Succulent sites and useful utilities

Things I've run across while surfing the net, now you can run across them too.

Images - NASA astronomy pictures - 100's of great astronmy pictures as only NASA can provide.

Site - Doug Fine - Green guy.

Site - Planet Photoshop - Photoshop site.

Useful/Utility Links - 13 Email Addresses That Can Be Useful - gives you a host of useful email address that basically you send an email to with an attachment and receive an email with that attachment converted to another format. Example: send a .wav file and receive an .mp3 back.

Learnin' - Ted.Com - is a whole big 'ol site full of really cool, interesting and entertaining lectures (if you will) all taped for your watching pleasure or eduction. Their tag line is: Inspired talks by the world's greatest thinkers and doers. I ran across this site a while back and was interested and vowed I'd go back and check it out more thoroughly, well I finally did when I saw a link to a certain lecture.

Utility/Site - DownloadYouTubeVideos - is a pretty self-explanatory site. You get your YouTube video URL and punch it in and hit download, you'll get another screen, right mouse click the 'Download' button and save the link as a .flv file and it be on your computer in no time. Btw... you will need a flash video player, there are a lot out there. I like to use 'nFLV Player', find it yourself.

Freeware Site - Otherblogz - has a few links worth investigating, you'll have to hunt around but there are some cool wallpapers, fonts and a good amount of some cool freeware.

Wallpaper - Social Wallpaper - I won't pretend to imply this is the best wallpaper site out there but it's right up there with PixelgirlPresents. For us dual-monitor users we will find a few nice offerings as well. You can also browse by category as well, nice site!

Hack - File Finder - Type the following (inside the pointy brackets) into the google search box, replace "name" with the filename of you're looking for and "file-extension" with the file extension (no period). <"intitle:index of" name file-extension>. Example: <"intitle:index of" happy birthday mp3> would return indexes that might contain .mp3 files of the song Happy Birthday.

Utility - Laptop Alarm - is a small laptop security utility you can download to your desktop and run when you want ot step away from your laptop in a public place. Unplugging the AC power, the USB wireless mouse receiver, moving the mouse or attempting a shutdown will activate the alarm, it's loud!

Site - Life Hacker - I'm still figuring this one out but it is a cool site. It's where I found this article on computer security.

Utility - Bulk File Renamer - is not really a Useful site but I've been looking for a good file renamer since the one I used a million years ago 'dissapeared'. This guy is great for renaming a gob of mp3's when... well, you use it how you need to.

Tutorial - Photoshop Tutorials - from Creativecloseup.com. There are a lot of tutorials from a variety of appraoches like photo touchups, makeovers for gals, font work and so on.

Link - Open Source Apps - listed on Wikipedia, a great 'source' of open source applications of all kinds all listed out. Give it a look before you shell out cash for something you need.

Site - Pop URLs - is an aggregate RSS site with stuff from: Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, YouTube, Flickr, Newsvine, Metafilter, Truemors, Metacafe, iFilm. I use this as a surfing starting point.

Utility/Site - Dropsend - allows you to send someone (or yourself) large files up to 100MB. Basically you enter the recipient's email address and a brief subject line and note to the recipient, browse for and select the file you want to send and upload it. The recipient will have an email waiting for them with the download link. They will have a week to download the file.

Utility/App - Revo Uninstaller - uninstalls applications more thouroughly than Windows' uninstaller in the control panel. AND... it even 'Reinstalls' applications.

Site - Open Source Web Design - offers HUNDREDS of great web site templates all of which are open source and totally free. I think they ask that you keep the 'Made by' stuff at the bottom of most if not all of them. They have such a broad range of page styles and colors, it is amazing. I wonder where I got the template for this ol' web site... hmmmm.

Site - PixelGirl Presents
I've been going to this site for YEARS to get desktop wallpapers. Its run by a girl named Shana Victor and she does a stellar job! The site has way more than I use it for but the wallpaper section is where I spend 99% of my time there. To understand my excitement over her site, go to the main page and find the link "+ Desktops" and look through the fantastic art that users have submitted.

Site - Passive Aggressive Notes
I just ran across this site today from a friend in Florida. I've left a few notes in my day.

Hack - Cool Google Hack
This is pretty cool. Put the following text between the pointy brackets <"Parent Directory" ARTISTorSONG.mp3 -xxx -html -htm -php -shtml -opendivx -md5 -md5sums> in the google search box. Replace 'ARTISTorSONG' with exactly what is looks like. You'll have to search around and figure out the rest by yourself after you get your search results... I can't do everything for ya. But, I will tell you that you are probably going to end up finding .mp3's that you can play or 'Save File As'.

Site - Buttons galore!!
I have never seen so many cool buttons in one site. These are the coolest buttons you could ever hope to use developing a site... it you are indeed, in need, of some buttons. A picture in worth int i = 999; i++; words.

Site - Net Disaster
Have you ever wanted to blow up, shoot or let a bunch of angry hornets loose on a website? Or SOMEBODY'S website!?. Well now you can. Net Disaster lets you pull up a website and choose from a nice selection of disasters to unleash upon the site. You are actually attacking a screenshot of said website, no website will be hurt in this endeavor.

Site - World Monument Watch
This site was a Yahoo Daily Pick a couple of months ago. I started looking at it had to take it 'offline' so to speak. There were just way too many places to look at while at work.
What World Monuments has for you are lists of World Monuments of historical importance that are in danger. You can read up on what they do at their site. What you will see is an interactive map of the world with all the Monuments in danger designated by geographical location on the world map shown by hot link dots. When you click on a dot you'll be shown some pictures and more information about the monument in question. A very nice site to navigate and beautifully done.

Game - Gravity Pods
I found this wonderful distraction in an Instructables entry. What you do is shoot your 'ball' at the target out of a gun that you control with your up and down keys and fire the ball off with the spacebar. Its pretty straightforward except that there are 'Gravity Pods' that will throw off the flight of the ball. Have fun.
The Instructables entry has a lot of othter things to do, here is the link to that entry.