By The Business Insider, Gizmodo – March 16, 2010 at 03:40PM
One of the more interesting things you can do with the iPhone is use it as a remote control for other devices. Since the iPhone App Store launched almost two years ago, developers have created hundreds of remote control applications. More »
By Saikat Basu, MakeUseOf – March 16, 2010 at 03:31PM
What is the longest movie ever made?
Got the answer? Well, I will put the answer at the end of this article but I hope you got the point behind the quiz. If you get it correct, you have the taste for trivia that probably goes with your taste for good movies.
The word ‘trivia’, literally stands for something which is of not much importance. But as trivia buffs know, in such trifling details lie oodles of fun. A heap of trivia knowledge on movies gives a movie buff a whole lot of bragging rights. It’s the same with sports as it is with movies.
There’s a broad line that separates a weekend watcher from a true cinema lover and that’s the cinematic general knowledge you carry along with your popcorn. Movie trivia is not only fun, but it is a slice of moviedom history as well. It is through movie trivia we get to know a lot more astonishing facts and surprising tidbits that add to the magic of movies.
When we brought out our Internet Guide for the Movie Freak, we missed out on giving cool movie trivia games and quizzes a spot of the limelight. A film and movie freak can dig out all the usual – and unusual – details of a movie without help, but to give movie lovers some heads up here are ten websites or webpages where you can find a bucketful of trivia questions.
Expand your knowledge or just have some fun testing your grey cells.
The Internet Movie Database is the ultimate reference for movies released around the world. But it is not just loads and loads of data. You also get to chill out with some cool games like Tile Slider where you arrange the tiles to make scenes from your favorite movies. There are levels too, from the easy to the super difficult. How fast can you solve it?
If that’s a bit too much then check out the trivia quiz, or The Hangman Game where you have to guess the answer or swing.
You won’t become a Jedi master, but you will be able to hold your head high in the council of Star War fans if you manage to conquer this cool movie trivia game. A little video pops up and a fan just like you asks a question. Get the answer before the light saber beats you to the time.
The two games featured here took me back to my school quizzes. Given a frame from a movie, you have to get the name. That’s the Frame by Frame game. If you think watching a 5 second clip and guessing is easier, think again because you might get a lot of answers wrong when you play Gone in 5 Seconds. Screenplay also has a puzzle game called Movie Madness and a normal quiz for those who like their games simple.
Play against the community and find out how well you know a movie. The questions are put up through a host of Flash quizzes. The challenge is to get on the leaderboard.
Visual and text quizzes and its trademarked Invisibles quiz are the hallmarks of this movie trivia website. In the Invisibles quiz, you are given a screenshot from a scene but with just the costumes of the characters. The characters are all invisible. How cool is that!
Check out the Filmwise forums too for a lot more content and contests.
Follow the link and get into the site’s Movie Quizzes. You can sort the quizzes that are collected or browse them according to the genres given in the sidebar. The quizzes are of similar Q&A types but the sheer variety of topics makes them interesting challenges.
Play a clip and answer from the multiple choice answers given below it. Some of the clips really call upon your attention to detail while you are watching a film. For instance, watch a clip from Rocky IV and answer – The character Apollo Creed is known by all of the nicknames listed below except for…
Just like IMDb, Flixster too is a movie info site. So it takes fun seriously too with its Fun & Games section. You can register and log in to share all the fun with the community or just play it alone. There are cool movie trivia games like The Never-Ending Movie Quiz, where users submit questions and keep the game going by answering those submitted by others.Play a round of Personality Tests and you can find out which Hollywood star you resemble the most. Then there are a host of user submitted quizzes to keep you busy if you get ditched by your date on a movie night.
Entertainment quizzes galore. These are a mix of trivia and tests. For instance, the question in the screenshot above will give you an inkling. But nearly all of them will test how much you really know about the movies.
Go into this trivia game if you really know your ‘Maltese Falcon’ from your ‘Casablanca’. Turner Classic Movies can really test your knowledge by asking you 15 trivia questions daily. Get yourself on the leaderboard or better still, ask your grandparents to play this game for a round of Sunday fun.
