Showing posts with label reviews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reviews. Show all posts

Thursday, December 5, 2013

Life is so much easier with a sense of humor...

What's a better way to wrap up the blogs for the semester than a humor blog? Okay, maybe one that gives away money or prizes or something but whatever...this will do. So here are a couple websites you might get a laugh from!



So first, we have The Oatmeal. Everything on the site comes from a dude named Matthew Inman. He has created a blog with his illustrations featured on his comic strips and quizzes. What's really awesome that I discovered when surfing through the site..I actually already own a (small) book by Inman that was first a comic strip!
This comic strip to be exact....


(And after reading it I determined Snowball indeed showed all signs of plotting to kill me, so if I ever show up dead..well you know what hellcat to blame)

The comics can all be bought in either poster form or like what I purchased, an actual book, which is really cool. There is a whole collection of other funny comics on the site, a few of my favorite, aside from the one above, being: What it means when you say "literally" , What we SHOULD have been taught in our senior year of high school, and How Everything Goes to Hell During a Zombie Apocalypse. 

                                     

And the quizzes are just as quirky as the comics. I discovered that my body could feed 39 hungry weasels which has created a feeling of purpose in my life....along with a new found fear of hungry weasels.




Next, there's Cracked. The layout of this website is oddly reminiscent of like, CNN to me. Almost a parody of CNN...yeah..that's how I'm gonna phrase it. The site is comprised of articles and videos that make fun of pretty much anything pop culture (television shows and games) and then there's some science stuff and some other stuff on top of the other stuff. (I have a way with words, I'm aware)


Anyone can become a writer on this website. With the articles and videos, there are also podcasts. When you look around, there's more than just snarky articles, but as well as very informative articles (the one I found most interesting was 5 Lost Documents That Shatter Your Image of Famous People)

But because I am very childish I really liked 15 Texts from Last Night From Famous Superheroes


(how I will envision every conversation with Batman and Robin)



Engrish is the next humor site. It can simply be summed up as repeated mistakes foreign countries make when translating to English. They have a "brog" (lololol AKA blog) and a store for all their merchandise. Here are a couple of my favorite wonky translations:







Monday, November 4, 2013

Facebook, Myspace, Google+ Comparisons

I'll just go ahead and tell you all, the only social media I really use these days are Twitter and Instagram. I'm not much for managing a whole page, even this blog is a bit much for me. But for this post I will compare Facebook, Myspace, and Google+.

Now, I used to have Facebook....3 years ago. I got really tired of it for some reason and left it idle fr the longest time. Then someone hacked into it so I just deleted it because I didn't want to deal with it anymore. I'm probably one of the like 10% of the population that doesn't have it, but ya know..oh well. I'm not going to sign back up, because I won't maintain the page. But I have gone to the home page (not the dashboard or timeline) to see some things have changed.


I don't remember the graph search and don't really know if it's relevant to be honest. 

I will say, when I had a Facebook page, that was where all my friends were. It's very well known and for that gives a better chance of socialization with people I know because it is so easy to find them with their search, as well as celebrities or maybe anyone else that I'd want to add. The site has so many languages for all its users and allows for people all around the world to communicate.

Also, I know that the site is much more than just a social media page.You can play games, find a job, learn about music or news and so much more. You can go to Facebook and not leave it for hours. That's something that annoyed me about Facebook though...


Facebook became a platform for games. Old people stay on there and invite people all day long like it's there job. Once you block invites for one game, another one would pop up. A lot of the people I know only get on Facebook for the games, so that's annoying.

I used to have Myspace as well, but my account was also deleted on there. I went back to find this: 


The interface change is so dramatic! I would definitely rather have the old one than deal with this updated version. You scroll to the right instead of down and that's so impossibly stupid I can't even deal. 



I don't really know how to edit my profile. The timeline is really strange. Messages continue to show up as new notifications even after you check them. (Notice Allyson Brewer harassing me in those messages) I just do not like it. 

So I started to search for any of my friends with no luck in finding anyone that still had Myspace. So, instead I looked for the band I've been really into lately...


Let me note that I hate the search features. And also, I hate all the columns, there is no information under the pictures, but still I found it. Myspace is really designed toward artists these days. I find no reason to keep an account or even deal with it since it's so hard to mess with. I'll stick to simple Twitter, thank you.


