When people want to edit their photos looks cool, we always use photoshop, but it’s not easy for a novice .so i was look for a easy way to do this. Yesterday, i found an interesting and useful website that we can creat our own funny photos effect online easily .

Picjoke.com is an online photoshop website that will give you a cool experience. It is using for photofunia technology. Photofunia is a online photo editing tool that gives us a pleasant experience. It is a widget that lets you merge your photos into already prepared templates and you can create very funny pictures.

You will only need to choose one from many templates available there. Then the site will navigate you to upload one of your pictures. In just seconds, its application will automatically match your picture with the template creating a new custom picture. You can save the picture and upload it to your social network account. Using Picjoke, you will get a lot of fun.

I’m now hooked on this website. Every day they have a new photo effect added to use, and I’m seriously thinking that it’ll be the perfect way to showcase the pictures for my website, when I get around to taking them. Yes, I know it’s been months and I still haven’t gotten to it. I’m a procrastinator lol.

Written by Mahendra Palsule

Facebook statistics show that it has 250 million active users each with an average 120 friends. More than 1 billion photos are uploaded every month by its users, over 70%

of whom use applications like games and quizzes in Facebook. Unfortunately, most users don’t know the implications of entering personal information, making friends, and playing games on Facebook.

This guide will show what you can (and cannot) do to safeguard your Facebook privacy.

1. Organize Friends in Lists

What do you do when your boss, mother-in-law, or a casual web acquaintance sends you a friend request on Facebook? Use Friend Lists. Friend Lists are the foundation of your Facebook privacy settings. Select Friends from the top menu, and use the Create link to create friend lists like Co-workers, Family, College Friends, etc. Your friends can’t see your lists, so you can name them whatever you like.

Tip: On your left sidebar, all your friend lists may not show up by default. Click More to see all of them, and drag and drop those you want above the separator.

2. Customize Profile Privacy

Click Settings > Privacy Settings > Profile. Select which parts of your profile will be seen by whom.

If you choose Customize in the drop down, you can be more specific. This is where the Friend Lists you created before become really useful.

Also go to the Contact Information tab and choose how you want your contact information to be shared on the Internet.

3. Set Facebook Privacy Level of Photo Albums

On the Photos tab of your profile page, click Album Privacy. Here again, you can use your Friend Lists to set the privacy for each photo album.

Note that your profile pictures go into a special album that is always visible to ALL your friends.

4. Restrict Search Visibility

Click Privacy > Search to set your visibility when someone searches Facebook for people. This is an important way to safeguard your Facebook privacy.  You can also select what will be visible in the search results.

5. Control Automatic Wall Posts and News Feed Updates

Your actions in Facebook such as comments, likes, appear as highlights on ALL your friends’ home pages. You cannot use friend lists here, only turn them on or off.

Go to Privacy > News Feed and Wall and choose whether you want your boss or ex-girlfriend to know that you’re in a relationship.

6. Set Facebook Wall Privacy

Go to your profile page, click Options > Settings under the status box.

Here you can control whether your friends can post to your Wall, and who can see the posts made by your friends.

7. Avoid Appearing in Advertisements

Facebook has two types of advertisements: third-party and Facebook. Third-party advertisements are currently not allowed to use your pictures, but there is a setting to disallow it if it is allowed in the future. Go to Privacy > News Feed and Wall > Facebook Ads tab to turn this off.

The Facebook ads shown to your friends are about ‘social actions’ like becoming a fan of something. You can turn this off at the bottom of the page.

8. Protect Yourself from Friends’ Applications

Go to Privacy > Applications, and click the Settings tab and uncheck all the boxes. These settings control what information about you is visible to applications installed by your friends. By default, these are set to visible. This means that your religious, sexual, and political preferences, pictures, etc. are readily available to one of the million worldwide Facebook application developers, each time any of your friends takes a quiz, plays a game, or runs any other Facebook app. This is obviously a Facebook privacy issue.

This is the most commonly misunderstood aspect of Facebook privacy. These settings control what applications installed by your friends can see about you, even if you don’t install the application yourself.

