CoolNerd » Online Tools

Lynda.com – Online Tutorals

Tyler Toone — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 08:19:52 +0000

Recently I signed up for a membership on Lynda.com after hearing about the site from so many different forums and comments from several friends of mine. Granted there are many tutorial based sites around the web, but none that are broad and expansive as Lynda.com, at least that I’ve seen thus far.

I am a self-proclaimed-learn-it-yourself type of a person, and I strongly believe that hands on experience is a very powerful way of learning new skills. For this reason I have enjoyed the tutorials on Lynda.com because it allows me to work at my own pace, whether fast or slow, to learn new skills or dust off unused skills with a good refresher course. I would say, however, that the cost may seem high to pay $25/month, but I think it’s worth it.

I’d like to know from any of you out there if you know have used Lynda.com, your experiences, and if you recommend any other similar resources online.

Get Your Budget Into Mint Condition

Tyler Toone — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 05:28:16 +0000

Earlier this year my wife and I decided we would organize a monthly budget into a Google spreadsheet so we could both collaborate and make sure we stayed within our means. This worked for about 3 months because of the pain it was to manually review our monthly transactions and plug them all into the budget spreadsheet. I first saw Mint.com back when it launched as a beta site, but chose not to sign up on the service because I wanted to wait until it was out of beta. Well about 3 weeks ago I signed up on Mint.com an “intelligent online money management” (Mint’s About section).

There are so many very cool things about Mint.com, but the biggest thing for me is that I no longer have to spend 2 to 3 hours a month manually figuring out our budget. Signing up was extremely simple and having the site auto categorize my expenditures was amazing! This site is definitely in my top five cool sites!

Plaxo – Comcast Deal

Tyler Toone — Thu, 15 May 2008 06:29:43 +0000

One big piece of news from today is the deal between Plaxo and Comcast – yep – another big merger. The purchase price is between $150 and $170 million. All in all I think this is a great move for Plaxo, even though they originally wanted $250 million. Plaxo has been making some great advances on there site over the past year, including Pulse - their version of the Facebook News Feeds and User Feeds. Even though Plaxo may not be as trendy and popular as Facebook, I do think with proper guidance and marketing it can be a great tool for a more business savvy audience and possibly an older generation.

Rsizr.com – A pretty nifty image re-sizer

Tyler Toone — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 05:51:42 +0000

Cruising the Internet this evening I came across Rsizr.com, a really cool image re-sizer. It uses a method called “retarget” where certain brush strokes are removed when shrinking the image and when enlarging it the brush strokes are added. I can see a lot of potential for this site and the software behind it. All-in-all, Rsizr.com is pretty cool.

Here is a screenshot of Rzisr reading the brush strokes with the retarget mode: