Charting a Course for News

I’m a serious consumer of news. I read, listen and watch a lot of it. Sometimes though I get caught in the trap of only reading stories that I find interesting. Certain major topics do not interest me enough to follow up and read about them as much as I probably should. I still don’t really know what Rihanna said about Chris Brown, so sometimes I need something that will force certain items to my attention.

One website that I’ve found that can do that is Newsmap. Newsmap is a colored-coded grid of stories that uses Google News to prioritize the most significant stories of the news day. Stories that have had more written about them are relatively bigger in the grid and have their headline in a larger font. Clicking on any of the stories will bring up the story where you can read more about it.

It defaults to having all categories of news, but if you want to limit it to just certain sections like health or technology, you can just click the appropriate check boxes and the grid will reorganize itself. It’s a nice little way to visualize the news.

At the 10000 Words blog, they have a great list of other news visualizers if you are interested in looking at news in a different way. There is the popular Newser tiled headlines with pictures, but this type of layout tends to make me focus on the interesting pictures instead  of finding good stories.

Another interesting visualization is 10×10, which offers a 10×10 grid of story pictures taken from Reuters, the BBC and the New York Times RSS feeds. It is very focused on international stories, but the way that it works is worth noting. It analyzes the words from the RSS feeds of these stories and computes the most important words of a particular hour. Then it will associate a picture with each word. Often times, the result will be that the same picture will come up multiple times, which lets you know that a story is worth looking at more closely. I would prefer if looked at a larger amount of time than an hour, because you will often get stories with no picture or only a very few stories and lots of repeated pictures.

How do you find news content? Have any interesting tips? Let me know in the comments.

Making Craigslist Look Good

Craigslist.org is a very useful site that a lot of you are probably already familiar with it. It’s how I got my apartment and a lot of my friends and colleagues have done the same. My major problem with the site is the design. It’s about as interesting as the newspaper Classified ads that’s it is replacing. The really sad thing is that it doesn’t have to be that way.

Check out Craiglook.com. Using only the data that is already on the Craigslist site, you get a much more easily usable way to search for the types of ads that you are looking for. A few navigation tips though, the front page looks like it has check boxes, but they are actually links, so I would either use the text entry at the top or click through the category first. This minor hiccup, however, does not prevent the site from being a big improvement over the Craigslist site itself.

Makeuseof.com also had a few useful Craigslist tools that I would like to mention. The first is one I’ve mentioned before on the blog is called Typobuddy. This little site will check Craigslist (and eBay) for common typos and misspellings to see if it can find additional listing that may not have gotten much attention. This is a sneaky way to get a little more value for your search time.

The last site I want to point out is Weekend Treasure.com. This site uses Craigslist and other listings to help you find garage and yard sales that are happening in your area. Simply type in your zip code and a series of pins will pop-up on a Google map for you to check out. This makes it a very simple, but very slick tool for finding potential bargains.

Do you have other ways of getting the most from Craigslist? Let me know in the comments.

All Work and No Play Makes Techeap a Dull Blog

It would have been nice if I had been able to write about the new Windows  7 release and share my views on it. However, I never got the release candidate and it is no longer available. If you are using it, feel free to let me know in the comments.

Since I can’t write about that, I will write about some interesting gaming websites I’ve come across.

The first is actually for “optical productivity,” that is looking like you are being productive. At Can’t you see I’m busy! You get a series of games that actually look like they are business documents. There is a block-busting game that looks like a word document, a game where you are flying a rocket between two line graphs and a game like Super Collapse, where you click on groups of the same color in bar graphs. They are pretty basic games, but they do look pretty convincing office suite software.

The next site that I found was Jeopardy Labs. This would probably be most useful in an educational environment, but you could probably fine a use for it at a party. Basically, you enter a series of answers and question on to a Jeopardy board, and then you can use the website to run the game. A player choose a category and dollar amount, you click on the question and ask it. Then you apply the points for correct and incorrect answers. The important thing that confused me is that you have to do the scoring in the page for the question. Otherwise, the question won’t be taken off the board. The about page explains using the site well if you have any questions.

