On Computers

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Home-Brewed Projects and A New Way to Search the Web

– Instructables.com boasts over 17,000 home-brewed projects from around the globe.

We looked at hooking a treadmill up to your video game machine, adding a rapid-fire button to your mouse and modifying Disney’s “Wall-E Robot.” We also learned how to pick and husk a coconut (and were warned not to stand underneath when picking), and how to make an electricity-producing wind turbine. You can also check out a book called “The Best of Instructables, Volume 1,” $35 from Oreilly.com.

–Sprout.com offers a new and free way of searching the web. It’s a little like stumbledupon.com, in that it browses the web at random. You give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to rate whatever comes up and over time the downloadable program learns the kinds of things you like and starts to focus. Click on a smiling fish when you like a site and you’ll get more like that. Choose the frowning fish, and you’ll get fewer. And by the way, if you’ve never tried the earlier stumbledupon.com, it’s definitely worth a trip.

Tech Bite and USA.gov

Language Games

- BBC.co.uk/languages has free language lessons for English speakers who want to learn French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Italian, Greek or German. There are at least a dozen web sites that offer free language lessons but this is easily the best we’ve seen. They have movies and games in the chosen languages. Instruction in 36 other languages is offered as well, but restricted to essential phrases for the traveler. You can download the phrases to your MP3 player and take them along.

Bill Shrink and Google’s InQuotes

– BillShrink.com lets you compare your credit card or wireless service with hundreds of others without entering any personal information about yourself. We noticed that the credit card given best ranking depended on what your major spending areas were. In one case, it said we could save over $1000 a year with a different card.

– Labs.Google.com/inquotes lets you compare quotes from the Presidential candidates, side by side, on major issues.

First Wives World and The Online Mom

– FirstWivesWorld.com is a social networking site for divorced women. It was founded by the guys whobrought the book/movie “First Wives Club” to Broadway. Besides information on how to get a divorce, or how to cope with one, the site has bloggers on topics such as “An Open Letter to My Husband’s Mistress.” The site also has video tutorials on how to make new friends on the site.

– TheOnlineMom.com is a nice technology guide for moms needing to get up to speed on what their children are doing. Why are they watching YouTube, for instance? A link to the YouTube article has examples of nearly every kind of video people watch, as well as safety guidelines. “Mom, Can I Have a Cell Phone?” deals with a question moms are getting at an increasingly early age. Lots of resources here, including links to other sites for women. The site reports that the top social networking sites, Facebook and MySpace, are now 60 percent female.

Discount Gift Cards and Campaign Stuff

• Buy-Discount-Gift-Cards.com uncovers heavily discounted gift cards on eBay. It filters out phony ones, they say.  This is the same outfit that also has a site for companies that provide free shipping on purchases (FreeShippingOn.com) and TypoBuddy.com, which searches for eBay listings that may have been misspelled. We used the discount card site and bought a $100 restaurant gift card for $18. We were the only bidder.
• Campaign.com is oriented toward the current U.S. elections and has lots of information on voter registration and the issues. It is not limited to the Presidential candidates but covers Congressional and local elections. The site also has addresses and phone numbers for most national and local office holders, whether they running for re-election or not. You can also register to vote here.

Work for Hire, Google Start-Ups, Mobile Web Sites, Photo Gifts

• LimeExchange.com is a free site that gives businesses a place to find freelance service providers. A quick look found people who offered writing and translating, market research, legal counseling, web site development, programming, data entry, etc. The site lets potential customers see a sample of each person’s previous work.
• Gaebler.com is venture capital firm and service provider for new businesses. They have a bunch of helpful advice and other notes you can click on for free, and an interesting list of new companies that have been started by former employees of Google.
• Ubik.com is a free site that provides instructions on  how to create a mobile web site for cell phones. They claim you can build a site optimized for cell phone viewing in about 15 minutes.
• RocketLife.com is a fun place for creating unusual photo gifts, like mugs, coasters, tiles, notecards. You supply the pictures, they supply the products. Joy had a set of note cards made for $2.75 each. It’s a little expensive, but of course one of a kind.

