All Entries in the "Web" Category

How To Find Top Five Books About A Subject

When a subject suddenly catches your fancy, it’s not uncommon to turn to the web for more information.  Problem is, it’s usually tough to figure out where the best resources are.  Five Books is a website that seeks to simplify the process, interviewing one renowned expert on each field about the five best books they will recommend to anyone who wants to catch up.
Every day, a list of recommendations from one eminent personality in a specialized industry gets added to the list, potentially making this one of the most critical “top five lists” when it comes to unearthing dependable source materials.  Current topic listings include a varied range, from the top cooking books of all time (by food columnist Nigel Slater) to virtual living (by broadcaster and journalist Alex Krotoski) to the atom (by theoretical physics professor Jim Al-Khalili ) to British Film (by British cinema academic  Brian MacFarlane).
Five Books’ [...]

Chocomize Lets You Cook Up Custom Chocolate Bars

Tired of the same old chocolate munchies you can buy off the shelf?  Check out Chocomize, a service for sweet tooths hankering for a custom chocolate bar experience.
A milk bar with Cheerios and mini-marshmallows?  Check.  Dark chocolate with bacon?  Not a problem.  White chocolate topped with a heaping of beef jerky, diced ginger and curry powder?  Gross, but definitely approved.  Like your very own chocolate factory, the company lets you fashion treats that would have otherwise stayed in your sugar-addled imagination.
Chocomize starts you off with a simple choice: dark, milk or white chocolate bar base, all premium Belgian.   From there, you get to pick from 80 default ingredients (nuts, fruits, herbs, spices, candies, decorations and others), churning out up to 30 billion different possible combinations.  You can also pick from pre-selected customer favorites, such as the Berry Bar (milk chocolate with a variety of berries), Hawaiian Sunset (milk chocolate with [...]

Oil Spill Destroys Websites Specially The Ones You Love

There is nothing cool about the BP oil spill. The effect of this nasty disaster is going to be felt by generations to come. Every time when I pick up some cool new gadget, I am amazed by how far mankind has come and amazing things that are being invented. But then we have an oil leak at the bottom of the ocean that is gushing millions of gallons of this nasty liquid into the ocean and no one seems to know what to do about it.
We can all sit here and cringe at what’s going on, but we can never even come close to feeling the real pain that people who are being directly effected by this disaster must be experiencing. Here is a virtual way to see what happens to your business, house or in this case your favorite web site when oil spill takes it over.
Just head [...]

Wordpress 3.0 Thelonious Is Calling You

We are a big fans of WordPress here at CT and consider it to be a pretty cool CMS. WE have seen many great open source projects go downhill pretty fast usually because of founder egos clashing with user input. Wordpress development on the other hand seems to be following an amazing life cycle of bug squashing and feature enrichment that makes us feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
We have been waiting for wordPress 3.0 and its finally here. Some of the coolest features and enhancements include multi site/blog functionality where you just install WordPress once and can have hundreds of domains hosted on the same base install, merging of
MU and WordPress into a single install, faster/lighter and more intuitive user interface, a nice new default theme, tons of bug fixes and enhancements and more.
Follow the link below to WordPress blog for download link and a nice little feature [...]

Idle Keyboard Makes You Sound Busy

Everybody knows that keyboards make sounds when you type. So when you’re spending the afternoon reading Perez Hilton instead of working on that report, it’s easy to notice the lack of keystroke activity.
We slack at work too, so no judgment from me. If you’re hunched over your desk with no typing noises coming from your cubicle, however, it won’t take more than a few minutes to figure out that you’re just tending to your crops on Farmville again. Idle Keyboard lets you add an audio component to your office fakery, playing a never-ending stream of typing sounds over your connected speakers.
Just launch the site on a tab in your browser and leave it on, as it plays a varying series of typing and clicking sounds in a continuous loop. The sound will stream out of your speaker, so make sure to mute the volume on [...]

PediaPress Lets You Compile Wikipedia Entries Into A Custom Book

Think Wikipedia is the shiznitz? Build yourself a study filled with the human-edited encyclopedia’s wisdom through PediaPress, a service that lets you pick out choice Wikipedia entries for publishing into a softcover book.
Of course, someone already made a Wikipedia book before. But that was magnificently unusable. Operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, the new service lets you pick and sort your own content, essentially commissioning you as an editor for your own custom volume of niche knowledge.

