CareerSonar Finds You Jobs Through Your Friends' Connections

A friend on social media is often more of a friendly acquaintance, but you can use that to your benefit when seeking out a new job. CareerSonar uses your connections to others to help you find work at companies where your contacts can assist.

To start, you log into a social media account or five to connect them to CareerSonar. The webapp then searches through those connections for relevant job information and then finds job listings at those companies. You'll get a dashboard with not only a bunch of available jobs, but also who you know that might help you actually get that job. You can then apply and ask a friend for an introduction to help improve your chances.

You get more than a list, of course. If you want to narrow down your listings you can filter by search terms and location. You can also add missing friends and companies that you know have certain connections in the event CareerSonar can't find them through available social media data.

Overall, it works well as a job search site but it's really nice having that added bonus of knowing someone at a company you might like. Thanks to the vague relationships on social media, you might actually know a few people who can help you that you haven't though of. CareerSonar helps you identify those people and use their help to find better employment.

CareerSonar

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123D-4P

123D-4P is a process and materials exploration of the 123D Catch app. The "4P" in 123D-4P stands for photography, ponder, process and prototyping. This Instructable is not quite a set of instructions, but more a documentation of my experiment. I plan on catching many items with hopes of generating some funky objects.

Catch is revolutionary because it allows for people to easily generate 3D models of objects that would be difficult to build in conventional modeling software. Food, for instance, can be caught, modeled and output.123D Catch is not just a modeling tool, but it is also graphics tool. It has its own aesthetic: a smoothing of textures, distortion, and cool color-cast. Since 123D catch allows for the user to upload around 20-50 images of their object, there is a lot of room for discrepancy in form. Maybe its the lighting situation, the shadows or the backdrop that obscures the form? The 123D-4P experiment is a celebration of the weird imagery that Catch creates. I know that the software was designed to work seamlessly with digital images, but I'm going to make it harder for myself and use alternative methods of photography. I will make scans, renderings, pin-hole shots, flash photography with disposable cameras, images of shadows, and other techniques to experiment with 123D Catch. 

*Animated Gifs were excessively used in the making of this presentation. 

First, I tried scanning. It was difficult using the computer while my hand was in the flat-bed! I did approximately 40 scans, hoping it would be sufficient for a solid Catch.

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Do Your Hobbies Make or Cost You Money?

Everyone has something that they invest their spare time and money on. Some of these hobbies retain their value more than others, though.

By their very nature, hobbies don't need to make money. They're for entertainment and relaxation, so a return on your investment isn't required. It couldn't hurt, though. Take the Simple Dollar's example of comic collecting:

At first glance, a person might think this is a wasteful hobby. Thousands of dollars a year on comic books?

Here’s the catch: his collection is retaining at least all of the value he’s putting into it.

Just like many of us, he’s spending a lot of money each year on something that entertains him. He gets a great deal of personal enjoyment from it.

The big difference is at the end of the day, he can sell off the items he has been purchasing and not only recoup his money, but likely make a nice return on all of it.

Of course, that's not always a guarantee. Comics will lose most of their value the moment you buy them, but if you're willing to put in the effort to find a buyer when you're ready to give them up, you can probably make some decent money. On the other hand, collecting things like DVDs or Blu-Rays will probably be a pure money pit.

What about you? Do you pick hobbies that can bring returns on your investment? Or do you prefer to skip worrying about finances when you're having fun?

Hobbies That Retain or Create Value | The Simple Dollar

Photo by Roadside Guitars.

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Challenge Winner: Silence Your Keys With Heat Shrink Tubing

In last week's MacGyver Challenge, we asked you to hack something using heat shrink tubing. We received some great entries, but the winning hack shows us how to keep those jangling keys silent.

Check out the description of the winning entry below and read about some of our other favorite entries.

Sick of the sound of jangling keys and dog tags, Profound found a clever way to silence them. He fits a piece of heat shrink tubing over the head of the key, heats to shrink, and then trims off the edges. Though you could use the many colors of heat shrink tubing available to color-code keys, we kind of like the transparent look—especially for things like dog tags that you still need to be able to read. Sure beats wrapping them in duct tape!

We got a lot of great entries and we'd be remiss if we didn't share some of our favorites. Here are some of the entries that really impressed us.

Bbaks used heat shrink tubing to create a clever solution to tangled headphone cords. By sectioning off the cables with the stiffer tubing, he created a cable that folds up accordion-style and never gets tangled up. He adds that the solution works best with the thicker cord you find on over-the-ear headphones. When he tried the same trick with the thin cord on a pair of earbuds, the tangling problem actually got worse.

FidesOnus uses a Helping Hand clamp tool to hold parts in position while he works. He found that the bare metal of the clamp often caused damage to delicate components like printed circuit boards. His solution? A bit of heat shrink tubing applied to the tips of the clamps protects those components while retaining full gripping ability.

A big thanks to everyone who took the time to send us entries! Be sure to check back every week for a new challenge.

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Generate a Monthly Calendar from the Command Line

OS X and Linux: Need to quickly check calendar dates and don't have an app at the ready? You can generate calendar data for any month in an instant with a quick terminal command.

Just type this:

cal 10 2013In fact, you only need to type cal to generate a calendar for the current month. If you want a different month, however, just type cal and then the number of the month. If you want to specify a year other than the current year, type cal then the number of the month and then the year, all separated by a space. The result? A nicely formatted text-based calendar like the one you see pictured above.

5 Most Useful Terminal Command Utilities | Using Mac

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