Friday, November 28, 2008

5 Excellent Sources To Download Free Text Fonts



 
 

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via MakeUseOf.com by Mark O'Neill on 11/28/08

When I was a little innocent computer newbie, still finding my way around a keyboard and gasping with delight at the internet ("WOW!  HOTMAIL!"), I made a few really bad mistakes while learning.   One of them (which I still cringe about to this day) was back in 2000 when I installed 9000 fonts on Microsoft Word and then wondered why it took forever for the damn thing to start up! ("Dear Mr Gates, I'd like to complain about your Word product and its slow startup speed….")

Even though I have learnt my lesson from that day, I still love fonts and I am always trying out new ones.   Art and graphic design were my best subjects at school and calligraphy has always been a big interest of mine as well.   So I am always collecting new free online sources for fonts.

Here are the five best ones in my opinion :

What The Font?!

Do you really like a particular poster design or a particular style of font and you would like to duplicate it?   "What The Font" allows you to upload a scanned image of a piece of writing or a font and it will identify the name of the font for you.    Or instead of uploading, you can point it to a URL.

It seems to be very accurate and fast.   I uploaded a scan of the title of a book I have called "To The Lighthouse" by Virginia Woolf.   "What The Font" identified the font seconds later as "Baskerville Old Face" :

DDFont

Some nice fonts here. Not too many to choose from but the ones that ARE available are quite nice. Just click on the one you want, enter the activation code, and it will download to your computer.

Fonts 500

Claims to be the top 500 free fonts on the web.   Not sure if that is true but nevertheless the fonts on this site are REALLY good.    Each one is in a ZIP file so just click on the ones you want and they will immediately download to your computer.   Then just unzip them.   Some notable ones include Harry Potter, Yahoo, Scrabble letters, Star Wars, Godfather, Terminator, Bon Jovi and Pizza Hut.

TypeNow

Here, they have some movie and TV themed fonts.   If you have a favourite movie or TV programme, check here to see if the font is available.    TV show-wise, they have things like "Lost" and "Prison Break", movie-wise, they have ones like Casino Royale and Kill Bill.    In other ones, they have the Google font and Estee Lauder, among others.  Worth checking out.

Search Free Fonts

This excellent site allows you to search through 13,000 free fonts, broken down into various categories.  When you click on a particular font, it then gives you a close up view of that font so you can see what it looks like.   You can type in your own text, specify a size up to 72 and preview it in that font so you can decide which font will suit you best before downloading it :

To finish off, here's a College Humor video on a "Font Conference" which I have always found very funny.

Where do you find your fonts?    What are your favourite sites?

(By) Mark O'Neill is a freelance blogger and professional writer. He is also the managing and publishing editor of MakeUseOf. Check out his personal blog at Better Than Therapy

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Tags:design, fonts, free

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Thursday, November 27, 2008

Watch Any Site for Certain Stories with Notify.Me



 
 

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via MakeUseOf.com by Sharninder on 26/11/08

notifylogoNotify.Me is a service that informs you of updates to your favorite websites using a variety of different methods. You can even get updates from your Facebook, LinkedIn or Evite account and have them delivered to you over SMS or plain ol' email.

But the best feature of Notify.Me is being updated about specific keyword articles - more on that later though.

To get started with Notify.Me, head on over to the website and click on 'Register'. Give them a username, password and an arm and a leg … oh sorry, your email address. That should do it. You'll get an email from Notify.Me with an embedded link. Click on the link to verify your email address and you're good to go.

notifymain

Once you're logged in, you'll have to set up your Notify.Me account. From here on, the process involves following a simple wizard and giving the website some information.

The first screen asks you for your mobile number so that Notify.Me can send you notifications over SMS. I don't know if you'd like to be SMS'ed every time Techcrunch posts a new article but for news and similar stuff, I can definitely see the use.

