Tag Archives: internet

How long are you going to live?

http://www.livingto100.com/ is a free tool you can use to generate a personalized health profile that tells you the do’s and don’ts for living longer. After a quick 10 minutes of answering ~60 questions about your lifestyle, ranging from dietary habits to drug use to flossing your teeth, Dr. Perls generates an estimated life expectancy, as well as ways to increase it. Although you have to suffer through a few poorly written “always-sometimes-never” questions and several limited response options, it is a quick and easy way to find out how long you have to find the perfect gravestone. Thanks so much to Brian for the tip, the link, and the beginning of this article.

Zopa.com. It's lending without the banks

http://www.zopa.com/ZopaWeb/ is social lending brought to the masses. The principle is no different from a 12 year-old kid asking her parents for 10 bucks to go to the movies, but the implications are much wider-ranging. Through the very pretty Zopa website, individuals can borrow from other individuals, much like the "earlier profiled":http://duenos.net/article/106/lend-money-online-to-third-world-entrepreneurs micro-lender "Kiva.org":http://www.kiva.org/. Unlike, Kiva, Zopa facilitates big loans in the same way that banks do, only with much lower interest rates. Spreading the risk over dozens of lenders, a £5,000 loan over 3 years would brook 6.38% interest as compared with high-street banks rates of 8.7%-14.9%. It's also a good deal for lenders who can dictate the rates and risk they're willing to take, making an average of 6.75%. Rather than feed the bloated banking industry, paying a 0.5% fee to Zopa seems like a good idea. Unfortunately Zopa is only working in the UK at the moment, although they do have plans to open in the US soon. *Redjoe says: "For a comparable US based site that aims to democratize the banking industry try "www.prosper.com":http://www.prosper.com/"

Books on bytes

Following on from a post I made some time ago about the online book sharing site, “Book Mooch”:http://www.bookmooch.com/, I’ve found another one. “Library Thing”:http://www.librarything.com/ is a free online book cataloging service that takes the ultimate solo activity (reading… get your mind out the gutter) and makes it social. Now you can chat with others that have similar literary tastes, make recommendations, and even trade books with people. Organize your books however you’d like with the now ubiquitous, but still helpful, web2.0 tagging structure, write reviews, anything you want. I’ve only been messing around with the service for a few hours so far, but I’ve already entered a small part of my library and explored the forums. Below is a picture of my “virtual library”:http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=aeherder which is, I regret to say, a lot more organized than the carbon-based one.
Previous posts about similar things are the musical equivalent to Library Thing, “Last.fm”:http://duenos.net/article/14/melodic-match-making-on-lastfm/ (yet again) and “analog peer-to-peer”:http://duenos.net/article/88/analog-peer-to-peer/, sharing in the real world using the internet.

Post Pandora plays to Last.fm


Real music enthusiasts have known about “Pandora”:http://www.pandora.com for a while now and just as many have accounts on “Last.fm”:http://www.last.fm. Why then shouldn’t you ‘get credit’ for the tracks you listen to on Pandora on your Last.fm profile?? “PandoraFM”:http://pandorafm.real-ity.com/ seeks to do just that, combining the long-term tracking and social aspects of Last.fm with Pandora’s unique and creepily accurate music profiles. Do both!
For those of you who’ve never tried it, “Pandora”:http://www.pandora.com is a really fun way to find new music. Entering a song or artist will prompt the software (all browser-based) to recommend further tracks and gradually a whole listening profile based on literally hundreds of musical attributes that make up what developers are calling the “musical genome”:http://www.pandora.com/mgp.shtml. Last.fm was one of the first subjects covered by Duenos.net “here”:http://duenos.net/article/14/melodic-match-making-on-lastfm. Also see other ways to play with your Last.fm profile with “Visual Representations of Last.fm”:http://duenos.net/article/90/visualizations-of-lastfm.

Browser based image editing

http://www.kk.org/cooltools/ points out this amazing website that offers multi-functional, useful, and speedy image editing tools, all for free. It's called "Picnik.com":http://www.picnik.com and, while still in Beta (what isn't these days?) is actually very useful. For more about the site, I recommend reading Jeremy's "article":http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/001646.php at Cool Tools, or you could just go ahead and "try it yourself.":http://www.picnik.com I was able to do this in no time at all.