Photos for Sale, Alternative Energy

• MostPhotos.com, a photo repository for professional photographers, is now permitting anyone to submit photos for sale.
• AlternativeEnergy.com specializes in news about, well – alternative energy sources. Lots of info here on wind and solar power, geothermal, biofuels, etc. Site has interviews, photos, videos, products and forums.

Cash Back, Opinion Surveys, Job Hunting

• Live.com
  is a Microsoft site that is
  offering cash back amounts of two to seven percent on
  products purchased through the site. Not all products
  are eligible for this. When you go to the site’s main
  page, click on the box that says “Cash Back” to get the
  special deals. We checked a few of them and the prices
  were comparable to Amazon or slightly better, even
  before the cash back kicker.
• BuzzDash.com
  is a collection of more
  than 12,000 opinion surveys the site maintains for
  continuous updates by visitors. Some are on odd
  subjects. One of the choices in the poll for Thai
  restaurant names, for example, is “Bow Thai.” (Oddly
  enough, Bob once ate at a restaurant called “Beau Thai,”
  in Chicago.) You can suggest a new opinion poll for
  their site or make one up, using their simple form for
  doing so, to email to people or post to your own web
  site or blog.
• RealMatch.com
  is a job hunting site that keeps
  the job hunter anonymous. Someone looking for a job
  provides their email address, but that information is
  kept confidential until an employer likes the look
  of the candidate’s description. At that point, the
  potential employer pays a fee to get the candidate’s
  name and contact info. The site is quick and easy to use
  because you can cite your skills by checking them off
  from a list for each job category.

Get Fit, Remodel Your Home, Create a Custom Search Page

• WellSphere.com
  is a good place to get nutritional information and
  calorie counts on restaurant meals. Many restaurants
  today are part of a chain and serve standardized meals
  from a semi-permanent menu. The web site provides
  suggestions for alternative meals at these restaurants.
  You can look up this information on the web or get it by
  phone. That can be help you decide what to order while
  you’re sitting in the restaurant.
• HGTV.com offers home
  improvement calculators which provide you with cost
  estimates for various remodeling jobs. These vary by
  location, of course. HGTV, by the way, stands for Home
  and Garden TV, and is a regular cable channel. Search on
  “calculator.”
• PimpMySearch.com
  lets you create a customized Google search page. Instead
  of the screen being headed
  with “Google,” for example,
  it can look like “My Search Engine” or “The Kids’
  Homework Tool.” Trivial, but amusing.

Search Engine and Firefox Add-Ons

• SpaceTime.com has a
  free program that shows you pictures instead of text descriptions
  when you search on any topic. Normally, a browser
  
  search
  comes up with brief descriptions of sites that match your key words
  but with this add-on you get views of the home pages for those
  sites. As you use your scroll wheel, the pages appear to fly into
  view from a stack in the background.
• 
  AddOns.mozilla.org is
  for users of the Firefox web browser, which is the browser we use
  most of the time. There are many add-ons here, including the helpful
  “ErrorZilla,” which suggests other places to look for similar
  information when you go to a web site address and get a “site not
  found” message.

Magazine Covers and Museums

- - CoverPop.com

contains collages of hundreds of magazines, books, album covers,
video cover art, YouTube videos, musical instruments, and on into the
night. What you see is a screen that looks like a mess of stuff dropped
on a floor. When you hover your mouse pointer over any of the tiny
pictures, that picture expands. If you click on it you get more
information and sometimes a link to where to buy it. We had fun with the
collage of Sci-Fi magazine and MAD Magazine covers. This is a fa scinating
site.

– Coudal.com
is another fascinating site. Click on the “Museum of Online
Museums” for a look at some really odd museums. We bet you haven’t seen
the
Museum of Old Soviet Radios, the Virtual Absinthe Museum, the Museum of
Fred, the Big Things of Canada, the Gallery of Nurse Novels, or the
Museum of Japanese Vending Machines. Of course you might have visited
the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford University, but in case
you missed it, you can take a look here.

Houses Out of Trash, Radio and American Towns

Superuse.org has pictures of
weird houses and structures made with recycled materials. For example: a
safety tunnel made out of a shipping

container, a house made from recycled cardboard, a chandelier made of
bananas, and so on.

