I Love Trackpads! [Trackpads]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/RlqYcOA_WIs/i-love-trackpads

Somewhere, as I transitioned from being a proud desktop user with parts scattered around my room, to the being a dedicated laptop user, I forgot how to use a mouse. And today, I embrace the swiftness of the trackpad.

Is it a matter of preference and practice? Yes, but no.

Think about it. The distance it takes to move your hand from the QWERTY to the trackpad, usually below the spacebar, is much closer than the distance it takes to drop your hand on a mouse, reorientate your arm/wrist and fingers into place. And a trackpad's control scheme uses a finger, which has a lot more dexterity than an arm/wrist you use when handling a mouse. Also, the future is multitouch trackpads. No other control scheme can match the potential of pinching/scrolling with multiple fingers, zooming, etc.

The touchpad is also a really natural movement, practiced by everyone since childhood days of drawing in the sand on the beach, or fingerpainting. The only more natural movement is to trace movement on an actual screen, but any screen we use in a non mobile environment is too big and vertical to do this easily on, for extended periods of time. Besides, the touchpad itself would work great with a secondary LCD display under it, making it essentially, a touchpad.

So, here's to a future where the trackpad is everywhere. I look forward to it.

[SanwaNexus404, AdessoNexus404, Adesso2Nexus404, DinovoGiz, KeysonicKustomPC, SandbergTechhook, Adesso3Pcrush, MCEallproducts, McsaiteGeekalaert, TruFormProKeyboardco, ToshibaOverclockers, iKeyGadgetadvisor, iKey2Geekwithlaptop, FentexMiniGeekwithlaptop, EeeKeyboardDeviceDaily, LogitechHomeTheaterDialectical, special thanks to Quinton Ma for researching the models in this gallery.]

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Bing Tips & Tricks

Source: http://www.labnol.org/internet/bing-tips/8931/

Now that Bing is available for use outside Microsoft, here are some quick tips and tricks that will help you do more with Bing.com.

1. Use the full version of Bing

If you are using Bing outside North America, chances are that you seeing a localized version of Bing that may be missing some features. For instance, the Indian version of Bing.com doesn’t have search history and the image on the Bing home page here is not interactive as in the US version.

To explore the full version of Bing, go to this page and set English - US as your default region. You can now enjoy all the Bing features from anywhere.

2. Track Companies from the IE Favorites Bar

If you search for a company stock (e.g. GOOG or MSFT), Bing will automatically create a web slice for that company which you may then add to IE 8 and track the performance directly from the favorites bar. You need Internet Explorer 8 to try this feature.

3. Watch Preview of Hulu Videos outside US

Hulu hosts some popular popular TV shows but the problem is that you can only watch these videos if your computer has US based IP address.

However, Bing lets you watch shot previews of Hulu video even outside US. Just search for any TV show episode on Bing Videos (see example) and hover the mouse over any of the video thumbnail to watch a short clip.

4. Save and Email search results

With Bing, you can save your search history on to a local folder inside Bing or to your Windows Skydrive account. Alternatively, you may send your search queries to a friend via email or publish them on your Facebook wall via Bing. You’ll need Silverlight to share queries in Bing.

5. RSS Feeds of Search Results

Unlike Google or Yahoo, Bing offers RSS feeds for their web search results that you can subscribe to inside any feed reader. Your browser should be able to auto-detect the RSS feed of Bing pages or you can append &format=rss to any Bing search URL and convert it into a feed.

This RSS feature is not available for Image or Video search in Bing.

6. Find Pages That Link to MP3 Files or Documents

Bing (and Live Search) supports a unique "contains" search operator that lets you find web pages that contain links to particular file types.

For instance, a search like susan boyle contains:mp3 will show pages that are about the British singer and that also link to MP3 files. Replace mp3 with doc to search pages that contain links to Word Documents.

For more tips on software and web apps, check our popular how-to guides.

Bing Tips & Tricks - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS)

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How to Publish Screenshot Images on Twitter

Source: http://www.labnol.org/software/publish-screenshots-on-twitter/8991/

Whether you need help with an error message or just want to show off your new desktop wallpaper, Twitter can be a good place to share all those screenshot images with the world.

Now capturing screenshots of anything on your desktop screen is easy but let’s explore a couple of ways that will enable you publish these screenshot images on to your Twitter account as a tweet quickly and effortlessly.

TechSmith Jing (Mac & Windows)

With TechSmith Jing, you can quickly grab a screenshot, add some text notes or annotate your image with arrows and basic shapes. Once you are done editing, the image gets uploaded to your free screencast.com account and the URL is automatically copied to the clipboard so you can easily paste that in your tweets.

That’s one way of doing things but let me share another Jing trick here.

