With 3D Online Package it’s easy to generate 3D box art. Just upload a graphic in PNG, GIF or JPG format for the cover, side and top and the server side program generates the graphic that you can copy and use.

Added to the online generators list.

Ever wanted or needed a place to share expiring semi-private files, links, notes with yourself or others? That’s the service drop.io provides.

Just last week in our IRC chat a friend wanted me to look at how a site looked on my Mac. The only problem was my Mac wasn’t logged into the IRC, I was using a different Windows machine. While we discussed a modification to our custom IRC bot that would work — our system was essentially what drop.io already does (and drop.io does more) — we could have simply used drop.io has a place to store the shared link.

What can you use drop.io for?
You can use drop.io to share up to 100MB worth of something per address: files, links, notes. You can even send email to your drop.io address.

drop.io optional features
Using drop.io is simple to use and requires no registration or email address. Optionally you can choose to:

1. name the CODE (minimum of 7 alphanumeric characters) for the drop.io address (drop.io/CODE). The code must not be already taken. You can purchase a code for $7.89 to allow an additional 1GB of space or reduce the code to 2-6 characters, say for example you wanted to have something like drop.io/hmm (that’s already taken by somebody).
2. add a password to your drop.io address to make it more private. Default is no password.
3. define the amount of time for the drop.io address to live from one day to one year. Default is one month. When your drop.io address is about to expire, you can manually extend the time if you want.

You can create one now by visiting the drop.io home page which also serves as the creation page and filling out the form fields: name the drop, password protect (optional), delete drop after time (optional, default 1 month), others can options (view, view & add notes or default: view & add notes and files).

EXAMPLE
Here is a drop.io I created as an example if you don’t want to create your own that contains the default time (1 month), default others can options (view & add notes and files) and has been password protected.

This is not private and you can do whatever you want playing around with it, subject to the drop.io terms of use.

http://www.drop.io/z8u8dyt - code created randomly by the system
optional password created: test123 - you’ll need this code to access the dropio to view what’s there

Since this is open and anybody can do anything with it, including hack the admin password and delete the drop page altogether (I intentionally didn’t make the admin password very difficult to guess, so not meant as a challenge of any kind), you might be best served just creating your own page. However if it hasn’t been vandalized too much, you should see something similar to the screenshot above which contains examples for notes, links, pictures and a recent Hmmcast. It isn’t set so that media can be deleted, so the media I uploaded should be there by the time you read this and you’re welcome and encouraged to add something of your own, if you like. Call this a community test page.

About the admin features
When logged in as the admin to your drop.io created page, you can perform the following additional functions:

1. Destroy drop - this dumps the whole page and all the contents including files, links and notes
2. Change the following:

Drop Address
User Password - that’s the test123 in the example above
Admin Password
Drop Expiration - change up to one year from the current date
Other Users Can Add - change the permissions for the drop page
Other Users Can Delete Media - by default only those with the admin password can delete media
First Page Displayed - by default this is “Media View” shown in the screenshot above. Other choices: chronological view and interactive view

3. Upgrade Drop to Premium - as mentioned earlier, if you pay $7.89 you can upgrade to allow changing to 2-7 code names and expands the storage from 100MB to 1GB of storage space.

Summary and thoughts
drop.io has a very clean, user-friendly design. No advertisements were seen anywhere on the site which leaves me thinking the entire business plan is based on hoping/planning enough people upgrade to premium. Nothing wrong with that if there’s enough demand. With the abundance of free web space out there these days, but not the convenience of a service like drop.io, they might be onto something.

I also didn’t see any API, bookmarklets or widgets. Seems like a natural to have at least a bookmarklet for adding stuff to one’s drop.io space. Maybe that’s one of the features you get if you upgrade to premium or coming in the future?

Among a sea of web-based services drop.io stands out as being one of the more useful ones. I like it and bookmarked and will probably use here and there.

Google (disclaimer: I own GOOG stock) has a new bookmarklet that you can drag to your Firefox bar to share sites to a page on their site. Just click on the bookmarklet to add a page you are currently browsing. You can also share the page with friend(s) via email and a custom message or submit to digg, reddit, delicious, Facebook, Furl or Social Poster (who?).

Here’s my Google shared page . Here’s how the page looks with a test link from here:

Stats fans will note that the page shows the number of views. I’m starting to amass a bunch of these type of public shared pages and here are two I use regularly:

StumbleUpon - view sites I like and dislike and add to the service. Been using since January 2004.
Del.icio.us - my online bookmark repository. I mark most things public. Since April 2005.

I also share a fair amount of links in our IRC chatroom with our IRC bot and that’s all archived in XML on the server. Probably should take a little time and make those links shared publically somewhere, either on one of these third party services or on a page. Wonder when there will be an API to add to this list, Google (hint, hint)?

