Skellie

25 Incredible Skins, Resources & Tools for the Gmail Power User

February 5, 2008 by Skellie 76 Comments

Gmail is one of those rare things unanimously loved by everyday web users and tech-heads alike. The possibilities are endless. It can be anything from a simple email client to your central nervous system on the web. How far you take it is up to you.

Each day seems to produce a new hack, tool or tip for better Gmail use. In this post, I want to highlight only the very best, hand-picked from hundreds of resources. This is not another resource list you’ll bookmark and never look at again. These tips, monster resources and tools will change the way you use Gmail.

Best Gmail skins

1. Super Clean skin — probably the most popular Gmail skin, Super Clean replaces the standard interface with a minimalist white and sky-blue version. Perfect for the budding Zen-master.

2. Air skin — makes subtle changes to the visual interface, adding clean lines, a cloudy color combo and changes the primary font. The perfect solution for users looking for a fresh look without any radical changes.

3. Mac skin — a Mac-inspired Gmail skin to match the Mac you’re checking your mail on! Adds a Mac-style menu and color-scheme to your Gmail account.

4. Fe Mail skin — a well-crafted and very pink Gmail skin.

5. Dark Gmail skin — almost the complete opposite to the last link, this skin is one for the dark and brooding Gmail user.

6. Silverstar skin — a popular minimalist gray theme.

7. Brushed skin — a gray and maroon theme with nifty gradients thrown into the mix.

Best Gmail resources

8. The Gmail Shortcuts Cheat Sheet — a comprehensive printable cheat sheet of useful shortcuts for Gmail. Print it and stick it to your desk: these shortcuts are worth memorizing. Did you know pressing ‘Tab’ and ‘Enter’ will send the email you’ve composed?

9. Gmail Craze: 40+ Tools and Hacks for Gmail — a frequently updated post from MakeUseOf featuring essential Firefox extensions, Greasemonkey Scripts, Desktop Apps, Web Tools, tips and hacks.

10. 55 Gmail tips — this website is dedicated to providing detailed Gmail tips. It covers everything from excluding chat from search results to importing Hotmail contacts.

11. Hack Attack: Become a Gmail Master — this fantastic guide from Lifehacker introduces Gmail’s most powerful capabilities in a way that’s easy to follow. It will help take anyone only familiar with Gmail’s basic functions to the next level.

12. Use Gmail as Your Universal Email Account — got too many email addresses to keep track of? Forward them all to Gmail and deal with your incoming mail from one central location.

13. Ultimate Gmail Collection: Over 80 Tools and Tips — a monster list of extensions, scripts, apps, notifiers, how-tos and shortcuts for the serious Gmail user.

14. Turn Gmail Into Your Personal Nerve Center — influential technology blogger Steve Rubel shares his essential Gmail life hacks, including:

How to turn Gmail into a massive personal database
How to get real-time news updates in Gmail
How to automatically store your bookmarks in Gmail
How to manage Calendar and To-Dos in Gmail
How to blog from Gmail

15. 1 Awesome Gmail Tip You Didn’t Know About. Seriously. — this easy tutorial explains how you can customize your Gmail address to serve different purposes.

16. Gmail Toolbox: 60+ Tools for Gmail — Mashable.com works its magic with a huge compendium of Gmail tools. It includes all the extensions you know and love in addition to some (previously) undiscovered gems.

17. Access Gmail When It’s Blocked at Work or School — Engtech provides five strategies you can use to check your Gmail anywhere, even when the I.T. department doesn’t want you to.

18. Mark Spam Messages as Read — this simple filters hack allows you to prevent your unread spam count showing in the main display. Best of all, it will still alert you to items that have been incorrectly marked as spam.

19. Gmail Tips and Tricks: Monster Roundup — Lifehacker’s big roundup of its favorite Gmail downloads, hacks and articles.