Did I tell you that you can also configure Notify.Me to send you updates over IM ? The next step in the account setup wizard shows you how to do exactly that. They have instructions for working with Pidgin, Google Talk, Adium and Jabber, so they've got pretty much all operating systems covered, although personally I'd love to see MSN and Yahoo messenger also on that list.

notifyIM

The next screen asks will let you enter all the feeds that you'd like notify.me to keep a track of.

notifysource

The best part is that you can even filter the kind of notifications that you want to be, well, notified about.

For example, suppose you only want to hear about Gmail related articles on MakeUseOf. Just head over here to MakeUseOf. In the search box, type Gmail and press enter. Now, copy the URL from the address bar and paste it in the Notify.Me text box marked 'Feed'. That's it.

Now, every time there is an article mentioning Gmail on Make Use Of, you'll get a notification. You can even filter the source further by specifying keywords in the filter text box. Click on the IM, SMS or email icon to set the method by which you want to get your fix … err, feed.

notifyfilter

This can also obviously be done for any other blogs too where you would like to only be notified about articles on particular subjects.   Just go to that site, enter the subject into the blog's search engine and copy the URL into Notify.Me's text box.

So, you're all set now? What if one day you're surfing your blues away and come across a really interesting site and would like to see that added to your notify list?  Well, Notify.Me has you covered there too. With the bookmarklets that they provide, you can add new sources to your account as fast as you can click the bookmark button.

I can definitely see myself using this service to keep myself abreast of the latest news and blog posts. Are there any other similar services that you guys use ? I'd love to hear about them.

(By) Sharninder is a programmer, blogger and a geek making a living writing software to change the world. He is also passionate about open source and loves to ride around the country on his Royal Enfield motorcycle. Read all about his exploits at his weblog - NomadicRider.

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Tags:email, IM, notification, SMS, update

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Browse Through History With Online Photo Archives



 
 

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via MakeUseOf.com by Tim Watson on 27/11/08

Here's a great way to pass some time: browse through some photography archives. Students, teachers, scrapbookers and bloggers may find inspiration as well as material through several different websites. Recently, Life Magazine's historic photo archive was made available to the public through Google Image Search, which can be accessed directly from the Google homepage.

Some of these images date back as far as 1750 and others are as recent as the 2000's. You may browse through photos grouped by people (FDR), places (Taj Mahal), events (the Kentucky Derby), sports, or any cultural keyword you can think of.

For example, here's a word that's been thrown around lately: "depression." Type that in to find photos from the Great Depression of the 1930's.  You can start from http://images.google.com/hosted/life or simply add "source:life" to the search box on any Google Image Search page. Framed copies of any photo you find are available for purchase.

Other Image Collections

It should be noted that Life's sister publication, Time, also has an extensive (but not yet Googleized) photo archive dating back to 1999. It can be found on the Time homepage, but here's a direct link. You may also use the site's search function, where photo essays will show up on the right sidebar.

National Geographic magazine offers thousands of beautiful stock photos at NationalGeographicStock which can be searched by keyword. You may also specify whether you want royalty-free images and/or images which may have their rights managed.

NASA's Johnson Space Center has a collection of over 9000 press-release photos of America's manned space program. More can be found here. Both can be searched by keyword.

America's National Archive has but a fraction of its materials in its Archive Research Catalog. However that still amounts to over 140,000 digitized photographs and documents which can be searched by keyword, or leisurely browsed.

Rounding out our list, Image Services at the University of Pennsylvania Library has archives in several categories: Fine Arts, Chemistry, South Asian, or Shakespearean. Certain large images are only permitted for use on UPenn's domain, however all images can be viewed from outside UPenn.

There's some beautiful stuff and potential desktop wallpaper to be found in these collections. You may find some more wallpaper fodder via this February article by Tina.

Do you know of any other media treasure-troves?  Do you have any favorites?  How else can we use archives such as these? Let us know in the comments.