Why is this important? Because these settings will not change anything about what you are sharing with the applications you install yourself. For that, go to the next step.

9. Privacy from Your Applications

There is no way to control what applications see about you; it is an all-or-nothing affair. Take this quiz developed by the American Civil Liberties Union to check what anonymous application developers can know about you and your friends each time you take a quiz.

The Burton Group’s Identity Blog features the Facebook Privacy Mirror, an application that you can use to find out what applications know about you and your friends. If you really want to see exactly what profile data of each of your friends is visible to application developers, Privacy Mirror shows it in detail.

The only thing you can do is to authorize only those applications you require and trust. Go to Settings > Application Settings from the top menu. Change the drop-down from Recently Used to Authorized. Here you can see all the applications you have authorized to get access to ALL your profile information. Remove the ones you no longer need.

Also check the list of applications Allowed to Post and Granted Additional Permissions to remove unwanted ones.

10. Quitting Facebook? Delete, Don’t Just De-Activate Your Account

You can easily deactivate your account in Facebook from the Settings page. But deactivation will retain all your profile information within Facebook, including pictures, friends, etc. If you want to permanently delete your Facebook account, click here to submit a deletion request. Note that:

1. There is an unspecified delay between submitting your delete request and actual deletion.
2. If you login to Facebook, your deletion request is automatically cancelled.
3. There doesn’t seem to be any way to confirm that your request was completed.
4. Even after permanent deletion, Facebook says that copies of your photos may remain on their servers for technical reasons.

Also, note that once in a while, there is news of a Facebook hack or leak that can expose your information on the Internet. It is better to be safe than sorry by avoiding using Facebook for anything that may embarrass you.

I hope this article gives you a better understanding and insight into Facebook’s fragile privacy. Have any questions or concerns? Liked the post? Please tell us in the comments!

Written by Kevin Purdy

We’ve offered up a wealth of tips on locking down your data, but old-school, straight-up stealing is another matter entirely. Try these 10 tips on securing, disguising, tracking down, and hiding your goods so they don’t get nicked.

Photo by tom.arthur.

10. Sign your gear, add return incentives

Your wallet or purse already has your license in it for identification and mailing, but what about your other, possibly more expensive gear? You should definitely get a label on it. Adam kinda-sorta thinks the ImHonest label service makes sense, if you want to protect your mailing address and give gadget finders an offer of a reward to return your gear (even if that reward is, not surprisingly, just some ImHonest labels, unless you go further yourself). Homemade labels with an email address might be good enough for most, but for gadgets with memory cards inside, digitally signing with a .txt file makes sense as well. (Original post)

9. Make your lunch look less appetizing

This falls under the same category of ugly-as-deterrent mentioned elsewhere on this list, but office lunch thieves are a different kind of bandit. They (somewhat) know you, they (hopefully) don’t want to sell your goods, and they’re more of an opportunistic nuisance than a hit-and-run thief. Since we originally posted about designer Sherwood Forlee’s faux-moldy anti-theft lunch bags, Forlee’s put his bags up for sale at $10 for 25 bags. Not a bad price for semi-reusable bags, but you can likely replicate the effect on your own with non-toxic paint or food dye. Better still, if you’re willing to sacrifice two slices of bread for the cause, we’ve heard a surreptitious coffee grounds sandwich often teaches a vital lesson about personal property to refrigerator prowlers. (Original post)

8. Get a carry bag that doesn’t scream “Steal me!”

Targus bags and other carriers meant to look like a laptop, or have a generally high-tech appearance, do a great job of letting everyone know that something inside is expensive enough to buy a single-purpose bag for. Getting clever with your gear holders is a good way to ensure you always know which bag is yours, and that laptop-hunting thieves are less likely to nick yours. The newspaper sleeve is a good reference point, although it might get your laptop mistaken for a left-behind periodical. You can also cobble together a clever carrier made from old plastic bags, cardboard, a FedEx envelope, or even an old wetsuit.