RadioTime.com is a nice
place to go when you feel like listening to the radio on your computer.
You can tune by subject heading, like talk shows for conservatives or
progressives, or your choice of classical, jazz, world music and many
others. You can even browse by country. There are hundreds of choices on
places and subjects, from stations all over the world. It also has a
free trial on software that lets you time-shift broadcasts, so you can
pause or turn to something else and then come back to the program.

AmericaTowns.com lists
what’s going on in any American town if you just type in the ZIP code.
You get not only events but also a summary of local issues.

Legal Documents and 8-Foot Photographs

• Jdsupra.com is a free web service for downloading legal documents. You can read detailed
  lawyer and law-firm profiles, including their area of primary
  practice, education, awards and memberships, court filings,
  decisions and more. According to web research firm ComScore.com,
  more than 44 million people use the Internet to research legal cases
  and look for legal services. Many use
  Westlaw.com            

  and LexisNexis.com,
  which charge hefty fees.

• MyPhotoPipe.com was pointed out to us as a low-cost source for
  large photographic prints. A 20 x 30 inch color costs $23; 48 x 96
  inches (that’s            

  
  four by eight feet!) is $200. Comments from professional
  photographers have been good.

Inventors’ Hub and Art Shows

IdeaTango.com is a resource
site for inventors. It has downloads of audio and video interviews with
inventors, photo galleries, virtual trade shows, TV shows from National
Public Television, services for inventors, and all that stuff. (They
should have had a topic heading for “better mouse traps.”) Cost is $99 a
year, but there’s a free trial.

MutualArt.com lists local
and international art shows. We went to the special exhibit of Edward
Hopper paintings at the Chicago Art Institute, but didn’t find
out
until we visited this site a couple of days later that there was an
interesting exhibit of ceramics at an art gallery nearby. The site culls
information from 10,000 art galleries and museums and has 150,000
articles from magazines. The links to exhibits, galleries, art fairs and
auctions are worldwide.

My Life in Six Words and Custom Post Cards

• SmithMag.net publishes six-word summaries by people explaining their lives or key
  moments therein. Some examples: “Saved by women’s magazines. How
  Bazaar.” “My ex had a better lawyer.” “Sixties hippy chick finally
  grows up.” “Shook family tree; nuts fell out.” “Down for
  maintenance; be back soon.” You, of course, can log on and submit
  your own. The company has published a book of what it thinks are the
  832 best summaries, but you don’t have to buy it. Our own six-word
  summary: “Stop us before we write again.”
• WYWH.mobi
  stands for “Wish You Were Here,” and what it does is mail postcards
  with the photos you just took on your vacation (or just hanging
  around home, if you prefer). You send in a photo straight from your  cell phone and the address it should go to, and WYWH turns the photo into a postcard and mails it. Cost is $1.99 per card; cheaper in
  bulk.

Robotic Trends and eBay Bargains

• R oboticsTrends.com
  is for anyone who likes to build, buy or invest in robot technology.
  The current article on robot wheelchairs was interesting. The site
  also covers industrial and defense robotics and includes a career
  center for those interested in working in the field.
• 
  TypoBuddy.com
  is a tool for finding bargains hidden behind a typo (typographical
  error). Sellers on eBay and craigslist, for example, frequently
  misspell keywords in their listings, making their items difficult or
  even impossible to find. Using this Web site, you can locate the
  near misses that everyone else misses. We tried looking for
  “stationery” and got 65 misspelled listings from eBay.

Recycle Center for Gadgets, A Registry for All, Software Deals

MyBoneYard.com wants to be
the place where you bury your old gadgets and computer gear. For
qualified products it provides a pre-paid shipping label that you can
download and print from the site. It accepts old laptops, desktop
computers, cell phones and monitors.

MyRegistry.com provides a
place to register your wishes for presents for any occasion. You can do
this at several other Web sites, but this one claims a difference
because you can request presents from particular stores.

Software-DOD.com offers
discount deals on software. The “DOD” part of the name stands for “Deal
of the Day,” so the deeply discounted price applies to one product for
one day. The product changes every day. Discounts range from just 10
percent to more than 90 percent on some software.

