Friday, March 28, 2008

Cash for Used Books

I tend to think that there's no such thing as having too many books. I would love to have an entire room lined with filled bookshelves, organized of course. But I don't have such a room, and my books are far from organized. They are on shelves, in boxes, under the bed, wherever I can find to stash them, and truthfully, I don't really read my own books. There are too many great books at the local library, so I end up bringing home stacks of those. Of course, those are the ones I have to read because they have to be returned after a certain amount of time.

Still, what to do with all the books I own? I know there are several I must keep no matter what, like my collection of hardcover Stephen King books, but what about the rest of them? Usually, if we're going to get rid of some books, we just donate them to Goodwill. At least then, hopefully, someone will get to read them. I could never throw a book away. That would just be wrong.

Today I found Cash4Books. You enter the ISBNs of the books you want to get rid of, or can live without, and they tell you how much they will pay for that book. Go through the checkout, supply all the necessary information, ship the books to them, and get cash for your used books! They'll even pay the shipping. Now I'm really curious to see how much some of the books around here are worth.

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Download and Save YouTube Videos

If you've ever wanted to save YouTube videos to your computer or be able to use them on your iPod, MP3 player, or iPhone, now you can. Tubetilla is FREE software that lets you do just that. No spyware, no adware, no registration - just free.

I haven't tried it yet, but I think this software could come in handy one of these days. There are some video tutorials showing how to use it, too.

Monday, March 24, 2008

Watch Your Favorites Anytime

Do you like television shows and movies? How about watching them any time you want and any way you want? For FREE? It sounds good to me. There are quite a few television series I've heard great things about but never watch. Here's my chance to get caught up.

Hulu.com brings together more than 50 content providers including FOX, NBC, MGM, Sony Pictures Television, Warner Bros., Lionsgate, and more to deliver premium programming across all genres and formats, television shows, feature films, and clips. They also offer full-length feature films. It's free and ad-supported. Available any time in the U.S.

You can also share videos by embedding them into your blog or sending them in an email, and what I think is really neat is that you can choose to share the entire video or just a portion you select. For instance, if you really love a particular scene from a movie, you can share just that scene. Use the hulu sliders to select the exact start and end times of the clip you want to share.

Learn more:



I'll definitely be signing up - for free - and checking into this further.

Sunday, March 16, 2008

The End of Slideshows?

I ran across this today and thought it looked interesting. Animoto takes your pictures and your music, and automatically creates videos. It's free to create short 30-second videos, and they have premium services for longer ones. I haven't had a chance to try it yet, but I signed up. When I create a video, I'll have to post it so you can see how it turns out. In the meantime, you can view some examples on the site.

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Going Mobile

I read about this on Lady Banana today. She recently got a new Internet enabled mobile phone, but so many sites are not mobile friendly. In a search to see how she could make her own site mobile friendly, she came across MoFuse. It's an easy, free way to create a mobile version of your site. I signed up and set up a mobile site for this blog and also for one of my other blogs. MoFuse uses the RSS of your blog to update the content, so once you've got it set up, you don't have to do anything else - just keep blogging. You can customize colors, create additional pages - like a contact page or an about me page, enable comments, and more. MoFuse also has site analytics so you can track your visitors.

I added a Mobile button to the top of the sidebar so hopefully, if someone browses through on their mobile, they will be able to get to the button and click through to the mobile friendly site. Ideally, I think, once visitors find mobile friendly sites, they will bookmark that url and bypass the 'real' computer site altogether. I was interested in the Automatic Redirect, but that won't work with my blog. If you have a Wordpress blog and can paste the code into your header.php file, you can use that. Then, if someone browses by your blog on their mobile device, they will be automatically redirected to the mobile friendly site.

View the mobile phone simulation for this blog if you'd like to get an idea what it will look like. Remember, the colors are fully customizable - header, text, links. If there are images in a post, they are resized to fit, too.

It's good to be aware that more and more people are browsing the Internet on their mobile phones. MoFuse makes it easy for you to make sure they can view your site. I'm sure I would appreciate it if I was trying to read my favorite blogs with a mobile phone.

Saturday, March 1, 2008

More Games

I found another game site today. It's called TheWeather.TK and they have games in all kinds of different categories.

I'm going to have to visit again to check some more of them out, because right now it's bedtime.