7. Put a cute baby in your wallet

When researchers left 240 wallets scattered around the streets of Edinburgh, Scotland, they inserted an equal number of cute baby, puppy, family, and elderly pictures in them, along with a relevant mailing address. They received 42 percent of the wallets back overall, but 88 percent of the wallets with cute babies in them came back. The researchers suggest it has to do with an evolutionary instinct to preserve the young, so if it’s not terribly embarrassing, keep a cute baby in plain sight in your wallet or purse. If you lack for your own adorable tyke, it’s a great reason to call that aunt you never speak to anymore. (Original post)

6. Destroy a credit card the right way

If you’re looking to ditch one of your expired or unused credit cards, don’t just give it one or two token scissor cuts and toss it where identity thieves would love to have a go at it. Try the method recommended by the Wallet Pop blog (and demonstrated in the video above), which involves using a strong magnet and 15 cuts across your little debt recorder. Worried you’ll hurt your credit score by canceling your plastic? Don’t be—if you’ve got no balance, canceling a card can make sense. (Original post)

5. Erase your hard drives the permanent way

Weekend editor Jason doesn’t like to leave his hard drives loaded with personal data, like 40 percent of the used hard drives that can be bought on eBay. So he keeps a variety of total-erasure software on hand, knows how long he needs to run them, and firmly believes in the security power of fire, magnets, and other physical disruption tools. You might not need to mount your hard drives and fire at them with real ammunition, but a quick read through our feature on properly erasing your physical media will make you want to truly cleanse your drives before donating, selling, or handing them off. Photo by scragz.

4. Uglify gear you don’t want grabbed

If the guts of your possessions are what matter to you most, and you don’t mind a little creative shoddiness, “uglifying” might be the way to go for your prized possessions. One blogger took his “ugly camera” for a spin in some fairly harsh areas, and even had it left in his pockets by muggers who went for a $20 cellphone instead. So if a digital camera, a nice bike, or anything else you’re concerned about looks like it might be a nice target, consider creatively junking it up a bit. (Original post)

3. Make little changes to prevent identity theft

The more people, companies, and places you ensure your identifying information to, the larger a target you are for whoever wants to masquerade as you until the packages arrive from eBay. You can, however, lock down your data life without moving into a mountain cave. Actively guarding your Social Security number takes patience and persuasion powers, but you usually don’t have to give it out. The Get Rich Slowly blog suggests keeping in mind the Three ‘D’s of identity theft protection—deter, detect, and defend, bolstered by the FTC’s identity theft tips. When you find a cheaper price at an off-brand store, use a virtual credit card to shield your real account from misplaced digits. Finally, be not afraid to bust out the shredder and feed it with the financial records you don’t need.

2. Know where to hide your money

It might seem counter-intuitive, but a former burglar suggests that leaving a little bit of money in a few barely-hidden spots might save your living space, and your actual stash of cash, from being torn apart and tracked down by those who would take what you have. If you’re looking for a place to store emergency money that you’ll (almost) always have on you, the Cash “Can” keyring is a good bet against being burglarized. (Original post)

1. Set up a laptop security system

Laptops hold a lot of data you probably don’t want in the open, and they’re not cheap to replace. If you’d rather your thin computer not find its way into the wrong hands, we have a few suggestions on securing your laptop on multiple fronts. From inexpensive, physical laptop locks to webcam mugshot takers and missing computer trackers, a lot of tools are available for Windows and Mac machines that make it hard for a thief to walk away with your system, or make him wish he hadn’t if he makes it out the door with it.

How do you secure your gear, money, documents, and other items against low-tech thievery—beyond, of course, locking your door and closing your windows? Tell us about your more creative theft deterrents in the comments.

Written by Mike Pomranz

As the weather turns cooler, we’re reminded that another year is facing its end.  Come January, we’ll be plunged headfirst into 2010, heralding the start of yet another decade.

The "aughts" were a fun time: The emergence of terrorism, a deadly and possibly unwinnable war in Iraq, the global economic collapse, and a World Series title for the Boston Red Sox.

One of the biggest developments, however, was the continued development of the Internet.

In 1999, 4 to 5 million websites were online.  Today, over 100 million sites exist.  To put that in perspective, scientist say that if you put all the information available on the web today in Albert Einstein’s head, he would have literally shit his pants.

