10 Online Geography Games That Help Kids Know More About The World

By Saikat Basu, MakeUseOfDecember 01, 2010 at 02:31PM

geography gamesGeography games take me back to my school years when we would play a Hangman’s version on a world map. The guessing of places and locations not only served as a study break, but it helped me score a few A plusses on the geography paper.

I also developed an abiding interest in geography and maps. Cut to the present, an app like Google Earth and Google Maps have almost revolutionized how we look at the world. The games we played on an atlas can now be played just as easily (and more interactively) in a browser.

As we found out with real maps as kids, todays’s online games based on maps are not only fun but they are very cool educational tools. Kids of today have it so much better with all the edutainment stuff they can call up with a mouse click.


Help your kids learn more about the world with these ten online geography games. You too can jump in.

Geosense

geography games

Geosense is an online geography game we have covered in detail before. You can play alone or go multiplayer. The fact that you can play and chat with someone across the world makes this game truly ‘geographical’. The idea is to get a fix on locations on the map within a time limit. You get to score over a few rounds. The game has five modes that are based on different choices of map, from an advanced world map to one that’s scrambled.

placeSpotting

geography trivia

This map based game is as you might have guessed, based on Google Maps. So you will have a bit of zooming in and out to do as you try to match the image on top to a location on the Google Map below it. Some hints are provided without which I can assure you that it would be practically impossible to solve. You can also create your own map puzzles and send it to your friends.

The site’s More page says that the success rate is 11%. The game is also available on Facebook and as an iPhone app.

Geo Challenge

geography trivia

Speaking of Facebook, Playfish is doing its bit for the geography IQ of kids and adults alike. Being on the social networking site, it’s also where you get to show off your scores as you pit your knowledge of countries, cities, flags, and landmarks against your friends. You have games like Suitcase Shuffle, Map Mayhem, City Blitz, and Landmark Loco to waste time on.

The Traveler IQ Challenge

geography trivia

This neat game is courtesy of TravelPod, the travel blog. You can play it on the other social networks too. Guess the locations within the time limit and move up the rounds. There’s a whole list of challenges for you to conquer. I really like the Photos of the World round.

FreePoverty

I missed including this game when I wrote about 5 Cool Edutainment Games You Can Play and Also Donate to Charitable Causes, because the bighearted idea is the same. So is the gameplay. The rewards are that correct answers from you go towards donating cups of drinking water and lessening world thirst. The site is looking for sponsors right now.

Virtual Game

A bit of promo and a whole lot more fun from Lufthansa, the German airline. You get to ‘pilot’ a jumbo jet and land it at destinations as directed. Three destinations and five destinations per round gives you a lot of chances to tote up points and feel good about travelling around the world.

My Wonderful World

geography games

NatGeo says that half of young Americans can’t locate world powers like Japan and India. National Geographic has a host of games including a lot of map based games in its section for kids. But I like this game because of its intent to give kids the power of global knowledge. So promote geography by taking part in the many geography games and quizzes that it has lined up. Crank up your global I.Q.

Placefy

geography for kids

The homepage gives you two geography games to pick from. Cluesify is a clue based travel game that takes you around the world. Placefy Classic asks you to identify cities by giving you landmarks as a hint. The former is the more difficult and more fun in my opinion.

Games4geog

geography for kids

I don’t know whether this site gets updated anymore, but the collection of cool Flash based games are variety enough to play a few rounds. The list of games tests your general knowledge as well as that of geography with games like Earthquakes and Volcanoes, Ecosystems, Tourism etc. Plus, you can explore countries like Brazil, Britain, and France.

World Map

geography games

I will end the list with one of the simplest geographical games you can use to start of your child with lessons on the map. 20 questions on cities and countries which you have to locate on a black and white map with your map, that’s all there is to it. Oh, it’s not easy as it sounds if you don’t know your geography.

An already globalized world necessitates that every child knows about his neighbors and those across the oceans (and adults too). After all you wouldn’t want them to grow up, become a U.S Vice-Presidential hopeful and not know the difference between a country and a continent.

