Recently in Cool Web Sites Category

The web is full of a lot of interesting, funny, and informative stuff. I was walking back from the cafeteria today with some of my co-workers when the topic of web sites came up. I shared with them the web sites I like to visit every day if I can find the time. I thought you might find the list useful, so here goes...

• Woot.com: This site offers a different product every day, which can be almost anything, at a deep discount. The product offered can be a hard drive, a golf club, a hammock, a laptop computer, a big-screen TV, or any of hundreds of other items. If you like the item they're offering and the price, you buy it. If not, move on. Some of the best parts of this site are the product descriptions, which are some of the funniest stuff on the web. I also enjoy their podcast, which usually contains music reminiscent of They Might Be Giants or Devo. Occasionally, Woot does what they call a "woot off" where a long string of items is posted one at a time on the site until each one sells out. They just finished one of these yesterday.
• Sellout.woot.com: This sister site to Woot.com also offers an item each day at a discount. This is a different item from the one on the main Woot site, but is sometimes complementary (e.g., an iPod on one and an iPod docking device on the other).
• Shirt.woot.com: This sister site to Woot.com offers a different T-shirt each day. The prices are more reasonable than most other t-shirt sites on the web, and the shirts offered range from the artistic to the geeky.
• User Friendly - The Comic Strip: If you're a technology/IT person like I am, you'll appreciate the antics of the characters on this web site, who work as consultants, tech support, and corporate IT. The strips tend to poke fun at science, technology, and related issues.
• Dilbert - The Comic Strip: If you have a corporate job, it's pretty easy to identify with this classic syndicated comic strip.
• Giveaway of the Day: This site offers, for free, a Windows software product that you'd otherwise have to pay for. Each day it's a new product. The product might be a utility like a disk defragmenter, a project management tool, a video editor, a PDF to HTML converter, or something else. If the product is useful to you, it's free if you download and install it immediately. (I also find it useful practice to repackage these downloads using Wise Package Studio.)
• Game Giveaway of the Day: This sister site to giveawayoftheday.com offers, typically less often than once a day, a game you'd otherwise have to pay for. Again, you may not like some of the games they offer, but it's hard to argue with the price (free).
• Yugster.com: Like Woot, Yugster offers 1-2 products a day and sells them until they're gone or it's time to bring on the next product.
• Fark: This web site is kind of like a "headline news of the weird". It features stories from all over the web, and all over the world, focusing on the more offbeat, bizarre, and humorous. I like to read this one on my lunch hour.
• iGoogle: Google offers a customized home page for users who set up an account with them. Using this customized home page, you can display the top technology headlines from any site with an RSS feed (like this one). You'll be able to tell instantly if something useful or interesting appears on your favorite sites without leaving your web browser's start page (assuming you set iGoogle up as your start page). I use it to keep track of Crave: The Gadget Blog, technology news sites, Slashdot, and CNet News.

Here are some of the other sites I like to visit regularly, but that I don't visit as often as the above:

• Amazon.com: I like to check in to see what Amazon thinks I might be interested in. Often, they're right. I keep a "wish list" on Amazon.com so that friends and family members can get ideas for gifts I might like.
• Newegg.com: This site specializes in computers and computer components at inexpensive prices. When I need a bit of technology, I usually look here for it first. If they have it, it's often going to be at one of the lowest prices on the web.
• Pacific Geek: This site offers deep-discount computer technology items, including lots of cheap little electronic gadgets and toys. My office is decorated with a lot of crap from here.
• Think Geek: This is kind of the "Sears Christmas Toy Catalog" for geeks. You can find a million little gadgets, gizmos, and things that us geeks find amusing. They offer products like a duct tape wallet, caffeinated soap (really!), bumper stickers that say geeky things like "Got root?", and animated doormats. I keep a wish list here, too.

As a "proof of concept" I decided to see if it would be possible to create a parody of Apple's "Mac vs. PC" commercials using the Gizmoz.com talking heads.  I think it pretty much works.  I used the "get this video on your PC" option to download the video for each individual line in the "commercial" and then spliced it all together in Ulead VideoStudio 10 (Macs, after all, aren't the only computers that can edit video.).

 

I recently purchased They Might Be Giants' "Venue Songs" album and DVD from their web site.  When I saw Apple's recent ad campaign with the PC vs. Mac theme, I thought to myself, "This is no PC! This is a deranged millionaire!"  No wonder the commercials seem to be filled with half-truths and misinformation...

