Help! I have a project due tomorrow and I haven’t started!

We’ve all done this before. It’s 8:00pm on a Sunday, the night before a big project is due. You haven’t started the project, or you’re only halfway through, because you’ve been battling your way through a League of Legends or MW3 tournament. What do you do now?

The procrastinators will start the project right away, working their way through the night and through three Monsters and countless cups of coffee. The truly lazy, nerdy, and risk-taking student, however, will use The Document Corrupter without a second thought. It’s a simple process. You upload your unfinished essay or research paper to the website, and it will spit out a corrupt document that you can take to your teacher and complain.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that your teacher will give you an extra day, so use at your own risk!

Website: http://neddyy.net/docs/

Easy scheduling with Doodle

Person 1: “Hey, we should all meet up sometime”
Person 2: “What time?”
Person 1: “I don’t know, what time are all of you available?”
Person 1: “Well, Thursdays work for me. I’m busy Fridays, and Saturday afternoons.”
Person 3: “And for me, I have a soccer game this Thursday evening, and there’s a concert on Saturday”
Person 1: “What time is the concert?”
Person 3: “8:00pm”
Person 2: “Oh yeah, I have a dentist appointment this Saturday too, 3:00pm
Person 1: “Whoa, hold on guys. So when IS everyone AVAILABLE?”
Person 3: “You know what, lemme right this down. Hold on a second while I get my phone out.”

Many a time I have heard that conversation (or had it myself) and wondered, “there must be an easier way to schedule a meeting.” Good news: there is!

Why 404?

I’m sure most of you have clicked on a link, only to discover something like this:

Sometimes, you may have wondered, “What does that 404 stand for? And why?”

If you want to rewrite an entire sentence, try this sentence thesaurus

Microsoft is well known for their operating system Windows, their Zune HD player, and the XBox, but did you know they’re making what’s called a “contextual thesaurus?” It works just like a thesaurus, but thesaurusizes entire sentences in one fell swoop.

What font is that?

How many times have we seen a font used in a magazine, on a box, or in an advertisement, and wanted to find out what font it is? Up until I discovered WhatTheFont!, I had to go through every font in Word and compare it with the original.

WhatTheFont! is a tool to help you discover, well, what font is being used. You upload an image, and the website splices up the image into many little images containing one letter or symbol. It’s remarkable what it can do for you.

For example, I took this Honey Bunches of Oats cereal box, and put it into the font finder, and voilà: Mushmellow. Now all I had to do was find the font, download, and install it. Within minutes, I was using it to create a parody of the world-famous cereal box.

I hope you will find this tool useful!

Write a letter to yourself … one year from now

Remember when you were young and the teacher would say, on the first day of school, “All right kids, write a letter to yourself one year from now, and at the end of the year, I’ll give the letters back to you?” Now, there’s a website for that (and maybe an app too, who knows?) FutureMe.org is a handy service brought to you by Matt Sly and Jay Patrikios. The concept is simple; you type in your email and message, and click on the Send to the Future! button. In addition, you can make your message public, and add a picture to it. The only disadvantage of the system is that the date has to be at least one month into the future.

Try it out today: http://www.futureme.org/letters.

Bored of video games? Try this.

I stumbled across this website a few days ago while I was flipping through the pages of Scientific American. The name of the website is “Old Weather“, and it’s a project that aims to fill the holes in the earth’s climatic record between the years of World War I and World War II.

Now you may ask, who the heck cares about weather that’s 100-or-so years old? The fact is, between the two World Wars, we have a paucity of climate data, because weather recording was affected by the wars.

Then how do we get the data if it’s missing?

While ground-based weather stations lacked sufficient records, there were numerous ships at sea that kept records of weather on a day-to-day basis. OldWeather.org is a treasure trove of these ship logbooks, which typically contain six weather reports per day taken at four hour intervals. Unfortunately, the handwriting in these logbooks is almost impossible for a computer to read without horrendous mistakes. And that’s where the power of the HUMAN BRAIN comes in. Or rather, 550-thousand-plus human brains.

Stay safe! Know where that short-URL goes!

Someone sends a link, comments on your Facebook post, or you see an interesting link somewhere on the interwebs, but it’s that annoying bit.ly or is.gd link. Is it absolutely safe to click, or could it infect your computer with viruses?

Miss the ’90s? Try Geocities-izer!

Who remembers the good ol’ ’90s, when the Internet was still in its infancy? There was no HTML5, no Adobe Flash, no Youtube, and Google had barely taken its roots on the Internet.

Geocities came online around 1995 as a free web page service. Soon, gaudy-looking web pages with GIF animations and retro graphics were popping up faster than a colony of rabbits could reproduce. In 1999, Yahoo! bought the service for around 3.5 billion dollars. It was closed ten years later. As Yahoo! released in a statement, “we have decided to focus on helping our customers explore and build relationships online in other ways.”

But now, you can relive the nostalgia! The website WonderTonic has provided a free tool to make almost any website look like it was made “by a 13-year old.” It takes you back to the days when tiled backgrounds, GIFs, and site hit counters ruled the Web. You can find this tool at http://wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/. Happy Geocities-izing!

Meet graph.tk, a great utility if you forgot your graphing calculator

Website: graph.tk.

It does nothing more and nothing less than you’d expect it to. Simply put, it graphs functions of all different kinds!

The interface is beautiful not because it has a thousand buttons, but because it is so simple and straight to the point. Here’s what you see when you load up the website:

In case you're wondering what that function in the right hand top corner is, it's a derivative.

You can add almost an infinite number of functions, and toggle their display via the colored checkboxes. And this isn’t your ordinary Cartesian coordinate grapher; it can even handle polar functions and inequalities! The controls are very intuitive: use your scroll wheel to zoom in and out, and left-click + drag to pan around. There’s even a screenshot option built-in to the page so that you can take a picture of your beautiful graph! The equations are displayed as you would expect to find them in a mathematics textbook (with LaTeX), and for you tech geeks, it’s built with HTML5 and it’s open source.

The only caveats to this otherwise awesome web app are that you can’t find points of intersection or roots of a function so easily… but that’s where your high school/college algebra skills come in!

I would give this app an overall rating of 9/10 (10/10 if only it had tools to find intersections/roots), and I highly recommend it to anyone who needs a quick graphing calculator because they’re too lazy to go downstairs and get their backpack.

For more information, visit their about page.