December 2007, Week 3

November 2007, Week 5

• FSF.org  has free programs for users of the Linux operating system.

  Includes stock market trackers, crossword puzzle generators and many more.

• Switched.com  is a subset of AOL News, and has odd stories. We learned of Best Buy stores faking a shortage of Nintendo Wii game machines by having a clerk walk around with a unit held high overhead and the store's public address system stating this was the last one it had. This was done every half-hour with a new one for sale each time, the reporter noted.

November 2007, Week 4 : From the Silly File 

n  We have a Cubicle Doorbell for our office now. It comes with a Velcro or sticky backing and a button on the front. Push the button to announce your presence and desire to enter. There’s a choice of sounds, from the classic “ding dong” to a foghorn, birds twittering and a dozen others. There are three volume levels; price is $12 from CubiCaller.com.

n  Saitek is offering a mouse with a clear plastic body that can display a photo inside. You cut out a picture, insert it into the mouse case, and be reminded of something or other every minute of your computer day. We found it for $20 at Amazon.com; works with Windows and Mac.  

November 2007, Week 3

•  iBakeSale.com  has made arrangements with more than 400 retail businesses to return a portion of an individual's purchase money to charity or community groups that register on the Web site. Most of the retailers are well-known, like Starbucks, Nordstrom, Macy's, Gap, Wal-Mart, Brooks Brothers, etc. As the shopper, you can list which organization you want the funds to go to, and then purchase things normally. You can elect to keep some of the cash-back reward for yourself. It takes 30 to 60 days for your cash-back to become available.

• The FranceRadio.net site we recently recommended for downloading free music seems to be "hors de combat," as the French might say. In other words: it's not up there and working anymore. Was it something we said? Could be. Because within a couple of days of our reporting that you could download music here for free, boom, they were gone. We'll keep checking to see if the site returns. In the meantime, you might try Skreemr.com, using Real Player, which lets you download music.

November 2007, Week 2

•   FormSpring.com  has a free, simple way to add a survey form to your Web site. It provides the templates and you fill in the fields and questions you want covered. Just click on the "Build" tab to build the form. You have to go to the FormSpring Web site to see the responses to your form in the free version. Paid versions have more form templates and send you results by e-mail.

•   Economist.com/charts  is a section of the famous news magazine's Web site that presents extremely interesting charts that do not appear in the magazine. For instance, we learned that most Europeans hold a job for 10 years, while most Americans hold one for four years. We also learned that despite new cars being more fuel efficient, gas consumption in the United States is as high as it was in the 1980s. A large part of the reason is the increase in sales of heavier vehicles like SUVs (Sports Utility Vehicles), vans and trucks, which get poor gas mileage.

October 2007, Week 4

FranceRadio.net  has free MP3 music downloads, and the choices run from rock to classical. You can also just listen. We listened to Beethoven's "Waldstein" sonata while we started writing the column and then turned to the Beatles. There are thousands of pieces listed here, all free.

PBS.org/wiredscience  is the Web site for a new show from public television, and it's excellent.The first episode looked at the cyber attack that shut down Estonia's computer system after the government moved a statue commemorating the Soviet Union's war dead. Another looked at junk floating in the oceans and found that there was an average of 46,000 pieces of plastic floating for every square mile. Some of the objects have been floating for more than 30 years.

ThinkFreeDocs.com  lets you search for the type of document you need: catalogs, spreadsheet reports, invoices, estimates, cookbooks, etc. Some are PowerPoint documents. But all, plain or complex, can be modified to make them your own. You can also contribute by uploading your own documents for others to use. (One we looked at was a "break-up" letter. It was allegedly done by a Marine in Afghanistan who got a "Dear John" letter from his girl back home. He sent back a composite of 57 photos of girls collected from other Marines, with a note that he couldn't remember what she looked like but she should feel free to remove her photo from the group.)

October 2007, Week 2

·     DigitalBhoomi.com  is a classified ad site similar to CraigsList.com, but restricted to cities in India. Choose a city and select a topic, like jobs, things for sale, marriage proposals, etc. Marriage proposal ads may seem like an odd category but it’s quite common in Indian publications.

·     Amazon.com has entered the MP3 music download field with more than two million listings for 99 cents each or less. This all started with Apple but it is open season now and we can expect more listing services.

October 2007, Week 1

• Podanza.com  is a free audio and video search engine with links to programs from the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Fidelity Investments, The Economist magazine, etc. You can watch and listen through your Web browser or download the programs to portable media devices like the Apple iPod, Sanyo Sansa and others.

• Video.AOL.com has a tab that offers you a choice of a number of full episodes of popular TV shows. Examples include "Desperate Housewives," "Ugly Betty," "Dancing With the Stars," and many new shows making debuts in October. The service is free.