Blogoscoped is calling this a “social link sharing service” perhaps in part due to the feature that will also show you shared items from people in your Gmail contact list? I have a pretty good sized Gmail address book and so far nothing is showing on this page. Will have to test this with friends and update once I see how that works.

By copy pasting the right to left override character at the very end of this post that looks like the image above, hidden codes will make all your type appear backwards (thanks tip of the day). Want to drive folks batty today in chat (IM, Twitter, IRC)? Just copy and paste that and start typing. Could be semi useful for spoilers in blog posts.

Also, I learned from this article that some middle eastern languages like Hebrew and Arabic are written in bidirectional text (right to left and left to right). ‫‬‭‮‪‫‬‭‫‬‭‮‪‫‬‭‮

‫‬‭‮‪‫‬‭‮҉Drive them crazy in chat with right to left chat.

Brian Shaler’s DiggStatus compares your digg user account to the aggregate of all Digg users in the following areas. DiggStatus was built using PHP, MySQL, Flash, and XML.

The comments in italics are generated from the system about my digg account:

- digg account age: “Looks like you joined Digg while it was still young.”
- total stories dugg
- stories dugg per month
- total stories commented on: “Either you’re new to Digg or you’re too much of a coward to voice your opinion in the comments.”
- comments per month
- total stories submitted
- stories submitted per month
- stories promoted to the front page: “Stop wasting your time browsing profiles on MySpace and find an interesting story for the Diggnation to read!”
- profile views
- friends
- people that have befriended this user: “:-( Nobody Likes you. Not even me. Now get out of my face, loser.” LOL! I had two friends that generated this response and juar made sure to add those two people as my friends. Will it cause me to escape loserdom in this tool’s eyes? Probably not, life goes on

Brian’s no stranger to making Digg Flash tools. His list shows he’s also made: Wheel of Upcoming Stories, Digg Heat Map, Digg Radar, Digg Taggr, Mapping the Digg Community and No Comment Digg RSS Feeds.

I don’t use Digg much any more but I can see more active Digg users enjoying these tools. Nice work, Brian.

You’ve seen CAPTCHAs before, it’s where you type characters in a picture to prove you are human.

The two major issues I’ve experienced with CAPTCHA implementations are:

1. garbled characters
2. image only CAPTCHAs aren’t accessible to sight-impaired

The latter can be resolved by offering a clear text to speech voice option. Unfortunately most created CAPTCHAs don’t (myself included with Form Sentinel) offer voice functionality. On my someday to-do list is adding voice capability to Form Sentinel.

There have been some creative CAPTCHA options like the hotornot CAPTCHA and there’s a new one called reCAPTCHA from Carnegie Mellon University which uses the CAPTCHA to fix OCR (optical character recognition) problems digitizing books:

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

This is not planned to be a permanent change (if you don’t like this please speak up below) but I’ve reimplemented a CAPTCHA on the comments using reCAPTCHA. It’s already running and working in the comments below. Fellow bloggers with Wordpress can snag the Wordpress plugin here. Note: you’ll need to register at reCAPTCHA to get a public and private key.

We tried CAPTCHA in the comments here once before and I took it away after receiving some complaints from sight-impaired readers. As someone with sight that is getting progressively worse as the years pile on, I can sympathize with these readers. If any sight-impaired readers are disappointed that I’ve readded CAPTCHA, you’ll be delighted to know that this reCAPTCHA offers a voice challenge, woohoo!

I want to help this digitizing books project and would also like sight-impaired readers to be able to leave comments. Readers please let me know what you think of this project and the CAPTCHA being re-enabled in the comments area.

Will this cause you to leave less comments? Do you mind typing in the extra two words or not? Hmm doesn’t require registration to leave comments (to me that’s worse than a CAPTCHA) and it will remember your details in a cookie if you allow them, so all you’d need to type is your comment and two extra words. I’m particularly interested in those who feel this will make them leave less comments than they would without a CAPTCHA in use. The last time I tried CAPTCHA here it didn’t have any negative impact on the number of comments being left and significantly reduced the amount of comment spam. I removed it because of the valid accessibility complaints.

Personally, I don’t mind using CAPTCHA as long as I can read it. I despise CAPTCHAs that I can’t read and won’t keep refreshing the page to get a better looking one, I’ll just pass on leaving a comment.

I like using my Sony PS3 to help find cures and this seems like a good use of the comment feature to help accurately digitize more books and help reduce the growing onslaught of mechanized comment spam. Agree? Disagree? Sight impaired people will benefit from having more digitized books that their text-to-speech readers can read too.

