Avoid talking to the customer support bot!

When you’re tired of wasting money and time due to phone systems that require you to press 10 or more options in order to reach a real person and spending many minutes or even hours on hold, consult the GetHuman database of secret phone numbers and codes that immediately get an actual, live person on the line for customer service at nearly 1000 major companies. Click here for a full list or use our search below to find a company by part of its name, industry and/or country.

Wink: Tutorial and Presentation creation software

Wink is a Tutorial and Presentation creation software, primarily aimed at creating tutorials on how to use software (like a tutor for MS-Word/Excel etc). Using Wink you can capture screenshots, add explanations boxes, buttons, titles etc and generate a highly effective tutorial for your users.

Kill (yourself), again! – Time Waster

As a kid, at family reunions and holidays like Thanksgiving, my cousins and I used to play a variation of Super Mario Bros. that we liked to call, “Suicide Mario.” The goal of the game was not to complete the level as directed, but to find the most creative way to kill our Mario or Luigi character. Bonus points were awarded for quick, hilarious and extra sadistic acts of hara-kiri. It was a great way to infuse new life into a game that we could all beat in our sleep, and the idea eventually spun off into other variations like, “Suicide Zelda,” “Suicide Starfox” and in later years, “Suicide Golden Eye.”

This is why [adult swim]’s Five Minute’s to Kill (Yourself) easily earned its place as one of my favorite Flash games, well, ever. In that game, you are an office worker who has five minutes to kill yourself. You inflict damage upon your character by annoying co-workers, microwaving metal, stapling your head, running yourself through the shredder, that kind of thing. It’s hilarious and awesome.

Now, the game team at [adult swim] has released a sequel: Five Minutes to Kill (Yourself) 2. This time, instead of trying to kill yourself at work, you are trying to kill yourself at a family reunion. Even before I played the game, I was already in love based on the concept alone.

In the original game, you used your keyboard to move around and select objects to inflict self-injury. The new game uses the mouse instead, which offers better mobility, and I dare say might make the game a bit easier. There are also several “areas” to explore where you can slit your proverbial pixelated wrists, each area has its own unique death trabs — the beach has sharks and life-guardless pools, the pavilion has drunken relatives and hot oil, the park has fire-ant hills. You get the drill. To get certain injuries, you have to first collect items that will trigger their release. This makes the game a bit more challengng, as you have to find what someone might want before they can hit you with a baseball bat or hug your out of drunken fervor.

Real suicide is not funny. Pixelated suicide, however, is hilarious.

You can play Five Minutes to Kill (Yourself) 2 at [adult swim].com

Busuu makes language learning almost simple

Busuu coffee!
Learning a new language can be a tricky thing. Some of us need to hear the language, others like to read it and still others just want to get out there and talk.

Busuu gives you the opportunity to try all three methods of learning and find out what works for you. After registering with the site, still in beta, you can start learning. You can choose learning modules based on things like travel, your daily routine or going to the bar.

Once you choose a module, you will be shown a variety of pictures. With each picture comes an audio pronunciation of the word (which you can replay) and a sentence containing the word. I really enjoyed using this part, but I wish I could’ve heard the sentences pronounced to get a feel for different word tenses.

After you review, and hopefully learn the words in the module, you move on to the fun parts! Read on for those…
Your first option is to take a little reading comprehension quiz. You are presented with three pictures and a dialogue in the language you are learning. From that, you take a three question quiz to see how well you can comprehend what is going on.

The quiz pulls from other models as well and you only need to have a basic grasp of the ideas presented to get the questions right. It was kind of fun, but I know if I heard that conversation by native speakers, I would still have no clue what was going on.

Next you can let native speakers critique your writing skills. You enter a phrase pertaining to the lesson you are working on. Native speakers have the chance to rate and comment on what you have written and offer suggestions. This is where knowing tenses and articles and such would really be helpful. The response, so far, is relatively quick with comments popping up within 10 minutes or so.

You can also choose to chat directly with native speakers. You can turn on a webcam and microphone, or, just type. Like any online space, it’s really hard to say if you will get someone useful to chat with or not. I had someone message me several times asking if I could teach him French. Since I registered as an English speaker wanting to learn Spanish, I am not sure what he was hoping for. There are also plenty of people looking to flirt.

After going through those steps, you can take a test to see how well you learned the vocabulary in that module. The more tests you take and do well on, the bigger your language tree grows in your learning garden.

I don’t think Busuu is going to actually teach me to speak a language but, I could certainly learn a lot of vocabulary if I put some time into it. At least I know how to get some coffee.

PDFMeNot Offers Flash-based Online Viewing

When people think about the most irritating apps on their computer, Adobe Reader usually shows up on the list. Our readers tend to think the alternatives (like Foxit) are the way to go, and I couldn’t agree more.

That’s why I decided to give PDFMeNot’s web app a try. I’m a Foxit user, but I really don’t use PDF files that often. If PDFMeNot works well, that’s one more app I can leave off my flash drive. Also, I enjoy the irony of thinking that I’m getting away from Adobe, when really I’m just choosing Flash over Reader.

Damn it. You win again, Adobe.

