The Great Geek Manual

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.

Utilities

• DevChirp – helps you find people working in the software industry on twitter. Software developers twitter profiles are cherry picked by DevChirp and displayed.
• Startup Applications List – a list to show you which startup applications are fine and which are evil before you settle in to enjoy your new Christmas computer.
• Etherpad – this simple application is causing it a bit of a stir. The Atlantic calls it “The Simple Software That Could —but Probably Won’t—Change the Face of Writing.” Now a Google property, EtherPad is the only web-based word processor that allows people to work together in really real-time.
• QuietWrite – this is a SUPER minimalistic notepad site for saving notes online.
• TweetMyGaming – is for game lovers on twitter. The site aggregates all tweets related to games and displays it to you.

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Utilities

• Body Browser – Google’s latest toy is like Google Earth for the human body.
• Nerrot – bills itself as the world’s most minimal torrent site. Just type in what you’re looking for and poof – it’s downloaded to your desktop.
• Teach Parents Tech – send your parents a tech suppot care package now before you head home for the holidays. Might save some work on Christmas.

Tutorials

• LifeHacker’s Most Popular DIY Projects of 2010
• Google presents: TeachParentsTech.org (via the official Google blog). You’ll never have to teach your parents how to copy and paste, attach a file to their email or transfer files again.

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Utilities

• Discover – an amazing Wikipedia client developed by the folks behind the popular CoolIris extension that brings Wikipedia to your iPad in an elegant way.
• gPodder – a clean and simple client for downloading podcasts in one place.
• OboPay – one of the first mobile payment systems to make it to the web, enabling customers to transfer money to one another right from the mobile phone.
• PollDaddy – create polls and post it directly on twitter. This can be extremely valuable when you are researching a subject or need user feedback.
• TweetaFile – using Tweetafile, Twitter users can send any files (images, PDFs, Docs, videos… whatever) to all of their followers or via direct message to individuals.

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Utilities

• ArsClip 3.1.3 – a free, powerful, customizable clipboard extender. It stores text strings, pictures, filenames for easy reuse, and basically does everything for cut-and-paste that Windows’ own clipboard should do but doesn’t.
• Ge.tt – this site bills itself as the easiest way to share any number of files, no matter how large, within seconds.
• RedNotebook – a journal that incorporates calendar navigation, customizable templates for each day, export functionality, and word clouds. Great for keeping notes over long periods. You can format and tag your entries for easy organization.
• Unfollow Finder – find out who is not following you back on Twitter.

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