The final site that I’ll mention is TheSixtyOne.com. This site combines a music site with a quest system. This is very similar to achievements if you’ve seen or played an Xbox 360. The way it works is that you get bonuses for performing certain activities (usually for listening for certain types of songs) on the site. These bonuses give you extra votes (or hearts) to denote the songs that  you like and have them move up the charts. It’s a very interesting system and can be kind of gratifying when you complete a little quest. If you want to sign up for the site, you should use my name (zargonddg) as a referer. (It’s one of the quests. )

Have any cool games or relaxation site that you want to let others know about?

Add them in the comments.

It’s a Secret to Everybody

Pardon the obscure reference (bonus points if you recognize it without Google) and my unexpected time off last week, but I’ve got a new interesting, bit of free stuff on the web for you today.

This week, I’m going to talk about an unusual offering called Mystery Google, but this requires a bit of a side trip to explain what really brought this to mind.

A fellow blogger heard about a fellow who went to a cafe in Japan. Nothing too unusual so far, but the interesting thing about it is that you don’t get what you order and pay for.

You actually get what the person in front of you ordered and paid for. It seems a little strange so an example might be in order. Let’s say the cafe gets three customers a day.

Person A orders a cookie.
Person B orders a hot dog.
Person C orders 2 nachos.

However, what they receive is different.

Person A actually gets whatever was ordered last the night before.
Person B gets a cookie.
Person C gets a hot dog.

And the first customer tomorrow is going to get 2 nachos.

Pretty interesting, but you do have to be able to eat a variety of things in order to try this sort of cuisine. Food allergies or vegetarianism might lead to some trouble.

Anyway, Mystery Google works on the same premise. You actually get the search results of the person who did a search before you.

I just did a search for “It’s a Secret to Everybody” and got the search results for “Mistery Google,” which basically gave me the misspelling search results for Mystery Google. While that isn’t terribly creative, I have gotten some interesting results during other test searches.

Another search lead me to Kittens, which led me to the lolcatz website. Something that I had actually wanted to see what the fuss was about. This site mostly contains pictures of cats with sometimes humorous captions, but many of them seem to be inter-related and only funny to those in the know. I did like this one though.

In any case, this may be an opportunity for you to pick up some additional knowledge on a subject that you had no idea you were interested in. There are caveats though. I have gotten content inappropriate for younger folks trying to gross out the system. You could imagine people at the restaurant ordering liver and Limburger cheese or something worse.

Get any interesting results? Let me know in the comments.

I am A Tech Blogger, AMA

For those unfamiliar, AMA stands for ask me anything. While looking around for an interesting topic to talk about this week, I came across something that I visit periodically but hadn’t really thought of as a good resource.

You’ll find it on Reddit.com (pronounced like read it) and it is called “IAmA.” The interesting thing about it is that people from all walks of life come on this community and answer questions about their lives. Right now, people are asking questions to a K-Street Washington lawyer, an ex-Mennonite, and a guard for Iraqi detainees.

There are a number of fascinating conversations, and if you want to sign up for an account you can also ask your own questions. Reddit also works with a ‘karma’ points system, so that people can vote up conversations that are interesting and vote down conversation that are juvenile or spam. This system really seems to improve the conversation and get interesting topics to the top of the lists.

Some responders respond more quickly than other and some conversations have been proven to be false, but a good majority of the content is accurate and very interesting.

One word of warning though is that it can definitely be a big time sink. Sometimes you can get involved in threads of conversation and realize the you’ve been reading about other people’s lives for an hour.

If you are willing to take that risk, however, it is definitely an interesting place to check and learn about your fellow humans.

Any questions? AMA in the comments.

If You’ve Got Unlimited Texts…Use Them

Followers of this blog know that I am not a fan of text messages or more specifically the crazy rates cell phone companies charge for them. These 160-character (and by the way, when’s the last time you got a 160-character message from someone) communiqués can cost 20 cents a message.

