Hot Stuff From My People: December 2007

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?)

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

http://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.

http://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.

http://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.

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

http://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.

http://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."
http://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.
http://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.
http://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.

http://www.oncomp.com/internuts3.htm

http://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!

-- http://www.fabriculous.bigstep.com/ The menu on the lefthand side of the screen has a huge number of links to suppliers. Click on the one that says "Spechler Vogel" and you get an even bigger list of fabrics, the largest we've ever seen in one place. The Royal Air Force cotton twills seem just right for that military look.
	-- http://www.pearlriver.com/ This is a commercial site for products in about two dozen categories, all Chinese. The fabrics include beautiful silk brocades for $12.50 a yard and fanciful cotton prints for $7.50 a yard.
	-- http://www.harristweed.org/ All about Harris tweeds, something to keep out the chill of those Scottish Highland mornings.
	-- http://www.thebritishnook.com/ Scottish Tartan plaids. Choose your pattern from nearly a hundred clans.
	-- http://www.swdecoratives.com/ Fabrics with Indian patterns of the American Southwest and Mexico.

-- http://www.freakyfreddies.com/ A site for product samples and other free stuff. Current offers include a $50 gift certificate for KB Toys if you provide your address and phone number. We got a free ream of Hewlett Packard inkjet printer paper for filling out a short survey. PaperMate is giving $40 worth of free classroom supplies to teachers. There are hundreds of other freebies.
	-- http://www.sfsite.com/ Author interviews, book reviews, convention news. One of many science fiction sites. Nice interview with Gene Wolfe.

-- www.j-walkblog.com/blog Here's a guy who just puts things on his web site that he finds interesting. And by golly, they are interesting. There's the collection of 300 odd icons he's found on other sites while browsing the web. Also has links to anything on the web that caught his fancy. For instance ...
-- http://www.coolproductz.com/ How about a blender powered by a cordless drill? Make smoothies and shakes even if you didn't bring your blender to the beach -- as long as you have your electric drill. Doesn't grab you? How about sticking a soda can on the side of your monitor? Needs a long straw, though.
-- http://www.fakeisthenewreal.org/ Click on "electoral college" and you get maps of the world's subway systems. Tells you where to get off. Moscow radiates, Paris clusters. Or, a hypothetical map of the United States if it were rearranged into 50 states with equal population. The states would then have about 5.6 million people each. Interesting map.
	-- http://www.iwantoneofthose.com/ Here you can get a set of cow stickers to make your refrigerator look like a Holstein cow, sort of. Oh boy. Lots of odd gift ideas on this site.
	-- http://www.thinkgeek.com/ Hot hands might need a mouse with a built-in cooling fan. Find it here.

-- www.rinkworks.com/dialect A reader in Arkansas led us to this amusing web site. It takes any text you choose – from great quotes and news headlines to anything you care to write yourself – and puts it in any of several odd dialects: Redneck, Cockney, Moron, Jive, Elmer Fudd, Swedish Chef, Pig Latin, Hacker and others.

For example: A recent news feature prompted by Martha Stewart’s conviction for obstruction of justice, was titled “Best Places To Go To Prison.” Or as Elmer Fudd would have put it: “Best Pwaces To Go To Pwison.” In Redneck: “Eff’n Yo’ Muss: Bess Places T’Go T’Prison.”

-- http://www.sillyhumor.com/. And speaking of Martha Stewart … this site offers a mock-up of a new magazine: Martha Stewart “Living Behind Bars” and several strange messages you can put on your answering machine. Plenty of other silly stuff as well.

www.xdrive.com/partners/pfForms

All the business forms you can eat. They also have over 1,000 U.S. federal and state tax forms, which you can download and print. Everything’s in good form. This is also a site for file storage, and they offer a two-week free trial.

www.naupa.org A government web site for unclaimed property. State governments have billions of dollars in unclaimed funds. These are monies from abandoned bank accounts, insurance claims, uncollected refunds, etc., that can be claimed by the owner or rightful heir. When you go to the site, select a state and enter a name, last name first. If the shoe fits, file a claim.

* http://www.webcamlocator.com/ A master site for links to public web cameras all over the world. Watch the crowds in Prague or Moscow, or peer into volcanoes and see if anything is about to pop. Want something a little, shall we say, out of the ordinary? How about the web cam at the "Bo Jangles Saloon" in Alice Springs, Australia?
	* http://www.leonardsworlds.com/ Another web cam locator. Most sites are also listed in the previous Internut but it's worth checking both to see if there's a camera missing in the other.

* www.lulu.com: This one is a lulu. It's a collection of books that apparently have been published only online, not necessarily on this site first. Readers who have been caught up by the current best seller "The Da Vinci Code," can download a $2 book discussing all of the symbology and artwork that forms the dramatic background of the story. The book also provides pictures of the places and artworks essential to the story's momentum. You can also upload and sell your own literary efforts, including calendars.

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Clearance Savings at Walmart

This day in History website

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Deals from TigerDirect

Some interesting sites

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