Bob and Joy Schwabach
 

Search 2000-2007 columns

This Column Appears in:

Birmingham, AL, "News"
Little Rock, AR "Democrat Gazette"
New Britain, CT "Herald"
Orlando, FL, "Citizen Gazette"
Vero Beach, FL, 'Press Journal"
Kaneohe, HA, "Midweek"
Geneva, IL, "Chronicle"
Shreveport, LA "
The Times"
Worcester, MA Telegram Gazette"  
Orlando, FL, "Citizen Gazette"
Carlisle, PA, "Evening Sentinel"
Fort Myers, FL "News Press"
Spokane, WA, "Northwest Online"
Bangkok, Thailand,  "Post"
Shanghai, China “Daily News”


  





  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Internuts: Useful and Curious


These are sites we thought were interesting or unusual in some way, and might prove useful and amusing to our readers.

April  2008, Week 5

  • SpaceTime.com  has a free program that shows you pictures instead of text descriptions when you search on any topic. Normally, a browserSpaceTimesearch 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.


  April 2008, Week 3

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 fascinating 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 theNurse Novel gallery 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.  

 

April 2008, Week 1

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

March 2008, Week 3

  • 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’sMy Photo Pipe four by eight feet!) is $200. Comments from professional photographers have been good.

 

March 2008, Week 2

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 Edward Hopperout 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.

March 2008, Week 1

  • 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 hangingWYWH 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.

February 2008, Week 3

  • RoboticsTrends.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.

January 2008, Week 2

You can have the lyrics to many songs scroll by on the screen of your iPod or other music player by downloading them from any of several sites devoted to this. Here are a few we looked at: Mp3lyrics.org, lyricsdownload.com  and lyricsfreak.com. They were easy to use, and it was a treat to see the lyrics roll by as a song played. A lot of song lyrics are hard to understand when listening.

January 2008, Week 1

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 isTraveler IQ Earth, you know that, right?" When you're close, it tells you "You rock." (By theTraveler IQ 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.

December 2007, Week 3

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.

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 gameSwitched 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 Cubicallerpresence 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,PhotoMouse 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. Srkeemr 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 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. Srkeemr 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 Economist Magazineyears, 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 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 forDigitalBhoomi.com 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 isAudissey Guides 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.comMyPhotoAlbum.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.

 

September 2007, Week 2
  • 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 Wheel of Fortunelocal 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.

August 2007, Week 1

  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

   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.)

July 2007, Week 5  

   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 ...)Crackle

 Internut Pricing

   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 nlhas 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.

June 2007, Week 4

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.” 

June 2007, Week 2

·  Eons.com describes itself as a web site for those "on the flip side of 50."Eons 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.

May 2007, Week 2

 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.  

April 2007, Week 4 

 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.)  

April 2007, Week 3 Old Bailey Online

·  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?)


March 2007, Week 1

 Duct Tape Wallet·  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.

 February 2007, Week 3

Skibonk

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.

 Star Doll 

February 2007, Week 2

   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.

February 2007, Week 1

   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.Happy Neuron

 

 

    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 aYSN 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.

 January 2007, Week 5

 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 wasEvite 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.

 January 2007, Week 3

 ·  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 IrishAmerican Folklore wristwatch." There are also bedtime stories to read to your children.

 

January 2007, Week 2

    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 knowTravelistic 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.

 

December, 2006, Week 4

   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.

December 2006, Week 3

 ·  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,Epocrates 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.

 December 2006, Week 2

  ·  Spymac.com  has approximately 1 million 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.Online Idols There's a new contest every month. Each winner gets $400, and presumably some attention for his or her talent.

December 2006, Week 1

·  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. lightning bolt

·  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.

 November 2006, Week 4

 ·  Education: The World Book for Kids is being offered online for $50 a year atWorld Book Kids 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·  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.Wired Berries "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 everythingTrulia.com 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 craftsAmerican Craft Expo 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 narratedPhilly by Phone 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,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-jr  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.

Picture it Postage

·  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 likeask oxford 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 theCrafty PC 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 swappingSwitch Discs 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 atMaxwell St. 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 ofEcho Sign 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, youKnot 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,Charles Shulz 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 Sky Vector 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 inPictureal 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, windSports videos 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. AlmostBen Franklin 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 42,000Art 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, 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.

November 2005, Week 2

  • 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 InternetLegal Match 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.

 October 2005, Week 5 : Music, Music Music  

  • www.redhotjazz.com: Just what the name says. Learn about famous jazz musicians and listen to their performances from original recordings. Red Hot JazzAll 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.

 October 2005, Week 3

 ·  www.thefreedictionary.com: One of several dictionary sites, but this oneFree Dictionary 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.

 October 2005, Week 2

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!