And The April Fools' Day Winner Is . . .

“Overclocked Remix”:http://www.ocremix.org, a site specializing in arrangements and remixes of video game music, absolutely blew away the rest of this years’ “April Fools’ Day joke field”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_1,_2007.
The site today released a “soundtrack featuring 18 remixes”:http://icecap.ocremix.org/ –mixes of perhaps the single most clichéd song in the vgremix world: Ice Cap Zone from Sonic 3.
http://www.ocremix.org/remix/OCR00691/ of djpretzel's (subtly enough, entitled "Love Hurts") with Ice Cap awkwardly overlaid on it. Another "gem":pixietricks features a ridiculous a capella rendition of the artist singing her name and the song's name repeatedly--to the tune of Ice Cap. The rest of the humor stems from the hundreds of site members who have "not yet realized this is a joke":http://www.ocremix.org/forums/showthread.php?t=8732, including remixers who have "threatened to quit":http://www.ocremix.org/forums/showthread.php?t=8734&page=4 the site over the poor quality of the collection. Clearly, they did not hear the toilet-flushing (literally) beats in "this song":toilet. Is it a bad thing that I really like "some of them":beats? [beats]http://rama.herograw.org/icecap/ReCapitated_03_Icecap_Zone_2007_(Green_Hill_Mix)_(Ice_Cap_Zone_Act_1).mp3 [toilet]http://rama.herograw.org/icecap/ReCapitated_17_The_Music_of_My_Icecap_Zone_(Ice_Cap_Zone_Act_1).mp3 [icecaphurts]http://rama.herograw.org/icecap/ReCapitated_01_Ice_Cap_Hurts_(Ice_Cap_Zone_Act_1).mp3 [pixietricks]http://rama.herograw.org/icecap/ReCapitated_13_Pixietricks_Ice_Capella_(Ice_Cap_Zone_Act_1).mp3

Oh April Fools, You Bring Me Joy

Every year April Fools’ Day delivers wacky internet hijinx, and it seems like each year sites try to outdo themselves and each other. Some of my favorites from today thus far include “Facebook’s”:http://www.facebook.com LivePoke system (which I absolutely wish were real) and “Google’s free in-home, toilet-based broadband”:http://www.google.com/tisp/. More awesomeness to be updated throughout the day!
More April Fools’ jokes:
“Gmail’s Google Paper”:http://www.gmail.com
“NASA’s first game of Space Quidditch”:http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap070401.html
“woot!’s million dollar bag-o-crap”:http://www.woot.com
“Blizzard’s ‘new’ Warcraft game”:http://www.blizzard.com/whoa/
The “complete list”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_1,_2007 at Wikipedia

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Time Out Film Guide

Time Out magazine started in 1968 as a simple fold out poster for all the entertainment listings in London. Now they publish three weekly periodicals (London, Chicago, and New York) dozens of city guides, and an annual compendium of every single film review ever written by Time Out reviewers. That’s over 17,000 films reviewed. Starting this year, that entire database of film reviews is available online for free at “timeout.com/film.”:http://www.timeout.com/film/ Reviews from Time Out tend to be witty, shrewd and very sarcastic. In a word, British.
Style aside, the online film guide acts much the same as “IMDB”:http://imdb.com/ (allowing cross searching actors, directors, genres) but all with a sleek, professional sheen to it. Also if you like the review, you can buy or rent the DVDs right on the screen.
http://elliott-herder.com/plugins/ you can just go to the search engine selector in the top-right, go to the bottom and select "add Time Out Film." Happy searching.

Nikon's universal measuring stick

Did you know that the common dust mite was about the same size as a human ovum? Nikon’s beautifully simple, yet very informative “Universcale site”:http://www.nikon.co.jp/main/eng/feelnikon/discovery/universcale/index_f.htm explores size and scale in a fun new way. By placing commonly understood, but not necessarily related things together and showing their relative size this site succeeds in entering that very rare category of things that change the way we look at the world. Shown here is a screen shot of the site showing (from left to right) a paramecium, an amoeba, a human ovum, a common dust mite, a raindrop, a sesame seed, a snow flake and a cat flea.
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