However, some people have avoided this problem by getting unlimited text messaging. One option to take advantage of this is to send and receive massive amounts of messages, but that doesn’t show much creativity. One way to really take advantage of unlimited texting is a new service called DotGo, which I heard about here from the good folks at technologizer.com.

DotGo allows you to send the domain name of a website in a text message to them. The top-level domain (e.g. .com, .org. .edu) will determine the number that what number you use for the text message. The number is actually spelled out using the letter values on the number pad, (DOTCOM address go to the number 368266.) which makes it easy to remember.

You are then sent a text message with a description of how to interact with the website you’ve entered. When you use this website techeap.com, you’ll get a list of the last ten blog posts (in 3 separate messages) and if you wanted to read any of them you would just reply with the number for that entry. Dotgo would then send you a series of text messages until the whole article is sent.

While this may not be the most efficient way to read a website, many other website are much more optimized to use this technology. If you use enter Google or Yahoo and a search term, DotGo will return some of the top hits. There is a simulator on their website, but it was not working for me when I tried it.

One very useful integration for me was with NJTransit. You simply send them the message NJTransit and the locations you want to go between, (for example “njtransit nypenn woodbridge”) and they will send you back a schedule of trains.

Some queries got returned faster than others and my tests were mostly done during off-hours, but the service was pretty speedy overall. While this certainly will not replace browsing on a web-enabled cell phone, if you don’t have an advanced phone and you need a way to get information, this may be exactly what you need.

The service is free, but some of the sites it has integrated with will have ads embedded at the end of messages about them. They promise and I haven’t gotten any spam or other unrequested messages from them. All of the tests I did, did not have any ads, but I’m sure that will change as the service matures.

Is this something that you might use? Let me know in the comments.

On-line Life After Real Life Death

I’m going a bit off the beaten track today after I saw an interesting article in Time about what happens to your on-line accounts after you die.

This was certainly a wake-up call for me when I consider how much of my life is secured behind passwords and other security features. Time reports that both Hotmail and G-mail will allow you a CD of the deceased’s e-mails, but doesn’t seem to allow actual access. Facebook will either take down a profile, or create a memorial profile that only users friends can access. Flickr will lock families out of any images marked private.

The main thing to take away from this is that each site has its own methods of dealing with the digital assets of the deceased, so this should be part of anyone’s planning for their death.

A number of sites, as described in the MSNBC article, have started to help people prepare for their death. One site, Deathswitch, which seems like a disaster waiting to happen, will send out a notice to predetermined e-mail addresses in the event you haven’t checked in on the site that week. A more reasonable system might be Slightly Morbid, which will alert your designated people, when family members let the site know.

I think in my case I’m considering including a sealed envelope of instructions along with my will for access to these accounts. In this case, a low-tech solution may be the best answer to a high-tech problem.

What are your thoughts and have you done any digital death planning? Leave them in the comments.

Free ISPs, Please

I’ve been a long-time member of Internet service provider (ISP) Netzero (and their sister company Juno). Basically, since my days out of college to today, I’ve had them in my bag of tricks. In the early days, I had upgraded to the “premium plan” and used dial-up as my primary way to access the Internet. Those were sad slow days, but they were also cheaper days than with the cable company plan that I have now.

However, after I upgraded to a real connection, I did keep Netzero around. Why? Because they have a free service available for dial-up. It serves as a wonderful back-up if I’m at a hotel or visiting family that doesn’t have Internet access and I need to get my fix.

I was reminded of this when I saw a blog post from makeuseof.com for all-free-isp.com. The way this site work is basically as a search engine for dial-up spots in any give city or area code. You type in the data and it will spit out a list of free ISPs in that area, what systems they are compatible with, and even reviews of the services. It’s a pretty useful site.