But as the web weaves its tangled mess of stock quotes, political message board posts and pornography across the globe, sites continually lose favor to newer, more popular pages.  Every Britney Spears has her Miley Cyrus: The more Britney attempts to make a comeback, the more we realize how gross she is and how glad we are that she’s been replaced by something younger, better and less depressing.  So it goes on the Internet as well.

Therefore, as we near the end of a decade, we wanted to take a look back at what websites haven’t been worth visiting in the past 10 years, so that we may never forget that today’s Twitter could be tomorrow’s Pets.com.

After the jump, see our list and add your own.

1. Geocities (or Tripod or Angelfire, etc.)

Where was your first website?  Assuming you weren’t a ’70s Computer Science major writing programs with punch cards in between your weekly mustache trimmings, you probably used a free online web space like Geocities.  Yes, cobbling together your first homepage with a not-so-user-friendly web-based design tool and limited knowledge of this emerging code known as "HTML" might have been difficult.  Still, building a page used to instill a sense of achievement that some ass who uses PimpMyMyspace.com to add flashing marijuana leaves to his profile will never understand.  Alas, Geocities is closing next month, officially ending an era of terrible webpages.  R.I.P.

2. WebCrawler (or Excite or Altavista or Infoseek or Lycos, etc.)

WebCrawler used to be my go-to search engine.  We had AOL dial-up and they kept pushing that silly spider whether we liked it or not.  In retrospect, I never realized it was "the first Web search engine to provide full text search."  I’m not sure what that means, but I sure am impressed.  However, by the time I went to college I was into AltaVista, my WebCrawler days having waned.  Nowadays, if you don’t use Google, you’re probably on some corporate crusade that no one really feels like hearing about anyways.

3. The homepage of your old dial-up provider

Prodigy, CompuServe, MindSpring?  Who was your first Internet provider?  As a kid, our first ISP was some company called Erols.  They required us to fly a kite with a key tied to it to receive emails.  Whoever you went through, your first web stop was probably their annoying homepage.  Typically, these sites were a mix of silly headlines trying to get you to click through to articles you didn’t want to read and annoying, distracting advertisements for products you would never buy.  Thank God websites aren’t like that anymore!!

4. Netscape.com

Can you believe at one point Netscape had 90% of the browser market?!  Now, Netscape Navigator is officially done.  Turns out no one took into account that Microsoft would spend the majority of the 1990s breaking federal and international law by engaging in monopolistic practices.  Whoops!

5.Open Diary

Could you imagine the Net without blogs?  Back before becoming a web staple and source of my weekly paycheck, the idea of the blog was spawned out of online diaries.  Open Diary claims to be "the first web site that brought online diary writers together into a community."  Unfortunately for O.D., sites like LiveJournal and Blogger quickly followed, meaning most users had migrated to another company by the turn of the millennium.  But to be fair, online diaries were NEVER worth visiting regardless of the year.  If people wanted to hear your every thought they would hang out with you socially instead of making you the online pariah that you are.  So I guess, technically, Open Diary could be taken off this list all together.

6. Classmates.com

Classmates.com was a great idea: Let’s use the power and connectivity of the Internet to allow alumni to locate each other.  Unfortunately, people had to pay a fee to take full advantage of the most important site features – like reading messages sent to you – thus keeping Classmates from reaching its full potential as the site that Friendster would have eventually taken over for anyway.  Today, Facebook fills the void of helping you reconnect with people you didn’t even remember going to high school with.  Give Classmates.com credit, however, for leading the way in the field of placing annoying banner ads on every site on the entire Internet!

7. Rotten.com

"If you post weird stuff on the web, they will come."  That fake mantra I just made up is true now more than ever.  And one of the first sites to gain popularity for posting what other media outlets would never dare, was Rotten.com.  The site has since fallen out of favor: Too many other places exist to find similar content, and, in the end, their obsession with the nasty made them a bit too niche.  You could say Rotten.com was the Ty Cobb of websites: An early pioneer that was a total train wreck off the field due to heavy drinking.