September 2007, Week 4

• WhereIveBeen.com  is a web site that lets you click on places in a world map and add that graphic to your FaceBook  or MySpace profile as well as to blogs and other web sites. It’s sort of a picture of where you’ve been in the world. About three million Facebook users have chronicled their travels this way.

• AudisseyGuides.com  offers walking tours with a jazz beat. You can download  tours for some major American cities  and  hear turn-by-turn directions on your iPod or MP3 player as you stroll. The narrative is delivered by hip locals who seem to have been instructed to act really cool. There’s a jazz background and we found the whole thing rather too precious for words. Ah well, anything to be different.

September 2007, Week 3

• Accuweather.com/astronomy  is a new feature with star charts and a sky photo of the day. Enter a U.S. location, and it gives you information on the night sky from there. You can also get free hour-by-hour weather forecasts for any U.S. location.

• Body.AOL.com has tips on nutrition and fitness. Includes celebrity diets, memory exercises, a calorie burn calculator, etc.

• MyPhotoAlbum.com  offers a free Web site with templates for making photo albums. There are many sites like this, but since it's free, there's no harm in taking a look.

 

 ·  Education: The World Book for Kids is being offered online for $50 a year at WorldBook.com. The interface was designed by kids and was not the one chosen in a survey of adults. That's nice. Unfortunately, you can buy the Windows XP disks from Amazon for less than $18, so why pay the online price?

·  World Time: Find the local time any place in the world at TimeAndDate.com. You can also pose questions like "What day will it be 9,999 days from now?" That's in case you wanted to know what to wear. You can also generate a calendar for any year you wish, including far in the past.

·  Music: Mercora.com, an online social music network, has been revamped with an easy-to-use interface. Artists and composers are listed by name and category in a clear, pleasing display. Interfaces are important; just consider the initial success of America Online, which had little going for it in the beginning, but had a great friendly user interface.

So the interface here is the good news. The bad news is you can click on a selection, which we did from a list of songs by Andrea Bocelli, and what came up was a song from a Walt Disney movie. The problem, it turns out, is that the music is contributed by listeners, who simply post their favorites in no particular order. The selection list changes without warning; the classical category can switch to pop singers, and so on. Still, there are about 100,000 listings, and it makes for interesting browsing. No download required.

November 2006, Week 1

·  EurekaCode.com: A reader who travels through Southeast Asia, China and Japan tells us this site is really popular in the Internet cafes. The site gives you a series of numbers and you have to figure out the English sentence or sentences that go with them. There is a prize fund, paid by the advertisers, for cracking the code. As of this writing, the prize is about $142,000 or 112,000 Euros.

 ·  SpotPitch.com: Here's a limited chance to do your own commercial. Make a video for one of the products listed and you might win $1,000 and see your commercial used in an online advertising campaign. It's a contest, and it's only open for the month of November. We were tempted to get an "Ant Vacuum" because of a pitch someone did, but since we moved from California we no longer have an ant problem.

October 2006, Week 3

·  WiredBerries.com: A new Web site for women who are interested in sports, fitness, food and related concerns for a healthy life, like relationships, music and meditation. "WiredBerries Radio" has author interviews. Music downloads promised for later.

·  MyBrainTrainer.com: Offers free tests of your mental quickness. You can find out how well you're doing compared to others in your age group who have taken the same test. We can't help but feel that people who go here and take the tests probably already know they are above average, which is going to skew the curve higher. Hey, bring 'em on.

 October 2006, Week 2

• www.scitoys.com: A tinkerer's delight. Buy some gallium and cast it into whatever shape you want, then give it to somebody and watch it melt in their hand. The site shows you how to make dozens of gadgets, and with each one you learn something along the way. For instance, you can make a high-voltage alarm in five minutes using a couple of Coke cans and some aluminum foil.

•  www.trulia.com: A handy real estate search engine with "heat" maps that color in the most expensive or popular areas in red, and cooler regions in yellow or green. Type in a ZIP code and get a list of everything for sale, with thumbnail photos. You can see if a home is considered expensive for its ZIP code or compare it to other neighborhoods in the area. Some listings have detailed price histories going back five years.

October 2006, Week 1

   AmericanCraftExpo.org  is the Web site for the prestigious American crafts show held each year on the campus of Northwestern University. All the craftiest people are there, and you can see pictures of their work and contact the artists through this site. We especially liked the miniature planets made by Josh Simpson. He also has his own Web site: Megaplanet.com, as do many of the other artists.

August 2006, Week 4  

·  www.phillybyphone.com: A tour of Philadelphia's historic spots narrated on your cell phone. The cost is $10, and we found the free sample tour to be well done and entertaining. The site also provides maps.

