Internet Tools Blog Posts
EverytimeZone.com
Dealing with multiple time zones can be complicated. When is it morning in London? When is a good time to call Hawaii?
Fortunately there is a good resource to make it easy - EveryTimeZone.com. There slogan is simple: "Never warp your brain with time zone math again."
When you load up the site you are shown a chart of current time around the world. It's a great timezone layout that's pretty easy to understand. You can drag the time to see different times on the chart.
Check out the site and definitely bookmark it if you do frequent international communications.
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Pattern8
If your looking for good selection of patterns, check out the Pattern8.com site. There are lots of free seamless patterns to select from. These would make great computer backgrounds.
From John Rawsterne, the founder of Pattern8.com:
Pattern8 was created to make it easier to find high quality free seamless patterns. Our sister site, PatternHead.com, offers free vector and pixel patterns but it can be hard to find the pattern you need. Pattern8 keeps things simple and allows searching by color. You'll find lots of free pixel patterns here. When you preview a pattern you'll find a link to the vector version of the pattern from PatternHead.com (if available).
What's nice is that you can select a color that you want and then pick a pattern in that color. So if your background looks best in green, you can find all the green patterns that may work for your design. Since these are seamless, there's no limit to the size you need.
John's Been Busy...
John Rawsterne hasn't been active for a while, no new blog post since July 19, 2013, and the last twitter post was May 23, 2016. Who know's how long these sites will stay around. I understand that it's a side project so you update only when you have time to.
I think it's certainly worth checking out to get some design ideas for seamless background. The Santa Hats patterns are great!
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Fake Donald Trump Tweet
Hate him or Love him, but Donald Trump is the President of the United States. His use of Twitter, as a method of communications, has typically generated some attention.
Thanks to faketrumptweet.com, now you can pretend that he's tweeting your message. It's a great way to add humor to any situation.
Sample Entries
Some sample tweets to get you thinking about how you could use this idea on Slack or Facebook.
- Happy Birthday [Some Names]! It's going to be a Tremendous Day
- Ok, Now What?
- Great Party. Had a Lot of Fun.
- [ Company Name ] party? It'll be Yuge!
- What the Covfefe are you talking about?
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Quozio
Quozio is a fast way to turn words into graphics. It's really easy to transform a simple quote into an image. Very useful when you spend time in a chat room and you want to highlight a quote that fits the moment.
There are 37 designs to make your message stand out. The whole purpose of Quozio is to quickly convert text to graphics as quickly as possible. Once it looks good, simply drag the image to the desktop and then apply it to Slack, Email, Facebook, or Twitter.
From their website
Quozio turns meaningful words into beautiful images in seconds. Then share 'em on Facebook, Pinterest, email and more!
The nice thing about Quozio is they offer a Bookmarklet to make it super easy to create quotes. Bookmarklets are an easy way to create interactive bookmarks (See my post from earlier this year for how bookmarklet works. )
Quite simply Quozio is the fastest way to transform a simple quote to an eye-catching graphic.
Sample Content
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Ultimatest Grocery List
There are lots of great list apps to help people shop smart - particularly when it comes to the weekly grocery shopping. We use AnyList (iOS App), which is a great tool to share any type of list.
The only problem with this list Apps is understanding basic fundamentals; Do you need Trash Bags, Cleaning Supplies. Things that your not thinking about when your planning the weekly grocery shopping.
Usually you don't think about some items until you walk down the aisle and see it in the grocery store. This makes grocery shopping not so effective. If there was only a way to help think of these items.
Ultimatest List to the Rescue
That's why having the Ultimatest List is awesome. You can use the list to get a better understanding of what you may need to get at the store. Simply print it out, and use it as a reference guide as your
From their Website:
This is awesome, in fact, it's The Ultimatest
Below are the best pre-formatted grocery lists ever created. I made them just for you--and they're free. Print 'em out, hang 'em on the refrigerator door and mark 'em up before you go to the grocery store. We have comprehensive versions for both meat-eaters and vegetabletarians.
