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!

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.

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!

This is a really awesome drawing tool

The above image was produced with a lot of random mouse strokes and messing around on a program called Flame.

The program was designed by Peter Blaskovic, an artist and graphic designer from Slovakia. Here’s how he describes it:

Flame is a painting program, it belongs to my ‘I am Artist’ experimental project. I think with tools which inspires you, everyone can be an artist. more>>

It’s true, anyone can be an artist. Any random mouse gestures will make awesome light-painting on this web application. It’s a program with a very easy learning curve. Its interface is simple, yet very functional and customizable. If you want to save your image as a JPEG, there’s a button for that.

You can see some of the trippy things you can do with this and Flame Painter, the desktop equivalent here.

And that’s not all. Explore the website, and you’ll find a lot more cool things like interactive animations and other painting tools. Have fun!

Overcome Writer’s Block With Plinky Prompts

Do you ever think "Ugh, I'd totally write a new blog post, if I just had something to say?" Or maybe, "I'm sick and tired of writer's block but I don't know what to do about it!" We've all been there — those days when the light bulb seems dim, if not burned out. To give you a little creative push and get that writerly mojo flowing again, we've added a new service called Plinky.com. Each weekday, Plinky provides a prompt — like a question or a c … Read More

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