Hmmcast #107 mp4

Here is the list of programs I use daily, Paul, since you asked. Might not be in the format desired but then I’m not into being a meme or web pooh point oh conformist. Do appreciate you thinking of me though, Paul, thanks.

Daily service/programs list
I put a dollar sign in front of commercial programs. It’s interesting looking through the list as a whole and realizing the majority of tools I use regularly are commercial programs: 9 / 14 (64.3%).

$ SecureFX - FTP
$ SecureCRT - SSH
Notetab Light - text editor
Google - search
Gmail - email
$ Adobe Photoshop - image resizing, compression, creation
$ Logo Creator - logo and image creation (also advertise this product here)
Screen Grab Pro - screen grabs
$ eWallet - password management between Pocket PC and Desktop
$ Skype - VoIP, chat (I pay for SkypeOUT and SkypeIN, hence the dollar sign)
Firefox - primary browser, IRC (Chatzilla)

Use regularly but not daily
$ Visual Studio Professional 2005 - Microsoft .NET coding, Xbox 360 Creators Club coding
$ Windows XP - primary development machine
$ Mac OS X Tiger - secondary machine, mostly used for music and research

Behind the Hmmcast
Oops, looks like the audio wasn’t synced up properly on the still slides, sorry about that.

Want to create a public debate on a topic and have others vote on the outcome? Convinceme.net (beta) offers three debate options:

open debates - others can add arguments for either side of the debate and/or vote on it and earn points, the debate doesn’t have an ending
competitive debates - head to head debates where others are only allowed to vote on the outcome
king of the hill - first person to receive 100 convince points for their argument wins and debate ends

The first time I registered it shaved off the “TD” in my name and registered me as “avid” so I needed to re-register. I then created a debate shown below for “Real life or Second Life”

Starting with a blank debate template allowing others to add arguments to either side:

Before publishing and with no arguments added somebody already voted once for Second Life.

There is a ‘watch’ function to keep track of debates you’re interested in and includes a personal watchlist RSS feed, as well as other Convinceme RSS feeds allowing subscription by debate type or the following categories: books, comedy, conspiracy, economic, fashion, fights, food, history, martial arts, movies, music, people, philosophy, places, politics, religion, sci-fi, science, sports, supernatural, technology, toys, travel, trivia, TV, video games, weapons and zombies.

Civility
To keep the peace with debates some basic rules are required:

1. No profanities directed towards people.
2. No personal attacks.
3. No racial slurs.
4. No threats or implications thereof.

Violation of these rules will have your account removed.

Hmm thoughts
If civility is maintained and there are enough people involved — and that’s a big if — this might gain a little traction. It combines a digg-style voting with the ability to create original content (the arguments). Sites like Yahoo Answers have proven that point systems can generate activity and interest.

The points don’t seem to have any value or unlock any other features although on the playoffs page there’s a teaser:

Compete for a chance to enter and win each season of debating playoffs. Only top candidates can enter, and win the BIG BUCKS!

This isn’t the only thing coming soon, they also promise a weekly podcast. They should have kept the podcast in the back pocket until they actually launched one.

Perhaps the biggest letdown is Convinceme.net not offering any way to put the debate on your site/blog say with some copy/paste code. Maybe that functionality will be coming soon too?

Also, not having the .com hurts. Convinceme.com leads to a site dealing with “computational tools for modeling and aiding reasoning.” I’m sure they’ll enjoy a few new hits. There are very few historical examples — del.icio.us comes to mind as a rare exception — of sites that don’t own the .com having much sucess.

That’s the other thing, the business, where is it? Ad supported? At this point I guess that’s the plan?

Unfortunately in it’s current beta state Convinceme.net has more downside than upside. Don’t think I’ll be using it that much other than keeping in mind as a place to suggest taking a debate elsewhere. I think many folks, myself included, would rather keep the debate on their sites rather than sending visitors elsewhere to a site that may or may not be here in six months. Good concept, just not very good execution. Grade: D+

Download Hmmcast #43 mp4

You’re familiar with the tradition known as Thursawday, right? For those who prefer the chainsaw variety, see last Thursawday.

We’ve seen much more creative down for maintenance messages, maybe Google is losing their creative touch? The engineers are tired?

The numerous languages on that this page are a reminder of just how global Google is these days too. The official Adsense blog explains the outage:

It’s that time again — our engineers will be performing routine AdSense maintenance this Saturday at 10 am PST. You won’t be able to log in to your account for approximately 4 hours, but we’ll still serve ads to your pages and record your earnings as usual.

I think my personal favorite down for maintenance message has been the Bloglines plumber:

Seen a really creative down for maintenance message?