The Great Geek Manual

Utilities and Resources

• dushare – a simple direct file-file-transfer service. It makes sending unlimited file sizes between two people as simple as clicking a link. You can send you files to your peers directly (P2P) with no server for upload/download.
• Join.me – a site that allows you to share your screen instantly with anyone, anywhere. Ultra simple interface.
• Lockbin – a free, online service for sending encrypted email messages without registering a whole new account.
• Mockingbird – an online tool similar to Microsoft’s Visio that lets you create, link together, preview, and share mockups of your website or application.
• PDFUnlock – this simple online tool lets you remove restrictions from PDF files. Copy text, edit the document, or print.

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Utilities and Resources

• INCLIQ – a brand-spanking-new browser-based social network that operates over a peer-to-peer mesh. Kind of like Facebook meets Skype, without all the private user data getting spread around. Sign up for beta now!
• Read It Later – a fantastic plug-in that saves webpages away to be read later from a cloud-based reading list.
• Twtspire – this application uses the Twitter search API to find tweets with key phrases like “I wish there was a site that…” and collects these ideas for your perusal. Hours of distraction for developers.
• Vizalizer – this new Search Engine allows you to explore the Web visually, using serach-generated infographic. Currently in beta, but fun to play with.

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Utilities and Resources

• Convore – a Google Wave-style chat service, minus all the unnecessary complications. Great for group collaboration. [Read more]
• Google for Weddings – a site set up to show you how to use the various google tools for wedding planning. Not sure if this is more about using the existing tools, or a new set of tools using picasa/blogger/etc under the hood. Still, it’ll help keep engaged nerds happy.
• lightlywake.me – this service turns your computer into an alarm clock, playing the Pandora or YouTube channel of your choice.
• Treesaver.js – a JavaScript library for creating amazing magazine-style layouts

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Utilities and Resources

• DooID – your one-stop virtual business card that links friends, contacts and clients to your networking websites, business info and contact details.
• PavoMe – a java based mobile twitter app that will run on most of the Nokia phones out there. PavoMe let’s you easily upload photos, videos, audio recordings etc. You can tweet, view mentions and send and read Direct Messages.
• PicArtia – create your photo mosaic online fast, easy, and free.
• Twitshift – a service that lets you follow yourself on Twitter…a year ago. “We’ll store your old posts on our server and repost them to a second account of your choosing on the same day you posted them last year.”
• YaCy – a free search engine that anyone can use to build a search portal for their intranet or to help search the public internet. When contributing to the world-wide peer network, the scale of YaCy is limited only by the number of users in the world and can index billions of web pages. It is fully decentralized, all users of the search engine network are equal.

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Utilities and Resources

• About.me – a lot of us have multiple online profiles scattered across various services, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, and Twitter. And one problem we face is pulling all of this information together to build a single on-line identity – be it for personal use, or to create a professional on-line profile. about.me fixes that.
• Awesome Fontstacks – this application automatically match fonts based on typographical metrics, optimize the font bundles for their intended purpose, and deliver rock solid CSS for those fonts and their fallbacks to copy & paste.
• crocodoc – this service takes your PDFs, Word documents, and PowerPoint presentations, and lets you view and mark them up online. Documents can be shared with others, who can collaboratively highlight or strikeout text, add notes and comments, and make revisions.

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Utilities and Resources

• Answer.IM – an auto answering machine for instant messaging. Answer.IM allow you to stay online even when your PC off. They support icq, msn, aim, yahoo, google talk, myspace and others.
• CopyTaste – allows you to create your a private URL with the data you wish to share with your friends or colleagues.
• Google Refine – a free data-cleaning tool provided by Google. You install it on your own computer and run it through your browser. It’s very similar to PivotTables in Excel, but there are some advanced features such as data matching. On their blog, ProPublica provides a practical example of how they used the software to clean medical billing data for one of their investigative reports.

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Utilities

• Quora – a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. An excellent social network.
• Spokeo – a people search engine with a twist. Spokeo can find the real person behind any e-mail address, which is a bit creepy, when you think about it.
• Universal Subtitles – a software project and online community that’s building the world’s simplest subtitling tool. The’re drawing on contributors around the world to make captioning and translating video free, fun and open to all.

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Can a Google search give us any psychological insight in to what people think of something? Natalia Buckley, a design student at Goldsmith’s College, University of London, has certainly given us insight in to what people think about robots in this short presentation of Google’s many search suggestions for the term.