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These are sites we thought were interesting or unusual in some way,
and might prove useful and amusing to our readers.
June 2008, Week 2
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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.
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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.
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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.
May 2008, Week 4
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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.
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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.”
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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.
April 2008, Week 5
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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.
April 2008, Week 3
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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.
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
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
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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.
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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.
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
 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.
March
2008, Week 1
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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."
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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.
February 2008, Week 3
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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.
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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.
February 2008, Week 2
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.
January 2008, Week 4
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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."
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 CollegeFanz.com
looks to connect fans of college sports teams. It has photos, videos
and lots of opinions on teams. Go! Rah!
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 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.
Click here for more internuts.
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