Peter's Useful Crap

First of all, let me state that with all of the sites that I mention, unless they are my own silly creations, I am receiving nothing for the free plugs.

Anyway, so the great news from Skype earlier this year was that it was offering free PC-to-phone calls within North America until the end of the year. However, this rather new site called Jajah takes the whole PC/phone convenience thing one step further. You need your computer only to initiate the call. It works like this:

1) Register your phone number
2) Enter the number you wish to call on the Jajah website
3) Your phone rings (not your computer) and you pick up
4) Your friend’s phone rings

Boom — phone-to-phone calls, initiated at the Jajah website. Check their Free Calls FAQ Page to make sure they’re not messing with us. They do state, however, that there really is “no catch”. I’m interested to see what will become of this Jajah…

Also, make sure you check the rate page to make sure that your call is free (remember, it’s between many countries that it’s free, but not all!).

————————-

August 8th, 2006 update: so, what’s up with this… yet another startup offering a free PC-to-phone service (although not phone-to-phone like Jajah). They call themselves Gizmo, and work very similarly to Skype.

————————-

January 28th, 2007 update: a few months on Jajah, a few more friends convinced, many dollars saved! Just make sure to keep your account “active” by making a free call at least once a week!

Sick of the Magic 8-ball? Or do you simply not have one? Get The Blog to answer all of your trivial (or not so trivial) yes/no questions!

Now, you might say, this is more “useless” than “useful”. However, consider this scenario: Trevor cannot decide whether he should eat a sub for lunch. Compared to all of the other problems that this world is presented with (wars, starvation, etc.), Trevor really ought not waste too much time on such a trivial matter. Therefore, by getting The Blog to offer its opinion quickly on the lunch issue, Trevor can then get on with saving the world. I would say that’s some darn useful crap.

So there I was typing in every possible keyword combination into Google about “resizing text boxes without resizing the text itself” (and 200 other variations over the course of an hour). All I wanted to do was to change text from being left-aligned to being centered, but the text box was obviously the wrong size to be centered. Naturally, I went to resize the text box. But when I resized the text box, the text itself was changed as well!

From:

To:

Trying to tweak every conceivable Photoshop option and using ctrl+click, shift+right-click, scream-at-computer-click, etc. got me nowhere. So thanks for nothing to Google and thanks for nothing to my brain.

Yeah, I could have just created a new text box, but that would have meant giving in. So, after an hour I sent the file to Derek (smart guy) and complained. He replied: “I don’t have the problem — I can resize the text box and the font size isn’t changed.”

What!?!? Is this a joke!?!? I went back to Photoshop and… ah… for some reason a light finally turned on: I should have simply resized while using the Text Tool; all along, I was trying to use the arrow to resize the text box.

Thankfully, somebody else has had this problem (way back in 2003, and his question in a newsgroup was actually never answered), so before I go and bang my head against the wall, maybe I can blame Adobe Photoshop for poor design? OK fine, I’m an idiot. But now I am writing about this in the hopes that someone, somewhere, sometime, will have this same problem and will find this post. And that hour that they will save (well, probably less since I’m a bit slow) is priceless.

I’ve had a Writely account for a while but haven’t really done much about it until now. It can be quite handy to collaborate on documents with other people (in real time, no less).

Anyway, Google does a good job about keeping projects in Beta and increasing hype by limiting sign-ups. I don’t know how many people I can invite to Writely… if you want to check it out, leave a comment on this post and I’ll send you an invite. Write your e-mail address in the e-mail field — it won’t be publicly posted.

Also, if you need to collaborate on spreadsheets (read: tough assignments if you’re a student), check out Google Spreadsheets. You don’t even need an invite for that.

—————————————–

Update: looks like Google has fully integrated Writely into its Documents and Spreadsheets and all you need to sign up is a Google account (which is free).

This caps my recent scripting urge… and is the most fun of the bunch in my opinion!

For those who have an account at my Unkymoods revival, Punkymoods (go get an account if you don’t!) and who blog with WordPress, here’s the tool for you! It is a Wordpress plugin that will allow you to update your mood from within the WordPress control panel. All you have to do is upload two php files to your plugin directory, configure the first few lines, and voilà — more Punkyfun!

Note: you must have a Punkymoods account first!

—————————-

Download the Update Punkymoods WordPress plugin Version 0.4 (March 30, 2008)

Widget version:
Punkymoods widget plugin! It includes the usual “Update Punkymoods” plugin but you can also drag and drop the Punkymoods display in the sidebar. Fun times… fun times indeed. Follow the same instructions as listed below for the normal Punkymoods plugin, but make sure to upload the files into the widget folder (wp-content/plugins/widgets/)

Note: if you have a wordpress.com installation of WordPress, you cannot use this plugin wordpress.com does not allow users to install plugins…

—————————-

Brief instructions: download the plugin above. Unzip the two files inside to your WordPress plugins directory (likely /wp-content/plugins/). Log into your WordPress admin panel. Click on Plugins, then Plugin Editor, then Update Your Punkymood. Scroll down through the file until you see the lines “// set this to equal 0 for female, 1 for male, 2 to display all images” and “// enter your punkymoods login info”. Set the appropriate fields for your username, password, user id, and mood gender (all from punkymoods.com). Save your changes, go back to the Plugins menu, then activate the plugin. Go to the Manage menu to change your Punkymood from within WordPress!