Demo Girl

In this QuickCast special, I’ll show you some sites that can help you get around town, monitor your drinking habits, and make you look good at the same time.

Taxime is a free service that will give you an estimate of what it will cost for you to get from point A to point B.  It’s as simple as entering in your starting point and destination and allows you to adjust the fare rates according to your city.  You can also get directions on Google Maps so you’ll know if your cab driver is trying to pull a fast one on you.  There’s nothing to sign up for and Taxime is also iPhone compatible.

DrinkLogger is a service that allows you to keep track of your BAC (blood alcohol content) by keeping track of all of the alcoholic beverages you consume in a night (or day, if you’re a day drinker).  After you sign up for an account, you can start logging in your drinks every time you throw one back.  You can customize each drink for size and alcohol content and save drinks into your account for future use.  You can text your drinks in as well, so you can use it right from the bar which can help determine whether or not you should be behind the wheel.  What I learned is, that for my height and weight, I can’t have more then two Stella Artois and expect to pass a breathalyzer.

The last site in this QuickCast Special has nothing to do with drinking or driving but has everything to do with making you look good while drinking and driving.  That probably doesn’t sound right, but you know what I mean.  PleaseDressMe is a search engine for t-shirts.

There are many different sites out there that specialize in graphic tees, but in order to find what you’re looking for you need to perform a search on each one.  PleaseDressMe optimizes your search by crawling all of these sites at once, based on what you’re looking for.  You can search by keyword, tag, color, price range, or “stumble” through random tees.  After you find what you’re looking for, you’ll be brought to the original site where you can purchase it.

To see all of these great services in action, watch the screencast below:

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OtherInbox is an email service that wants to give you control over emails that come from services you sign up for and other various accounts you may have online.

At first, I didn’t understand why a service like this would be useful.  Why not just create a new hotmail or Gmail account for singing up for various services?  Well, because that can be a pain and waste time.  OtherInbox pretty much eliminates the need to create throwaway email addresses.

When you sign up, the username that you choose will be part of your OtherInbox email address.  But, when you use your OtherInbox email address, you can customize the domain each time you use it.  For example:  If I was signing up for Twitter, I would use molly@twitter.otherinbox.com twitter@molly.otherinbox.com as my email address.  My OtherInbox domain is molly@otherinbox.com but I can use each service or account as part of my domain when singing up for things. (Update:  In the screencast I said you use your username first as your OtherInbox domain and then the name of the service.  This is incorrect.  Use the service name first (ie. Twitter) followed by @ and your username.otherinbox.com.  Make sense?)

When you sign into your OtherInbox account you’ll see that each sub-domain has its own tab which contains the emails from that particular service.  So, since I signed up for Twitter with my OtherInbox email address, and since I used twitter as my sub-domain, Twitter has its own inbox within my OtherInbox account.

If a service starts spamming you, you can block all future emails from them with one click.  That means you no longer have to click on a link to opt out of receiving emails that you don’t remember ever opting into in the first place.

OtherInbox is currently in private beta, but they’re giving invites to the first 50 people who sign up by clicking on this link.  To see OtherInbox in action, watch the screencast below:

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As the name states, PrintWhatYouLike is a handy little tool that allows you to edit any Webpage to only print what you like. 

It’s really easy to use:  Either enter in the URL of the Webpage you want to print or use the bookmarklet.  This will open up the site in the PrintWhatYouLike editor.  Then it’s as easy as selecting the text or images that you want included in your printed page.  You can also do things like remove the background, remove all images from the page, isolate certain areas, change the text size, and add parts of other Webpages to your final print.  To see PrintWhatYouLike in action, watch the screencast below:

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[via Lifehacker]

BudURL is a URL shrinker that not only makes long URLs shorter, but also provides you with stats and an account so you can keep track of clicks.

After you create an account, you can use the bookmarklet to shrink URLs on the fly.  Actually, you don’t need to create an account, but the best part of BudURL is the fact that you can track who is clicking on what and when they’re clicking on it.  There’s a timestamp showing each time your URL was clicked on, how many times it was clicked, and you can even see the IP address of who was doing the clicking.

