Plurk is similar to twitter, but it displays updates in a timeline instead of a flat list. I like the idea of having a timeline. It can serve as a mini journal. I have a timeline, but I’m not making any guarantees I’ll keep it updated. I heard about Plurk from Amir, the lead developer […]

Sometimes things don’t work out like you planned.

I’ve been happy with Akismet, the spam filtering plugin from Automattic. It has caught over 250,000 spam comments with minimal effort on my part. A handful of spam comments get through each week that I have to manually mark as spam, but that’s far better than the hundreds I used to deal with. I’ve often […]

SoundIndex searches the big social networking sites (myspace, facebook, last.fm, bebo, youtube and iTunes) to determine the most popular artists of the day. Right now Robbie Williams is sitting in the #1 spot. (via techcrunch)

I’ve made three new additions to the sidebar on this site. I’ll explain what they are. The first two sections come from del.icio.us and the third comes from LibraryThing. The first section, named “My comments elsewhere”, lists sites where I’ve made comments. I’ll be posting about the process I use in an upcoming blog entry. […]

The Bank of North Georgia has a sweet offer. You open up a checking account sign up for online billpay and pay 3 bills with the account by July 31, 2008. In return, you get a free iPod Nano. Their signature checking account has free billpay service, so it shouldn’t cost you anything. The Apple […]

With the US national average at $3.83 a gallon, gas prices are going up fast. If you’re feeling the pinch, here are eight ways to reduce what you pay at the pump. GasBuddy – The king of gas price sites, GasBuddy is a network of more than 181 information sites to help you find low […]

TuneGlue is yet another site that shows related artists (like recently mentioned Music Map). Once you search for an artist, you have to click on it and choose Expand. The site is powered by data from Amazon and Last.fm. Rick will be pleased to know it even has Dennis De Young :)

I wrote about a web site that let you see what celebrity you look like in 2006. I’ve found a new site that does the same thing. I wasn’t all that impressed with the other one, given that it didn’t even get the gender right, so I was pleased to see Picitup Celebrity Match lets […]

I’ve had no trouble finding processor, memory and network monitoring tools on Windows. Process Explorer from SysInternals does a great job of showing processor and memory use (overall and for each process) and NetStat Live displays incoming and outgoing network traffic. The only thing missing was an easy way to see what processes were using […]

I always enjoy getting recommendations for good movies, books, games or web sites. I’ve had mixed results from web sites that try to do this. Listible is overrun with spam and The best stuff in the world is mediocre. Their recommendations are often sub par. My latest find is a site called Ditto, tagline, “The […]

The first release candidate of Firefox 3 is available. If you hadn’t upgraded before because of instability concerns, this should take care of all known issues. If no new showstopper bugs are found, this release will be the official one. Download it now (or go to Help -> Check for Updates in your browser)

Music-Map.com asks you to enter the name of a music artist. It then produces a tree of artists where the proximity indicates the degree of similarity. For example, Armin Van Buuren pulled up DJ Tiesto and Paul Van Dyk, artists I already know of and like that are similar to Armin.

I used to have a PDA where I’d input my gas mileage every time I filled up. I liked seeing my gas mileage over time with the handy graph. But I stopped using the PDA and even though I still check my gas mileage, I don’t track it anywhere. FuelFrog allows anyone with a web […]

“The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life” by Steve Leveen suggests you track all of the books you’ve read. This enables you to see patterns, refer back to the list for reference needs and illustrates your varying interests over time. Plus, it’s cool to see how many books you’ve read. I started to do this, […]

The idea behind ManBabies.com is simple. Swap heads of men and babies then display the resulting image. How they came up with the idea is beyond me. It’s frighteningly bizarre, but intriguing at the same time.

It’s not a strict requirement to be in your skivvies while browsing USASpending.gov but it provided a catchy headline, no? Have you ever wanted to know what the government is spending your money on? Ever wondered where federal contracting dollars and grant awards go? Wonder no more. USASpending.gov was created to comply with the Federal […]

The New York Times created a chart that provides a fascinating look at how we spend our money as consumers. It comes as no surprise that the largest increase is in gas. It’s interesting to see a visual depiction of our spending. You can even zoom in on a section to get an even more […]

Foodsel.com gives you three ways to look at your food. 1. Activities to burn off the calories contained in it 2. The energy, sugar and fat it has 3. The nutrients in the food. For example, here are some exercises and their duration I could do to burn off a slice of Pizza Hut pizza, […]