Comics starring YOU and your Friends. This little tool lets you create stories based on your Facebook friends. You can create avatars and then pop them into interesting or fun situations. This is my first attempt, just with me in the picture:

Custom Photo ID Card Printing, with Templates. IDCreator looks like a fun little tool. You can make a wide variety of different sorts of ID cards. There are lots of templates that you can use to make cards such as luggage labels, gift cards, employee badges, business cards, police cards and so on. (Umm, police cards? Like identity cards? Apparently so.) Very simple to use. I think you can download a pdf of the badge or pay them to produce it for you.

ProxFree is a simple and completely free web proxy service.  Unblock and access any YouTube videos in your country now. If you can't watch the video that you're interested in because it's not being shown in your country for some strange reason, Proxfree may be a solution for you. Simply enter the URL of the video you want to watch, choose a server location and IP address and you're then able to view the video. If you still find it's difficult, try a different server location. Should you do this? I have no idea - it depends on why a video was blocked in the first place. However, it's always worth knowing how this stuff works, because if you work in a school for example, you'll need to understand how children may be able to see stuff that you're not expecting them to be able to view.

Freemake offers a variety of tools, such as the Video Converter. You can use it to download a programme in one format and turn it into another. This does have some interesting side effects. Suppose you download a programme from the BBC iPlayer, and you pick the Windows Media Player as the download option. When it's finished, you can drag the file to your library, and watch it - but of course you only have 30 days to do this. However, if you right click the file and select Properties, and then click the Media usage rights tab, you'll see that it can only be played to the specific date.

However, with the Freemake Video Converter you can click the video option, open the protected iPlayer file and select a different format, such as AVI and click convert. When it's finished, you can drag the converted file across to your media player library and click the Media Rights tab again and you'll see the restrictions have now gone. I wouldn't advise sharing the file with anyone else however, and of course you shouldn't use this option to keep a programme longer than the Media Rights attached to it in the first place.

There are times when you can't see the stuff that you want to see, mainly because you're in the wrong country at the wrong time. Suppose that you're American, and you're in Britain for a holiday, and you want to watch a particular programme on Hulu for example. You can't, because it's blocked in the UK. This is where Hola's unblocker comes into play. You can download it and install it, and the application makes it appear as if you're accessing the resource from within the USProblem solved. This may also help if the content that you want to look at has been blocked for other, political reasons.

Free printable papers for the daily use. Lovely idea. Do you need lined paper? Memo paper? Dotted paper? This website has over 40 templates that you can simply download and then print out to use however you want. All free. So if you fancy a quick game of battleships... this is the site to start you off!

ChatWing is a product that I've reviewed before, but was asked to take another look at it since they've made a lot of changes. It's a nice site - you can create your own chatroom really quickly. New functionality includes the ability to include video straight in the chat box, as well as images and hotlinks. You can also password protect chat and force login and change styles. It also supports 9 different languages. I tried it out yesterday, and it's quite impressive. I shall be using it on my multimedia courses!

Use the Bingo card generator tool to create your bingo cards easily and quickly !. Bingo Card App is a bingo card generatorthat lets you make custom printable bingo cards. You can use Bingo Card App to create hundreds of random/unique bingo cards and print them using printer friendly in PDF format(with no ads or watermarks). Every card is unique and scrambled, Let's play your bingo game, it's free.

I think this would be great for educational use, or perhaps fun on a course.

"Meograph is the easiest way to create multimedia stories. With no training you can quickly create stories about the news, history, travels, life events, and more by combining video, audio, pictures, text, links, maps, and timelines. Then share by embedding anywhere on the web, or through your favorite social network." I'm very keen on Meograph - it's a great tool and it does exactly what they say that it does (quote above). They've now added in a search function so that you can see what guides have been added. There's a lot of them which have been created by children, and it's really interesting to see what they have done.

So far over 40,000 stories have been told, and now folks will be able to see all of them (including content created by other teachers and classrooms!).  Unique features include:

With PDFConverter.com It says of itself "Use our online PDF to Powerpoint Converter to create editable Powerpoint slides easily and quickly. Conversion is done online, relieving you of the need to install yet another piece of software on your hard disk. All you need to do is upload your PDF file, provide the email address where we can send you your converted document, and sit back and relax. Maximum file size of an uploaded file is 2MB." I haven't tried it myself, but it looks neat and tidy - and very easy to use.

CloudConvert supports the conversion between more than 100 different audio, video, document, ebook, archive, image, spreadsheet and presentation formats. You can specify advanced options for every conversion type.

