1-Click Answers

One of my favorite tools that I've never written a blog entry for is 1-Click Answers from Answers.com. If you've yet to use Answers.com, it's a search engine that lets you search for a particular word or person or subject (or just about anything else) and it pools various reference sources such as Wikipedia, Houghton Mifflin, or the American Heritage Dictionaries to tell you about that subject. 1-Click Answers from Answers.com is a tool that simplifies searching Answers.com. All you do is Alt-Click any text from just about any window, and a small bubble (like you see above) will appear with the abridged results from Answers.com relating to that word. Here's a few of the ways I find 1-Click Answers useful:

• When I'm reading an article and I'm not sure what a word means.
• If I'm writing an article and want a quick thesaurus, or I'm not sure if I'm using a word correctly.
• To quickly check the spelling of a word (Google Desktop is great for this, too.)
• If there is a person or subject referenced that I want to learn more about, quickly.

Another optional feature of 1-Click Answers is "Today's Highlights". When turned on, this feature will display facts about things that happened on this day in history, links to today's top news stories, and an interesting or little-known word or phrase that has been used in the news recently. This is a nice way to get yourself a little better educated and keep up with basic current events.

Read: 1-Click Answers to download.

Easily Post Images Without Hotlinking

If you've ever posted an image from someone else's site into a forum, or message board or on MySpace, you (should) know that you're not supposed to link directly to that image. This is known as hotlinking or leaching, and is considered a no-no since it uses the bandwidth of the source's website every time that image is displayed.

Normally you would have to download the image to your computer, upload it to a hosting company (such as ImageShack, or a $99/year Image Hosting plan with us), then link to the file you uploaded -- A rather lengthy process for a silly little post. Well, now the folks over at ImgRed.com have simplified the process for us posters. All you have to do is prefix the full URL to the original image with http://www.imgred.com/. For example, http://www.imgred.com/http://www.grinn.net/images/jesus.jpg instead of only http://www.grinn.net/images/jesus.jpg. Thank you, ImgRed, for being so awesome.

Oh, and if you want the source code for ImgRed, you can find it here. ;)

Read: lifehacker