Do you or your kids play geography games online? Let us know the ones you like.

Image: Shutterstock


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A Freeway System In Miniature

By Rich Whittle, Business Opportunities WeblogDecember 01, 2010 at 02:30PM

In 2006 artist Chris Burden and a team of eight studio assistants, including an engineer, began “Metropolis II.”

It includes 1,200 custom-designed cars and 18 lanes; 13 toy trains and tracks; and, dotting the landscape, buildings made of wood block, tiles, Legos and Lincoln Logs. The crew is still at work on the installation.

In “Metropolis II,” by his calculation, “every hour 100,000 cars circulate through the city,” Burden said. “It has an audio quality to it. When you have 1,200 cars circulating it mimics a real freeway. It’s quite intense.”


Via: Neatorama

ANNOUNCEMENT: Best Windows Software Page

By Aibek, MakeUseOfDecember 01, 2010 at 01:01PM

We enjoy making things easier and simplifying the web for our readers — that’s you.

First, we provided you with our customized Ninite pack for Windows, that automates the entire process of finding, downloading and installing selected applications for your Windows PC.

Still, we weren’t completely satisfied and went the extra mile to figure out the apps that you need/want/should download. We took that information and stuffed it all on one page so that you can use it as a reference on a regular basis.

Try not to be awed by the extensiveness of this amazing page. We’ve taken the effort to categorize the apps and picked the ones which will most likely be useful to you.

 

Make sure to bookmark and share the page with friends!

And like everything else on MakeUseOf, we appreciate your candor. If you think that we’ve left out your favourite app, let us know using the comment section below.


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A Comprehensive Guide to Sharing Your Data Across Multi-Booting Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs [Dual Boot]

By Whitson Gordon, LifehackerDecember 01, 2010 at 12:00PM

A Comprehensive Guide to Sharing Your Data Across Multi-Booting Windows, Mac, and Linux PCsWe’re platform agnostic at Lifehacker, which is why we love dual- and triple-booting our computers. Unfortunately sharing data between operating systems can be a huge headache. Here’s how to stay organized by keeping it all in one place.

There’s nothing more annoying than booting into OS X only to realize you need access to some files on your un-readable Linux partition; or Windows; or any combination thereof. The more operating systems we put on one computer, the more our data can get scattered around different partitions that we can’t read or write from other OSes. With the right drivers and a bit of organization, though, you can keep all your data in one central location, and read and write that data from any OS under the sun.

Of course, not everyone triple-boots their system, so I’ve divided this guide into easily scannable sections, so you can skip right to the sections that apply to your machine (i.e., if you don’t have OS X, you won’t need to know how to read HFS volumes, nor will you need any drivers for OS X).

Part One: Sharing Drives Between Operating Systems

One of the biggest roadblocks to making your data available through each OS are all the different filesystems each one uses. OS X uses HFS+ and can’t write to NTFS drives; Windows uses NTFS and ignores pretty much everything else, and Linux has support for nearly everything (albeit with some serious hassle caused by stingy UNIX permissions). Thus, before you do anything else, you’ll need to install the correct drivers in each OS for reading and writing to other filesystems. Here are the best choices we’ve found in each situation.

Note: while it’s very likely that your OS X partition is HFS+ and your Windows partition is NTFS, your Linux partition could be any number of filesystems. Unfortunately, Ext4 (which is becoming the new standard) still isn’t supported in most third-party Ext drivers. For the most part, the drivers in this guide will work with Ext3 and Ext2 formatted Linux drives only. If your drive is Ext4, you may have to clone your Linux partition, using an Ext3-formatted drive as the destination.

Accessing Mac and Linux Drives in Windows

Reading and writing to Linux drives is easy in Windows, but there aren’t any free, read/write drivers for Windows, so you’ll have to compromise somewhere. Here are your options.

