Internuts    

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

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

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

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

November 2006, Week 1

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

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

October 2006, Week 3

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

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

 October 2006, Week 2

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

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

October 2006, Week 1

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

August 2006, Week 4  

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

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

August 2006, Week 1

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

June 2006, Week 1

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

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

May 2006, Week 5

  www.kbears.com: Another new educational site for children. It can't match the recent AOL site http://kids.aol.com/kol-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.

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

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

May 2006, Week 4

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

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

May 2006, Week 2

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

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

April 2006, Week 3

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

April 2006, Week 2

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

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

March 2006, Week 4

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

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

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

March 2006, Week 3

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

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

March 2006, Week 1

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

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

February 2006, Week 4

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

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

                                                                                                                                                         Charles Shulz,
                                                                                                                                  cartoonist, creator of "Snoopy"

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

February 2006, Week 1

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

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

January 2006, Week 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January 2006, Week 1

 LA Times publishes lengthy correction to article with plagiarized material

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

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

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

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

November 2005, Week 3

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

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

 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. 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.

 October 2005, Week 3

 ·  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.

 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!

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.

October 2005, Week 1 --

 ·  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.

September 2005, Week 5

·  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.

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