Podcasts and College Sports, 

A podcast is a kind of Internet broadcast that you can hear and

• watch on your computer, an iPod, MP3 player or a number of similar
  devices. There must be more than a million podcasts and
  Podcast.com lists many of
  them, plus its 10 most popular of 2007. Leading the list is a
  podcast on soccer. If that doesn’t grab you, other top choices
  include CNN News, 60 Minutes, Geek News, NOVA and the BBC’s “Best of
  Today.”
• 
  CollegeFanz.com
  looks to connect fans of college sports teams. It has photos, videos
  and lots of opinions on teams. Go! Rah!

Geography Game, Ask.com and FrontDoor.com

Travelpod.com/traveler-iq

is the site for a fast-paced geography game. It gives you a city
and you try and pinpoint it on a world map. If you miss, it shows you
how far away you were. When you’re way off, a message says: “This is
Earth, you know that, right?” When you’re close, it tells you “You
rock.” (By the way: In many tests done over the past several years, approximately
one-fifth of U.S. high school students could not identify the United
States on a world map.)

Ask.com , an Internet search engine that
responds to plain language questions, has an “Eraser” button you can
click to automatically erase any information about search queries and
remove any cookies that were collected. It is available in the U.S. and
U.K. right now and will be expanded to other countries shortly.

FrontDoor.com

is a new U.S. real estate site from Home and Garden TV. It
combines sales lists from major Realtors and has 1.2 million listings.
It also has some good advice about how to back out of a deal: Make a
note of some flaw in the property and cite it later if you change your
mind about buying.

DealLocker

DealLocker.com has online discount coupons for 4,500 retailers and
18,000 products and services. For instance, there’s a coupon for free
gift wrapping at Nordstrom upscale department stores. A PR guy we know
told us he saved $365 on 21 baskets of goodies from Mrs. Beasley’s using
coupons from DealLocker. This was a much better deal than we found going
directly to Mrs. Beasley’s site.

We have been pitched coupon sites before, but they didn’t work well;
this one seems OK. Not every coupon is a good deal, however. When we
looked at Dell laptops, the coupon savings from DealLocker wasn’t quite
as good as the discount being offered by Dell itself on its Web site.

Free Linux Programs and Odd News

• 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.

Charity Donations and Radio

• 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.

Online Forms and Fascinating Charts

• 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.

Radio, Wired Science and Online Documents

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.)

Indian Craig’s List and Amazon MP3s

·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.

Audio and Video Search Engines

• 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.

Where I’ve Been and Walking Tours

• 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.

Star Charts, AOL Body, Free Online Photo Albums

• 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.

IM, Cell Phone Games and Circle Up

• Yoomba.com is a free service that lets you send instant messages to your e-mail contacts even if they do not use the same service. Ordinarily you can do this only if you are all on AOL, Gmail,
  Hotmail or whatever. You can also use Yoomba to make free Internet
  phone calls. Yoomba works only with Windows XP or 2000, not Vista or
  Mac.
• Thumbplay.com has over 20,000 games, ringtones and wallpaper
  selections for your cell phone. We were skeptical, but in fact
  enjoyed downloading the local college football fight song as a ringtone. Unfortunately, the “Wheel of Fortune” games we downloaded did not work with either of our two
  Internet-ready cell phones.            

  Thumbplay charges $3 for one download or
  a $10 a month for 10 credits.

• Circleup.com helps you create online forms that you can e-mail to a
  list of contacts and then get a detailed report of their replies
  with summaries. You can try it out by sending yourself a form.
  There’s no charge either way.

Video AOL, Mind Games and Non-Disclosure Agreements

Video.AOL.com
is a new AOL service that delivers videos. In fact, it has 20 million of
them, and the e-mail giant has already started drawing 8 million
visitors a month. Check out the video of 1,500 prisoners in the
Philippines doing a take on Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” dance routine.
We guess you could call it “The Thrilla From Manila.”

Lumosity.com has three
online games designed to improve your memory and reasoning powers. If
you’ve had enough crossword puzzles and Sudoku puzzles for the moment,
you can have some fun with these new games. The bad news is the site
wants you to sign up for $80 a year. But there is a free trial.

·ConfidentialityWizard.com
creates nondisclosure agreements that match the specifications you
outline by answering its questionnaire. Cost is $99 for as many as you
want. (Our favorite nondisclosure agreement goes like this: If you don’t
tell us about it, we can’t disclose it.)