(By) Tim Watson is a freelance 'blogger, part-time Web addict, full-time father, and Aperture Science test subject (but only on the weekends). His 'blog and projects can be found at Twenty Ounce Enterprises.

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Tags:archive, Document, image, Image Search, media, photograph

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The Best Online Sources To Play & Learn Chess



 
 

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via MakeUseOf.com by Mark O'Neill on 27/11/08

I love playing chess and collecting chessboards and like everything else, my enjoyment of the game has moved online.   As well as playing installed software chess games, I also have some favourite chess websites where I like to meet other players from around the world for a game or two.    After all, it gets boring eventually playing against a computer.   Sometimes, it's good to play against a real live human being.

So here are some of the places where I like to play chess.    Later, I will also discuss some of the places where I have learned some chess tactics.

But one place which I will not talk about is Yahoo Games (in case anyone starts getting worked up in the comments).   I used to enjoy playing chess in Yahoo Games but the site is just not built for Firefox (Yahoo seems to be not inclined either to rewrite the site for Firefox) and so having to use Internet Explorer all the time just ruined it for me.   So eventually I stopped using the site and moved on.

So here's the three places I use for my chess fix :

ItsYourTurn

I wrote about ItsYourTurn back in September last year and it's great for playing chess.   Free IYT members get 40 game moves in 24 hours (paid members get unlimited moves) but the whole idea of ItsYourTurn is that you make a move, walk away from the game and come back to it later or the day after.   So 40 moves a day is more than enough.

I personally have 10 games going on at one time - I make one move on each game every morning then I don't go back to it until the next morning.  But there are paid members who have dozens and dozens of games going at the same time.   So if you're looking for an opponent, you won't find it hard.

If you feel like upgrading to a paid membership, it costs $29.95 per year.   But I don't see the point personally.

Flash Chess III

This requires Adobe Flash to play but it has a nice interface and the website plays a good game against you with three levels of difficulty.   You use your mouse to move your pieces around the board and there's a time limit.

Email Chess

One that I have only recently started using.   You set up the game, enter your email address and the email address of your opponent.

You make your first move, and then the game and your first move are emailed to your opponent.   Their move is then emailed back to you and so the match begins!

This would be for people who like long drawn-out games, people who don't mind waiting for their opponent to get back to them a few weeks later with their move.   I'm personally still waiting for my friend on the other side of the world to get back to me 3 weeks later with his move.   I'm impatiently waiting to see how he's going to get out of his King's check.

Online Sources To Learn Chess

So, playing chess at these three places is good enough but you've got to learn how to play and you've got to improve your game.    So where you do find advice on chess tactics?

About.com Chess: The old dependable About.com which everyone can rely on.    You can learn everything on this site ranging from the history of the game, the rules, beginner's tips, tactics to improve, books and equipment to buy and much more.

Chess Problems - the best way to improve is to be given a chess problem to solve.   "Chess Problems" gives you problems to solve ranging from "novice" to "fiendish"

Chess Openings - the most important moves in chess are always the first ones.  That's why you need to always practice your opening moves until they are perfect.   "Chess Openings" is "an interactive series of +8,000 unique board positions, from first moves through to full development of pieces, covering all major openings, defences and variations."

Predator At The Chessboard - I just love the name of this site.   This has lots of advice on each chess piece, its value and various tactics.   My only complaint is that it is lots of text and no graphics which makes it hard to follow.

Free Internet Chess Server - many chess games document your every move (and your opponent's move).  If you save those moves, you can submit your games to the Free Internet Chess Server and more experienced chess players can analyze them for you.    They will then spot possible areas where you are weak and suggest improvements.

So that is basically where I play chess and how I improve my game.   What about you?   Where online do you play and what online sources do you use to improve your game?

(By) Mark O'Neill is a freelance blogger and professional writer. He is also the managing and publishing editor of MakeUseOf. Check out his personal blog at Better Than Therapy

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