For Mac Volumes

To install the Boot Camp drivers, just insert the Snow Leopard install disc into your Mac and install the drivers when prompted. If you’re on a Hackintosh, you won’t get this option, since the disc won’t recognize your computer as a Mac. To install the HFS drivers on a Hackintosh, you can use this installer instead.

A Comprehensive Guide to Sharing Your Data Across Multi-Booting Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs

Unfortunately, these drives are read-only. If you absolutely have to write to your HFS partition, the only way to do so is to spring for either Paragon’s $40 HFS+ for Windows 8 or Mediafour’s $50 MacDrive 8. It isn’t cheap, but sadly it’s the only read/write option currently available.

For Linux Volumes

A Comprehensive Guide to Sharing Your Data Across Multi-Booting Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs
Luckily, there is a relatively pain-free Ext2/Ext3 driver for Windows called Ext2Fsd. Just download it and install it like a normal Windows program. When you get to the “Select Additional Tasks” stage, check all the necessary boxes for your setup (I chose to check all three). Once you’re done, however, you’ll get this error message:

A Comprehensive Guide to Sharing Your Data Across Multi-Booting Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs

To fix it, navigate to Ext2Fsd’s install location (C:\Program Files\Ext2Fsd by default), right click on Ext2Mgr,exe, hit Properties, and check the “Run as Administrator” box under Compatibility. Then, double click on it to set up your drive. Double click on your Ext3 drive, click the Mount Points button, hit Add, and select a drive letter for your drive. I chose to create a permanent mount point for the drive so it’s always mounted. You can choose whatever you want at this stage. Once you’re done, you should be able to browse your Linux drive from Windows Explorer just as you would any other drive.

A Comprehensive Guide to Sharing Your Data Across Multi-Booting Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs

Accessing Windows and Linux Drives in Mac OS X

A Comprehensive Guide to Sharing Your Data Across Multi-Booting Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs

With the free, open-source utility MacFuse, you can enable support for Windows and Linux drives very easily in OS X. All it takes is a few simple installer packages. Before you install the drivers themselves, you’ll need to install MacFuse. Then, install either (or both) of the drivers below depending on your needs.

For Windows Volumes

While Mac OS X can read NTFS partitions out of the box, you can’t actually write to them. If you need both read and write support, you can install the NTFS-3G driver after installing MacFuse. Just head over to their homepage, download the software, and double-click on the package to install. When prompted, I chose to use UBLIO caching during the installation process, since my NTFS partition is on an internal drive and is unlikely to be unintentionally disconnected. When you reboot, you should have full write support.

A Comprehensive Guide to Sharing Your Data Across Multi-Booting Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs

Note that their homepage is a bit confusing—the people who work on NTFS-3G also develop a driver called Tuxera NTFS for Mac, which is not what you want (unless you feel like paying $30 for slightly better performance, in which case go for it). Make sure you’re downloading “NTFS-3G for Mac OS X” before you install. You may have to scroll down the blog to find a post containing the latest download. It isn’t the most well-organized homepage.

For Linux Volumes

A Comprehensive Guide to Sharing Your Data Across Multi-Booting Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs
To get Ext3 and Ext2 support in OS X, just download the Fuse-ext2 driver from this Sourceforge page and install the package. When you reboot, you should have read access to your Linux drive.

A Comprehensive Guide to Sharing Your Data Across Multi-Booting Windows, Mac, and Linux PCsWhile the drive does support reading and writing, it’s set as read-only by default. You can enable it by tweaking a configuration file, but I will note that while many have had success with this method in Snow Leopard, it keeps throwing me an error when I try to write to the drive, so your mileage may vary. To make OS X mount the drive as read/write, just navigate to /System/Library/Filesystems/. Right-click on the fuse-ext2.fs file and hit “Show Package Contents.” Then, drag fuse-ext2.util to the desktop, right-click on it, and hit “Open With”, choosing TextEdit when prompted.