So, we come to the end credits for this post. In listing these ten sites for movie trivia, I hope the film buffs will really like the picks. Also, keeping the list to the number 10 meant leaving out a few more which I am sure are out there.
Heck! That’s what the comments section is for. Leave a mention of your own favorite movie trivia game or website. With movies, even many ain’t enough!
And the answer to the trivia question asked at the beginning? Here it is you movie buffs – Cinematon, an experimental film that was 151-hours long. You get points for getting it right.
Image Credit: photine
Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!
By Simon Slangen, MakeUseOf – March 16, 2010 at 02:31PM
You really need an avatar or profile picture in your day-to-day online life. They add a certain personality to your online identity and allows you to distinguish yourself from the rest of the flock.
You need them on Facebook, in your instant messaging application, and you can even use Gravatar to personalize your comments on MakeUseOf, and a ton of other sites.
A lot of people are too shy, or paranoid, to use a ‘real’ profile pictures. It’s understandable. You just don’t want to have your face next to everything you say and do on the internet. That’s why you build your own avatar: a digital caricature to represent the online you.
Below are four highly diverse online services that allow you to build your own highly personalized avatars, ranging from black-and white sketches to animated 3D.
Build Your Wild Self is that one-in-a-million avatar tool. It draws your kiddy self in rich colors and imaginative features. Inner adults do not exist. You should still find a remnant of the kid in you. The resulting avatars have that grainy pencil-drawn look about them. Talk about character.
Sure, you can use the tool to draw some normal arms and buttocks, but how boring would that be? Rather put in a little octopus, lying, or arachnid. Consider it a conversation starter.
When you’re done, click on ‘Get a Wild Desktop‘ for a big wild-you picture. Crop the image, or just take a screenshot of the part you want to keep. Easy as that!
With Avatar in our wake and Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland on the horizon, you’ve got two very good reasons to get excited about 3D. And don’t forget Heavy Rain. While you’re at it, why not build your own 3D avatar? With a bit of tweaking, it’s like looking in a 3D mirror. The only downside of Avatara is the need to sign up to render your avatar.
Once you’re satisfied with your avatar’s appearance, you can choose an animation. Use breathing for a simple mugshot, or have yourself dance around on the screen.
The easiest way of ‘extracting’ the avatar is to mail it to yourself after signing up. This will give you an animated gif of your 3D character. Not a lot of sites still allow for animated avatars, but even in the worst case scenario, you can still use the 3D you as a still.
Back to pencilwork, Digibody’s Caricature Maker is for those of you who aren’t looking for the most realistic depiction. Draw yourself in caricature with a few heavily exaggerated facial features. There’s things little more personal than enlarging and making fun with your own characteristics. After all, it’s the quirks and imperfections that make you… well, you.
The tool is sometimes a little slow to respond, and seems to reload the page with every customization, but the result is often hilarious. I give you my word, you’ll have a hard time finding a lot of normal facial features on that page.
Once you’re done, save the image to your desktop in png, gif or jpg, or extract the HTML to embed it on a web page or in a forum.
One of the best avatar (I should say, mangatar) creators. Whip up a funny manga-style profile picture in a whip. It’s one of the avatar creation services that’s used a lot with Gravatar.
Where the above caricature makers really focuses on facial features, FaceYourManga takes on your character by exaggerating facial expressions. It’s easy to make a smart-, angry-, energetic-, or happy looking avatar. Throw in some crazy accessories, and you’re all set.
What avatar creator do you prefer? Tell us your personal picks in the comments section below!
By (author unknown), The Onion – March 16, 2010 at 11:00AM
Buying a house is one of the biggest decisions a person can make, so when I set out to purchase my first home, I didn’t take the matter lightly….
By Ben Blanquera, Techlife – March 15, 2010 at 10:55PM
Source: Business First Columbus
An Ohio State University cancer researcher has landed on an annual ranking of the most-cited researchers in the world.
Thomson Reuters in the March/April issue of its Science Watch publication named the 12 “hottest” researchers, which it defined as authors whose recent scholarly papers were referenced most often by other researchers last year. On the list with 12 “hot” papers was Dr. Carlo Croce, director of human cancer genetics at Ohio State.
