Here’s some interesting stuff I’ve found/gathered over the summer whilst surfing the web. You will have to forgive me here, as hardly any of the content is connected. Simply a smorgasbord of good stuff.

1. Have several images to host on your site? Hongkiat ‘have put together a showcase of the best 10 galleries, slideshows and sliders they know of. They are all available for free, making them the perfect addition to position your website well for optimized browser and mobile viewing.’

2. If you do any portrait/life drawing, check out the examples on Carla Sonheim’s blog for drawing with a graphite stick.

3. If you love old ad imagery, have a look at “The Bart&Co. Historic Clip Art Collection” on Flickr.

4. Comic or graphic novel artist? Download the beta version of MotionArtist until January 2013.

5. Love the old sound of a typewriter? Download Noisy Typer for your Mac here.

Noisy Typer – a typewriter for your laptop. from Theo Watson on Vimeo.

6. Finally, if you haven’t checked out PBS’ webseries OffBook yet, you have been missing a great show. Their most recent episode is embedded below, but also check out their last one on the art of logo design.

If you haven’t caught on to Flavors.me to hub your online content, you may be interested in about.me. With this, you may build your personal profile page that points users to your content from around the web. Watch the video below for more info.

All about about.me from about.me on Vimeo.

What are some of your favourite widgets? I haven’t rummaged through newer widgets in a while now and probably should. My…uh…widgets, are pictured below.

I labeled a few that may not be so clear. Some are self-explanatory and come equipped with a Mac. Yes, I use two clocks. One for Japan and the other for Canada. Some of the others I use are:

• Adobe Creative Studio Help – provides a collection of hints and tips for Adobe’s Creative Suite.
• BPM Counter – count the beats per minute for songs to enter them into iTunes
• Guitar Chords – Just pick a note and type of chord. Then watch as the widget displays how to fret that chord on the guitar. Scroll up the neck and see alternate ways of playing that same chord.
• Hula Girl – Dancing Hula Girl, Boy, Jesus or Homer to sit atop your Dashboard and provide literally decades of hilarity…seriously. Jiggles to your iTunes as well.
• Leopard Tricks – The Leopard Tricks widget displays an RSS feed of the popular leopardtricks.com website. Leopard Tricks prives tips, tricks and news on Apple’s latest operating system, Leopard.
• Oblique -
• Pianochords 2.1 – shows and plays all the musical chords you can think of. Just press a key on the keyboard to set the root of the chord and click the display to select the derived chord. It’s as simple as that!
• Plasmatube – The PlasmaTube dashboard widget leaves your Dad’s old Motion Light in the 60′s where it belongs!
• Sphere – Helps you design your website, redecorate your home, or perhaps even choose your outfit in the morning. It can even simulates various forms of color blindness! Sphere uses basic color theory in order to automatically provide you with visually appealing colors.
• Tabit – Tabit Widget searches Ultimate-Guitar.com for guitar tabs and chords based on song title.
• Youpi – helps calculate your body mass index. I couldn’t seem to find this widget when I did a search. But, try this one instead. It’s more attractive. Or this one too.
• Not pictured, but I also use Catalyst TuneUp for GarageBand. They offer over 150 helpful and sometimes quirky ideas to solve that creative block. If the first idea doesn’t help, spin the widget again.

It is also worth checking subject specific widgets. I have used some before and installed them onto our class computer where students could simply go and check the item for themselves. Browse through available widgets here. Any other recommendations from readers?

Clear out your bookmarks. You’re going to need the space for 50 offerings that are indispensable to navigating, enjoying yourself, shopping or just killing time on the Web.

Go here to view Time magazine’s Best Websites list. Unfortunately, it’s a posting that requires you to skip through the list one by one. Some of us don’t have the patience or time to do this (sorry, that was a really lame joke). You may view the full list without descriptions here.

Also view 5 websites you may not know.

TiltViewer is a free, customizable 3D Flash image viewing application. Very cool.

Will Lion uses it to gather and present digital bytes (pictured below).

Select a photo and click the arrow. This flips the picture and shows relevant info. Click on “View image info” and it will bring you to the Flickr page.

Could be a very nice way to display student work or an alternative way to give presentations. Since I am on the topic, you may also be interested in CoolIris or DestroyFlickr.