8. Anything "Ate My Balls"

We get it, dude!  A number of celebrities ate your testicles.  By 2000, we were sick of hearing about it.  I’m just glad that the Internet has moved past such trivial matters and has finally embraced its power to do something other than promote the stupid nonsense of fringe wackos!!!

9. Hamster Dance

Before there were memes, there was Hamster Dance.  If you’ve seen Hamster Dance once, you probably don’t want to ever see it again.  And if you haven’t seen Hamster Dance, by all means, DO NOT click the above icon!  Your conscious is clean and your heart is pure.  Don’t turn back now.

This list was compiled from discussions with friends and coworkers, but I’m sure you have plenty of websites you haven’t visited in a decade either.  Give us your additions to our list in the comments!

Collected by Internet Pop Culture

We’ve seen so many shocking and startling images of 9/11 from the perspective of people on the ground but what did that terrible day look like from space?

As you will see from the following photos the chaos taking place in lower Manhattan was very visible from more than 250 miles above Earth inside the International Space Station.

View of the World Trade Center days later from the North.

One of a series of pictures taken of metropolitan New York City (and other parts of New York as well as New Jersey) by one of the Expedition Three crew members onboard the International Space Station (ISS) at various times during the day of September 11, 2001. The image shows a smoke plume rising from the Manhattan area. The orbital outpost was flying at an altitude of approximately 250 miles. The image was recorded with a digital still camera. (via globalsecurity.org)

This still image, taken from video sent from the International Space Station on Tuesday, shows a smoke plume rising from the Manhattan area of New York City. (via globalsecurity.org)

The smoke plume extending into Jersey City, New Jersey.

View of New York City on 9/11/01 from the International Space Station

Shifting winds move the smoke plume into Brooklyn and Long Island.

Collected by rtcrooks

A decade ago, if you had told me Danny Devito would one day be a major part of my favorite television show (and that he’d one day be funny again), I would have slapped you in the face. But he is. And his burning balls are the biggest thing online since LoLcatZ. In honor of It’s Always Sunny… starting up again in just a few days, and in tribute to Mr Devito, we thought it fitting to comprise some of our favorite ‘Frank Reynolds’ quotes – the following is The Timeless Wisdom of Danny Devito:

Collected by casey jones

Since you’re on a site called Ice Ice Babies, it can be assumed that the 90’s is your nostalgic decade.  That said, below is a collection of awesomeness that will take you right back to a time when ‘responsibility’ wasn’t in your vocabulary, Encarta helped you with research, and pay phones weren’t lonely.

You Know You’re A 90’s Kid If.

You know all the words to The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air theme song

Goosebumps and Are You Afraid Of The Dark scared you

You collected (and maybe played) Pogs

You remember people fighting over Beanie Babies and Tickle Me Elmo toys

You had a short-lived slap bracelet phase

You know the Macarena

Your winter coat used to be a Starter jacket

You thought you could climb the Agrocrag faster than any of the kids on GUTS

Your shoes had flashing lights

TGIF was your favorite TV lineup

Oregon Trail Day was your favorite day in class

Bill Nye taught you something

You’d have a cassette tape in the radio so you could record your favorite song when it came on

You wanted to find Carmen Sandiego AND Waldo

Surge was your idea of an energy drink

Warheads and Tongue Splashers were a key contributor to your cavities

You predicted your future with one of these:

You told someone The Blair Witch Project was real

You knew every detail about each Saved By The Bell character

Your goal was to be on American Gladiators if becoming a professional athlete didn’t work out

You had a stance on whether you liked Ice Ice Baby or U Can’t Touch This better

You thought gas was expensive when it was over $1

You (or someone you know) wore Jelly Shoes, the Crocs of the 90s

This list is far from complete, please post your additions in the comments and we’ll add to the post!

Written by Subhajit Banerjee

1. Impossible as it may sound there are still Beatles songs unreleased – the most notable ones being Carnival of Light (an experimental piece recorded on 5 January 1967 for The Million Volt Light and Sound Rave) and a 27-minute jam of Helter Skelter. A John Lennon composition the three surviving Beatles worked on in the early ’90s prior to the Anthology release called Grow Old with Me also remains unreleased.