Leading the latest Thomson ranking was biochemist Rudolf Jaenisch from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with 14 “hot” papers. Behind Jaenisch with 13 papers were genetics researchers Mark Daly and David Altshuler from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University and materials researcher Andre Geim at the University of Manchester.
For details on the Science Watch researcher ranking, click here.
By Ryan Dube, MakeUseOf – March 15, 2010 at 03:30PM
I love Google, Bing and Yahoo just as much as the next Internet user, but sometimes you really want to dig down into a particular subject.
In order to do that, you really need access to those underground search engines that may not be quite as well known, but they dig much more deeply into specialized areas of the Internet than the general search engines are capable of.
In many cases, these search engines are tapped into what is currently termed the “invisible web,” which is the information available on the Internet that standard search engines don’t have access to, because they are buried behind query forms or directory requests.
The following 6 underground search engines that I chose are not porn sites, illegal piracy sites or anything else that could get you in trouble with the law, or with your significant other. Instead, I term the following as “underground search engines” for two reasons. First, because they are so specialized that, although they are extremely useful, these search engines remain hidden from the general Internet population.
Second, because they provide a search service to a select community of Internet users who are interested in the specific subject matter that the search engine covers. So, in this article I’ll be covering seven “topical” search engines that I consider that best in that topic area.
If you are a Torrent enthusiast, and you find yourself pouring through the hundreds of search engines that are available online for shared torrent files, then search no longer. Torrent Finder is one of the most impressive meta-search engines for Torrent files around. It methodically searches through over 170 torrent sites to identify the results that pertain to what you’re looking for.
The available list of Torrent sites that are plugged into this meta-search is impressive, and even more impressive are the search results. Now, I did say that I would stick to underground search engines that are not illegal, and many Torrent searches are done for the purpose of downloading copyrighted software, but the truth is that there are thousands of legitimate and legal Torrent files available. Torrent Finder is clearly the king when it comes to accumulating and presenting an aggregate of search results.
Here is a search for “classical music,” with over 300 results. Some keywords searches turn up a thousand results or more. The nice thing about the results from Torrent Finder is that you get a view of positive and negative comments, so you can get a hint that a file may not be legitimate before you attempt a download.
At MakeUseOf, you’ll find a lot of excellent resources for how to find awesome deals, such as coverage of the great bargain search engine FreshBargains. FreshBargains aggregates results from 15 top websites, which is excellent. However, another fantastic and barely known website to find freebies is called Prospector.
Prospector is based in the Czech Republic, but the list of free stuff that you can find here knows no borders. We’re talking stuff for the home, free computer software, free educational supplies and tons more. In all fairness, the site is more of a directory of content, but with over 3300 categorized and reviewed links to freebies – it’s a body of information that deserves greater recognition.
Earlier, I wrote an article about the best websites to find foreclosed homes. Public government sources seemed to provide the most information without requiring a paid membership. However, somehow I missed AOL Foreclosures. This foreclosure search engine sifts through various sources of foreclosure listings from all across the country (U.S. only), and unlike the paid sites – it offers price, address, and as much information about the property as is available. AOL Foreclosures is one of the unsung heros of free foreclosure search engines.
An even better as-yet unknown search engine that also deserves mention is Trulia. Trulia is yet another young search engine that provides collected real estate information from various sources, and offers it to you, the homebuyer, completely free of charge. No longer is it only for those who are “rights” to the information. With Trulia, you can see the current asking price, the address (most paid sites will leave that out for free members), square footage, and even whether the price was recently reduced or increased, and by how much.
Most importantly, the site also shows recent sale prices – which is information previously very difficult for buyers to obtain without a realtor. When you’re searching for a house, knowledge is power, and the knowledge that the Trulia real estate sales search engine offers will give you that power.
Another very common sought-after search engine that isn’t always very easy to find are those that offer free public records information. Nine times out of ten, if you try to find such a search engine, you’ll end up with results from one of the major commercial companies trying to sell paid public records search results to you. However, the Public Record Center is different.