Use Cmd+F to find the line that says OPTIONS="auto_xattr,defer_permissions" near the middle of the file. Add ,rw+ to that line inside the quotes, so it reads:

OPTIONS=auto_xattr,defer_permissions,rw+"

When you reboot, the drive should be mounted as read/write. Note once again that write support is a bit buggy in this driver, so just be wary.

Accessing Windows and Mac Drives in Linux

Most Linux distros come with full NTFS support built-in, as well as read support for HFS+. So, you only need to do anything extra in Linux if you want to write to Mac-formatted drives.

For Mac Volumes

A Comprehensive Guide to Sharing Your Data Across Multi-Booting Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs
By default, Mac OS X formats volumes in journaled HFS+ volumes. Journaling is a feature that improves data reliability, and unfortunately it makes HFS drives read-only in Linux. To disable journaling, just boot into OS X and fire up Disk Utility. Click on your HFS partition, hold the Option key, and click File in the menu bar. A new option to Disable Journaling will come up in the menu. Click that, and reboot into Linux. You should have read and write access to your HFS partition—however, the permissions on your Mac user’s home folder will prevent you from reading or writing those files. See Part Two below to fix that problem.

Part Two: Putting All Your Data in One Place

This part is optional, but I’ve found that using one home folder to store all my data (and linking to that home folder in the other two OSes) makes life a lot easier, especially since a few of the drivers listed above aren’t quite perfect. Plus, by putting all my data in one place, I can keep my music libraries synced together, pause torrent downloading in one OS and resume it in another, and so on.

A Comprehensive Guide to Sharing Your Data Across Multi-Booting Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs

First, pick which OSes home folder you want to use for this—I like to use OS X’s home folder—and follow the instructions below to use it across OSes. Depending on your needs, you may choose to store all your data in your Windows or Linux home folder. The best way to decide which to use is by which OSes you use the most—since I barely use Windows (and thus didn’t feel like paying $40 for a read/write driver), I used my OS X partition as my main data dump, since it’s easy for Linux to read and write to it. The main idea is to not use a partition that has bad write support in an OS you use often—so, if you’re a heavy OS X user, you wouldn’t want to put all your data on your Linux partition, since the OS X driver isn’t so great. Similarly, if you use Windows often, you wouldn’t want to put it all on your OS X partition (unless you want to pay $40 for MacDrive). Think about which partition would be most convenient for you and go with it—after all, you can always move your data later if you so choose.

Making Mac and Linux Home Folders Play Nicely with One Another

The great thing about OS X and Linux is that they are both UNIX-based operating systems, so they work pretty well together if you can get everything set up correctly. When you create a user in either operating system, it gives you a User ID number. OS X starts these numbers in the 500s, while Linux usually starts in the thousands. This is problematic because a different “user” owns your home folder in OS X than owns your home folder in Linux. As such, Linux will deny you access to your OS X home folder, since you don’t have the right permissions to access it.

A Comprehensive Guide to Sharing Your Data Across Multi-Booting Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs

There’s an easy fix, however—we just need to change our UID in one OS so that it matches the UID in the other. Unless you have a reason for choosing otherwise, we’re going to change our Linux UID to match our OS X one, since it’s a bit easier. By default, the first user in OS X has a UID of 501, but you can double check this by going into System Preferences in OS X, right-clicking on your user, and hitting Advanced Options. If your User ID is something different from 501, replace 501 with your other UID in the terminal commands below.

Boot into Linux (we’re using Ubuntu in this example) and fire up the Terminal. First, we’re going to add a temporary user, since we don’t want to edit a user that we’re currently logged into. So, run the following commands int he Terminal, hitting Enter after each one:

sudo useradd -d /home/tempuser -m -s /bin/bash -G admin tempuser

sudo passwd tempuser

Type in a new password for the temporary user when prompted. Reboot and login as tempuser. Then, open up the Terminal and type in the following commands, once again hitting enter after each one (and replacing yourusername with your Linux user’s username):

sudo usermod --uid 501 yourusername

sudo chown -R 501:yourusername /home/yourusername

This will change your Linux user’s UID to 501 and fix your home folder permissions so that you still own them. Now, you should be able to read and write to both your Mac and Linux user’s home folder, no matter what OS you’re logged into.

