Posted by seniorgeek | 0 Comments
Newsletter 11/30/2008
Hope you all had a great Thanksgiving holiday weekend and are not suffering from too much turkey and trimmings.
Need to find something about someone in the past or present? This is the place to search to find out. It Is the largest directory of biographies available on the Web containing information on more than 110,000 important people from antiquity to the present time.
www.omnibiography.com
I was looking for some environmental maps and found this site. What a great specialized map resource.
“Maps of America are what you’ll find and make on nationalatlas.gov™. Maps of innovation and vision that illustrate our changing Nation. Maps that capture and depict the patterns, conditions, and trends of American life. Maps that supplement interesting articles. Maps that tell their own stories. Maps that cover all of the United States or just your area of interest. Maps that are accurate and reliable from more than 20 Federal organizations. Maps about America’s people, heritage, and resources. Maps that will help you, your children, your colleagues, and your friends understand the United States and its place in the world.”
http://nationalatlas.gov/
This site has a unique statistical database which allows you to research and compare a multitude of different data on US states. They have compiled information from various primary sources such as the US Census Bureau, the FBI, and the National Center for Educational Statistics. More than just a mere collection of various data, StateMaster goes beyond the numbers to provide you with visualization technology like pie charts, maps, graphs and scatterplots. Also you can find thousands of map and flag images, state profiles, and correlations.
http://www.statemaster.com/index.php
Edible Bacteria? Really?
“Probiotics, a field that seeks to use edible bacteria to improve human health, may soon undergo a metamorphosis. Students at MIT and Caltech are using the techniques of synthetic biology to create bacteria that fight cavities, produce vitamins, and treat lactose intolerance.”
Read the whole story at this site.
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/21654/?nlid=1496″
The stock market crash of 1929 is aid to be the worst in history. Well it seem like the market recession we are in now is just as bad. PBS has a good video called “The crash of 1929”. Interesting to watch and compare to what is happening right now. Check it out and watch the video at this site.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/crash
Posted by seniorgeek | 0 Comments
Newsletter 11/23/2008
Need to know how to do something around the home? This is a great site on how to do most anything around the home, garage, yard, or just making stuff in your shop or work area. Right now they have a nice article on decorating for Thanksgiving on their home page.
http://www.doityourself.com
The mission of The Why Files is to explore the science, math and technology behind the news of the day, and to present those topics in a clear, accessible and accurate manner. We are based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but The Why Files covers science at all institutions that engage in scientific exploration and discovery.
http://whyfiles.org
Eric Weisstein’s World of Science is written and maintained by the author as a public service for scientific knowledge and education. Although it is often difficult to find explanations for technical subjects that are both clear and accessible, this web site bridges the gap by placing an interlinked framework of mathematical exposition and illustrative examples at the fingertips of every internet user.
http://scienceworld.wolfram.com
“Professor Newcomb, one of the first scholars to examine the content and history of television…assembled an advisory committee [to reduce] the vast array of possible “television topics” to around 1,000. An early decision was made to focus the majority of the work on major English-speaking, television producing countries, and for that reason the bulk of the material presented here deals with television programs, people, and topics drawn from the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia. The Encyclopedia of Television has now become our “map” for future exhibitions and public programs. With a stronger knowledge of television’s past our aim is for those projects to continue our role as an important participant in media education.”
http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/index.html”
Have a Great Thanksgiving Week, and remember to help the less fortunate.
Posted by seniorgeek | 0 Comments
Newsletter 11/9/2008
I don’t know how many of you still have old TV that you are still using, but you will need a converter box come next April or else you won’t we able to see anything on your old TV.
At midnight on February 17, 2009, all full-power television stations in the United States will stop broadcasting in analog and switch to 100% digital broadcasting. Congress created the TV Converter Box Coupon Program for households wishing to keep using their analog TV sets after February 17, 2009. The Program allows U.S. households to obtain up to two coupons, each worth $40, that can be applied toward the cost of eligible converter boxes. You may also ask questions or make coupon requests 24 hours a day, 7 days a week at 1-888-DTV-2009.
https://www.dtv2009.gov/
While on the TV subject, there is this great place on the Internet that archives recording all TV news since late 1968. The Vanderbilt Television News Archive is the world’s most extensive and complete archive of television news. We have been recording, preserving and providing access to television news broadcasts of the national networks. (I may have put this in a previous newsletter, but worth repeating)
http://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/
“The Encyclopedia of Television includes more than 1,000 original essays from more than 250 contributors and examines specific programs and people, historic moments and trends, major policy disputes and such topics as violence, tabloid television and the quiz show scandal. It also includes histories of major television networks as well as broadcasting systems around the world and is complemented by resource materials, photos and bibliographical information.”