 

 

I recently started playing "The DaVinci Code Quest on Google", which is a contest promoting the movie for Dan Brown's "The DaVinci Code" book. If you have a Google account and use their customized homepage, you can add the contest content to your Google homepage and become immediately aware of new puzzles when they become available.

If you haven't been playing the Da Vinci Code Quest on Google, don't worry. You can play all the previous puzzles you've missed, catching up immediately to today's puzzle.  Fortunately, you should be able to catch up pretty quick with all the Da Vinci Code Quest solutions on this page.

Update 05/15/2006:

Yes, folks, I did it! I'm in the final 10,000!  Here are some photos of my cryptex! 

Update 05/11/2006:

 

 

 

 

The puzzles and their answers/solutions are provided below.

Day 24 - The Final Observation Challenge:

The video of Sophie Neveu is shown and you are asked 3 questions, the answers to which are:

2 books were shown in the scene where they're reading together.

"so dark the con of man" was the phrase Langdon asked Sophie about.

"Madonna of the Rocks" is the picture's name that the above phrase unscrambles to.

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I think I made it into the final round, folks!  After I completed the last puzzle I was sent to a page where they asked for name, address, phone number, etc.  After I submitted it, I was told something along the lines of "congratulations, we'll be in touch".  Out of curiosity I went back a second time and it said that the contest was over.  If I do make it into the final round, I'll know May 18when they're supposed to have delivered the cryptex.  Naturally, if I do make it into that final round of 10,000 people, I'll tell you all about it here on the site... so please keep dropping by to check in with me - and wish me luck (unless of course I'm competing against you - in which case that's optional).

If you made it into the final stage, congratulations and good luck to you also!

One of my fondest memories from childhood is listening to the vinyl LPs of Bill Cosby comedy albums.  His various bits about Noah and the Ark, sharing a bed with his brother, football players doing shaving commercials, etc., all cracked me up.  I used to memorize them and tell them to the kids at school, getting all kinds of laughs from them.  In the 80s, I was happy to see Mr. Cosby getting the success he deserved with his sitcom and live performances.  He was able to deliver humor without the use of racism, 4-letter words, or gratuitous discussion of sexual intercourse and/or bodily functions.

It seems, though, that Mr. Cosby has lost his sense of humor.  I'll offer as my first evidence that atrocity of a movie "Leonard Part 6" where... well... I don't have a clue what was going on in that movie.  All I know is that it sucked.  Big time.  "Ghost Dad" was no better.

I recently read about the "M4 Message Breaking Project", which is a distributed computing experiment being done to crack some previously-undeciphered messages transmitted by the German military during World War II.  The messages were encrypted by one of the "Enigma" encoding machines, which the Germans thought were unbreakable, but which the Allies secretly had cracked soon after they went into widespread use.  During the period of time between the use of the "M3" encryption machine and the much more robust "M4" device, there was a period of time during which the Allies were unable to translate the messages the Germans were sending.  The M4 Project has 6 messages believed to be from this time period and is using "borrowed" computer time on a number of PCs and Macs around the world to decode these historical messages.

So far, the project has cracked one of the 6 messages, which was a message from German U-boat commander Hartwig Looks of U-264, indicating that he had been forced to submerge during an attack due to the enemy's use of depth charges.  The message also provided the last known coordinates of the enemy vessel.

The current message been analyzed by the project has not yet been decoded as of this writing, though several passes over the "decoding space" have been made. 

I'm currently running the client on my home PCs when they're not doing anything else for me.  They've contributed a number of "chunks" of analysis to the project already, with more delivered every few minutes/hours.

If you're interested in contributing some of your own computers' time to the project, all you need to do is download the client software, install it, and let it set to work.  The client software is quite well behaved.  It will generally only consume computing resources when your system isn't doing something else, so you don't tend to notice that it's running your CPU at full-tilt.

What can I say about one of my all-time favorite web sites, Woot.com?  A lot, really.  But first, you'll need a little background.  Each day, the fine folks at Woot list one item up for sale, usually at a drastically reduced price (compared to other merchants online).  For example at a time when the best price I could find on The Matrix Ultimate Collector's Edition was $39.99, Woot was selling it for $29.99.  They sell a little of everything, including electronics, clothing, computer products, and home appliances.  But there's more to Woot than just good deals on consumer goods...

Much like the rest of us, J.D. "Illiad" Frazer has been having a lot of fun with Sony's Digital Rights Management (DRM) woes in his comic strip "User Friendly".  Below are the recent Sony-related strips, which link directly to the author's web site.  If you enjoy these as much as I do, PLEASE make it a point to visit and bookmark that site to show your support!