You may also want to fix your login screen, since by default Ubuntu won’t list users with a UID of less than 1000. To do this, just open a Terminal and run gksudo gedit /etc/login.defs and search for UID_MIN in the text file. Change that value from 1000 to 501, and when you reboot your user will be listed in the login screen.

A Comprehensive Guide to Sharing Your Data Across Multi-Booting Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs

Lastly, log back in as your normal user and run sudo userdel -r tempuser to delete the temporary user we created earlier.

If you like, you can create symlinks in one of your home folders that point to your main home folder for quick access. For example, since I use my OS X home folder as my main data dump, my Linux home folder is mostly empty. So, I created symlinks in my Linux home folder for Documents, Videos, Pictures, etc. that point to the equivalent folders on my Mac partition. You can do this by using the following Terminal command:

ln -s /path/to/linked/folder /path/to/symlink/

If you’re using your Linux home folder as the main one, you can use this same command to create symlinks that link to your Linux home folder instead.

Note that if you’re using your Mac partition as the main home folder, you’ll probably also want to automatically mount it in Linux when you start up. You can do this by adding a line to the end of /etc/fstab. This will vary from person to person, but mine looks like this:

/dev/sda3 /media/Data auto rw,user,auto 0 0

Where /dev/sda3 is the location of the partition containing the home folder and media/Data is the path I want to use to navigate to it.

Using Libraries in Windows 7

A Comprehensive Guide to Sharing Your Data Across Multi-Booting Windows, Mac, and Linux PCsSince Windows doesn’t support UNIX permissions, you won’t need to mess with them at all—you should be able to read and write to your Mac and Linux home folders without a problem (as long as you have the correct drivers installed). To make them easier to access, we can use Windows 7’s awesome Libraries feature, which allows your Documents, Videos, Pictures, and other “libraries” to link to multiple folders on your drive, so you can access the files stored in your main home folder from shortcuts in the Windows Explorer sidebar (and in many applications).

To add those folders to each library, open up Windows Explorer. Right click on a Library (say, Documents), and hit Properties. Hit the “Include a folder” button and navigate to the Documents folder in your main home folder. Hit Include, and you should see it show up in the list. You can even click on it and hit “Set Save Location” to set it as the default save location for the types of files Windows associates with that Library. Repeat this for your other libraries and you’re all set on the Windows front.


Now, I just make sure all my applications point to the same directories in each OS. For example, I have Amarok watching my iTunes folder for new files, so when I add music to my iTunes library, it will show up automatically in Amarok (similarly, I can add newly download music to iTunes’ “Add Automatically to iTunes” folder for it to automatically show up in both Amarok and iTunes). I tell my torrent downloader in each OS to download new torrents to the same location, so if I want to leave Linux and continue downloading a torrent in OS X, I can just reboot, add the torrent to Transmission’s queue, and it will pick up right where I left off in Linux. This way, you don’t need to use space-limited solutions like Dropbox (as awesome as they are for inter-computer syncing) to sync your data—it’s just always there. There are, of course, other ways to do this, but this is the way I have it set up. How do you share your data between multiple operating systems? Share your favorite strategies in the comments.

Divine Composition With Fibonacci’s Ratio (The Rule of Thirds on Steroids)

By James Brandon, Digital Photography SchoolDecember 01, 2010 at 09:22AM

Are you a stickler for little details? Well, if you’re a photographer, you had better be. Discovering the rule of thirds is a big milestone for any photographer. Suddenly, you realize that all you ever did before was center your subject right smack dab in the middle of the frame, because that’s where the camera’s focus grid is located. Makes sense right? The rule of thirds took you to new heights in your photographic journey, moving your subject off to one side or another in your frame, or to the top or bottom. But don’t some of these photos look a bit crowded being so close to either side of the frame? Sure it works in some cases, but what if there was still another rule you could incorporate into your photographic repertoire?