PediaPress offers both pre-edited books and custom ones whose contents you pick out on your own. Pre-selected books include a 298-page volume about different NBA awards, 152 pages of information about pro-wrestling brothers, the Hardy Boyz, and all sorts of random mess you probably can’t find in a regular bookstore. To design your own, simple enable Book Creator on Wikipedia, which is a bar that will appear on every page [...]

Adverputt Manages To Keep Ads-Filled Flash Game Surprisingly Enjoyable

We all know game advertising is only going to get blatantly more intrusive. But I kinda like what Adverputt did with their mini-golf Flash game, seamlessly integrating the adverts with the multi-level playing course.
They do have annoying pop-overs, though, which disappear after a few seconds. The small window lists the full name of the sponsor for the hole, along with a clickable link to their website. Seriously, I hope that doesn’t catch on, or at least, put it where I can ignore it (instead of right over the putt).
Make no mistake: Adverputt is a game designed for advertising, much like Kim’s Diet Blog (or one of those other fake personal websites) was designed to pimp Resveratrol or Hoodia or whatever the current weight-loss fad is. Unlike other similar efforts, though, the game is actually very entertaining, with a simple control scheme, challenging holes, clever physics [...]

Voxengo Lets You Cut A Record Without Your Own Drummer

Ready to record a demo on your one-computer home studio, but still can’t find a decent drummer?  Instead of settling for an awful-sounding drum machine sequence, you can get a real percussionist to lay down professional drum tracks with the Voxengo Custom Drum Track Service.  Yep, a working studio drummer for hire at the bargain-basement price of $69.95.  Win.
If you’ve spent any time in a studio, you’ll know the difference between a hack drummer and a seasoned artist.  Back when I used to work in one, producers will literally pick fights with band members about how much they need to kick out the guy behind the skins because they suck on record.
To order, simply provide Voxengo with a copy of your song sans drums, pay the fee and wait a week to get your drum track in unprocessed wav format.  For the low price, you get overhead, side and room [...]

Google Street View Snowmobile Braves The Slopes For Google Maps Fans

Think you can hide from Google Street View by camping in icy mountains, Abominable Snowman?  You may have to rethink that strategy with the Google Street View Snowmobile, which plows through slush terrains hoping to catch a glimpse of your snowy white hide.
Yep, that’s a snowmobile with a Street View rig duct taped to it, capturing the world of treacherous icy hills one unique snowflake at a time.  You can feel a little better, though, in knowing that they aren’t really using it to turn up evidence of your existence.  Instead, they outfitted the vehicle to get a top-to-bottom shot of the slopes at Canada’s Whistler Blackcomb, where the world’s best skiers and snowboarders will show off their wares at the upcoming 2010 Winter Olympics.
The results, which are now available from Google Maps, are quite a sight, allowing ordinary mortals to experience the same view that streaking athletes will see [...]

Be A Certified Virgin And Make Your Parents Proud

Still a virgin and proud of it?  Don’t stop the announcement with wearing a purity ring.  Hang it on your wall with a Certified Virgin certificate, which proudly proclaims your sexless life to the world.  Yes, you’re so cool, just like a Jonas brother (oh wait, only two of them should be virgins now – one got married).
Whether you’re a 40-year old social misanthrope, a dry-humping maestro or the biggest prude in the world, these “I’m a virgin” diplomas will put your abstinence in very clear terms.  You’re as pure as Nickelodeon (well, before Jamie Lynn), as wholesome as Disney (errrr, before those Vanessa Hudgens photos) and with an unpopped a cherry as…ummm…I don’t know, Taylor Swift?

The Certified Virgin certificate, of course, isn’t any kind of official badge.  In fact, pretty much anyone can order.   If you want to pretend to be a virgin, I suggest getting one and hanging [...]

DeepDyve Lets You Rent Scientific Journals Online For 24 Hours

Do you consume scientific papers the same way you voraciously take to music?  Maybe not, but many folks do require them for regular research needs.  If you’re among those folks who fork out ridiculous amounts of cash for copies of obscure research publications, then you’ll love DeepDyve, a new service that rents out scientific papers for the same 99-cent price as an iTunes download.
For a long time, everyone without a student pass regularly had to pay serious cash for access to articles from science journals (typically from $30 onwards per title).  That holds true whether you only need to check out a couple of details from it or actually need the whole deal.  As a result, many folks ended up having to be stingy with their research budgets, often having to write out papers or perform experiments without full access to every piece of previous research available.
With DeepDyve, that can [...]