If you need to work out what a particular font is, it's worth taking a look at What Font is which will attempt to identify it for you. You can upload an image, or link to a URL. It has a database of over a quarter of a million fonts; many of which are free to download.

Ever felt like typing øéæå€ẅûø♀♂☺☆½¼Δ©¥¢ ? Probably not, but I'll bet there's a few in there that you'd like to have available quickly! If you know your keyboard inside out you can actually type in a lot of these if you have the arcane skills, but most of us manage without. However, there's a funky little website called TypeIt which allows you to choose from 26 character sets such as Russian, Welsh, Maori, Esperanto and so on. Simply click on the character(s) you want, and then cut and paste them into your document.

Youtube2GIF is a windows application that helps you to create animated GIFs when you are watching online videos. Convert video to gif animation file with high quality and fast speed, it supports capturing most popular videos such as YouTube, Dailymotion, NICONICO, Hulu, Vimeo, Metacafe, VEVO, Facebook Video, Yahoo video, MSN Video, Google Video, Liveleak, etc. more than 100 video sites.

Simply download the file and install, then just place the monitor window over the YouTube video that you're after, and it will start collecting images, then will turn them into an animated gif for you. You can loop it, add in your own subtitles and so on. Very nice little tool. The freebie has a watermark on it, but you can buy it for about $20.

Duplicate Content & Plagiarism Checking Tool In their words: "What Is PlagSpotter?PlagSpotter is an online duplicate content checking and monitoring tool. Instantly find copies of your web page(s) or automatically scan, detect and monitor your page(s) for duplicate content"

Simply type in the URL of the page that you're interested in, and it will find other pages on the web which have used a percentage of your content.

The tool that I usually use to see if my content has been stolen is Copyscape, so I thought I'd do a comparison. I checked one of the pages on my site which I know has been ripped off quite a lot, and it's about meta tags. PlagSpotter found 2 instances, with 2% of matched content, which to be honest didn't fill me with confidence. Copyscape came back with 10 (which is a limitation of the free service) including one with 97% of matched content. PlagSpotter was easier to use in that they clearly indicated what content had been copied - while Copyscape does show the content of the page, nothing is highlighted - you actually have to go to the site itself, which is mildly annoying.

I tried a second search, and again Copyscape gave me 10 results, but PlagSpotter returned over 30. However, their matched content, other than one site of 71% copied content was down in the 1%-3% range which is really difficult to see as plagiarism. The results from Copyscape were far superior, and much more helpful. I tried a couple of other searches, but the results were similar, and I quickly came to the end of the free searches that I could use on PlagSpotter. To be fair, Copyscape also has limitations on their service, but to be honest, while PlagSpotter had some good features, the free option is far too limited, and it just didn't return as many results as I know are out there.

Of course, the best way to work is to include a few slightly odd phrase constructions and run a normal search to see where else you find the phrase - chances are that it'll be on material copied from your page.

Need to find someone to look after your house or your pets while you're away? This site will find you House Sitters, Dog, Cat & Pet Minders and also jobs where you can housesit - the world over! It's well put together and a serious site - it costs £50 pa if you're a home owner, though you can join for shorter periods if you wish.

 

Looking for an alternative to DropBox? You might want to take a look at Copy in that case. Start off with 5GB of space, upped to 7GB if you tweet nice things. They say "Sharing large photo albums is as easy as sending a text file. And you control if people can sync your content to their computer or just view it online. You can share members-only links to your content so prying eyes can't cheat their way into your stuff. And we validate every attempt to access it."

I've taken a quick look at it, and it looks fine - works from the browser window and you can just click and drag the stuff that you want to share. Nothing to download either, which is excellent if you have super paranoid techie folks, although there is an app you can download. If you want to try it out, here's my invitation to you. (If you complete the invitation and install the app apparently you get an extra 5GB)

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Using Draft.in which is  a collaboration tool for writing. You can draft what you want to say and share it with other people to get their input and feedback. When you share your document using Draft, any changes your collaborator makes are on their own copy of the document, and you get to accept or ignore each individual change they make. You can import your documents from cloud services like Dropbox, Evernote, Box, Google Drive.

This looks like a really nice tool, and great for collaborative writing in that you can see the changes that someone has made without them over writing what you'd originally put.

This is a free online photographic editor from Pikock and it's a nice looking tool, which seems to do the business. Nothing to install, nothing to download.