Import Facebook and LinkedIn contacts into Google: It’s sometimes a smart move, since you’ve already invested all that time into building your social networks. The most reliable way we’ve seen Facebook importation happen requires Firefox with Greasemonkey installed, a handy Greasemonkey script to go with it, and Nic Pfost’s helpful instructions. (Original post)

The Complete Guide to Fixing Google ContactsAs for LinkedIn, it’s much easier: click the “Export Connections” link at the bottom of your Contacts page, and you’ll be prompted to save a vCard or Outlook CSV file with your contacts, both of which Google Contacts accepts. For a more continuous sync, try LinkedIn’s Outlook Plug-In.

Duplicates

The Complete Guide to Fixing Google ContactsManually remove all your duplicates at once: From the Contacts’ main startup page, look in the right-hand pane for the “Find duplicates” button. You’ll see every entry in your contacts for which the names are the same, but email addresses, phone numbers, or other statistics are different. Quickly scan the list and un-check false contacts, like Facebook and other automated reply addresses, then hit the “Merge” button in the upper right. All your contacts are merged, with Google making its best guesses as to which email is home or work and so forth. (Original post)

The Complete Guide to Fixing Google ContactsCarefully edit & merge a particular contact: Search their name from your main Contacts page. Click all the results that pop up that relate to the same person, then hit the “Merge these X contacts” link that appears in the right-hand pane. Fix the email assignments and other details in the editing pane that appears, hit the “Save” button up top, and two or more have become one. (Original post)

Mysterious “blank” contacts: This is most often the case with Android phones syncing to Google Contacts, and it’s known to many. It’s suggested that using Google Voice to call or SMS contacts, then not using Google Voice to do the same, creates these empty, name-only contacts, because you are, technically, using a different number. No fix at the moment that we’ve found, but at least you know where the blanks are (likely) coming from.

BlackBerry duplicate fix: If you’re using the Google Sync app to keep your BlackBerry and Gmail account in sync, here’s SudiptiNycteus‘ instructions on forcing your phone to stop creating dupes:

  1. Click and open contact folder
  2. click the berry button and look for Options
  3. Click on options
  4. Click the General Options Tab
  5. Under Actions you will see Allow Duplicate Names:
  6. Choose No

That’s it—no more duplicates using Google Sync

The Complete Guide to Fixing Google ContactsMake Android syncing selective: By default, your Android phone syncs your entire “My Contacts” group—great if you’ve kept it tidy, annoying if you only want a certain whitelist of friends and contacts to show up. Open the Contacts app, head to the Contacts tab, hit the Menu button, and select “Display options.” From this screen, you can choose which Google or Facebook accounts to sync, and which sub-groups inside those accounts you want shown. A master switch at the top also allows syncing only of those contacts with phone numbers, though that seems like a kind of drastic dead man’s switch for such a Gmail-savvy phone. (via Droidie, which also explains the sync fix procedure for HTC Sense-skinned phones).

The Complete Guide to Fixing Google ContactsThe nuclear option—Export/Import to CSV file: Maybe none of the fixes above will do it for you. Maybe they’ll take too much time. You do have an option, if you sincerely want to massively detangle your contacts, or start over with just your Outlook address book, your iPhone/Android list, or whatever you’ve got.

Find the Export link on the far-right side of the main Contacts page—it’s blue on blue, so they definitely don’t want you messing with it as a primary tool. Hit Export, choose to export “Everyone” and do so in “Google CSV” form. You’ll download a file, google.csv, that should open without much trouble in Microsoft Excel, OpenOffice.org, in Google Docs, or other spreadsheet apps.

It is much faster, easier, and, in some cases, formulaic to delete and fix entire rows and columns of data with your contacts inside a spreadsheet—no safety prompts, no buttons to push—just pure data. Of course, you can also mess things up if you move a column left or right, so it’s a good idea to make a copy of your initial contact download, then keep that original copy somewhere safe and backed up—or just email it to yourself.

Once you’re done fixing up your contacts, you can make the call as to whether you’re ready to click on All Contacts, select the “All” link above the list, then hit “Delete” and wipe the slate clean. You’d then re-import your CSV file into Google using the Import link, also on the right-hand side, and if you used the Google format, the contacts you chose to bring back should fit in just fine. It’s not a permanent solution, but for those at their wit’s end, it’s easier than searching out and selectively fixing contacts person by person.