I did a quick Google search and located an unclassified Air Force finance report, and dropped in the URL. It took a little bit (about three minutes or so, but it was a 728-page report) for the document to be displayed, but once it was up it worked nicely.

The developers are nice enough to offer a tools page, where you’ll find a bookmarklet, Firefox extension, and even code to embed the viewer on your own page.

Since it only functions as a viewer and I can’t print from it, I’ll be sticking with Foxit portable. I will, however, keep PDFMeNot filed away for days when I forget my flash drive somewhere.

Tagoo Finds MP3s for You to Stream or Download

Since I posted 35 Places To Download Free, Legal MP3s, I now fully understand just how much everyone on the damn internet wants free music. Well, here’s another place to feed your addiction.

I wandered over to Tagoo expecting to find another piece of hastily assembled Google search garbage. Man, was I in for a surprise.

Tagoo finds direct links to MP3 files, and it lets you stream them or build playlists right on their site.

It’ll suggest while you type: “prote,” offered me Protest The Hero. Well done, Tagoo! When results appear, click the play button immediately to the right of the track to listen to it immediately. The track’s artist, title, genre, bitrate, filesize, and length are all displayed.

It’s even nice enough to warn you about potentially slow download sites, marking them with a red dot.

Pausing on the button will give you other options: choose a mood for the track, open it in the player in a new window, visit the page hosting the file, or add the song to a playlist.

You’ll have to sign up to build playlists, but registration takes all of 5 seconds and the playlist feature is ridiculously cool. Add tracks to different playlists, and then view your lists to stream them or download the M3U. I love this feature. I can build playlists at home and then fire them up on my pc at work, or on my laptop wherever I’ve got wireless.

When Tagoo displays your search results, it’ll also show you user-created playlists that contain similar tracks. Take a listen, and then tell Tagoo if you liked it or not.

This is an awesome search tool, and a great place to find music. Here’s hoping it says around for us to enjoy!

Dr. Pic: A no-Flash online image editor

DrPic
There are plenty of web-based image editors out there. And while I love me some Picnik, Fotoflexer, or Splashup action, there’s one thing that Dr. Pic can do that none of the other online image editors do: Operate on a computer that doesn’t have Flash installed.

That’s because Dr. Pic is built using nothing but AJAX. While you probably won’t have much luck using the service with Internet Explorer 5, any modern web browser should be able to handle the basic image editing tools Dr. Pic provides. You can resize or crop images and add a handful of effects. For example you can blur, sharpen, or add text to an image.

You can export the result as a JPG, BMP, GIF, or PNG file.

Check Your PC’s Ability to Run Games Online

Need to know whether or not your rig can handle the new game you’re eyeing up? Head over to System Requirements Lab and fire up Can You Run It.

The browser-based utility will check your hardware configuration against the requirements for the game you select and quickly tell you whether or not you’re good to go. The assessment runs very quickly (about 30 seconds) and provides both an overall mark and individual ratings for each component (cpu, ram, OS, video, hdd).

SRL already has an impressive list of games to rate against, including titles like Spore, Bioshock, GRID, and (sigh) Second Life. Speaking as a tech, this is a great way to quickly show a customer why their new game won’t run on their haggard old PC.

Can You Run It works in both Firefox and IE.

Web Password Hashing

The Common Password Problem. Users tend to use a single password at many different web sites. By now there are several reported cases where attackers breaks into a low security site to retrieve thousands of username/password pairs and directly try them one by one at a high security e-commerce site such as eBay. As expected, this attack is remarkably effective.

A Simple Solution. PwdHash is an browser extension that transparently converts a user’s password into a domain-specific password. The user can activate this hashing by choosing passwords that start with a special prefix (@@) or by pressing a special password key (F2). PwdHash automatically replaces the contents of these password fields with a one-way hash of the pair (password, domain-name). As a result, the site only sees a domain-specific hash of the password, as opposed to the password itself. A break-in at a low security site exposes password hashes rather than an actual password. We emphasize that the hash function we use is public and can be computed on any machine which enables users to login to their web accounts from any machine in the world. Hashing is done using a Pseudo Random Function (PRF).

Phishing protection. A major benefit of PwdHash is that it provides a defense against password phishing scams. In a phishing scam, users are directed to a spoof web site where they are asked to enter their username and password. SpoofGuard is a browser extension that alerts the user when a phishing page is encountered. PwdHash complements SpoofGuard in defending users from phishng scams: using PwdHash the phisher only sees a hash of the password specific to the domain hosting the spoof page. This hash is useless at the site that the phisher intended to spoof.

Combine media files with MediaJoin

MediaJoin
MediaJoin is a free Windows utility that joins media files. You probably could have figured that out from its name. But let’s get a bit more specific, shall we? The program lets you select a group of audio or video files, put them in order, and then spit them out as one long media file.

For example, say you’ve got a bunch of MP3s representing a live concert and you’d rather have just one long file that will play the whole concert from start to end. Just select the MP3s, select your output format, and MediaJoin will do the rest.

The utility even lets you mix and match file types. So you can combine WAV, MP3, and WMA files and output the results as a single file. One thing to keep in mind is that MediaJoin appears to perform some recompression. So if you’re starting with a compressed media format like MP3 you might notice some quality loss in the finished product unless you choose uncompressed WAV as your output format.