Web Links of the Month

This is The web link of the month: Zillow.com - Your Edge in Real Estate - data gone crazy. Put in your address and see a quick map view of all the houses in your neighborhood, overlaid with their estimated value.  Click on a house and get all the tax info imaginable - how big, last sales, estimated price history, everything. Scary and amazing.

More links:

• Electronic Frontier Foundation Store : Buy some cool stuff, including a pocket-sized, metal edition of the Bill of Rights.
•  A life online: living decentralised (Mercurytide) : links to cool "Web 2.0" technology
• Bootdisk.Com : All kinds of cool PC boot disks, support programs and nice utilities.  Good if your computer is in serious trouble!
• Scanning Basics 101 - All about digital images :Good page with lots of excellent advice for using your scanner.
• Microsoft Linux - the premier linux distro :Yup, it's a joke. But a pretty funny one!
• The Why Files | The Science Behind the News : Just what it says - an in-depth look at the science in the news.
• World's Smallest Political Quiz : where do you fit in on the political spectrum? Not surprisingly, I'm a flaming liberal:
  
• NewspaperARCHIVE.com
  : A premium site, but it has lots and lots of data, including plenty of newspapers to search, all at a pretty reasonable price. Let me know if you try this and how it works out.
• Gas Prices : enter your zip code and find the cheapest gas in your neighborhood. Not necessarily 100% complete, but it at least gives you some good ideas, especially with the rapidly changing prices these days.
• Traffic Reports and Alerts : generate your own personal traffic reports. Pretty cool stuff. Ain't the web grand?
• Convert files and data online : drag and drop files to convert them. Useful for line-ending conversions between DOS, Unix and the Mac, as well as converting PDFs and Excel files.
• BookFinder.com : Very similar to Abebooks - search booksellers for out of print books.
• FCKeditor - The text editor for Internet : put these web pages on your web site, and, voila, you have your very own online editor.
• Identifont - identify fonts and typefaces : answer a few questions about a font and it will try and guess the name of it. Good if you see a font you want to try and use, but you don't know the name. Or type in a name and see a sample.
  
• When The Long Tail Wags The Dog : you hear alot about the "long tail" these days in regards to Internet commerce.  Here, Dan Bricklin, a god among software entrepreneurs, tells you all about it.
• Who's on First : the full transcript of the classic skit by Abbot & Costello.  Still funny after all these years.
• Microsoft Interview Questions : a list of actual Microsoft interview questions. Many of them are dumb and I just don't see the relevance. Glad I've never had to answer these!
• The T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project : Tests With Inorganic Noxious Kakes In Extreme Situations
• PDP Planet : Microsoft mega-billionaire Paul Allen's tribute to the PDP
• Book-A-Minute Classics : dozens of classic books, boiled down to a one minute synopsis. Very funny stuff.
• : buy more of these for your car at EvolveFish.com
• Gelf Magazine: 'Bad Movie, Good Actors' : Examines the "critical" blurbs found on movie ads.
• NNDB: Tracking the entire world : I'm not sure what this is.  It's a massive, interlinked "Who's Who" of some sort.  You could browse for hourse, I think.
• A couple more editors for you to check out, following up on last month's links:
  • ConTEXT Programmers Editor : freeware editor with lots of syntax coloring options. Recommended by some as a Javascript editor.
  • Boxer : Text Editor for Windows : an old friend of mine wrote and sells this editor. It's got a million different options, has been around forever, and Dave Hamel is a fanatic when it comes to software, so it is good stuff. I'm an GNU Emacs man myself, so I've never felt the need to move on. But if I did, and I worked solely on Windows, I would probably use this one. Also, be sure to see the wicked cool Text Monkey product while you are there. It massages badly formatted text into usable forms, working seamlessly with the Windows clipboard. I've been using the Lite version (very slimmed down feature set) for a couple of days now, and am ready to pony up for the Pro version. It's that good! If you've ever gotten one of those gazillion forwarded jokes and would like to nicely pass it on, this will do the job for you.
• Brilliant Button Maker : easily and quickly make those little "brilliant buttons", found on many web pages, that look like this:
• And a couple of links to help keep Google's prying eyes off of your computer:
• Scroogle : a web page that "scrubs" Google's prying cookies clean
• Anonymizing Google's cookie : remove private data from Google's cookies, making you more anonymous to the ever-present Google eye.