Can’t You See I’m Busy… Busy Playing Games

Like to play a quick game while at work? Unless you have a strategically-positioned cubicle, it’s usually not that easy. Sure, you might get away with it every now and then. Chances are good that you’ll eventually be caught, though.
If your desire for mindless distraction overwhelms the need for job preservation, you should head on over to CantYouSeeImBusy.com for a solution. With games that are carefully masked as regular office software, you can waste an entire day on their offerings. Seriously, it’s your best chance to slack off without leaving your supervisor any wiser to it.
The current offering consists of three games, namely Leadership, Breakdown and Cost Cutter. Leadership has you commanding a ship that travels across a series of Excel graphs, with the goal of steering it to a landing area without hitting any of the edges. Breakdown has you controlling a [...]

Regretsy: The Dark Side Of Crafts

We love Etsy.  Heck, we’ve featured crafts being peddled around those parts in these pages multiple times.  Like many “creative” places, however, there’s about ten pieces of garbage for every brilliant item that shows up.  A site called Regretsy documents that former category.
From a Michael Jackson monkey doll to a cheese grater with a clock (called Time To Grate) to a half-fish, half-squirrel taxidermy freak, it’s a hilarious look at the questionable stuff “creative” people make.   Poring through the entries can feel like you’re reading through a pile of fake products designed for a laugh.  But, alas, they are real. Worse, they’re being sold (not that anyone’s buying, of course).

It’s tough to imagine the sellers expect people to pay for this stuff.  I mean, if they were going for $1 apiece, I’d probably splurge and put up my own Museum of Horrible Craft.  However, the price tags are bordering on [...]

Zero Baggage Lets You Travel Light Even With A Full Suitcase Of Stuff

Luggage sucks.  In fact, traveling is often a horrendous experience because of it.  From the hassles of carrying heavy bags to losing them at some point during the trip, it makes way for plenty of less-than-ideal situations.  That’s where Zero Baggage wants to come in.
The upcoming service intends to revolutionize the travel experience by letting you fly without bringing anything along.  Rather than pack two suitcases full of clothes before every trip, you can put your regular gear together once and leave them with the service.  During each trip, simply notify Zero Baggage and have your stuff delivered directly at the hotel.  When you’re done, simply call the company again to have the same stuff picked up, cleaned and readied for the next time you need it.  Basically, you travel both ways without carrying any luggage, yet having everything you require.
What if you need a pink power suit and your [...]

Swiss DNA Bank: Keep Your Genetic Record, Digital Data Under Tight Security

How would you like to keep a record of your DNA, along with your most precious digital information, in  one secure place?  I’m not sold on its actual value either, but the folks behind the Swiss DNA Bank thinks you’ll actually pay for the privilege.
The concept is simple enough.  Store a swab of your DNA in a secure location halfway around the world, for whatever purpose it may serve at some point in the future.  Say, you become a bazillionaire and die without a will.  All of a sudden, your estate suddenly gets ten random clowns claiming to be your illegitimate children.  All your estate has to do is pull up that swab sample and get them tested to verify.
Apart from the genetic record, the Swiss DNA Bank also stores digital data in secure servers.  I’m not entirely sure what kind of information you will want to entrust to a [...]

Mustang Customizer Lets You Pimp Your Own 2010 Mustang

Have some tuning ideas you’d like to see for the new 2010 Mustang?  See how your vision looks on a computer screen with Ford’s new Mustang Customizer, a web app that allows users to remodel the roadster in a large number of ways.
More than a simple graphics selector, like similar Flash apps have done in the past, the Mustang Customizer offers a wide range of personalization options that can end up  turning out an entirely different-looking ride.  Starting with a stock 2010 model, you get the option of decking your Mustang with a variety of  hoods, louvers, scoops, custom paint jobs, spoilers, grilles, wheels, stripe kits and everything else you can imagine slapping on a car’s exterior.

Of course, a sexy car looks even sexier in the proper setting.  As such, you can also change numerous environmental elements in the image, from the conditions of the sky, the length of the [...]