Cool Web Sites
by Don Singleton
Tulsa Computer Society
From the February 2004 issue of the I/O Port Newsletter
Including links previously reviewed at
http://www.educationindex.com/index.html,
http://www.komando.com/,
http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/arch.htm,
and http://marylaine.com/neatnew.html
We planned to cover just one of the many Shockwave games available for free play on their excellent site. The trouble started when we tried to decide which one. The pretty Puzzle Inlay? The bizarre-but-useful Typer Shark? The desperately addictive Daily Jigsaw? The multiplayer, Pictionary-like InkLink? We'd decide, but we have more puzzles to... we mean, we have work we're ignor... um, we gotta go.
It's the harvest season and a page celebrating well-stocked larders seems appropriate. The ever-creative folk at allrecipes.com have put together a collection of "staples lists" that might be used by shoppers from Milan to Mumbai. Let these basic ingredients stir your own culinary creativity, or seek what restaurant-friendly lunch cravings you can inspire.
It's a sad fact that the American government often — some would say consistently — ignores the needs of Native Americans in order to better itself. The Seneca Nation of Indians has created a site to remind the government and the public to keep their word on the treaties they've signed with Native American groups and tribes over the years, hoping to build awareness that when you break a treaty, you break the law. You'll find explanations of ancient and modern treaties as well as the latest violations of those laws. Links will take you to information about how to involve yourself in helping to solve these injustices
Competition among Web portals is fierce these days, with powerful search engines and major Internet service providers leading the way. Mooch has taken a different approach to gaining a strong Web presence. Its mission, as stated online, is to break down the banquet of information available on the Net into palatable bites. To that end, it offers discriminating, categorized links which it claims have not been purchased by advertisers. The best thing about the site, though, is the super-smooth Flash navigation, which makes it easy for the broadband user to quickly drill through and scroll across pages
We have a theory that telemarketers don't just upset people because they call during mealtime (after all, could there be that many Americans without Caller ID?). We think they unnerve folks by asking the hard questons, such as "are you happy with your long-distance service?" Hang up the phone, catch your breath, and give this handy site a try: Tell it your state, area code and exchange and it'll pull up the 25 best phone deals available to you. What you do with that knowledge is up to you, but you'll certainly be able to answer one more question in your life firmly and emphatically.
"Car Information provided by consumer advocate & auto expert Mark Eskeldson, author of What Car Dealers Don't Want You to Know." Includes money saving tips for buying and leasing cars, new and used car quotes, used vehicle history reports, auto repair secrets, and more.
Not yet nervous enough about world politics, terrorism or the arms race? Visit the Federation of American Scientist's Arms Sale Monitoring project. The FAS has compiled, for your convenience, lists of proposed arms sales and weapons manufacturers around the globe, profiles of potential recipients of those sales and just about everything you would ever want to know about which countries have purchased which weapons when and for how much.
Here's a game that involves armor, clubs, hammers, marital infidelity, and heavy drinking — and yet we deem it perfectly suitable for kids. The National Gallery of Art has put together this nifty Flash game in which you'll match 21 of the ancient Greek gods and heroes with their symbols — Ares with armor, Herakles with a club, Athena with an owl, and so on. It's a clever way to brush up on your knowedge of the myths and a nice chance to teach kids about the use of symbolism in art.
Most of this is pure science, with info on anatomy, fossil sites, genera, earth history, and such, but there's also a glossary, illustrations, news, and a DinoKids section.
All good things must come to an end. All bad things, too. When the deceased happens to be an Internet-based business, and the death notice happens to be posted on the site's homepage, Ebituaries is there to cache the moment. In a sea of monuments to the dot-com bust, this site represents a bit of lighthearted and user-friendly flotsam. Pick through the most-viewed Ebituaries or scan the entire list of 118.
Frustrated by your HMO/PPO/PPP? Here's a medical inquiry that doesn't involve waiting rooms, oceans of forms to fill out or embarrassing hospital gowns. PersonalMD provides categorized news headlines and feature articles written by actual doctors. Additional resources like the Drug and Medication Database, the Health Encyclopedia and the Drug Interaction Guide also prove quite useful to those of us without MDs or DOs of our own. While nothing can substitute fully for the opinion of your personal physician (read the small print on the Web site), this information can help you to understand a few more of those big words he or she is firing at you.
Links to over 1300 free medical journals, by discipline, title, language, and the period of time after which the material becomes free, with information on each journal's impact factor as measured by citations.
Verisimilitude. Fandango. There are certain words in the English language that are just plain fun to say. Photographer Robert Altman has compiled a list of more than 130 of these tongue-pleasers for your amusement. See if you can make a sentence using smarmy, mastication and Buttafucco. Oh yeah, Altman has posted some photography on his site as well. Go figure!
We were wondering yesterday what, exactly, an "apple brown betty" might be. We ended up on this remarkable site, created by and for true foodies. In addition to explaining how the aforementioned betty differs from the graveltops and vaniljhorn of our formative years, the site treated us to recipes, reminisces, news, puzzles, quizzes and a wonderful array of trivia. Whether you're observing National Country Ham Month or National Spinach-Lovers' Month, this site welcomes you with open arms and a full plate.
Includes a photo of the day, photo galleries, an FAQ on the photography in National Geographic, some very nice downloadable wallpapers, and more.