Best Gmail tools

20. Gmail Drive — this tool puts Gmail’s extensive storage capacity to use, adding a new drive to your computer which can be accessed via Windows Explorer. You can create folders and drag and drop files within the drive. If you’ve got unused space in your Gmail account, why not add some more space to your hard drive?

21. GTD Inbox — the email solution for productivity nuts, GTD Inbox is a Firefox extension designed to merge the “Getting Things Done” productivity method with Gmail. It transforms Gmail into a productivity hub you can use to set and manage tasks or to-dos. The interface is very subtle and won’t interrupt the look and feel of Gmail as you know it.

22. Better Gmail 2 — this simple and elegant Firefox extension, authored by Gina Trapani, makes several improvements to Gmail’s core functionality, allowing you to hide the ever-annoying Spam count, compose Mailto links in Gmail and view your storage quota as a useful graph. If you’re still using the old version of Gmail, you’ll need to download the original Better Gmail extension.

23. Gmail Music — this nifty little web-based GUI app allows you to store MP3 files in your Gmail account and play them on any computer.

24. Dragdropupload — a Firefox extension that does away with the pesky ‘Browse’ interface. It enables drag and drop email attachments to make the process quick and painless.

25. Gmail Skins — a Firefox extension to customize the color of your Gmail inbox.

Suggest your favorite skins, resources and tools in the comments section!

18 Undiscovered Websites Every Gamer Should Know

January 23, 2008 by Skellie 146 Comments

The gaming niche is characterized by its haves and have-nots. You’ve seen Kotaku, IGN, GameSpot, Joystiq, 1UP and the others, but what about the great, lesser-known gaming sites?

This post introduces 18 great gaming sites you might not have seen before. Whether you’re looking for freebies, music, laughs or oddities, there’s something here for occasional and hardcore gamers alike.

1. Overclocked Remix is a community hub of users who painstakingly remix and arrange video game music. There are thousands of tracks available for download. If you like the soundtrack to your favorite game, you can bet it has been remixed and reworked here.

2. The Freeware Indie Games Database offers just under 1,000 play-tested freeware titles from independent game developers. The games here are innovative and unique. Some of them are bound to be re-developed as Wii titles.

3. POKE is a light-weight utility that allows you to cheat in almost any single player game, whether it’s already published or to be published in the future.

4. The Daedalus Project gets into the minds of MMORPG players. The website’s author has surveyed over 35,000 gamers and provides a detailed break-down of his findings in areas such as the player life-cycle, making friends and status reversal. It’s fascinating stuff.

5. Gaming Magazines of the Pre-Internet Era is a treasure trove for retro gamers. It links out to .PDF databases of old and out of print gaming magazines.

6. The Grand List of Role Playing Game Clichés is a list of 100+ painful clichés any RPG fan would have encountered before. My favorite? The No! My beloved peasant village cliché: “The hero’s home town, city, slum, or planet will usually be annihilated in a spectacular fashion before the end of the game, and often before the end of the opening scene.”

7. GameCakes is the website for people who love cake and video games. These game-themed cakes run the gamut, from the bizarre to the majestic. The scrumptious photos will have you baking your own cupcakes in no time.

8. CrazyPC is the hardcore gamer’s place for computer accessories. All the neon, case mods, plexiglass, tubes and coolant fluid you can poke a memory stick at.

9. VGMusic is host to 24,000+ midi versions of video game tracks from all your retro favorites: Megaman, Mario, Zelda, Sonic the Hedgehog, et al.

10. Build Your Own Gaming Computers is a website dedicated to helping you… well, you can probably guess. Gaming rigs sell for thousands of dollars and learning to build your own can save you lots of cash. This website provides advice on the entire process, from choosing parts to installation.

11. Abandonia offers thousands of abandonware DOS downloads. Abandonware essentially means games which aren’t sold anymore, prompting their release into the public domain. They’re the games you might have owned and loved as a child or teenager. Chances are you’ll find some old favorites here.

