If you often find yourself wondering what movie, music or book to get next then Taste Kid is the tool for you. You may have used services such as Pandora, Last.fm or Shelfari to find new entertainment however these sites force you to signup and maybe even install software in the case of Last.fm.
With Taste Kid you just type a band, movie or book that you like and the engine will provide you with recommendations of similar bands, movies or books to the search term. Taste Kid provides a simply, clean interface with just one big input box.
The recommendation engine works reasonable well from my experiences most of the suggestions had some similarities to the original search however I am sure this will improve over time. Taste Kid learns from everyone’s searches by linking together searches from each individual.
The coolest feature of Taste Kid is the popup boxes appear when you hover over a suggestion. These boxes display a brief overview and a youtube video for bands and movies however, they aren’t yet available for books. Below you can see an example of a popup for The Postal Service.
The Firefoxkeyboard shortcuts are a great way to save time when browsing however they have many limitations. Firefox add-on Mouseless Browsing enables as the name suggests totally mouseless browsing. The extension adds small numbers next to each link on the page using the num pad you can then quickly navigate to each of these links.
The program also allows you to specify certain urls and it will automatically turn off or on when you visit these webpages. Mouseless Browsing doesn’t work for all the links on gmail or google reader so if you are looking for something to speed up your email reading this isn’t the tool for you.
Mouseless Browsing also lets you customize the css used to display the link hotkey numbers so you can adjust them if they are too small to read.
You will also want to change the default shortcut for toggling the extension on and off. The default is period which can get annoying when typing in numbers I changed it to Ctrl + Q which hasn’t presented any problems so far.
Mouseless Browsing also integrates some other handy keyboard shortcuts around the num pad such as - to scroll up and + to scroll down. The / also will send you back a page and * will send you forward but don’t worry these shortcuts only work when you have activated Mouseless Browsing so you can still type in equations.
If you have used Mouseless Browsing or you know of another mouseless program please share your experiences in the comments.
I’m sure you’ve all seen Microsoft’s surface technology or the ‘big ass table‘ which shows how useful multi-touch can be. However if you don’t want something the size and cost of a small car then you should look at the MTmini. All you need to make a multi touch is a cardboard box, a piece of transparent material (glass, acrylic or plexiglas), Paper, USB Webcam, Computer, Pictureframe (this is useful to get the glass from).
You can download all the software on their website. The video below shows how it works:
Have you ever listened to a great music video on Youtube which you would love to add to your MP3 collection? Well now you can with a new service called VidtoMP3. Simply enter the video url and this service will rip the soundtrack out of it and provide you with an MP3 file download.
VidtoMP3 currently supports all the video sharing sites I have heard of such as the popular sites like Youtube, MySpace and some I havn’t heard of such as SantaBanta, Sharkle and ZippyVideos.The only downside is that the website is covered in advertisements but they have to make money somehow.
For the last two blog posts I have been using Zemanta, a blogging add-on which suggests related images, links, tags and similar articles to the post you are writing. Zemanta provides a few installation options either as a Firefox or Internet Explorer extension or you can install as a plug in for your blogging software, it supports many blogging platform such as Wordpress, Drupal and Movable Type.
The links and tags suggestions have been the most accurate and useful, all the links and tags of this post have been suggested by Zemanta. Sadly the same can’t be said for the images or articles suggestions. During the creation of this blog post Zemanta’s gallery didn’t feature a Zemanta logo or a screenshot of Zemanta in use however it was flooded with Firefox, IE, Drupal and Wordpress logos and screenshots.This is due to Zemanta ignoring the tiltle when finding images suggestions, which may be alright for longer blog posts with multiple images however an average post only has one image which is usually related to the title.
Zemanta automatically puts a reblog button at the bottom of any post which has been “Zemified”. I don’t really like this as although the button is easy to delete I still think it should be opt in feature.
The Zemanta’s website features a live demo of its suggestion algorithm at work, showing you example suggestions from your own text.
Recently I have been looking for a virtual desktop program with clean and simple desktop switching and hotkey support. I had previously been using Dexpot but it lacked of visual eye candy. Then I found DeskSpace from Otaku Software. DeskSpace gives you 6 virtual desktops in a beautiful cube switching interface. It’s desktop switching is fast, simple and as eye candy rich as Apple’s spaces.
When the hotkey is activated (default is Ctrl + Shift + Win) your desktop zooms out to become one face of a semi-transparent cube using the mouse, scroll wheel or desktop number key you can then rotate the cube to a different desktop. DeskSpace also handles multiple monitors nicely however a downside is that the program does cost $19.95 yet a 14 day trial version is offered.
What’s your favourite desktop switching program? Let us know in the comments.
A few days ago I created my first timeline using a service called dipity which allows you to create a timeline of your life by importing feeds from other websites such as your blog, last.fm, flickr, twitter and many other services. You can also manually add events to your timeline and many people have made very detailed timelines such as this IRAQ war timeline. Collaborative timelines are also supported which is another great feature. Dipity has also recently launched an interesting mashup called Timetube.
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