Your Video on TV

Crackle.com is a new Sony Web
site with a pathway to fame. Opinions from the site’s editors and
responses from viewers will be combined to select the best video or
taped comedy performance and move it along to the big time. Selected
videos will win $15,000 and a sit-down with a Columbia Pictures senior
executive. Animation creators will get to pitch their work and ideas
directly to Sony. Comics will get a gig, as they say, at an improv
theater in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles. (So this reporter walks
into a bar, and he says …)

Discount Drugs and Green Goods

HeathPricer.com has lists of
drug prices, supplements, contact lenses and other health products and
where to get them cheaper from Canada. No trip abroad is required, since
you can order them online. We liked the fact that the site gave you the
price per package and per pill. All the prices we checked were cheaper
than ordering the same things from
Drugstore.com , a major U.S. online drugstore service.

PriceGrabber.com has a new ”green” category that steers you to environmentally friendly products.
Joy ordered a skirt made from hemp. Hemp fabric has been made since at
least 8,000 B.C. There’s also recycled office furniture.

Scientific American and Seinfeld Scripts

SciAm.com/podcast is a
site run by Scientific American magazine. Along with a lot of other
information they carry audio podcasts describing recent developments in
various fields of science. Depending on your Internet connection, the
podcasts may take a minute or two to come in, so it’s best to minimize
the site and do something else on the computer while they’re loading.

SeinfeldScripts.com
has all the scripts for eight years of the Seinfeld comedy show.

Our favorite is “The Marine Biologist.”

50-Plus Site and World’s Healthiest Foods

·Eons.com describes itself as a
web site for those “on the flip side of 50.”
We especially like the travel section, which featured the new
cantilevered glass walkway stretching out over the Grand Canyon. The Fun
section has games like Sudoku, crossword puzzles, Scrabble, trivia
questions, etc. The Groups category is where you can join special
interest groups, meet new people, create a blog and so forth.

·Whfoods.com discusses
the World’s Healthiest foods and provides recipes using them.

Tech Support Jokes and User Reviews

Wize.com
has a search routine that hunts for user comments for thousands of
products. It searches more than 6,500 Web sites and ranks more than
30,000 products by user satisfaction and media buzz.

This is pretty much the way we all shop: We ask someone we know what
they use and like, or we look up published opinions. But we’ve mentioned
the problems with this before. Some songs of praise may be coming from
people connected with the manufacturer or people who know a friend who
works there. Some critical opinions may come from people at competing
companies or someone bearing a grudge. It’s always a judgment call, and
common sense should be applied.

Virtual Stock Picking

Marketocracy.com
lets you create a portfolio of stocks and trade and track them. Joy has
read the two books Bob wrote on investment software and advice but
didn’t really get into it until she bought some virtual stocks through
this web site. (She’s up 5 percent in the first week.) You can invest up
to $1 million of virtual money. If you create a dud portfolio, dump it
and start over. (Some brokerage firms also allow you to create test
portfolios and track them, by the way.)

Criminal Trials in Old England and Writer’s Block

·OldBaileyOnline.org
contains the proceedings of London’s Old Bailey from 1674 to 1834. The
Old Bailey is the name of London’s primary criminal court, and this
recently organized Web site contains the records of more than 100,000
trials. Great material for aspiring or even already accomplished mystery
writers. In fact, it’s already been mined for that purpose and for
movies too. With 100,000 cases, there should be some material left.

LanguageIsAVirus.com
has aids for writers and advice on how to overcome writer’s block. (What
is writer’s block?)

Map That Story, Make Stuff from Duct Tape, Take CNET Classes

·81Nassau.com/apnews

brings up a map of the United States showing the locations for recent
news stories from the Associated Press. Click on a city or town and you
can read the story.

·DuctTapeGuys.com will
take care of any free time you might have by telling you about dozens of
things you can do with duct tape. You’ll learn how to make a wallet or a
tie or pants or a dress out of duct tape. Duct tape gowns and tuxedos
were all the rage for high school proms a couple of years ago. You can
make a munchies bowl in your car by taping a plastic bowl to your cup
holder. Tape the box to the back of your “page a day” calendar and you
have a place to put the torn-off sheets you want to save. Ah, the myriad
uses of duct tape. Comes in colors too.

