Computers

A Chartchooser for excel/powerpoint

Having trouble selecting the right kind of graph/table for your data? Think that excel’s default colour options are, for the lack of a better term, sucky? Then you might like this site that lets you choose the right kind of chart/table for the data you want to present, and provides a nice template with distinct colours to start off. You can save charts as templates in excel, so you’ll always have nice looking graphs!

via chartchooser

Table2Clipboard – Nice Firefox addon

Table2Clipboard :: Firefox Add-ons

While doing a quick comparison between Victoria and Vancouver’s racial characteristics (a topic for a separate blog post), I came upon this very handy firefox addon that lets you copy entire tables from the browser for pasting in excel. The formatting is preserved very well and if you have ever had to copy browser tables into excel, you’ll appreciate the ease with which this application works!

Google goes back to maps showing Katrina damage – CNN.com

That did not take long! – See here for background. I guess a little bit of outrage goes a long way, especially when it did not hurt google one bit to revert to the old pictures. All’s well with the world, we can now go back to worrying about Britney Spears!

Google goes back to maps showing Katrina damage – CNN.com

Google Inc. is once again showing this city in ruins after the company came under fire for replacing post-Hurricane Katrina imagery on its popular map portal with views of the city as it existed before the storm.

An Associated Press article on Thursday highlighted the changes, leading a U.S. House subcommittee to accuse Google of “airbrushing history” for depicting a New Orleans and Mississippi Gulf Coast without hurricane damage.

The new satellite imagery, which offers a bird’s eye view of the world, now shows post-Katrina New Orleans dotted by blue protective tarps on damaged roofs and the Lower 9th Ward neighborhood covered in debris.

Catalog the world

Librarians doing what they do best, enabling people find books in libraries, this site helps you find books/authors in libraries near you. I don’t see the Chapel Hill/Carrboro public libraries pop up in the three searches I have done so far, which is puzzling, but the UNC system is there, so is Duke and State and a lot of community colleges.

WorldCat [OCLC]

The internets are truly great.

Flashblock Firefox extension – Browsing heaven

Flash on demand, get rid of those blinking parts of websites, only use flash for the good parts.

mozdev.org – flashblock: index

Flashblock is an extension for the Mozilla, Firefox, and Netscape browsers that takes a pessimistic approach to dealing with Macromedia Flash content on a webpage and blocks ALL Flash content from loading. It then leaves placeholders on the webpage that allow you to click to download and then view the Flash content.