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Ever run across a website that made you cringe? Maybe it was the flaming logo, the animated “new” buttons or the painful site navigation. Don’t get mad; get destructive with this cool little site called NetDisaster that came across my desk courtesy of Mark Hurst’s Good Experience newsletter.

NetDisaster doesn’t actually damage the site that raises your ire, but does give you a chance to harmlessly deface it with scribbling babies, nuclear bombs, meteors, pee, fried eggs, crashing zeppelins and more. It’s a cathartic experience that must be lived to appreciate. And a perfect way to kill 10 or 20 minutes.

Google Docs is making it really easy to share work and collaborate online, and they’ve just announced a new feature that seems like a no-brainer: embeddable presentations. You’ve been able to create or upload Powerpoint presentations to Google Docs for some time now, but embedding in a page (or a blog entry) makes so much sense, you wonder why this wasn’t done earlier!

Here’s an example:

To embed a presentation, you must first “publish” it, making it visible to anyone on the Internet. Now during the publish process, you’ll be given the direct link to the full presentation, as well as the embed code for this new, mini-view mode.

I recently ran across a couple of Flickr groups devoted to iPhone wallpapers, and decided to try my hand at it. The proper size for an iPhone wallpaper is 320×480, portrait orientation. And just for kicks, I used Flickr’s (relatively) new built-in editor to crop and resize the images. Click the images below for the full-size version, then right-click to download.

I’ve tagged my wallpapers, so to see them all, just click here.

If you’ve got an iPhone or an iPod Touch, you can download your fave wallpaper images to a folder, then simply sync that folder to your iPhone using iTunes. Pretty sweet, no?

I’m still trying to decide whether to jailbreak my iPhone or not. There is a very easy method if you’re running the 1.1.1 firmware, but I’ve already upgraded to 1.1.2. Should I downgrade to 1.1.1, just to jailbreak my iPhone?

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Tags: iPhone, wallpaper, photos, jailbreak

Last month I shared that Techsmith was giving away free serial numbers for their popular Snag-it screen capture utility. Unfortunately, that offer has expired, but there is a great, free alternative — and it’s also from Techsmith!

The Jing Project is a free screen capture utility that works on both Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. While Jing doesn’t have all the post-capture editing features of it’s older sibling Snag-it, it does have a few really nice new touches.

Jing is designed to make it really easy to capture images or screencasts for sharing. You can share your capture automatically on screencast.com (for screencasts — duh), Flickr (for still images) or via FTP (assuming you have an FTP server).

And now that Flickr offers inline image editing, Snag-it’s additional features are not really needed.

If you need a decent screen capture utility, give the Jing Project a look.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: Techsmith, Jing, utility, screen capture, screencasting, tools

This week’s Photo Friday theme is Sunrise. This particular sunrise was captured in Laguna Niguel on my way to work during the recent brush fires in Southern California.

As you can see, I’m a sucker for sunrises.

Happy Saturday morning. I’ve just got a couple of interesting links to share.

Google Blogscoped has an interesting post with screenshots describing Google’s intranet. It’s interesting to see what the employees experience from inside the firewall.

Over at BigBlueBall, Fanatic posted statistics from an interesting study that shows 20% of all instant messages are never sent.  Maybe it should be called instant hesitation?

And because it’s Saturday morning, I thought something completely different was in order. I previously posted the link to Banksy on my del.icio.us bookmarks, but he warrants more attention. And if you live near an Urban Outfitters store, they have an excellent Banksy coffee table book for sale.

17-Dec-2007 UPDATE: The free serial number has expired, though you can still download a free 30-day trial. There is another free alternative; I’ll write about it later this week.

We all have our favorite tools, utilities and websites. One of mine is SnagIt, a great product from TechSmith that makes screenshots a snap. SnagIt isn’t free, but it’s one of those tools that I find indispensable.

Now TechSmith is offering free serial numbers for SnagIt 7.2.5! It’s not their latest version, but it’s not crippled or limited in any way. SnagIt gives you tremendous control over how you capture, save and print screenshots. My personal favorite feature? SnagIt can automatically capture long, scrolling web pages into a single image!

Why are they giving away serial numbers? It’s a great idea to introduce people their products, and hopefully convert a few into paying customers. Not only do you get SnagIt 7.2.5 for free, but you can upgrade to the latest version for half price. Not a bad idea.

To get SnagIt 7.2.5 and your free serial number, download one of these files:

• ftp://ftp.techsmith.com/pub/products/snagit/725/SnagIt.exe - English
• ftp://ftp.techsmith.com/pub/products/snagit/725/snagitde.exe - German
• ftp://ftp.techsmith.com/pub/products/snagit/725/snagitfr.exe - French

Then visit the TechSmith website here and give them your name and email address. I got my key in my inbox less than one minute later.

Hats off to Amit Agarwal at Digital Inspirations for the tip!

I will admit, I like Flickr a lot. I like the convenience, the tagging and the social nature of the comments. My enthusiasm for Flickr has rubbed off on a number of you, too.

But one of the things that has always been frustrating was the inability to upload large numbers of photos in a batch. That changed a few months ago when Flickr introduced their new Flash-based upload page, but I still prefer Flickr Uploadr. This handy desktop application let’s you drag-and-drop as many photos as you like and send them all en masse. For anyone sharing large number of files, the Uploadr is invaluable.

The current version of the Flickr Uploadr 2.5 is great, but it’s not without limitations. It let’s you edit titles and descriptions, but only after uploading, which isn’t really the best situation.

Fortunately, the new Flickr Uploadr 3.0 beta fixes those limitations. Now you can upload in batches, and still edit titles, descriptions and most of the other editable fields associated with a photo — all before you upload.

The new Flickr Uploadr is available for both Windows and OSX. I downloaded the Windows version on my XP machine, and gave it a try. In my initial tests, everything worked flawlessly. It is beta software, so it’s likely to have some bugs still, but if you’re a Flickr fan, give it a try!

For a more detailed review, check out Christina Warren’s notes over at Download Squad.  

One other quick note for Flickr fans: be sure to check out BigHugeLabs Flickr DNA webapp. It’s fun!

Here in the states we get a day to rest, reflect, eat too much and watch football. It’s called ‘Thanksgiving.’ Hope your day gives you reason to be thankful.

Tech investor Yossi Vardi spoke recently at TechCrunch40. Vardi is perhaps best known for being the original investor in instant messaging pioneer ICQ. Michael Arrington describes Yossi as someone who invests in people, not business plans.

To help make his point and establish his philosophy for investment, Vardi quoted Theodore Roosevelt’s 1910 speech at the Sorbonne:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” - Theodore Roosevelt

Inspiration for aspiring entrepreneurs and business provocateurs.