·Classes.Cnet.com offers free classes on using Vista, the basics of
wireless, digital cameras and many other subjects.

Fast Food Maps and Ski Bonk

1.) FastFoodMaps.com
provides maps showing outlets for the 10 largest fast food chains in the
United States. For example, El Paso has 106 of them, while Chicago,
which is roughly five times the size of El Paso, has only 266. The map
provides addresses and phone numbers. This kind of information is
critically important if you have a sudden Big Mac attack or are
traveling with children.

2.) SkiBonk.com provides maps of
ski resort locations in the United States and Europe. Click on a site
and you’ll see the current snow conditions, lift waits, temperatures,
etc. It also has comments on whether the natives are friendly and photos
for some places.

Virtual Paper Dolls

At Stardoll.com you can move
clothes around on models. This is the Web site equivalent of playing
with paper dolls, but the dolls you play with are pictures of
celebrities like Cameron Diaz, David Hasselhoff and Beyonce. You drag
and drop clothes onto the models from closets on the side of the screen.
The site is aimed at children aged 7 to 17 and has visitors from many
countries, about a third of them from the United States.

Happy Neuron Mind Games and Career Advice

For $10 a month, HappyNeuron.com
promises to train your brain for high performance. Each time you log on,
your digital trainer suggests games that help you improve logic,
concentration, language and spatial skills. We tried some of them and
felt a little smarter afterward. Of course, we couldn’t go anywhere but
up.

YSN.com stands for “Your Success
Network.” Once you’ve got your brain power up, you can read some career
advice and self-assessment tests. The site was founded by Jennifer
Kushnell, best-selling author of “Secrets of the Young and Successful –
How to Get Everything You Want Without Waiting a
Lifetime.” There are lots of career areas to inquire about, and when you
go to them, you can read advice from people who actually work in that
field. Many of these felt their college education had little value and
experience was what mattered most.

Party Invitations and Translation Sites

1. We found several Web sites that let
you send out nice-looking party invitations and decided we liked
Evite.com best. Second choice was
MyPunchbowl.com . The main difference was
that Evite has hundreds of finished e-invitations you can customize with
your photos or theirs, and MyPunchbowl has the same basic template into
which you drop clip-art or photos.

Both services are free and allow you to send out decorative invitations by e-mail and collect responses. Invited guests can leave comments when they reply. With
Evite, they can also see who else has replied and who will be there.
With MyPunchbowl, a map and driving directions are included with the
invitation.

2. BabelFish.Altavista.com is one of the oldest multi-lingual
translation sites. We tried new ones like Fox Lingo, a plug-in for
Firefox, and found BabelFish was still the best. It will translate Web
sites or any text you paste into a window, between many languages,
including French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese, Korean, Dutch,
etc. The translations are far from perfect and sometimes nearly
nonsensical, but if you work at it you can sort of figure it out. The
service is free.

Online Newspapers and American Folk Lore

·OnlineNewspapers.com . Our
previous go-to site for newspapers online was
ecola.com . We know, it sounds like a
disease, but that’s spelled with a “b.” This new site has hundreds more
newspapers than we could find before, including 22 of them from
Azerbaijan, for example. Who knew they had so many newspapers?

·AmericanFolklore.net . You
can find a lot of the classic tall tales here, like stories about Paul
Bunyan and Pecos Bill. There are four categories: Tall Tales, Myths and
Legends, Spooky Stories and Children’s Stories. Under this last category
there are even tongue twisters, like: “I wish to wash my Irish
wristwatch.” There are also bedtime stories to read to your children.

Interesting Reports and Travel Videos

1. AskSam is a well-known and well-regarded random access database, but the company
also operates a Web site, askSam.com ,
that lists hundreds of databases, each divided into areas called “Surf
Reports.” Each of those reports, like “Science,” “Health,”
“Biographies,” “Government,” etc., has links to dozens of sites related
to that topic. Think of it as a bibliography of pre-screened Web sites.