12. Jay is Games sources out the best casual games and brings them directly to you. The blog’s authors sure know their stuff and their opinions are worth listening to. Subscribe to their feed for a daily stream of gorgeous, idle distractions.

13. Old Grandma Hardcore is the blog of a foul-mouthed, lovable gamer grandma (with the pictures to prove it!). No, we’re not talking Brain Training and The Sims — we’re talking games like Bioshock and The Darkness. This grandma really is hardcore!

14. Insert Credit is a multi-author Japanese games and culture blog specializing in breaking news from the land of the rising sun.

15. Replacementdocs is an online archive of .PDF game manuals for thousands of popular games. If you’ve experienced the frustration of losing the manual to your favorite title, replacementdocs should have a solution for you.

16. Wonderland is an odds-and-ends gaming blog mainly known for its cool gamecrafts. From Darth Vader backpacks to Quake coasters, this blog is proof that gamers are an arty bunch.

17. The Speed Demos Archive is host to hundreds of videos documenting the efforts of those dedicated individuals who’ve conquered games in the shortest time possible. Watch epic games like Half Life 2 and Icewind Dale beaten before your lunch-break is over.

18. The System Requirements Lab analyzes your computer, benchmarking it against the minimum requirements of a specific product. Ever wondered if your computer can handle that gorgeous new release? Now you’ll know.

Update: Here are some more great websites that you might not have seen before, suggested from our readers:

17 Sensational, Free and Downloadable Graphic Novels

January 8, 2008 by Skellie 72 Comments

The web is home to a treasure-trove of free culture. Thousands of artists, writers, film-makers, poets and illustrators craft impressive creative works and share them freely online, in the interests of making their work accessible to as many people as possible. We thank them for that.

In this post, I want to highlight a booming segment of the online free culture movement: graphic novels.

Each link will take you to a page where you can download or view a high quality graphic novel or excerpt freely and with no strings attached.

There are plenty more to be found, but these seventeen are some of the best you’ll find.

1. NYC2123 is a graphic novel designed for the Sony Playstation Portable, though it can easily be viewed as an image slideshow on any PC. It’s a B&W cyberpunk story, set on a post-apocalyptic earth. There are currently 6 issues available for download.

2. Fell #1 by Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith follows Detective Richard Fell, recently dumped in the roughest part of town and forced to try and stay afloat amongst the decay. Like many graphic novels, this one is heavy on the dystopia and will please anyone who likes their characters dark and morally ambiguous.

3. Crossing Midnight Vol. 1: Cut Here is a fantasy meets Asian horror story of two twins born under strange circumstances. It’s set in present day Nagasaki, Japan, and is bound to please fans of J-Horror.

4. Fables Vol. 1: Legends in Exile asks the question: what if classic fairy-tale characters were banished to present day New York?

5. Deadman Vol. 1: Deadman Walking follows the journey of a man struggling to solve the mystery behind his own death.

6. Salamander Dream is the whimsical story of a girl and her salamander spirit friend. The print version of the novel was named one of the best comics released in 2005 by Publisher’s Weekly.

7. Y: The Last Man Vol. 1: Unmanned is the story of Yorick Brown, the last man alive in a world inhabited only by women.

8. Meanwhile is an interactive comic from Jason Shiga — kinda like a much cooler version of those Choose Your Own Adventure books you read as a kid.

9. The Sandman Vol. 1: Preludes and Nocturnes, written by best-selling Sci-Fi author Neil Gaiman, chronicles the story of Morpheus, Lord of Dreams.

10. The War of the Worlds graphic novel adaptation is available freely online courtesy of Dark Horse Comics.

11. DMZ Vol. 1: On the Ground is the story of an embedded war journalist trapped in the war-zone that is now New York City.

12. Outside the Box chronicles the dangerous adventures of a bored dotcommer drawn into events much larger than himself.

13. Doom Patrol Vol. 1: Crawling From the Wreckage twists the group of superheroes stereotype on its head.

14. Indefensible Positions is a modern day story where magic and myths are real.

15. Hellblazer: Original Sins follows the early days of John Constantine, a British occultist with murky morals who is often forced to save the day.

