Use Toothpaste to Fix Car Body and Headlight Scratches

Toothpaste: it restores old sneakers, de-stains MacBooks, un-clouds drinking glasses, and, it seems, heals whatever minor scratches ail your car, whether on the body, or the problematic kind that reduce your headlights' brightness.

Image via Jonas B.

Among the 35 (technically 34) non-tooth-related uses the Coupon Sherpa suggests for toothpaste, two of them are of particular help to anyone who's been nagged by the small scratches that accumulate on any car that gets actual use:

Auto Scratches
Much cheaper than expensive scratch removers, toothpaste can smooth over minor damage for mere pennies. Apply a dab of toothpaste to a damp sponge and rub with a circular motion. Wipe dry with a soft cloth. Just make sure you don't rub too hard or you'll damage the paint job. ...

Headlights
The dings and scratches sustained by headlight glass defuses the light and makes it harder to see. Eliminate this haze by thoroughly cleaning the headlight, then rubbing in a glob of toothpaste. Follow up with a good buffing to even out the glass, either by hand or with the buffer on an electric drill.

Click here for the 35 Uses for Toothpaste That Don't Involve Your Teeth.

The U-Socket Charges USB Devices Without an Adapter

Nowadays, many of our mobile devices are USB-based, but those darn wall socket adapters are so easy to lose (or not have enough of). Thankfully, this fall, you can plug those USB devices straight into the wall with the $20 U-Socket.

Most of us tech lovers have no shortage of USB cables in our house, but it seems like there are never enough adapters to go around. The U-Socket installs into any normal wall outlet (a little bit of DIY will be required) and accepts most USB devices, USB 3.0 included, giving them a good 10 watts of power (meaning you can charge even the iPad at full speed). Plus, it's Energy Star compliant, and only outputs power through the port if something is actually connected to it, so you don't spend power and money without getting a full battery out of the deal.

The U-Socket won't be available until October due to a last-minute redesign, but its getting so much attention since its appearance at Macworld this year that we recommend checking it out now, and getting in on the nice and cheap $20 pre-order action while you can. Hit the link for more information.

U-Socket

FillAnyPDF Lets You Electronically Fill In and Sign Any Form

Fax machines are going the way of the dodo, yet sometimes there's no easy way to transfer forms back and forth, especially ones that need to be filled out and sent back. FillAnyPDF steps in to fill the gap.

FillAnyPDF is a free web-based service where you can upload any file in PDF, PNG, JPG, or GIF format. You don't need to do anything to your form before or after it's uploaded; the service will do all the heavy lifting for you.

You can email a link to anyone and they can open the form and fill it in right on the site, no download necessary. Of course if they want to print out a copy for themselves, thats an option, too. FillAnyPDF lets users type right into a document, add images or HTML markup, redact, highlight, or white text.

The service allows accepts standard handwriting input from a mouse or writing pad so the document has a realistic signature on it. Digital signatures—a simple typed name—are acceptable as legally binding as well, thanks to the app's native IP logging and tracing features.

One obvious use for a service like FillAnyPDF is to make it easier for freelancers and clients to manage contracts, tax forms, and other paperwork. That's a lot of private information flying around the internet, but the company says your data is safe:

Your account and documents are password protected, so no one will be able to access your data unless you grant them permission.

All forms and sensitive information on the site are encrypted with full 128-bit SSL security.

Our servers are housed in state-of-the-art secured facilities with security and backup power. The servers have redundant hard drives (RAID) and daily backup to a separate device.

Even if you're not comfortable sending personal information via a service like FillAnyPDF, it's still a great tool for managing more generic paperwork that doesn't involve private information. If you give it a go, let's hear what you think in the comments.

Click here to check it out FillAnyPDF.

Get a free college education online

Not headed back to school this fall? You could be, minus the exorbitant tuition and without even leaving your chair. The web has made it easier than ever before to get a free education, and you'd join the ranks of great thinkers in history who were also self-taught, like Joseph Conrad, Albert Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell, Paul Allen, Agatha Christie and Ernest Hemingway. You, too, can be an autodidact; the breadth of free educational materials available online is absolutely astonishing.

Note: Many colleges and universities offer free courses online in the form of podcasts, lectures, tutorials and full-blown online classes. Most of these courses, while extremely smart-making, will NOT award any college credits or degrees.

Free online college courses
Grab some learnin' from the University of Washington's free online courses; Greek mythology, American Revolution, Heroic Fantasy are just some of the offerings. If you get tired of that, you can study economics at the University of Nebraska.

Teach yourself sign language from Michigan State University. Browse through the vast treasures at the Library of Congress. View free videos on all sorts of subjects from Annenberg Media, a major supplier to most distance learning universities, or read the core documents of American democracy.

Feel like a little light reading? You can study theology at Covenant Seminary; course offerings are delivered via a combo of free downloadable .pdf files and podcasts, and include subjects ranging from Church History to the Modern Reformation.

Learn mathematics with this extensive list of free online math courses from Whatcom Community College. Visit Carnegie Mellon University and take Biology, Causal Reasoning, Statistics, and more, all for free.

Penn State University offers a free Swedish language course, in addition to a free Hungarian language course. Or, you can take an Italian language and culture course from Brooklyn College. California State also offers a free Conversational Mandarin Chinese course, and you can learn Turkish via the University of Arizona.

The University of Washington School of Medicine offers free CPR classes online, complete with video and instructional guides. You can also take health courses from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; anything from adolescent health to population science.

Prepare for the US citizenship test from the Missouri Southern State University. Learn linear algebra from the University of Puget Sound. Learn about bioterrorism (really) and other hazards from the University of North Carolina.

Get free online mathematics textbooks, videos, and lecture notes from New York University. Take advantage of Tufts University's open courses on dentistry, medicine, nutrition, and more. Learn about cognitive science from Hampshire College.

Take eight different courses via the Sofia Project, a collaborative effort between select California community colleges. Brigham Young University offers independent study in subjects such as Family History, Family Life, and Religious Scripture Study. Get access to ten free seminary courses from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.

Learn about human resources in 52 (!) different free courses from ERI. Browse a huge variety of materials in the University of Michigan's courses and seminars on Internet laws.

Ivy League
Take advantage of Stanford University's free CS education library. Go to college by taking free classes at MIT. Go to Berkeley with your iPod. The University of Pennsylvania has an extensive online library; over 25,000 books are listed here.

Just debuted, you can take free courses from Yale (funded by HP) on such diverse subjects as the Old Testament or Physics. Watch or read free online lectures in archival format from Princeton. Get a free Introduction to Probability text from Dartmouth.

Google tricks
Using the right keywords, find course syllabi (insert your own subject), lectures, tutorials, notes, podcasts, and various sorts of online books using Google.

As time goes on, I'm sure we'll see even more colleges and universities making even more of their courses open access.

Resource: Wendy Boswell