Links

Last weekend a StumbleUpon hit lead me to subscribe to some new blogs. That's lead me to some new discoveries. I've also had a links from another place too so here's a round up.

Seam Carving for content-aware image resizing

Stephen passed this one on to me. It's a technique for re-sizing images in a very clever way. Hard to explain - just watch the video and marvel.

lifehacker

As it says in their FAQ, it's

a blog that covers tips and tricks for streamlining your life with computers (and sometimes without). Updated several times daily, Lifehacker points out software downloads, web sites, do-it-yourself projects, how-to's, tutorials, shortcuts and tips for going beyond the default settings and getting things done in the most clever, unexpected and efficient ways. Think of Lifehacker as self-help for geeks.

Inevitably there's a lot of Windows stuff on there but it's still worth a read.

Adjust Web Forms with Resizeable Form Fields

And here's an example of the sort of thing lifehacker has brought me. This blog article describes this FireFox extension which lets you re-size textareas and other fields in web forms. If you've ever been annoyed by a stoopidly small text entry box for entering your message this is for you.

Thumbalizr

This is from another blog makeuseof.com. It's an online tool that allows you take thumbnail screenshots of any webpage and save it on your PC. No sign-up required, just enter the website URL and press the "thumb it" button. For someone like me who designs web sites this is a real time saver.

Google Apps

This is from yet another blog Gearfire. Google Apps is essentially an extranet hosted by Google. So get a domain and you can have lots of users each with their own email address in that domain using a Gmail interface to read it, plus shared diary, Google Talk and more. Free for home use. If we didn't already have our own intranet I'd be tempted to go with this.