16. Chaos PhD is a finely crafted and off-beat homage to the Silver Age of American comic books.

17. Swamp Thing Vol. 1: Saga of the Swamp Thing tells the tale of an unlikely hero: a swamp creature forced to fight against the destructive influence of a corrupt and decadent human-kind.

Top 10 Places to Get Movie, Music and Game Reviews Online

November 26, 2007 by Skellie 12 Comments

We’ve all done it: paid hard-earned money for something in the hope it would be good, only to find out that it wasn’t worth the risk. Think of all the shopper’s remorse we could avoid if we read a few reviews before we bought something!

Thankfully, web users are spoiled for choice when it comes to quality music, movie and game reviews online.

This post is an introduction to the top 10 online review websites, each striking a delicate balance between quality and respect in the field.

All-purpose

1. Metacritic.com is the one-stop shop for many, providing scores out of 100 for newly released games, movies, DVDs and TV shows. Rather than providing unique reviews, Metacritic aggregates all available reviews for a particular product and produces a score averaged across all critics. It’s a quick way to get an overview of how the critical community as a whole has received a certain product, particularly if you’re concerned about the biases of individual critics. Highly recommended.

Movies

2. Rotten Tomatoes is perhaps the best known source of online movie reviews from critics. It aggregates reviews from the critical community and calculates a total score for the film, deeming it either ‘fresh’ or ‘rotten’. The home page for each movie features quotes from each critic, summing up the general tone of their review. It’s a useful way get an idea of how good/bad a movie is while also using the quotes to gauge what aspects of the film stood out.

3. IMDb is a movie information and reviews site for those who’re more interested than the opinion of the masses than the opinions of paid critics. The emphasis is on votes rather than reviews, but the sheer amount of users who participate — in the tens of thousands — leads to a very democratic result.

Music

4. Pitchfork Media is the hipster’s music review site of choice (you can tell by the banner ads for American Apparel). The emphasis here is on less mainstream music, but the reviews are well-written and generally well-respected in the online community.

5. Rolling Stone the magazine publishes its CD reviews online. The focus is on popular music and widely known alternative acts. In other words, those searching for the obscure should look elsewhere. Despite this, the reviews tend to be well-written. After all, if Rolling Stone can’t find any decent music journalists, who can?

6. SPIN is Rolling Stone’s slightly trendier, slightly less mainstream counterpart. The online reviews are also plucked straight out of the magazine. Each review is short and to the point, though the editorial standard is hampered by an annoying tendency to give almost everything three and a half stars.

7. NME is the UK’s premiere music mag. Often a taste-maker, the magazine has frequently been criticized by ‘serious’ music aficionados for its tendency to give names to things that didn’t previously exist (the New Rave genre, for example). Still, the reviews are meatier than other alternatives. NME also has a disturbing tendency to pick out the UK’s ‘next big thing’ — often going on to become the ‘next big thing’ everywhere else, as well.

8. Drowned in Sound threatens to topple Pitchfork Media from its mantle of ‘hippest music review site’. For every band you’ve heard of there’s bound to be one you haven’t. Pretentious, maybe, but you’re almost guaranteed to happen upon some undiscovered gems you’d never have heard about otherwise.

Games

9. Game Rankings is a review aggregating site build especially for gamers. The home page for each game links out to a number of critics reviews while also aggregating a total average score for the game. The site is also highly interactive, awarding points based on user contributions to the community.

10. GameSpot is one of the oldest and most well-known video game sites. While the competition is fierce between the major players (IGN, 1UP and GameSpy), GameSpot is arguably at the fore when it comes to the quality of the reviews it publishes. Each review comes with a neat summary of pros and cons to help you quickly decide if a game is worth laying down cash for.

What’s your favorite place to get reviews online?

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