2. The Beatles (or at least half of it) sang for the Rolling Stones: Lennon and Paul McCartney provided backing vocals to the 1967 single We Love You.

3. Besides writing hundreds of songs for the Beatles, Lennon and McCartney also wrote dozens of songs for other artistes such as From A Window (Billy J. Kramer with The Dakotas), One and One Is Two (The Strangers with Mike Shannon), Step Inside Love and It’s For You (Cilla Black), Come and Get It (Badfinger) and Woman (Peter and Gordon).

4. The Beatles’ third studio album A Hard Day’s Night is the only one to exclusively contain Lennon-McCartney compositions.

5. Paul is not McCartney’s first name, James is. Lennon changed his middle name from Winston to Ono after marrying Yoko Ono in 1969.

6. At the end of Strawberry Fields Forever, Lennon is heard mumbling what sounds like "I buried Paul", which helped fuel the ‘Paul is Dead’ rumours. He’s actually saying "cranberry sauce".

7. The only Beatles single to ever feature another musician on the credit is Get Back/Don’t Let Me Down (credited to The Beatles with Billy Preston). Preston, recruited by George Harrison to ease the growing tensions in the band, played the Hammond organ on both songs.

8. Two days after Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band released, Jimi Hendrix opened his set at London’s Saville Theatre with the title track, something McCartney considers his "single biggest tribute".

9. The final version of Strawberry Fields Forever was created combining two takes of the song in two different keys and speeds – a remarkable achievement considering the equipment and technology of the time – but still failed to fully satisfy Lennon.

10. The only Beatles track to be credited to Lennon and Harrison is an early instrumental called Cry for a Shadow recorded in 1961 when the band was backing Tony Sheridan. Flying and Dig It are the only two tracks to be credited to all four Beatles.

11. The BBC banned several Beatles songs – I Am the Walrus (for the use of the word ‘knickers’) and Fixing a Hole, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and A Day in the Life (all for alleged drug reference).

12. The working title for the film Help! was Eight Arms to Hold You.

13. For the Sgt Pepper album cover, cutouts of Adolf Hitler, Mahatma Gandhi, and Jesus Christ were requested by Lennon, but ultimately they were left out, though a cutout of Hitler was made for use.

14. Ringo Starr was the first to actually leave the group, walking out in 1968 during the acrimonious White Album sessions. As a result, the remaining Beatles all took turns on the drums for some of the tracks. When Starr finally returned he found his drum kit covered in flowers.

15. The closest the Beatles came to reuniting was at Eric Clapton’s wedding to Patti Boyd in 1979, where McCartney, Harrison and Starr played. Lennon did not attend.

16. The last time Lennon and McCartney played together was at the Los Angeles Hit Factory studio in 1974. The abysmal (and possibly drug-fuelled) session, which also featured Stevie Wonder and Harry Nilsson, was of such bad quality that the bootleg recording was released as A Toot And A Snore In 74.

17. Lennon and McCartney each recorded demos called India which remain unreleased. Each of them also recorded a version of Fats Domino’s Ain’t That a Shame for their rock and roll albums (called Rock ‘n’ Roll and ????? ? ???? respectively).

18. The first song ever written by Lennon was called Hello Little Girl. McCartney’s first was I Lost My Little Girl.

19. Lennon was charged with plagiarism by Chuck Berry’s publisher over Come Together which resembled Berry’s 1956 song You Can’t Catch Me. The case was settled out of court. George Harrison faced and lost a similar lawsuit over his solo hit My Sweet Lord which resembled the Chiffons’ He’s So Fine.

20. Lennon’s number 9 connection: Lennon was born on 9 October 1940, his son Sean was also born 9 October, 1975. He wrote the songs #9 Dream (part of Lennon’s ninth solo album Walls and Bridges which was released in the ninth month of 1974 and peaked at number 9 in the US charts) and with the Beatles – One After 909 and Revolution 9. He lived in apartment number 72 on 72nd Street in New York and was killed in the evening of December 8 when it was already early morning of December 9 in his birthplace of Liverpool.