2. Travelistic.com lets you explore the world through short travel
videos. Most are supplied by advertisers and tourist bureaus and have
little feel of what the place is really like. But a few are created by
individuals who actually know the area. We really liked the ones by a young woman who shows you a bit
of what Newport Beach and Palm Desert, Calif., look like. She was as
charming as the Travel Channel’s popular Samantha Brown.

Bob Villa’s “How To”

BobVila.com is a how-to site for
home repairs, construction and crafts projects. Bob Vila himself used to
host “This Old House,” a home repair program on public television. What
interested us most about this site is the
section called “My Projects,” where people show off their personal
projects and describe how they did it and what they used.

Free Tech Tips and Drug Info

·WorldStart.com will deliver free computer tips to your desktop either daily or weekly.
For instance: You can open Windows’ Task Manager by right-clicking
anywhere on the task bar (blue bar at the bottom of the screen) and see
what’s running and what you might want to stop. If a menu on your screen
freezes up, you can clear it with a right-click of the mouse anywhere on
the desktop; select “refresh” from the little menu that comes up.

·Epocrates.com has detailed
information on more than 3,000 drugs, their use, side effects and
possible conflicts with other drugs. The Web site says that about 65
percent of people who visit a doctor’s office leave with a prescription,
and it is often a wrong one. That could well be; last year we saw the
results of a study that found medical mistakes were the fastest-growing
cause of death in America.

Mac Community and Virtual American Idol

·Spymac.com has approximately 1million registered users, making it easily the largest international
online community for Mac owners. The home page has 50 links to news
stories about Apple, and in one of them we learned to our astonishment
that about half of all Mac users are 55 and older. (We would have
guessed that it was overwhelmingly young people.)

·OnlineIdols.com is set up
like the TV show “American Idol.” You compete by sending a video of
yourself singing, dancing or playing an instrument.
There’s a new contest every month. Each winner gets $400, and presumably
some attention for his or her talent.

Bus Adventures, Eco Tourism and Photography

·GreenTortoise.com : We went
searching for cross-country luxury bus trips, and what we found instead
was the Green Tortoise. Luxury, it’s definitely not, since those who
have ridden the tourist trail described sleeping on the bus each night,
or the ground, if you have a sleeping bag. The feel of it was definitely
“young people.” But it sounded like fun, and it was fairly cheap. The
Tortoise has several trips that cover different parts of scenic America.

·HostelWorld.com : And as long as
we’re on the no-frills travel tour here, HostelWorld.com has suggestions
for eco-tourists. There’s a wind-powered Hobbit Hole in Ireland, an
Icelandic hostel with geothermal swimming, a working farm in England
that runs on bio-fuel and wind power, and a state-of-the-art tree house
hostel in the Philippines. They have others, and the hostel scene is no
longer just for young people.

·http://blog.fotolog.com The Daily
Flog is a new blog put together by a former photo editor at the New
Yorker magazine. There are some awesome photos of thick lightning bolts
in Australia.

World Book, Local Time and Music

·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.

Prizes for Cracking the Code and Creaing Commercials

·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.

Women’s Network and Brain Trainer

·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.

Tinkerer’s Delight and a Real Estate Site for Looky Loos

• 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.

Craft Expo

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.

Walking Tours on your Cell Phone

·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.

High-Speed Photography

You can see some remarkable high-speed photography scenes at

www.photron.com . Watch a water balloon pop, a rattlesnake strike and
others.

Do It Yourself Projects and Free Web Hosting

– 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.

Educational Sites for Kids, Travel Safety Tips and Custom Stamps

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.

Fun Kids Site

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.”

Free Dictionaries

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.

Craft Ideas

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.

Annual Reports, Game and Video Swapping

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.

To-Do Lists, Prize Site and Chicago History

·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.)

Scientific Search Engine and Online Contract Creator

·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.

How to Tie Knots and Geek Girls’ Advice

-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.

Free Graph and Music Paper, Author Interviews & Privacy Rights

·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.” (Example: 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.

Airport Maps and Computer Recycling

·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.

Search by Zip, PC Upgrade Tips, Video Editing, Extreme Sports

·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.”

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.

Newspaper Errors, Real Estate, Free Boating Charts and Art

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.

