I love paper toys, papercraft, card modeling, etc. & just found two cool blogs over at Blogger on the subject:

Papercraft Paradise

Papercraft World

Seven months ago I posted about a really cool web tool called Gliffy which lets you create rather nice looking diagrams from a very feature-rich interface (especially for a web-app).

Now, I present bubbl.us. That’s it, instead of .com, it’s .us.

Anyway, it’s a super easy, and surprisingly stocked “mind mapping” web app that’s great for throwing together ideas while brainstorming.

While it isn’t considered an actual “diagramming” tool, like gliffy/visio, etc., it can still act like one in a pinch (like any mind mapping tool). Mind mapping is simply the concept of visualy plopping down your ideas during a brainstorming session, and linking them together in various ways.

So, check it out. You don’t even have to register to use it (but you do if you want to start saving stuff).

Heroes in the Midst of Horror: Holocaust Survivor, Students Saved Others

http://www.pdfforge.org/products/pdfcreator/

Click the above URL to check out the feature list of PDFCreator!  I’m excited – especially about the fact that it’s so darn free

http://gethuman.com

Learn how to bypass (more-or-less) that phone maze when calling your favorite company. Assuming, of course, your favorite company is listed there. I happily just found our current insurance company in the list!!

I posted about this site many moons ago on an old blog of mine (soon to be lost to the ether), and just ran across it again after taking a quick sentimental journey on that site.

* term used loosely

Since I was a kid (well, a younger one) I’ve always gotten a kick out of those Christmas Eve Santa Trackings that the local meteorologists do. I didn’t realize that there was a NORAD deal as well. So, head on over to this site on Sunday (night?) to see how the flight is going.

Incidentally, LifeHacker (and many others I imagine) beat me to this morsel of newsworthiness.

This is cool. Just found it by clicking an ad on FD’s Flicker Toys (yes, sometimes I click ads). Anyway, looks like a pretty quick way to churn out a decent looking newsletter for whatever. Could be really handy for branches that don’t have Publisher or the like. Even for those that do, this is really quick, if you don’t mind the limited control of visual style.

At the moment, you can only pick from about seven online templates that seem more family-focused than business, but they say they’re adding more and are taking suggestions (there is one generic one that looks nice). Good set-up, though. Add extra pages (and pick from different layouts of those pages), use basic RTF tools in the text boxes, drag-&-drop pix (join free to upload your own), and you can print, email, or publish onine (even save it online to finish at a later time).

Pretty neat. Check it out.

I saw this on lifehacker, and just had to bring it to RUlearning. I love DIY stuff, especially when it involves attaching something to a remote-controlled car!

Here’s the link to the DIY article at EvilMadScientist.

Good DIY Sites:
EvilMadScientist and
Instructibles

I’m a word nerd.  Can’t help it.  Love figuring out the history and reasoning behind interesting words.

One of my favorite (and, let’s face it, one of the best) words of all time is strategery.

Well, wouldn’t you know it, Wikipedia has an entry for it, and you’re gonna love how they use the term inside the White House.  This absolutely made my weekend.

Enjoy

Now this is very cool. It’s been around for a little while (saw it on LifeHacker earlier this year), but I only recently got around to actualy using it, and I’m quite impressed. It may be a little hard to tell from the image (click it or here for a better shot), but it’s really quite remarkable for a web app (even in the world of Web 2.0).

Naturally, it’s not going to try to compete with big dogs like Visio on every level, but for a quick, free, easily accessible, and unexpectedly feature rich alternative, you’ll probably find that it is quite handy in a pinch or most other standard diagram-needing situation.

Some features include a nice desktop-style GUI, online collaboration, version tracking (to quickly see and edit previous saves of the same project), publishing to blog or wiki, tools for flowcharts, floorplans, UML diagrams, etc., and basic drawing tools (except freehand). The best part, though, is the little details, like quick color change and color memory, easy sidebar access to most formatting (no need to browse through menus), and a fairly professional look to the end product.

Click the images below to see some impressive examples of what you can do:

Gliffy is ad-supported, but they did this part nicely too since you only have to look at one ad right after logging in (just click past it – no wait), so there’s nothing to bug you while you work. Hopefully, this also means that we grateful users won’t have to worry too much about the day their venture capital runs out.