The shopping list is a great compliment to any electronic list program your using now. If your not using anything, then use the list as it's been constantly updated by thousands of people that use it every day.
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Printable Calendars on TimeAndDate.com
It's that time of year, time to start thinking about making next year's Calendar. Thankfully the folks at TimeandDate.com make the process really easy. They have a great widget that helps you create all sorts of different calendar types. Simply design your calendar then download the results.
This is useful for event planning and software release scheduling.
Create Printable PDF Calendars
You can open up the PDF in Affinity Designer and other programs and add enhance the calendar even more.
There's a lot of other cool Date/Time utilities over at TimeandDate.com:
- Date Duration Calculator: Days between two dates
- Distance Calculator - How far is it?
- Solar & Lunar Eclipses Worldwide
- Sunrise and sunset times in Boston
- World Temperatures -- Hottest/Coldest City in the World right now.
The "Make Your Own" calendar is the most popular thing that I use the site for.
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COLOURlovers
Finding good matching colors is tricky, especially if you're looking for colors for the holidays such as Thanksgiving and Christmas. COLOURlovers is a great site to find the perfect color for any occasion.
Description from their site:
COLOURlovers is a creative community where people from around the world create and share colors, palettes and patterns, discuss the latest trends and explore colorful articles... All in the spirit of love.
There's color help for just about anything:
Drag and drop the image into Affinity Photo and you can create your own Swatch set from the colors. Just use the Color Picker Tool and build your custom Swatch Set. Check out this video by Affinity on how to do it.
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Cloud Convert
CloudConvert is a powerful way to convert files from one type to another. It's very convenient and you don't have to install any software on your computer.
This site has been handy when I wanted to:
- Convert a Movie to GIF
- Convert an Apple Live picture to GIF
- Convert a PDF document to ebook
Website Description
CloudConvert supports the conversion between more than 200 different audio, video, document, ebook, archive, image, spreadsheet and presentation formats.
There is no need to install any software on your computer! Upload your files to CloudConvert and we will do the job for you. Don't worry, your files are safe and only you can access them. They will be deleted again as soon as your conversion is finished.
Most conversion types support advanced options, for example setting the codecs of audio/video files. Also, we support batch converting and folder monitoring!
Free and Subscription Plans
The free plan allows you to convert 25 minutes per day. Think of a conversion minute as the amount of time that you spend on the site. Larger files will take longer to convert, so plan your time according.
If you plan on using CloudConvert a lot, there are a couple of Package plans available. You can purchase a block of time, or commit to a certain amount of time every month.
The block of time is useful when your converting a whole bunch of files and don't want to make a long term commitment.
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Graphic Badges
Mozilla created a website called openbadges.me where people can design and Issue Open Badges. You can use the free online generator to create a badge for your website or blog. Badges also make great picture overlays.
It does take a bit of time to learn all the functionality of the online editor. Once you get it, making badges will be easy to do any time you need one.
Website Description
Open Badges are visual tokens of achievement, affiliation, authorization, or other trust relationship sharable across the web. Open Badges represent a more detailed picture than a CV or resume as they can be presented in ever-changing combinations, creating a constantly evolving picture of a person's lifelong learning.
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JPEGmini
Image compression is important when your sharing files. You don't want to email a large file if you don't need to. The problem with most image applications is that they don't have a good preview of what the image will look like when you compress it.
That's where JPEGMini comes in handy, from their website:
Get the smallest image file size without compromising quality. JPEGmini can optimize photos up to 28MP.
This is a very useful tool to help compress images for email or website development. You'll be able to see the before/after and decide if the compression is worth it.
In most situations, you don't really need the high-resolution photo unless your sending the image file to a printer.
JPEGMini Pro
If your using JPEGMini a lot, then consider going Pro, here are some features:
- 128 Megapixels - Support high-resolution photos from the world's leading camera brands.
- Lightroom Plugin - Fits perfectly in your workflow, enabling you to optimize photos without adding any extra steps.
- Batch Resize -Drag and drop any amount of photos and have them resized to your specifications.
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