Cheaper Hotel Stays

·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 Philadelphia were
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,
Argentina, and cities in Spain, Germany, France and Egypt. Paris was
listed as Paris, Calif., for example; Barcelona as Barcelona, Calif.,
etc. As long as you keep your wits about you, though, it should be easy
to avoid stupid mistakes.

Castelar Hotel, Argentina

The site has photos of many of the hotels and rooms, which is a great feature. We
saw a beautiful looking place in Buenos Aires, in town, quoted at $33 a
night. It almost made us want to go; after all, it’s springtime in
Buenos Aires.

Find Web Sites Get an Attorney, Track Your Wines, Books by Mail

• www.webstrider.com : You know there’s a link to that thing
  somewhere; you remember reading about it, but you just can’t
  remember the Internet
  address. OK, it could be here. This site has links to nearly all of
  the best sites, listed by subject matter. A few are obscure, like
  “How to fly a helicopter” and “How to do just about anything by
  e-mail.”
• 
  www.legalmatch.com : Describe your case and what you’re willing
  to pay for an attorney, and they match you with someone in your
  area. Site has many testimonials from users.
• www.cellartracker.com : Site can keep track of your wine cellar
  and has comments from more than 9,000 users on what’s good and
  what’s not.
• www.jiggerbug.com : Audio books by mail. We’ve mentioned this
  site before, but now it has a system that lets you download books to
  your MP3 player. Four thousand downloadable titles will be available
  this month, and there are already 25,000 on CD and cassette. So we
  thought it was worth another mention.

 Music, Music Music

• www.redhotjazz.com : Just what the name says. Learn about famous
  jazz musicians and listen to their performances from original
  recordings.
  
  All the headliners are here: Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Jelly Roll
  Morton, etc., along with some obscure bands like the Dixie-Land
  Thumpers and Vance Dixon and His Pencils. We were disappointed that
  the Benny Goodman performance of “Sing Sing Sing” was not the one
  from his Carnegie Hall concert.

• 
  www.mercora.com : Three million tracks and 50,000 channels of
  music. Search for your favorites and hear them instantly. On the
  downbeat, so to speak, is that many of the channels defy logic, or
  even common sense. We clicked on a station playing Bach, for
  instance, and that piece was followed by Barbra Streisand singing a
  song from “Hello, Dolly!” Another followed up a Cole Porter tune
  with a rap number. Go figure. An “auto-record” feature automatically
  saves up to 20 hours of music to a “my music” folder.

Free Dictionary

·www.thefreedictionary.com :
One of several dictionary sites, but this one
starts out with interesting shorts on its home pages: this day in
history, word of the day, quotation of the day, article of the day (”the
impact that killed the dinosaurs”), etc. Moving on, it provides links to
specialized dictionaries in business, science, medical, legal, etc.

Get Real Estate Info and Keep Track of Your Jogging

www.housingmaps.com
– Here’s a map full of housing information and the pushpins to get you
there. Click on a pushpin location and you get four options: places for
rent, for sale, sublets, and rooms. Click one of these and get a ton of
listings off to the right, all with more pushpins to push. Many
individual listings have photos, e-mail and Web links. Most listings are
for eastern and western U.S., but London was recently added as well.
Tomorrow, the world!

www.sueandpaul.com/gmapPedometer
– This was developed by marathon runners Sue and Paul, who wanted to
know exactly how far they were going on their training runs. You click a
starting point on the map and draw a line that traces the route. For
instance, starting at the North Avenue Beach in Chicago and keeping to
the edge of the lake up to the Drake Hotel is a wee bit under a mile.

Podcasts

·www.podcastalley.com : Podcasts are like radio broadcasts, only they
come in over the Internet instead of the airwaves. Here you can search
by type: comedy, music, news, etc., and then choose from thousands of
stations.

Great Games and Student Hostels

·

www.popcap.com :
Looking for something to do? PopCap has 24 free games you can play
online as long as you like. If you download them, including some for the
Palm and Pocket PCs, you can play for only an hour and then have to buy
to keep playing.

www.hostelworld.com : Student hostels in big cities and popular
destinations. The Sin City Hostel in Las Vegas charges $18.50 per person
per night, for double occupancy. Or $16 a night for a hostel with a
swimming pool.