Enter Fibonacci’s Ratio…

Also known as the Golden Mean, Phi, or Divine Proportion, this law was made famous by Leonardo Fibonacci around 1200 A.D. He noticed that there was an absolute ratio that appears often throughout nature, a sort of design that is universally efficient in living things and pleasing to the human eye. Hence, the “divine proportion” nickname.

Since the Renaissance, artists and architects have designed their work to approximate this ratio of 1:1.618. It’s found all over the Parthenon, in famous works of art like the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper, and it’s still used today. The divine proportion has been used by companies like Apple to design products, it’s said to have been used by Twitter to create their new profile page, and has been used by major companies all over the world to design logos. It’s not talked about in most photography circles because it’s a somewhat advanced method of composition and can be confusing to a lot of people. It’s so much easier to just talk about the “rule of thirds” because it’s exact, precise and easy to follow.

This ratio can be used in many ways to compose a photograph. Lightroom 3 even has a golden ratio overlay option when you go to crop on image. This way, you can line up a grid of the golden ratio to coincide with lines or points of interest in your photograph. At this point, you may be quite confused. If you are, please take a few moments to watch any one (or all) of these videos that seek to explain this ratio.

Video 1: Natures Number: 1.618
Video 2: Nature by Numbers
Video 3: Golden Ratio

Ok, hopefully that made things a bit more clear? By now you should know that this is NOT a conspiracy theory or fuzzy math. This is a real aspect of composition that has been used by historical famous artists and architects, and Fortune 500 companies. When applied to photography, this ratio can produce aesthetically pleasing compositions that can be magnets for the human sub-conscious. When you take the sweet spot of the Fibonnaci Ratio and recreate it four times into a grid, you get what looks to be a rule of thirds grid. However, upon closer inspection you will see that this grid is not an exact splitting of the frame into three pieces. Instead of a 3 piece grid that goes 1+1+1=frame, you get a grid that goes 1+.618+1=frame. Here are a few examples a Phi grid placed over some images that I’ve used it on in the past…

In the above example, I placed the slightly more dominant eye of the horse on one of the Phi intersections. Consider that if I had placed a rule of thirds grid over this photo and lined the eye up with that, the head would be crowding the left side of the frame. In this photo, the head isn’t center, it’s not crowding either side. It’s just right, would you agree? Let’s take a look at another…

This one is slightly different. If you’re a REAL stickler for details, you may have noticed that there is a slight difference between the intersecting lines of the Phi graph, and the sweet spot of Phi itself. In this image, I made sure to align the head of my subject within the spiral and placed the left eye approximately over the sweet spot. Ok, moving on…

In this photograph, from Key West, I lined up the horizon with the top line of the Phi grid. In my opinion, when you line up the horizon with a rule of thirds grid, the separation is too…obvious. I think it would leave a bit too much of what isn’t the subject in the image. In this photo, the sky and clouds are the perfect compliment to what I’m trying to convey in the photo: The church on the bottom right, and the famous Duval street on the left. But with any more sky than is already present in the photo, the viewer might think the sky is actually the subject. Here’s one more…

In this example, I used multiple lines on the Phi grid for my final composition. I lined up the doors with both vertical lines, as well as the bottom horizontal line. This provided for a perfect amount of ceiling to lead the viewers eye to the door. Here’s a few more examples without the grid. See if you can imagine the grid over the images and determine why the image was composed the way it was.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this article has shed some light on a somewhat mysterious subject in the world of photography. Fibonacci’s Ratio is a powerful tool for composing your photographs, and it shouldn’t be dismissed as a minor difference from the rule of thirds. While the grids look similar, using Phi can sometimes mean the difference between a photo that just clicks, and one that doesn’t quite feel right. I’m certainly not saying that the rule of thirds doesn’t have a place in photography, but Phi is a far superior and much more intelligent and historically proven method for composing a scene.