http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/index.html
In American Fact Finder, from the US Census Bureau, you can obtain data in the form of maps, tables, and reports from a variety of Census Bureau sources. From the Main Page find links to data in American Fact Finder and other Census Bureau sites. Their search tool returns very relevant information and well worth the visit.
http://factfinder.census.gov/home/saff/main.html?_lang=en
Not that gas prices have come back down to reasonable level, concerns over fuel cost are not so critical, but it is always nice to know what the current pricing is around the country so check out AAA’s Daily Fuel Gauge Report. It is updated each day and is the most comprehensive retail gasoline survey available. Everyday self-serve stations are surveyed. The AAA Fuel Gauge Web Site is derived from credit card transactions at more than 85,000 stations around the country. Prices shown are combined averages of the last card swipe of the previous day
http://www.fuelgaugereport.com/
Don’t forget to thank a Veteran this week for their service to keep this country “the land of the free”.
Veteran’s Day, November 11th.
Posted by seniorgeek | 0 Comments
Newsletter 11/02/2008
Did you set your clocks back today? How late was it when you finally got all of them changed?
Now that that is done enjoy this week’s newsletter.
Numbers, math, fractions, equations, all of these play a very important part in our life. Human beings didn’t invent math concepts; we discovered them. The language of math is numbers, not English. If we are well versed in this language of numbers, it can help us make important decisions and perform everyday tasks. Math can help us to shop wisely, buy the right insurance, remodel a home within a budget, understand population growth, or even bet on the horse with the best chance of winning the race.
OK, so what am I getting at? A very interesting site that deals with numbers. The following link is all about probability.
http://www.learner.org/interactives/dailymath/playing.html
Most of you have been to the photo site Flickr. The library of Congress has a special section on Flick show very old photo from 1900 through 1940’s. Classic baseball, boxing, military, early invention, etc. It is well worth your time to view these old preserved photos.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/
The History Channel has some interesting videos in the section ‘this day in history’. Today, Nov 2 they are featuring a video of Howard Hughes Spruce Goose which flew for the first time on Nov 2. What year was it? Don’t know? Check out this site to find out.
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history.
“The best things in life are free”, “ There’s no such thing as a free lunch”, and many more similar quotes lead you to believe that there is always a catch that goes along with a free thing. To some extent this may be true, but this web site does it best to disprove the above quotes. Thanks to Yahoo for providing this link from August 25 that I am just now getting around to sending to all of you.
http://finance.yahoo.com/banking-budgeting/article/105621/Fabulous-Freebies-2008
With the economy falling apart every day and if you are like me, my income isn’t going up to match the cost of everything I need. So what can we do? A little help is needed to find the best products and the best price. ConsumerSearch is here to help. They have reviews of thousands of products you buy every day.
http://www.consumersearch.com/
Have a great week and God bless you all.
Posted by seniorgeek | 0 Comments
Newsletter 10/26/2008
This week focus on some free software you can download to help you use your computer more efficiently.
Bug Shooting is a free screenshot utility that was developed for software testers who use bug tracking systems, but it just maybe the best free screen capture utility I have seen or used. Take the ‘screenshot tour’ to see all that it can do. A great little utility to add to your software collection.
http://www.bugshooting.com/web/index.php5?tpl=tour
Attention Vista owners, tire of how slow you computer runs with Vista? Microsoft has a PDF file that give you many helpful hints on how to speed up the performance of Vista. Download the PDF file at the following link and start making Vista perform better.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ab377598-a637-432c-a3c8-1607ab629201&DisplayLang=en
Have you ever gone to a web page and wanted to highlight a paragraph or just a line or to? Well now you can. This little add on to Firefox will let you highlight any area of web page in multiple colors. It remembers the page text location and color so it is highlighted the next time you visit that page.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6219
Sometimes I am thinking about a word that I just can’t quite remember. You know the saying ‘it’s on the tip of my tongue’. Well there is a web site that will try to help you out. You can search by partial word, letters that might be scrambled, or word meaning. All I can say is “it’s on the tip of my tongue”
http://chir.ag/phernalia/tip-of-my-tongue/
Quick, name the 20 most popular web sites in the US. If you guessed that most of them had the word yahoo.com in them you were right. Check out this page and see for yourself.
PS this site has a lot more stats if you are interested.
http://www.hitwise.com/datacenter/rankings.php
I have purchased a Nintendo WII and find it a joy. I have lots of fun playing the sports games and other that I have purchased. Now if you want to know some other uses of the WII, check out this web page.
http://hackawii.com/100-uses-for-the-wii/