While it is more of an underground “portal” than a search engine, it is actually a portal to some of the most obscure, yet useful, public information search engines on the Internet. Starting at this one site, you can find the government search engines where you can search for court judgments and liens, conduct asset searches, and even look up copyright and trademark information. With so much demand on the web for free access to public records – this is the perfect centralized location where you can access virtually everything.
Ever hear of a search engine that lets you dig up legal information from the web? Neither did I, until I discovered Cornell’s Legal Information Institute. This amazing little search engine digs through the Institutes extensive legal library and pulls out any information that you might need. This could include family law, criminal law, labor law and much more.
For those of you who feel that you have what it takes to defend yourself in court, there’s also a very useful search engine where you can extract opinions from the U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeal.
There are similar search engines buried throughout this excellent legal resource. If you have any interest in law at all, take some time to check this one out – it’s a diamond in the rough.
Of course, if we want to go really underground, we’ve got to go paranormal. And there’s really no better underground paranormal search engine out there than UFO Seek. Don’t let the name fool you, this particular niche search engine isn’t just focused on UFOs and aliens.
UFOSeek covers just about anything out there that’s paranormal, as well as new age, alternative health, science, the occult, ghosts and just about anything else that you might consider “fringe.” It’s one of my favorite search engines on the net.
Now that I’ve gone over a few of my favorite hardly-known, niche search engines, offer some of your own! What are your favorite underground search engines that you wish more people knew about? Share your insight in the comments section below.
Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!
By Lee Mathews, Download Squad – March 15, 2010 at 03:00PM
Need a simple way to download multiple images? Check out Downloadr (screencast after the break!), a free program with loads of options which makes short work of bulk downloading from Flickr.
Downloadr is packed with search options and fully plugged in to Flickr — so it can locate and download everything you’ve added to your favorites. Authentication is also supported, meaning you can download private images to which you have access.
Downloadr in action from Jan-Gerd Tenberge on Vimeo.
The .Net 3.5 framework is required — download it from FileHippo if you don’t have it installed already.
Downloadr is an awesome bulk downloading tool for Flickr originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 15 Mar 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Creative Commons – Flickr – Downloadr – Windows 7 – FileHippo
By Saikat Basu, MakeUseOf – March 14, 2010 at 08:27PM
No, it’s not Spiderman’s latest web slinging tool but something that’s more real world. Like the World Wide Web.
The Invisible Web refers to the part of the WWW that’s not indexed by the search engines. Most of us think that that search powerhouses like Google and Bing are like the Great Oracle…they see everything. Unfortunately, they can’t because they aren’t divine at all; they are just web spiders who index pages by following one hyperlink after the other.
But there are some places where a spider cannot enter. Take library databases which need a password for access. Or even pages that belong to private networks of organizations. Dynamically generated web pages in response to a query are often left un-indexed by search engine spiders.
Search engine technology has progressed by leaps and bounds. Today, we have real time search and the capability to index Flash based and PDF content. Even then, there remain large swathes of the web which a general search engine cannot penetrate. The term, Deep Net, Deep Web or Invisible Web lingers on.
To get a more precise idea of the nature of this ‘Dark Continent’ involving the invisible and web search engines, read what Wikipedia has to say about the Deep Web. The figures are attention grabbers – the size of the open web is 167 terabytes. The Invisible Web is estimated at 91,000 terabytes. Check this out – the Library of Congress, in 1997, was figured to have close to 3,000 terabytes!
How do we get to this mother load of information?
That’s what this post is all about. Let’s get to know a few resources which will be our deep diving vessel for the Invisible Web. Some of these are invisible web search engines with specifically indexed information.
Infomine has been built by a pool of libraries in the United States. Some of them are University of California, Wake Forest University, California State University, and the University of Detroit. Infomine ‘mines’ information from databases, electronic journals, electronic books, bulletin boards, mailing lists, online library card catalogs, articles, directories of researchers, and many other resources.
You can search by subject category and further tweak your search using the search options. Infomine is not only a standalone search engine for the Deep Web but also a staging point for a lot of other reference information. Check out its Other Search Tools and General Reference links at the bottom.