The Gmail/Google Apps Divide

Like Contacts itself, the confusion and division users of both personal Gmail and Google Contacts feel between their different Google-y platforms is something Google’s aware of, and more than one engineer has said a big, serious solution is coming.

In the meantime, Gina has addressed the divide at Smarterware, and noted that she’s had free syncing service Soocial recommended for syncing contacts across Gmail, Google Apps, Outlook, smartphones, and other platforms. After authorizing through Google, you can connect multiple Gmail and Google Apps accounts, and link their contact lists. Update: This paragraph was corrected from an earlier version.

Syncing Tools

This isn’t a complete list, by any means, but a primer on some of the tools we’ve run across that keep Google Contacts updated with other platforms. If you’ve got your own favorite app or service for syncing with Google Contacts, tell us about it in the comments, and we’ll try to update this post with more options.

Almost every mobile phone: All of Google’s desktop and phone syncing services

Google Apps to Outlook: Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook

Google Apps Contacts shared to anywhere: Shared Contacts [Google Apps Marketplace; not free]

Thunderbird: Google Contacts add-on or Zindus.

iTunes/iPhone: Through iTunes 7.7 and later.

Mac Address Book: Built-in sync option, with or without an iPhone.

That’s our take on how Google Contacts can be made better and more livable—at least until Google steps up their game. All app recommendations, clever fixes, and other suggestions are welcomed in the comments.

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4 Really Funny YouTube Channels Worth Keeping Up With

By Tim Lenahan, MakeUseOf – March 23, 2010 at 05:31PM

funny-youtube-channelsYouTube is an interesting place. You can find almost anything there. I even find music I love there and it works kind of like my personal jukebox allowing me to make my own playlists.

YouTube also has what they call channels. Any user can start their own channel, recording and uploading videos for others to follow.  As you can guess, some channels are more interesting than others. Some are less offensive than others.  Some are even educational. Then there are those channels that people use just to vent.

You can also find a lot of funny Youtube videos. I would like to share 4 funny YouTube channels that are hilarious and actually worth checking out.  So sit back and have a laugh.

ImprovEverywhere

This channel is hilarious! The whole premise that they go by is “we cause scenes”.  Kind of a play on words but what they actually do is choose a public place and actually make a scene using improvisation. The public has no idea what is taking place (except a few) so they’re really taken aback by what’s going on.  For example, one of my favorites is the “I Love Lunch” musical:

Check out some more of my favorite funny Youtube videos: Grocery Store Musical, Best Buy and Slo-Mo Home Depot

PennyPranks

Have you ever had to count pennies in order to get something in a pinch?  This is a YouTube channel where a man and a boy attempt to purchase large ticket items with nothing but pennies. As it turns out, some salesmen accept the payment but others do not.  As it also turns out, the video series was created as an advertisement for an office store sale – school supplies for a penny. Here’s the guitar video:

Jack Vale Films

This guy is crazy!  What he does is he sets up hidden cameras and randomly pranks people.  It’s neat seeing someone who can take people’s attention off whatever is going on in their lives and have a laugh.  Watch over and over as people are taken off guard by his shenanigans.  Warning, some of the videos will need you to appreciate fart humor (farting turkey, farting in NY, farting in an elevator).  Don’t worry, that’s not all he does.  He also has the unique ability to play peek-a-boo with total strangers in these funny Youtube videos:

PetTubedotcom

Who doesn’t love those funny pet videos?  Well, YouTube is not totally devoid of funny pet video channels. PetTubedotcom happens to be one of them!  I’m sure you’d get a kick out of baby raccoons chasing little kids around their back yard or cats getting into personal battles with sneakers, If so, PetTubedotcom could be the YouTube channel for you. For example, check out this video of three dogs teaming up on a tether ball:

See, I told you there are some funny channels on YouTube. I understand that everyone’s sense of humor is different. Perhaps some people do not find the same channels funny as I do.

Tell me, which YouTube channels do you find funny? Also, if you have some favorite funny YouTube channels that make you laugh, let me know in the comments.

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