·  www.talkingstreet.com: This site has walking tours by cell phone for Washington, D.C., New York and Boston. Though the speakers are celebrities, the tours didn't seem as well-done as Philadelphia tour. Nonetheless, this is an interesting way to do a city walking tour and the cost is low, only $6.

August 2006, Week 1

    You can see some remarkable high-speed photography scenes at www.photron.com. Watch a water balloon pop, a rattlesnake strike and others.

June 2006, Week 1

-- www.diynetwork.com    A do-it-yourself site for projects in eight categories: woodworking, autos, boats, gardening, hobbies, home building, home improvement, cooking and crafts. This is a commercial site from Scripps Networks and draws millions of visitors a month. It has good information and you can watch videos of each project as it's being done. The woodworking projects even include a bill of materials.

-- www.freewebs.com   A hosting site like geocities.com. You can sign up for a free account and host your web site here. They also provide tools for creating the web site.

May 2006, Week 5

  www.kbears.com: Another new educational site for children. It can't match the recent AOL site http://kids.aol.com/KOL/1/KOLJr   for sheer bravura and content, but it has good stuff and is worth visiting. It has pictures and coloring books of more dinosaurs than we ever heard of, plus odd facts about everything, nice games and sample music from many countries. All free.

·  www.allsafetravel.com: Find out what's safe and what's not before you travel abroad. This site has over a thousand links to advisories from the U.S. State Department and government agencies of other countries, as well as info from private sources. We looked up Costa Rica just for the fun of it and found you can carry photocopies of your passport as you travel around the country, leaving the real one behind in a safe place.

·  www.pictureitpostage.com: These are not your father's postage stamps. For a couple of years now you could print official U.S. postage stamps with your own pictures, but you couldn't promote your business. Now you can print stamps with a company logo, Web site or product picture. The cost is higher than regular postage -- around 90 cents a stamp instead of 39, but we threw caution to the wind and bought a sheet.

May 2006, Week 4

  http://kids.aol.com/kol-jr : A great new children's Web site from AOL. This was very impressive. Games, music, bedtime stories, movie clips from "Bambi" and all of "The Little Princess," a classic Shirley Temple movie. Because AOL is a division of entertainment giant Time/Warner, it has an enormous advantage with a children's site. There's no reason why much of the huge library of Time/Warner movies and educational films could not be made available. Tough to compete with that.

  An interesting and amusing feature of this site is the tiny tot critics. Little kids rank toys. We liked a criticism by Matthew H., of Missouri, age 4, commenting on a Tigger the tiger stuffed toy: "It's too young for me."

May 2006, Week 2

    There are several free dictionaries available on the web but the one we like best is www.askoxford.com. This is a site created by Oxford University Press, publishers of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, the gold standard in the dictionary business.

   AskOxford has definitions and explanations for 145,000 words and phrases plus some word games like hangman, crossword puzzles, anagrams, etc. They have a quiz each month, with small prizes awarded.

April 2006, Week 3

   www.craftypc.com: A good source for craft ideas and where to find the special materials for doing them, like where to buy cotton that has a good surface for running through computer printers. The site has nice photos of quilts made this way.

April 2006, Week 2

   www.annualreports.com: You can look through thousands of company reports here. The reports appear in their original format, and you can search by industry, company name or stock ticker symbol.

   www.switchdiscs.com: A sensible and legal trading network for swapping CDs, DVDs and video games. Membership is free. Trading is by "SwitchBucs." Members give each item a SwitchBuc price and use Bucs to trade. If someone takes your disc, you have Bucs to spend in your account for other discs. And so on back and forth. Note: This is not an auction or rental site.

March 2006, Week 4

·  www.43things.com: Create a list of things you want to do and/or look at other people's lists. As for your list, the Web managers will send you a reminder in a week, month or year that something is coming up that you wanted to do. High on the lists of things many people want to do are "get married and live happily ever after," "read all the books they have" and "download free movies."  

·  http://games.lycos.com: A game site that lets you compete for cash prizes. They say it's legal because the games are based on skill, not luck. They include Spite and Malice, a card game Joy recently learned from her aunt in Palm Desert. Site has a lot of ads.

·  www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org: Chicago is now the fourth most popular tourist destination in the United States, so you might want to learn some history before you go. The site has pictures, essays, art, music and maps. (Las Vegas, Disney World and New York are the first, second and third most popular destinations.)

March 2006, Week 3

·  www.scirus.com: A search engine that focuses only on Web sites containing scientific and medical content. We searched on "marshmallow," and got back articles on Marshmallow Root and a few other oddities. This is a good engine for finding lots of science sites.

 ·  www.echosign.com: A new Web service that facilitates the signing of legally binding contracts. You can send an encrypted contract as an e-mail, which arrives with a bar-coded cover sheet. After printing and signing it, the recipient faxes the contract back to a toll-free number. All documents faxed to that number are permanently stored with status information, telling you, for example, which ones are still awaiting signatures. Storage is free for up to 20 documents, and $13 a month thereafter.