Other than Screencast.com, Jing can also upload screenshot images to your Flickr account. Open Twittergram and associate your Flickr account with Twitter using the tag TechSmithJing. Now anything you upload on Flickr through Jing will automatically get pushed to your Twitter stream without you having to tweet about it. How cool.

Kwout (Web Based)

If you need to screen capture a web page for publishing on to Twitter, check out Kwout. You can either copy-paste the web page address that you want to screen capture or use a bookmarklet.

Kwout will help you capture as well host the screenshot image and you can post the link on Twitter directly from Kwout’s site. The very interesting part is that all hyperlinks in the screenshot remain clickable (see example) because Kwout uses an imagemap for screenshots.

ScreenTweetr (Mac, Windows, Linux)

ScreenTweetr is another interesting Adobe AIR app developed by James Ford.

The app stays minimized in the system tray but automatically wakes up as soon you do a screen capture on Mac (Shift-Control-Command-3) or a Windows PC (Print Screen) . It will upload the screenshot image (or the contents of your clipboard) on to Twitpic from where you can tweet it.

Skitch (Email to Twitter)

Like Jing, Skitch is both a screen capture software and a screenshot hosting service. If you have a Mac, you can capture and upload screenshots to Skitch from the desktop itself but Windows users will have to send their screenshots to a secret email address for posting them on to Skitch (see example).

Skitch also provides an "email to twitter" option so you can send in screenshots from iPhone, BlackBerry or your mobile phone to Skitch and the images will then auto-appear in your Twitter timeline.

Related: List of Screen Capture + Hosting services

How to Publish Screenshot Images on Twitter - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS)

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Find Public Domain Content via Creative Commons

Source: http://www.labnol.org/internet/find-public-domain-content-with-creative-commons/8996/

CC Zero is a new Creative Commons license to help content creators distribute their work on the Internet copyright-free. They can publish presentations, photographs, songs, web pages, screencast videos or any other form of content in the public domain via CC0.

When you apply a Creative Commons Zero (or "no rights reserved") license to your work, it means saying something like this to the world:

Here’s an article that I wrote for my blog but since I am distributing my content under Creative Commons Zero, feel free to copy this article or use it for any other purpose without asking for permission or attribution.

Almost all content (including blogs, images, etc.) will enter the public domain some day but with CC0, the author gets to push his work into the public domain during his lifetime.

As things stand, US copyright law prohibits reuse without explicit permission for creative works until they enter the public domain - 70 years after the death of the author or 120 years after publication date if the date of death of the author is unknown. These lengthy periods leave the public domain pretty anemic. CC Zero will let content creators uninterested in copyright claims push their work into the public domain immediately - ReadWriteWeb

How to find public domain content on the Internet (via Creative Commons Zero)

Yahoo, Flickr and Google do help you search for Creative Commons content on the web but the problem is that none of these search engines offer an option to restrict search results to content that’s available under "Creative Common Zero" or under "public domain".

There’s however an easy workaround.

When sites publish their content under Creative Commons, they are required to add some text (or a graphic image) in web pages so that human visitors can easily know the license under which that content has been made available on the Internet.

See the footer of Digg.com or Lifehacker.com to check their respective CC licenses - Digg uses a public domain CC0 license while Gawker Blogs allow non-commercial use of their content with attribution.

Now the trick. Yahoo! supports a linkdomain: command to help you discover other sites that are linking to a particular domain. For instance, linkdoman:cnn.com will show other domains on the web that link to the CNN website.

Since sites that are distributing content in public domain under Creative Commons will always link to CreativeCommons.org, you can easily find about some of these sites through the linkdomain command as in this example:

linkdomain:creativecommons.org "dedicated to the public domain" [your query here]

For instance, the query linkdomain:cc.org .. picasso will show pages related to Pablo Picasso that are in the public domains while the query linkdomain.. clipart will return sites that provide clipart images that are also in the public domain.

Give this a shot. You are free to use, share, or modify these works even for commercial reasons.

Related: Dummies Guide to Creative Commons

Find Public Domain Content via Creative Commons - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS)

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Google Map Captures the Mood of People from Around the World

Source: http://www.labnol.org/internet/google-map-of-world-feelings/9013/

If you curious to know how are people feeling around the world, check out World of Emotions - it’s an interesting mashup that plots the global mood on a Google Map through smileys.

The idea is pretty simple. You log on to the World of Emotions website and select an emoticon that best represents your current mood - it can be positive (feeling happy), negative (feeling sad) or neutral (meaning you are feeling just fine).

When you click on the smiley icon, the application automatically detects your physical location using the IP address of your computer and then plots your mood on the Google map.

You can then check this log or view an aggregated map to see the emotions of people by country. Of course, this may not be a true indicator of global mood but if enough people start using the app, it can get a bit close. Hat tip Keir Clarke.

Google Map Captures the Mood of People from Around the World - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS)

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