This is considered to be the oldest catalog on the web and was started by started by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the web. So, isn’t it strange that it finds a place in the list of Invisible Web resources? Maybe, but the WWW Virtual Library lists quite a lot of relevant resources on quite a lot of subjects. You can go vertically into the categories or use the search bar. The screenshot shows the alphabetical arrangement of subjects covered at the site.
Intute is UK centric, but it has some of the most esteemed universities of the region providing the resources for study and research. You can browse by subject or do a keyword search for academic topics like agriculture to veterinary medicine. The online service has subject specialists who review and index other websites that cater to the topics for study and research.
Intute also provides free of cost over 60 free online tutorials to learn effective internet research skills. Tutorials are step by step guides and are arranged around specific subjects.
Complete Planet calls itself the ‘front door to the Deep Web’. This free and well designed directory resource makes it easy to access the mass of dynamic databases that are cloaked from a general purpose search. The databases indexed by Complete Planet number around 70,000 and range from Agriculture to Weather. Also thrown in are databases like Food & Drink and Military.
For a really effective Deep Web search, try out the Advanced Search options where among other things, you can set a date range.
Infoplease is an information portal with a host of features. Using the site, you can tap into a good number of encyclopedias, almanacs, an atlas, and biographies. Infoplease also has a few nice offshoots like Factmonster.com for kids and Biosearch, a search engine just for biographies.
DeepPeep aims to enter the Invisible Web through forms that query databases and web services for information. Typed queries open up dynamic but short lived results which cannot be indexed by normal search engines. By indexing databases, DeepPeep hopes to track 45,000 forms across 7 domains.
The domains covered by DeepPeep (Beta) are Auto, Airfare, Biology, Book, Hotel, Job, and Rental. Being a beta service, there are occasional glitches as some results don’t load in the browser.
IncyWincy is an Invisible Web search engine and it behaves as a meta-search engine by tapping into other search engines and filtering the results. It searches the web, directory, forms, and images. With a free registration, you can track search results with alerts.
DeepWebTech gives you five search engines (and browser plugins) for specific topics. The search engines cover science, medicine, and business. Using these topic specific search engines, you can query the underlying databases in the Deep Web.
Scirus has a pure scientific focus. It is a far reaching research engine that can scour journals, scientists’ homepages, courseware, pre-print server material, patents and institutional intranets.
TechXtra concentrates on engineering, mathematics and computing. It gives you industry news, job announcements, technical reports, technical data, full text eprints, teaching and learning resources along with articles and relevant website information.
Just like general web search, searching the Invisible Web is also about looking for the needle in the haystack. Only here, the haystack is much bigger. The Invisible Web is definitely not for the casual searcher. It is a deep but not dark because if you know what you are searching for, enlightenment is a few keywords away.
Do you venture into the Invisible Web? Which is your preferred search tool?
Image credit: MarcelGermain
Got Tech Questions? Ask Them on MakeUseOf Answers!
By Whitson Gordon, Lifehacker – March 13, 2010 at 03:00PM
Often, even if we do catch a virus, it’s not so difficult to eradicate it using installed antivirus—but if your system has been crippled, try using Linux to scan the drive for viruses instead. More »
By Vladislav Savov, Engadget RSS Feed – March 12, 2010 at 01:43PM
We talk about the FCC a lot here, but usually the ways ye olde Commission affects our lives are indirect. A little extra spectrum here, a nice leaked image there, that kind of thing. Not this time, though, as the FCC is getting involved directly with its own Consumer Broadband Test app, designed to probe network latencies and download speeds on your home connection or mobile device. Part of the hallowed National Broadband Plan, this will furnish the FCC will useful data to show the discrepancy between advertised and real world broadband speeds, and will also — more importantly perhaps — serve as a neat way for users to directly compare network performance in particular areas. It’s available on the App Market and App Store right now, with versions for other operating systems coming up, so why not get with the program and give it a test drive?
FCC comes through with a Consumer Broadband Test app for iPhone, Android and the home originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 13:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink 
Switched | 
FCC | Email this | Comments