If you’d like to start incorporating this powerful composition tool into your photography, you’re in luck! I’ve included a PNG overlay of both the Fibonacci Spiral and the Fibonacci Grid. Just click this download link to start using them. These overlays are for use in Photoshop. Just place them into the file you are working on, then scale them to the correct size of the image.

Post from: Digital Photography School

Engineer Guy vs. the flight data recorder

By Sean Michael Ragan, MAKENovember 30, 2010 at 04:30PM

Bill Hammack’s video confection is especially sweet this week. Bill scored a vintage Delta “black box” on eBay and, in this week’s installment, tears it apart on camera to show you how they built ’em in the old days to stand up to “three-thousand gees and one-thousand degrees.” I just watched it, and I’m having a hard time resisting my ebullient urge to spoil the ending for you, so I’ll just shut up and let Engineer Guy take it away. [Thanks, Bill!]

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Store your Gallery 3 Images on Amazon S3

By ckdake, Gallery – Your photos on your websiteNovember 30, 2010 at 04:17PM

Does your webhost not have much file space available? Or perhaps are you hosting your Gallery 3 at home behind a slow DSL connection?

We recently pulled a module from danneh3826 into the Gallery 3 Contrib repository that may be just what you’re looking for. The Amazon S3 module takes over for file storage in Gallery 3 and saves all your images in the cloud on Amazon S3 which tends to be cheap, fast, and reliable.

Here’s how to Get started using Gallery 3 contrib modules. Enjoy the Amazon S3 module and all the other great contributions from the community!

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Use the “Dead Body” Bundle Technique to Transport Clothes When Moving [Clever Uses]

By theworldisasheep, LifehackerNovember 30, 2010 at 01:00PM

Use the "Dead Body" Bundle Technique to Transport Clothes When MovingWhen moving from place to place, packing up clothes is a huge pain. Skip all the folding, boxing, and fussing, the “dead body” bundle is a quick and hassle-free way to move your closet from your old home to your new.

Photo by Alicia Nijdam.

Lifehacker reader theworldisasheep shares a clever and speedy way to move an entire closet from one place to another without all the fussing around with boxing up clothes.

This tip is great if you’re moving from one living space to another and you’ve a lot of hanging clothes. Learned this from a friend, he calls it the “dead body method”.

Take a bed sheet, lay it out on your bed or floor, take the clothes (hangers and all) and lay them out on top of each other on the sheet. Pile them in the middle and make sure the clothes are aligned to they’re parallel with the length of the sheet.

Fold the sides of the sheet over the clothes (there should be some overlap) and twist the ends. You carry it by the twisted end—with a friend on the other side because this can get deceptively heavy.

Doing it this way is fast (you can get one bundle together in sixty seconds or less), efficient (no buying extra packing material) and your clothes won’t get wrinkled.

Plus, you get to freak out the neighbors.

Sounds like a much better method than trying to carry all your clothes down and hang them up in the backseat of a car or packing them all in single-purpose (and pricey) wardrobe boxes. Thanks theworldisasheep!

[via #tips]

Malwarebytes 1.5 detects and cleans more malware faster than ever

By Lee Mathews, Download SquadNovember 30, 2010 at 09:00AM

Malwarebytes is one of the most trusted and effective tools for removing all kinds of malicious software. Over at the Malwarebytes forums, there’s big news today: MBAM 1.5 has been released, and it’s faster, smarter, and better than ever. Startup time has been trimmed to just a few seconds and scanning speed improved by as much as 500%. There’s also a host of new detection algorithms which allow MBAM to better detect all the frustrating, shifty malware floating around cyberspace.

Users can now manually add files and folders to the Malwarebytes ignore list, too. If you own the pro version, you’ll get enhanced command line tools, a smarter, faster “Flash scan” which takes as little as 10 seconds to complete, and one-touch automatic updating.

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Malwarebytes 1.5 detects and cleans more malware faster than ever originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 30 Nov 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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