The other option is to try and find free wi-fi in your area. The best site for that is http://www.wififreespot.com/. I’ve used this site a few time to help people who needed to get to wi-fi quickly. Unfortunately, it basically only provides a list of location. While this is useful, I’d love to see this implemented on to something like Google Maps.

On this site, you simply click on the state that you want and out pops a list. You are probably best off using the find function on your browser to type in the city that you are looking for, and then you’ll find a list. While it isn’t the most technically advanced site, I’ve found the information to be pretty accurate and helpful. The site claimed on its blog that it has increased its database by 5,000 hotspots in just the first half of 2009, so it has a pretty impressive collection.

Anybody have their own tricks for getting on the net? Let me know in the comments.

Note: This post is coming out early this week, since I’ll be out of town this weekend. This will probably happen a couple more times this summer, so I hope you won’t be too upset with the break up of continuity.

Yale and Berkeley at a Techeap Price

I loved getting my college education, however, I did not love (and still don’t love) paying the bills for it. So what’s a good way to get some of the benefits of a college education without cashing out for thousands of dollars?

On-line lecture series. (Isn’t it interesting that the plural of series is series? No? OK, then.)

There are a variety of sources to get on-line lectures, with the most obvious being at Youtube. My favorite, however, is AcademicEarth.org. The site is very well-designed and easy to navigate. You can search for a particular topic you are interested in, or browse through a series of different subject areas, schools, or professors.

The most impressive part of the site is the quality of the instruction. Professors from Yale, Berkeley, MIT and more have entire courses available for you to listen to or watch.

This is where another great design move pays off. They have RSS feeds of the lectures in both video and audio format. You can just pop them into your everyday RSS reader and just pull off the next lecture as you finish the previous one. The organization is stellar and I found a breeze to get through the technical part of using the site to the actual content.

I listened to the class on economic game theory from Yale’s Benjamin Polak, and was very impressed. How much you get out of the class. of course, depends on what you put in. I did not, however, buy the books or do any out of lecture reading assignments. I basically just listened to the lectures and thought about them during the day.

I found an amazing amount of applicability to this particular class in my every day life, though. For example, there was a leak in the ceiling of my apartment.  I would call the superintendent every couple of days to see that it would get fixed. For weeks this went on and nothing happened. It was only when I started calling and visiting his family every day, or to use the economic terms, when I added costs to the delay of fixing my ceiling and improved his payoffs, that he actually came to fix it.

While this is a pretty simple example, if you decided to listen to this particular course,  I think you’ll find a lot of application in your life like I did. It is pretty friendly to people who are uncomfortable with math. There isn’t a lot of it in the course, and in the lectures, you can safely ignore or skip over the sections that deal with the theory behind the examples.

So for a college experience that may not be so different from what many graduates actually did in college, check out AcademicEarth.org.

If you have any great sites for learning or education, just throw them in the comments.

Birthday Greetings

I suspect this will be a shorter post than usually as I am just coming off a birthday celebration yesterday. I did think that this would be a good time to discuss free on-line tools related to birthdays.

There are a lot of sites that claim to offer free on-line birthday cards, but I find the one that works best for me is 123Greetings.com. The only thing you really need to have is an e-mail address, and you can always use the temporary one that I’ve suggested previously here on Techeap.

There is advertising on the site, but all of the cards are available. There are a number of sites that only offer a few cards for free and charge for the rest. It’s disappointing to have your heart set on the perfect card and then realizing it is going to cost you some money to actually send it.

My other suggestion for you is a reminder service, so that you can actually send those e-cards in time. I’ve tried Alerts.com, which didn’t exactly me floor me with the service. Amazon also offers reminders with items attached that you may want to get for the person’s birthday.

Another possible service that may work for you is Facebook. When you sign-up, one of the pieces of information usually included is a person’s birth day. Facebook will remind you when a person’s birthday is coming up, but that requires that both of you be members and friends with each other.

Another option, of course, is using a calendar service like Google Calendar and inserting your friend’s and family’s birthdays in there.

Do you have any other ideas or tools for birthdays? Let me know in the comments.