I had been using bit.ly recently to shorten my URLs because of the stats it provided, but because you still can’t create an account to keep track of those stats long-term, I’m now switching to BudURL.  To see BudURL in action, watch the screencast below:

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If you ever had the horrifying experience pleasure of going away to camp as a child then you may recall your Mother sewing labels inside all of your undergarments so that they wouldn’t end up in the wrong hands.  Well, even though it may have been embarrassing at the time, she may have been onto something.  SendMeHome wants help you keep tabs on your stuff, and it’s not stopping at your Hanes t-shirt.

The way it works is simple:  You register for an account and input various items that you tend to worry about loosing.  This could be anything from your iPod to your favorite baseball cap.  Each item you add will carry its own unique ID.  You can then print out labels that say “If lost, please return at SendMeHome.com”.  Hopefully you’ll remember to write the code on the labels, otherwise it won’t work.  You can also purchase custom labels in different sizes from the SendMeHome store.

If someone finds your item, they can visit SendMeHome.com, enter in the code on your label, and tell you how you can get your stuff back.  It seems easy enough and actually, the site is extremely easy to use.  The only thing I wonder is, if someone is going to go to the trouble of entering in all of their possessions into the site, why not just by a label maker and put your name and address on everything you own?  If people grasp onto SendMeHome though, it could prove to be very useful.  To see SendMeHome in action, watch the screencast below:

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If you create screencasts and are interested in drawing a bit more attention to yourself, then you may want to submit a few screencast tutorials to the Help Center on YouTube.

YouTube is asking its users to submit help videos, for various topics, and in return will embed the best ones in the Help Center.  There doesn’t seem to be any sort of a prize but if your video is selected you can bet on getting some attention from the “million+ users that visit the help center each day”.

I think this is a great idea but it’s unclear whether or not you’ll be linked to the video.  I’m assuming they’ll link to your YouTube channel page, but that’s just a guess.  So, if you like making screencasts and think you have something to offer then start making those help videos.  You only have until October 10th so start your screencasting software…now! (Thanks Amit!)

Yammer gives companies and organizations their very own space where they can communicate with each other about what they’re currently working on.  Think Twitter for business, but with better functionality.  Each Yammer account is connected to your company email address so only people with a valid company email address can join.

After you sign up, you’ll be able to add your co-workers to the account by entering in their email addresses.  Once everyone is in, you can communicate back and forth about what you’re working on.  There is a tab for everyone’s updates, another just for people you follow, one for your replies, and one for your own updates.  Everyone’s updates are shown in real-time so you never need to hit refresh.  You can also email any updates to yourself with one click – very handy if you need to look something over later and don’t want to search for it.  You can also create tags for projects you may be working on or a specific topic and you can follow those tags to keep yourself updated.  Yammer will also auto-complete member names and previously entered tags when you’re typing in your update.

Before I steer you towards the screencast I created of Yammer, I wanted to say congratulations to the Yammer team for winning the TechCrunch50!  I actually made this screencast yesterday afternoon but didn’t have time to write up the post until today.  I was truly excited about the service when I was trying it out and now I’m even more excited that they got the recognition they deserve.  If you want to learn about Yammer, watch the screencast below:

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The other day a friend of mine suddenly freaked out when he saw a long list of bookmarks drop down every time he started typing a URL into the address bar in Firefox.  I couldn’t understand the confusion because I thought everyone knew about “The Awesome Bar” in Firefox 3 and how to disable it.  Well, it turns out that he had just installed Firefox 3 and knew nothing about the “helpful” Awesome Bar.  It was very clear that he didn’t want any part of it so I sent him a link explaining how to disable it.  The response I got was, “That looks confusing, I’ll just install the old bar”.  I found that unacceptable and decided that if he didn’t know how to disable it, others may not either.  It’s a very quick fix and I think the screencast below should help anyone who would rather see how to disable it rather then read about how to disable it.  Oh, and I just noticed that it seems The Awesome Bar is now called the Smart Location Bar.  Whatever it’s called, if you want to learn how to make it stop, watch the screencast below:

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Chrome is a Web browser that was launched by Google earlier today.  I’ve spent all afternoon testing it out and learning about all of the features, only to stumble upon something new just when I think I’ve got it all down.  I tried to keep this screencast short, but there is a lot to show off.  Unfortunately, Chrome is only available for Windows users but they say Mac and LInux versions are on the way.  If you want to see Chrome in action before you download it (or if you’re not running Windows) then watch the screencast below:

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