Lost In Translation

I discovered a wonderful translation site called Reverso this morning.

It provides quite a nice interface to the various Collins dictionaries that translate between English and French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Portuguese or Polish.

Quite a handy little resource, so I've bookmarked direct URLs for a number of them.

I realise there are plenty of other translation sites on the web. I just thought this was a simple, neat one.

Oryza Sativa, Gratis

Jeannine sent me a link to Free Rice.

The site hosts a vocabulary word game. They say they will donate 10 grains of rice to the United Nations , to reduce world hunger , for each word you get right.

Irrespective of whether this is true, it's a fun way to work on your vocabulary.

Rsizr

I posted some time back about a new algorithm developed by a couple of Israeli software gurus that allows resizing and editing of digital images, without introducing distortions.

Well, it appears there is now a flash application that lets you apply the technology to your own pictures!

Take a look at Rsizr ... another one of those "Web 2.0" names that leaves out most of the vowels.

If you're interested in the algorithm itself, take a look at their paper.

Easy YouTube Downloads

This morning, I was looking for a way to download a copy of this YouTube Video on monads.

I discovered KissYouTube, which makes it about as easy as it can possibly be. You simply take the YouTube URL and put "kiss" in front of "youtube" ... so this one is http://www.kissyoutube.com/watch?v=9fohXBj2UEI.

You can download the video in its normal FLV (ie Flash Video) format or choose from most other video formats, including specific versions for various portable devices.

In case you're as mad as me and want to watch the entire series, I found it via this Lambda the Ultimate post.

iTunes Artwork Grabber

Josh's iTunes Album Art Grabber is an excellent site for finding album art that's available via the iTMS.

You type in an artist's name and album title, press the "grab it!" button and, hey presto, you have the album cover!

You don't even have to enter the entire album name; a substring is often enough.

How To Get Rid Of Things

Via Dump Trumpet comes this site that is dedicated to sure-fire methods for getting rid of things like skunk odour, old computers, static cling, chipmunks, black eyes, genital warts and ... perhaps the most valuable ... trick-or-treaters!

Free Technical Books

My mate Jeff told me about Free Tech Books.

It's a well laid out site that catalogues hundreds of computing and other technical books that are available free, either for browsing online or for download.

Many of them are PDFs, so they can be printed off if you prefer a dead tree version for reading on the train.

The site even has an RSS feed that informs you about additions to the library.

Psychology Of Clutter

Here's something to which I can definitely relate ... clutter!

To give you some idea, I recently spent a day making space in my spare room. It's now quite capacious ... and the hallway is chock full of crap that I'm yet to eject from my apartment.

While at least 99% of Psychology of Clutter consists of motherhood statements, there's the odd piece of useful advice.

With Dr Ragan's help, I'm sure my hallway will be clear by the next time I need to unclutter the spare room :-).

The picture at right isn't Dr Ragan, just a younger, prettier lady I found via Google images, who appears to share the same goals.

The Luggage Club

Via Trend Hunter comes this story about a service called Luggage Club.

I don't travel very much at all, and when I do, I try to take only carry-on luggage. However, with all the hassle that seems to have been added to airline use over the last few years, I could see how this would be really useful.

The idea is that they pick up your luggage from one place and deliver it to another, at a pre-defined time. They obviously use the airlines, too, but the important thing is that it's not you who goes through all the pain.

Goodness knows how much it costs, of course, but what price convenience, I say!

P*ss Off All Those F**king Asterisks

Every f**king day, I come across sites where the d**head of an author has censored their content using some bl**dy string of asterisks.

Well, all you prudish b**tards can just p*ss off! I want my World Wide f**king Web uncensored.

Sure, it might just sound like I'm b*tching to you, but that sort of thing annoys the t*ts off of me and I'm not going to take this bullsh*t anymore !!

Fortunately, someone else agrees and has created an Uncensor The Internet Greasemonkey script.

Last Minute Auction

The Random Good Stuff post that mentioned that German site also pointed me to Last Minute Auction.

I'm not into eBay, but this looks like an excellent site if you are.

It trawls eBay for auctions that have less than an hour to go and where the current bid is under a dollar. Hence, there are lots of potential bargains there.

Of course, we all know that many auctions stay at very low bids until 30 seconds before they end, but it's still worth a try, I guess.

Television Theme Tunes

I can't even begin to imagine how this could be legal, but ... Television Tunes hosts a huge collection of theme tunes from television shows.

They're relatively low-fi, but it's still nice to have them all available in one place ... well, until the site gets shut down, anyway.

You can listen to them online, or download them as MP3s.

Here's one of my favourites.

This One's For Dave

Song Tapper allows you to tap out the rhythm of a tune on your space bar and it will attempt to track down the song for you.

If it fails to decipher your keyboard pawing, you can update the database by telling the site what you were trying to tap.

Of course, that just means the results will become worse and worse over time as inept tappers and the rhythm deaf pollute the content.

Impressive Online Photo Editor

Picnik is a Flash-based photo editor that allows you to upload an image and perform all sorts of manipulations on it.

You can crop, rotate, play with the exposure, colour saturation, remove red-eye and it even has a Picasa-like "Fix It" button. Very impressive.

The Knowledge

Another great idea from Old Blighty.

The Knowledge is a phone service, manned by off-duty cab drivers. They can give you directions to get to anywhere you need to be, where to find something or the best place to find a parking spot near where you're going.

Again, this is a fantastic idea. I hope the cabbies in Sydney start a similar service.

In case you don't know, London cab drivers are required to pass an onerous test called The Knowledge in order to get their licence. Hence, the name.

Bug Me Not!

I'm surprised I've not heard of this site before.

It's a database of logins and passwords for websites that are free to use, but force you to register before you can access their content.

What a brilliant idea!

Online File Conversions

Here's another site that provides a useful service.

ZAMZAR allows you to upload a graphics, document, music or video file of up to 100MB and request that it be converted to any of a large number of compatible formats.

It seems to handle pretty much every mainstream format you're likely to want, as well as a number of more exotic types.

Quite a handy little service!

An Online Random Number Generator

The next time you're looking to do some kind of random selection, like tossing a coin, rolling some number of N-sided dice or selecting lottery numbers, you might like to try this site, which provides precisely those types of service.

These are true random numbers, based on atmospheric noise, collected via a radio, as opposed to pseudo-random numbers calculated by some mathematical algorithm.

The site includes a nice discussion of randomness.

If you're a geek, like me, you can even get your random data via HTTP, SOAP or CORBA!