Written by screenhead

Disney is forever synonymous with cartoons and animation, and while the recent Pixar films (Pixar is owned by Disney) have gathered critical acclaim, they’re still a far cry from some of the best Anime movies ever made. During the late 80s and the 90s, Anime went from a niche viewership that was rarely available in the Western world, to almost mainstream it is today, mainly because of a few films that changed the way the Western audience looked at animes. Here are ten anime movies that surpass virtually anything Disney has made, including the Pixar films.

10: 5CM Per Second (2007, IMDB link)

Probably one of the most visually stunning animated movies (not just animes) to be released this decade, 5CM Per Second is comprised of three stories, which deal with love between people with a great distance between them. It’s not for everyone, especially young kids who won’t understand much of it, but the sheer beauty of the animation of Makoto Shinkai is some of the most artful visions you’ll ever see – both in animation and live action movies. Just search the title on Google Images and indulge yourself in a few frames.
9: Cowboy Bebop (2001, IMDB link)

Based on the hit tv-series Cowboy Bebop, the movie continues the neo-noir, jazz infested action following the bounty hunters who get a job to track down a terrorists. Cowboy Bebop has had a cult following ever since it was first aired in Japan, then in the US, and the movie is a great introduction to newcomers to the franchise.

8: Tokyo GodFathers (2003, IMDB link)

Satoshi Kon’s Tokyo Godfathers is, more than anything, a social comment on Tokyo and the minorities of one of the largest cities in the world. The story follows three homeless friends, a young girl, a homeless man and a transvestite who find a baby in a dumpster and embark on a journey to return it to its parents. Pitch that to Pixar.

7: Princess Mononoke (1997, IMDB link)

Hayao Miyazaki, often referred to as the Walt Disney of Japan, has made plenty of genre defying anime movies (there are a few more on this list), and although he had done numerous movies before, Princess Mononoke was his breakthrough movie in the Western world. It was the highest earning movie at the Japanese box office before Titanic, which not only shows Japan’s love for anime, but just how popular the movie was in its home country.

6: Paprika (2006, IMDB link)

A visual feat for the eyes, Paprika shows just what a storyteller with a vivid imagination can do. A “dream machine” – which allows doctors to see a patient’s dreams – is stolen by a thief who uses it to enter people’s dreams, and it’s up to Paprika and her team to find the reclaim the machine. The movie shifts between reality and dreamworld continuously, and it welcomes a second viewing to get all the details.

5: Howl’s Moving Castle (2004, IMDB link)

The second Miyazaki film on the list, Howl’s Moving Castle, developed from the book by Diana Wynne Jones, centers around a girl who is cast with a spell that makes her look old, her only hope of becoming young again is with a wizard and his giant, walking castle. It features all the Miyazaki trademarks, from stunning artwork to graceful animation, and is widely considered one of his best films to date.

4: Ghost in The Shell (1995, IMDB link)

It was one of the first films to popularize Cyberpunk as an art style and vision of the future. The movie has not only been a visual inspiration to countless Hollywood action movies over the years, but a direct influence to The Matrix. The Watchowski brothers reportedly showed Ghost in The Shell to producer Joel Silver and told him, “We wanna do that live action”. There are countless references to Ghost in The Shell in the Matrix, from the way they’re plugged into the Matrix to the virtual world itself. It’s a must see for any sci-fi fan, whether you’re into anime or not.

3: Grave of The Fireflies (1988, IMDB link)

It was a movie that one can never imagine being made by Western animators or storytellers, Grave of The Fireflies was the film that made everyone realize, including the Japanese, that anime can be used to tell serious, heart felt stories. It centers on a boy and his young sister who struggle to survive in WW2 Japan when their mother dies during US firebombs of their city. Roger Ebert called it “the most powerful anti-war movie of all time”. And it’s just that.