It's ironic that cyberspace is one of the best venues in which to appreciate architecture, the art of habitable space. But aficionados know that the Net provides vistas previous generations could only dream of. This online reference guide is a great example of lucid, to-the-point commentary and good photos — certainly as good as many coffee-table books we've seen on the topic — coupled with only-online things like 3D walkthroughs. Writing about architecture may be no truer to the original artform than dancing about music, but this is just about as good as it gets online.
The first time we saw this pick-a-card trick, It took a while to figure out how it works. Give this site a try, or even two tries, but if you don’t have the hang of it after that, the third time around we recommend taking notes… or more than one card
Find out about ancient calendars, early clocks, world time scales and time zones, and more.
You can learn a lot about a person by the condition in which they maintain their keepsakes — pinned to bulletin boards, stuffed in shoeboxes, sorted in file cabinets, or arrayed in scrapbooks. For those of the neat-and-sweet persuasion and those who aspire to be, this site provides detailed information on arranging your mementos in scrapbook form. You'll find plenty of tips of archiving your photos, souvenir programs, ticket stubs and so forth in the way that'll present and preserve them best.
Geek identity isn't contingent on knowing from bits and bytes; the important thing is to have a topic in which your interest is so great it trumps any fear you have about looking foolish over it. Our hats are off, therefore, to this fascinating site, dedicated to critters that ordinary folk may only notice at the occasional picnic. AntColony has everything you ever wanted to know about the tiny crawlers; from photomicrographs that will give an eye-to-eye view of these little creatures to tips on building your own antropolis, all phases of myrmecology are covered
Edward Tufte, who revolutionized the graphic display of information, explains how Power Point "induced stupidity, turned everyone into bores, wasted time, and degraded the quality and credibility of communication."
James Henke, the curator of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, was in charge of getting musicians and critics together on this highly arguable roster of the songs that matters in rock history. We're sure something's wrong with our browser, in fact, since folk so impeccably qualified couldn't possibly have included two Allman Brothers songs and none from the Carter Family, but it's a fun read nonetheless.
The Web’s one-stop for hundreds of movie and video game reviews, this site lets you check out the popular rentals for the week, and update your celebrity gossip knowledge in between critical picks and pans. RottenTomatoes.com provides the nearest possible approximation to objective reviews by taking into account the opinions of dozens upon dozens of critics and providing links to their take on individual flicks. The Tomatometer ties the whole thing together, providing an ultimate “fresh” or “rotten” rating based on the overall balance of positive or negative reviews.
"Including expert tips on how to use search engines effectively, focus on quality STM information only, find hidden scientific information online, locate peer-reviewed, subject-specific directories, and set up subject-specific alerts that automatically e-mail you the latest news"
Some days we're mighty easy to amuse. For instance, this site will convert any other site's words into a random display of "ransom note" fonts. We particularly like this site because it reminds us that thanks to stuff like the Internet and laser printers and whatnot, there probably hasn't been a real cut-out-of-magazines-letter-by-letter ransom note put together for several years. And yet we can pretend to be doing exactly that right here. Isn't technology nifty?
Whether you see graffiti as street art or a nuisance, this interactive exhibit of images taken in various parts of San Francisco over the years is incredibly well-constructed. A number of photographers and some very impressive Flash and Photoshop work have combined here to show how that city's graffiti artists and civic wall-cleanup crews have sparred over the years on twelve public surfaces. The navigation tools turn what could have been a slide show into a fascinating excavation
"WhittleBit works much like most other search engines, except it can help you to refine your searches by allowing you to give positive or negative feedback on each search result." Not entirely successful in the searches I ran, since it kept reinstating results I said no to, but the approach has promise.
PC-using font junkies will adore this site, which identifies dozens of typefaces from various corners of popular culture — everything from food to the movies to automobile models — and presents a remarkable number of them for download in TrueType format. If you've ever yearned to give your Web site or holiday cards that New Yorker cachet, Godfather flavor or DeLorean alternate-version-of-history air, this is the place.
According to the Associated Press, global warming is threatening our planet's ski resorts. While this report probably won't ruin your New Year's vacation in Crested Butte, we figure it can't hurt to pitch into the salvage effort and pique your interest in one of the few good reasons to endure freezing temperatures and piles of packed powder — an activity Southerners refer to as snow skiing. OnTheSnow takes a mountain of information about ski conditions around the world and grooms it into a pleasant, skier-friendly Web site. Snowboarders also welcome.
Although the American Society of Civil Engineers does have a vested interest in repairing our infrastructure, its report on the state of our bridges, highways, dams, tunnels and other public structures our lives depend on is sobering.
We're still not ready to give up the joys of shopping at our neighborhood brick-and-mortar bookstore (how could we be? there's still room on the credit card!), but when we're buying books online we're adamant about getting the best deals available. This simple-but-effective site checks a number of online bookstores for the title, subject or author you're seeking and delivers a list of who's charging what and how long it'll take them to send it to you. Turns out the new non-fiction book we're currently enjoying could have been enjoyed for about 40% less if we'd checked in here first. Food for financial thought.
For more information on the Tulsa Computer Society click here
Tulsa Computer Society 2/01/2004
Don Singleton, President