I have a Google+ account, as shown on my blog, but I don't frequently use the site. I find it to be pretty similar to what I remember about Facebook when I think about sharing capabilities. You can post statuses, share news stories, or refer items. I saw a small detail I liked when sharing a photo (of me and my boyfriend if you're curious).


You can edit the picture. More than just rotating, but you can also crop and enhance the photo. Just something I find useful.

Compared to Myspace, where I didn't know what I was doing, how to find something, or how to get back to a page once I got to another, Google+ has really nice, easy navigation. There are options along the top and the left to get you to what you want to see and once you click something the "Home" button is always visible to get you back.

A notable feature is Google Hangouts. They are seen on the right and allow you to talk to many people at once. You can also start a video party at any time, something I haven't seen on other social media sites.


Oh, there are no ads clouding the page like Facebook. A nice refreshment.

So overall, I'd pick Google+ as my preferred social media. It's just sad it doesn't have quite as many users as Facebook. And I don't even consider Myspace in the running because it sucks so bad, let's be honest. 



Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Photo Sharing

For this blog, I will review image hosting websites. To make this just a bit more personal, I will use some pictures of the pets in my life. Might as well, right?

Photobucket: Okay, first off - don't report me for animal cruelty or something. This is my dog, Dodger, on Independence Day from this year. What can I say, he's all-American. But on to reviewing..if you can scroll over the picture and see my username *sigh*...you can probably tell I've been using Photobucket for awhile, like we're talking Myspace days. I've always loved that it gave an HTML code to place pictures within a website. It lets you have multiple albums and you can make these private or public (which allows people to like them similar to Facebook). There are a lot of sharing options and it allows you to edit the pictures to resize or even fix the quality of them.  You can also search through the website for pictures you're looking for. I use it to find patterns to put in layouts for instance. I'm a fan for life.

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Flickr: Here we have Snowball. Snowball is my house cat, who I hate in all of his fat glory, and who I also hold responsible for my hatred of ALL cats. Flickr though, I really like how it is connected to Yahoo. It's rare these days for me to find something that is directly connected with Yahoo in this Google world (see my Google is King of the World blog). It is also connected to Facebook, and if I had Facebook, I would find this very helpful in sharing edited photos. The website gives you a terabyte of space, very good for me. Something else I noticed is that though you upload it and it shows that date, but it also shows when it was taken and from what device. Which if you ever needed to know that, is very useful of the site.

Dropbox: Okay, here is the picture I originally wanted to share from Dropbox. These are my brother's dogs. A German Shepherd who was named Spartacus (he has recently passed away and I will tell you he lived up to his epic name, he was quite the epic dog) and a Boxer named Mira (which if you have watched the show Spartacus, is his wife...teehee my brother's a nerd) Anyway, here my rant begins. I hated downloading Dropbox, I didn't get how to use it/play around with it, and frankly I don't need storage that much to mess with it. I get it, yeah, it allows you to access photos within a folder that is on your computer on any website (or the app if you so choose to put up with the crap), and you can share folders and files with anyone but I just didn't like it from the start. I'd rather use a web based image hoster if using one at all. But, being that I needed to upload a picture to complete this review on all the image hosters...I pursued...and this (first picture below) happened. Over and over and over and over after I kept trying to fix it.


But I guess a cool thing about screenshotting this error was I found out that Dropbox with save screentshots. And I totally would have just uploaded that, ya know if I could figure the friggin' thing out. *end rant*


After many failed attempts and many keys torn off of my laptop in frustration...I uninstalled the program. Granted I'm not the brightest crayon in the box, so try it at your own risk.


ImageShack: Meet my sister's Chinese Sharpei Ace who, as my dad pointed out resembles Alf. He doesn't snack on cats though, but if he did that would be totally fine with me (hatred of cats, remember?). I remember a time where you didn't have to sign up for ImageShack and I miss that time. I miss a simple just upload and not having to sign in to get any features. But I guess it's reasonable. The site is pretty simple and easy to figure out. WHICH WAS SO BLISSFUL AFTER DROPBOX LEMME TELL YA! Hmmm...it was so simple there's really nothing more to say about it. It will host your pictures easily and without much stress.



Along with Photobucket, ImageShack would probably be the only other option for my photo sharing on the web.