March 2006, Week 1

- www.iwillknot.com How to tie knots that won't slip. Unless, of course, you want to make a slip-knot.

-- www.geekgirls.com The "Geek Girls" can tell you how to set up a home network and much more. Lots of tips on software, podcasting, utilities, VoIP, etc. Easy to understand advice and instruction.

February 2006, Week 4

·  Print out free graph paper, music staffs, calendars, all the world's flags and more at www.pdfpad.com. The music paper choices even include one for the rectangular staff used for percussion instruments (drum roll, please).

·  At www.bbc.co.uk you can find audio interviews with authors, painters, sculptors, composers, scientists, cartoonists, sports personalities, etc. It's very interesting, wide ranging and not confined to British subjects. Search on "audio interviews."

                                                                                                                                                         Charles Shulz,
                                                                                                                                  cartoonist, creator of "Snoopy"

·  www.privacilla.com is a complete resource for privacy issues, sponsored by companies such as Microsoft and the Cato Institute think tank. This is hog heaven for policy wonks.

February 2006, Week 1

·  www.skyvector.com: Provides full-color topographical maps for all the airports in the United States and its territories. The maps show the surrounding territory, terrain heights and approach lanes.

  www.cristina.org: How and where to donate old computers. Covers locations in all 50 U.S. states and many international sites.

January 2006, Week 5

·  www.truelocal.com: Lets you do searches by ZIP code. This is similar to Yahoo's and Google's "local" tabs. In general, we got better search results with those two leading search engines, but TrueLocal did turn up some gems. Use it instead of the yellow pages.

  ·  www.powerleap.com: It scans your computer hardware, tells you what kind of CPU, memory, storage and graphics card you have. Then it tells you what your upgrade options are. 

·  www.pictureal.com: If you hate video editing, this is your site. You mail in your video and indicate the star scenes you want to emphasize and the style you prefer. They then put it together, and the result looks quite professional. A free trial puts your video online for 14 days; the charge after that is $29 for each hour of video you supplied.

·  www.totalvid.com: Extreme sports videos: surfing, snow boarding, wind surfing, kite boarding, etc. There are 1,600 clips to choose from, and the short ones are free. We liked "Billabong Odyssey."

January 2006, Week 3 -- Happy Birthday, Ben!

   January 17 would be Ben Franklin's 300th birthday if he hadn't had the poor taste to die. In honor of his memory, the place to go for all things Franklin is http://ben.clusty.com. 

   This is a recently created subset in our favorite search engine: Clusty. Almost any search term you type in will yield something about this founding father. As author of Poor Richard's Almanac, Franklin was well-known for proverbs and aphorisms. You get a proverb at the top of the page for many search terms, or you can click the proverbs tab and see them all. Did you know Ben Franklin started the first fire insurance company?

   Franklin was one of the most important movers of the American Revolution, and this is a fun way to review his thoughts and life. He was world famous for his experiments on lightning and electricity, and when he was ambassador to France it was widely rumored in Paris that he carried a lightning bolt in a little container in his pocket.

January 2006, Week 1

 LA Times publishes lengthy correction to article with plagiarized material

·  www.regrettheerror.com: A collection of newspaper "oops" notices. These corrections are sometimes hilarious and typically appear in a small box at the bottom of page one or two. Unfortunately, this Web site does not have our all-time favorite "correction," which was from the San Francisco Chronicle of several years ago: "The instructions for de-worming a cat, printed in the Pets section of last Sunday's Chronicle, contained an error. Please do not follow the instructions, as this will cause the cat to die."

·  www.homepages.com: This is a real estate site. You can select a location in many U.S. cities and towns, and it will show what's available for purchase and the asking price. Let your pointer hover over an area, and little flags pop up. If you click on a flag, you get a photo of the property and more details.

·  www.freeboatingcharts.com: Thousands of free charts (yes, thousands) from NOAA, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. These cover coastal navigation and fishing charts for the United States and external possessions. The charts also cover many inland waters, like the Great Lakes.

·  www.askart.com: Histories and other information on the work of 42,000 American artists. Examples are shown for many, and some foreign artists are included.

November 2005, Week 3

 ·  www.quikbook.com: Its claim is that it will find you the lowest prices for hotels worldwide. We tried lots of places and the prices did seem low. Rooms at the Rittenhouse in Philadelphiawere quoted at $265 to $299 a night, for example, while the hotel's own Web site listed them for $380 to $700. You can also search for hotels with free Internet access, wireless or not, at 75 popular destinations.

   The site seems to have a loose grip on geography, however. A search for hotels near "Newport Coast," not an actual town, but simply a part of Newport Beach, Calif., produced suggestions for places to stay in Buenos Aires,