Silly Captchas

I just finished inviting a number of friends (you?) on Facebook to check out this blog. As many of you know, there is a prevalent system in place to stop spam posting. These captchas can be quite strange and I thought I would post some of the best I came across. The previous entry is still, at this point, the main attraction.

Not quite sure why I added this one, but it stood out.

Or not to carjack?

Something one does with their time off.

This sounds like a newspeak, conservative slogan.

It just sounded nice.

Some kind of a foretold pastry? Or perhaps just a person from Berlin.

I wonder if it was a careless year.

One of my favorites. Merriam-Webster has your back on this one.

I wonder who he was, or if he existed at all.

This one doesn't need much in the way of a caption.

An Introduction and Useful Bookmarks

I have decided that it is finally time to use this blog, parked some time earlier. This blog will be dedicated to technology news, reviews, etc. Oh, and for those of you too lazy to look up the word "celerity," a Merriam-Webster Online link.

Today I thought I would open the blog by listing some bookmarks that I have collected over the past indefinite period. All of these sites have been of use to me (or of interest) in one way or another and I thought perhaps others would find them useful or intriguing. Many of these sites feature cloud apps that I will review in depth in subsequent entries. I will provide only a short explanation for each link here, and links will be grouped (somewhat haphazardly) as I have them on my shortcut bar. They are in no particular order and won't be alphabetized, as it wastes far too much time and doesn't benefit you in the slightest in this case.

Fixed Gear Related

• Fourteen Teeth - An aggregator for fourteen fixed gear related blogs. The sites featured are a pretty good sampling of what is available on the net.
• Rabbit - A rather slow-loading web app for calculating a bunch of different things on single speed bicycles (gear inches, skid patches, etc).

News

• Popurls - This is the ultimate media aggregator. There is usually little need to use anything else. You really need to check this site out if you haven't already. Additionally, you can log into the site using a number of IDs in order to personalize your eperience.
• Skimmer - A remarkably elegant take on a news reader being tested by the New York Times. A must see.
• CNET News - An obvious addition, but one I had to list incase there really is anyone interested in technology who isn't already following this website.
• CNN - I find CNN to be the best site for news in America. Most other sites don't need to be followed individually since Popurls is so good.
• BBC - I find the BBC to be the best source for world news.
• Kotaku - A gaming news site with an at times hefty bias toward consoles and shooters. I'm still looking for a better gaming news site, so let me know if you follow one.

Music

• Fizy - A site for finding music videos and songs online (free, of course). There are many other sites like this that I will list. Sometimes if one site doesn't find a song you are looking for, another will.
• Grooveshark - This is perhaps my favorite in this category. It's simple to use and you can create playlists. It hasn't failed to find a song for me yet.
• Skreemr - A website so repulsive looking that it might discourage you from using it. Think of it aesthetically as the craigslist of the music search world. It does have the benefit of making it simple to download the MP3s, not just stream the music though.
• MP3Realm - This is a more attractive Skreemr, give or take.
• Playlist - A cool site for creating and then sharing playlists. A fairly large selection of music, though there are things it fails to pull up.
• Songza - Another generic mp3 search site much like Grooveshark.
• Moof - A site that claims not only to offer the capabilities of many of the sites above, but also claims to be a replacement for your desktop media player. Moof is supposedly able to replicate your iTunes library, though this process failed for me multiple times. This site is included as a curiosity; let me know if you get it working.
• Spotify - This will be the ultimate online music experience. It isn't even available in the U.S. yet, but I have included it on potential alone. Think of an iTunes sized music library streaming for free. The service will be legal because it uses ads to pay royalties.

Search Related

• Spezify - This is a textual and graphical search application. You need to try it to believe it. I love it. It searches your query along with related terms and gives you elegant output.
• Wolfram|Alpha - A search engine that, instead of returning links, gives you organized information about your query. This site works best on mathematical or quantifiable information and the engine's ability to understand what you are asking is still somewhat limited.
• Multicolr Search Lab - On this site you select colors from swatches and see quite immediately a batch of images on Flickr that contain the selected colors. Very fun to play around with.
• Craiglook - A web 2.0 take on craigslist listings. This is a better looking, more useful interface for craigslist. Be warned that sometimes this site is not completely up to date with craigslist's offerings.

Educational

• Academic Earth - An amazing site where you can watch free video lectures given by the worlds top academicians. A must see.
• World Digital Library - A cool site featuring a sliding timeline. Move the timeline in order to see the relevant historical information from around the world.

Cloud Apps and Related

• Bubbl.us - Collaborative (or solo) brainstorming application. This is just like what you did in grade school except flashier.
• Aviary - A collection of image editing tools. These tools are fairly sophisticated, and while I won't call this suite a photoshop replacement, it makes it obvious that such an app is possible. The free version shows your work to the community while a paid version allows you to keep some amount of privacy.
• LucidChart - An application that allows for the creation of flowcharts and related objects.
• Big Picture - A very fascinating calendar and organizational application that has very zen design principles.
• Box - a glorified online file storage dump. Useful to get files that wont go through e-mail from one place to another.
• Lovely Charts - Another chart making tool.
• Sumo Paint - An application for manipulating or creating images. Allows you to save files to your account. This is not as sophisticated as Aviary, but I believe the work is private.
• Picnik - Another photo manipulation tool. This tool is best used for alteration of photographs.
• Spashup - Very similar to Sumo Paint.

Other

• Jolicloud - The first social operating system. Jolicloud is based on UNR (a version of Ubuntu for netbooks). You can submit a form for an invitation to the alpha test, or wait a bit for an open beta. Though it is meant to run on netbooks, and driver support is limited, I had some success running a build inside of VirtualBox. The build I got was also a liveCD and for those of you willing to risk it, I'm sure it would install on non-netbooks if you took the time to find linux drivers for your hardware.
• Fonolo - Let me say first that I have never had an opportunity to use this site. Fonolo is essentially a website that dials through phone trees for you and waits on hold, ringing you once someone picks up on the other end.
• Mint - a website that keeps track of your finances and gives you hints on how to save money. A very useful and reputable site. Sometimes just looking at your spending can be helpful in curtailing it.

Thus concludes the collection of bookmarks. I hope that you find them useful or interesting. I will post more links as I come across them and I hope that you will leave links to some of the sites you frequent in the comments.