Whilst doing a crossword (well, make that closer to 15 or 20 crosswords) over the Christmas holidays, there was the occasional word that would simply stump me. In my frustration, I would occasionally refer to the old Roget’s Thesaurus sitting on the shelf. On a whim, I quickly googled for an OS X thesaurus, and found a great free alternative to paging through the old Roget’s, namely Nisus Thesaurus. You may want to check out some screenshots of the thesaurus in action before downloading it.
This, in addition to OmniDictionary (for all my definition needs) and cocoAspell (to catch all my silly spelling mistakes), makes my iBook a lean, mean, writing machine.
Although I’ve known about its existence for some time, I haven’t had many occasions to use the services of TinyURL.com. Today, however, I am having my Math 10 class explore rectangles and parallelograms using an interactive java applet found at the ugly URL of
http://standards.nctm.org/document/eexamples/chap5/5.3/standalone.htm
Rather than have them attempt to type this out, I simply clicked on the TinyURL bookmarklet in my browser, and TinyURL gave me a much more usable URL to give to my students, namely:
http://tinyurl.com/5djq7
All that the TinyURL does is to redirect the browser to the original URL. In other words, both URLs given above will lead you to the same place. Quite handy.
To use this service, either head over to TinyURL.com and type/paste in the long URL you would like to tiny-ify, or simply drag the following bookmarklet to into the links bar of your browser and click on it when you are at a page you would like to tiny-ify:
TinyURL!
Well, it looks like I’m going to have to be careful with the pocketbook — the iTunes music store just opened up here in Canada. This is just toooo easy…
If you haven’t already done so, go do yourself a favour and download iTunes (runs on Mac OS X or Windows).
