The world wide web has made interacting with other cultures so much easier. Even so, many websites are in languages that I don’t speak. And I know that English isn’t the first language of many people who visit my sites. But there is help. Babel Fish from Yahoo can translate a bit of text or an entire web page for you.
If you’re on a website written in a language you don’t know, you can visit Babel Fish and type in the URL of the page you want to translate and the ‘from’ and ‘to’ language. Here is a screen shot of Better Living On the Web from English to French.
Better Living On the Web Translated into French
If you own a website and would like to make it easy for people to translate it into their native language, you can add the Babel Fish translation service to your site. You can test it using the one here at Better Living on the Web (scroll down the right side navigation to find it).
The translation may not be perfect, but hopefully it will be enough to get the meaning of the website.
Craigslist can be an excellent resources for finding everything from apartments to jobs . The hassle is that you can’t search every city on Craigslist at once. It makes the job really tedious. Crazedlist.org is a site that will search multiple cities but you have disable referrers in your web browser so Craiglist won’t know you’re coming from Crazedlist and block your results.
So the best option is to use Google search. Over at Wired.com they posted an article on how to use Google’s advanced search to find what you’re looking for on all Craiglist’s city pages. Its worth a read!
To search on Craiglist through Google Search:
1) Visit Google.com and click on Advanced Search next to the search box.
2) Type in your search term (s) into the box marked Find Pages that Have All These Words
3) Type in “directory”* into the box that is marked But don’t show pages that that have…
4) Type in “Craigslist.org”* into the box that says Search within a site or domain
*When typing your search terms or domain, you don’t need the quotes.
Another option is to simply copy and paste the following into the Google.com search box with your search term in place of the words “your search term”:
It is possible to much of your grocery shopping online. But if you don’t live in a delivery area for one of the grocery stores that deliver, you still need to go to the market to get fresh items.
I hate grocery shopping. The very worst part is the unloading and putting the items away. But I also don’t like the actual shopping. I can’t find thing I need and almost always forget something.
Dave Cheong had a similar problem and he found a way to fix it. He created at the grocery shopping helper which is an online program that can help you organize your shopping trip by providing you with a list of all the items you buy sorted by the isles they are found in. No more back tracking or hunting. Simply take the list, mark the items you want to buy, and head straight to the store and isle.
You do need to do a little leg work before using the program by creating the list of items and visiting the store to find out what isle they are in. But once done, it could save you loads of time in the grocery store.
The most difficult task in working in the digital world is managing passwords. The easiest way is to have one password for everything. But it leaves you vulnerable. If someone gets it, they have access to EVERYTHING. So you have to have different passwords for all your log ins. But how do you remember them all?
One trick is to have a base keyword that is part of all your logins and is tweaked slightly for each program. For example, your base keyword could be mypassword (no don’t use that. This is just an example). Your eBay password could then be something like mypasswordeb or ebmypassword This creates a separate password for everything that’s based in a single root word. The trick of course is remembering how you choose the specific variant for each program. Again you want to be creative. If you use the initials for all of them, if someone figures out your base word, they’ll be able to figure out your specific logins as well.
Perhaps the best option is to store all your passwords. The problem with that is if someone gets your PC information, they will have your password information as well. Unless you use a program like KeePass. KeePass is a software that stores all your passwords in a safe, secure, encrypted file that is accessed with a single password. You can store all your login information including username, password, URL and details about the login. You can even group them by categories you designate.
KeePass is free and easy to use. The trick of course will be to remember the login information you create for the program.
Its been said that humans use only about 10% of their brain capability. I think the same can be said for many software programs. I can word process, create a spread sheet and resize graphics, but there are so many other things that my software can do that I never use.
If you have Photoshop and would like to learn more about all the cool things it can do, check out Donnie’s tutorials “You Suck At Photoshop”. As the title suggests, Donnie’s humor and language may irk some, but the tips he offers are really good. You can check out video lesson number one below.