2: Akira (1988, IMDB link)

With Akira, the West finally woke up to the power of the Japanese animes. It’s the movie that defined the whole genre, from its art style, to its realistic portrayal of violence, to its ability to tell several stories at once. The world of Neo Tokyo and it’s lawlessness, the motorcycle gangs and the technology introduced all contribute to making Akira the hallmark of anime for the past 20 years.

1. Spirited Away (2001, IMDB link)

Miyazaki’s masterpiece, the story of a girl who ventures into the land where witches, Gods and spirits rule, where she has to fight to keep her spirit, and fight to release the spirits of the ones she loves. The film was hailed by critics all over the world, and won dozens of awards, including an Oscar for best animated feature. The movie even surpassed Titanic to become the highest grossing move of all time in Japan.

Written by Steven Walling

Meetings suck. But if there’s one thing worse than meetings, it’s playing email tag to schedule them. Is your company still sending out mass emails to ask for preferred meeting times? It’s the pits, isn’t it? Yes, Outlook has a hack whereby you can solicit responses for scheduling, but it’s not much of an improvement. There’s a better way, and it’s a ridiculously simple concept. A Web app lets you pick a range of dates on a calendar and then notify your colleagues so they can pick the times and dates that work for them. You then view the responses and you’re done.

Just as wikis solved the distributed document collaboration problem (that we used to use email for), this class of online tools solves our scheduling problem. Here’s our rundown of the ten best scheduling apps to be found, in order of preference. Most of them operate on a freemium basis or are fairly cheap.

Tungle

The first thing you’ll notice about good apps is that many of them have ridiculous names. Tungle is no exception. But ignoring the silly branding, Tungle is my pick for the most innovative of the bunch. Its Web interface is quite nice, and it has support for the broadest range of integration including: Outlook, Google Calendar, iCal, Xing, LinkedIn, Facebook, Ning, and your blog. Why so many? Tungle is all about sharing your calendar as broadly as possible after you’ve published it.

Doodle

Doodle doesn’t have the social Web love that Tungle does, but it’s dead simple. If your coworkers can’t figure out how to use this, you may need to find a new career quickly. We covered Doodle launching branded versions for continuing use by a company. But if you just want to try it out once, then you don’t even need an account.

TimeBridge

TimeBridge is another app that syncs well with the standard set of both cloud-based and desktop calendars. As we mentioned in our initial review, the cool thing about TimeBridge is that the "Yes/No/Best" answer that can be provided by those you invite makes it really easy to get a response even from those who might be reluctant to use this kind of app.

Setster

Setster is a little more complex to navigate, but that’s because it’s probably better suited to more complex scheduling jobs. If you need a persistent SaaS calendaring tool that has good collaborative characteristics, Setster is probably your best bet. Read our full review from March here.

Congregar

Congregar doesn’t waste any of your time, and that’s to be admired. You can create a new event to schedule right from the home page, preview what the emailed poll will look like, and then move immediately to inviting people. Done, end of story.

Presdo

Presdo is pretty slick looking, but the interface is slightly less intuitive than many of the other apps in the list. If you need something with a decent feature set that’s really going to look more impressive to the boss, then Presdo would be a great choice.

Diarised

Diarised has got the simple process of online scheduling down pat. But it has one of those annoyingly long sign-up forms, and there doesn’t seem to be much integration with Outlook, GCal or iCal. Diarised would be just fine for a quick and informal job, but if you’re looking for something to use in the enterprise I’d pick something else.

When is Good

When is Good is probably the most bare bones of these apps on the list, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Like Doodle there’s no sign-up required. It’s got a highlighted calendar grid for choosing a range of dates, and it works the same whether you’re setting up the poll or responding.

Meet-o-Matic

Meet-o-Matic has got a really old school UI, with check boxes for choosing the dates you want to propose to coworkers. But it’s free and there’s absolutely no sign-up required for the basic version. The "advanced" version is a little under $20 a year, but I would suggest you hunt around for something with a better UI and more features if you’re willing to pay.

Meeting Wizard

Meeting Wizard is going to come up high in search results if you’re looking for this kind of thing. It’s been around for quite some time, and it has more of a corporate look than I would like. But it still definitely works fine and could be the ticket for you.

Photo by ghindo