Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
Most mobile users are interested in knowing just how well their battery is faring. On the Mac, a great (and thankfully, free) option is a utility called coconutBattery.
This small and unobtrusive utility tells you the easy stuff, like what the current battery charge is (in milliamp hours, or mAh) and whether the battery is currently charging or not. But it also gives you some interesting information, like the maximum battery charge & current battery capacity (basically the same thing), and original battery capacity, all in mAh.
It also tells you how old your Mac is, and how many battery loadcycles it has gone through - all good stuff in helping determine whether your battery is performing as it ought to given its age.
If you can't keep your hands off your nephew's Mr. Potato Head, you might enjoy playing with monoface from the PR firm mono (lowercase "m" intentional). It's a Flash-based application that allows you to mix and match various facial features from a number of real-life people to make interesting and sometimes hilarious results. The blending between the various features is mostly fantastic, with only the occasional face that ends up looking like a real cut-and-paste job.
It's not really clear what this is good for, other than wasting time - but since that's the point of this post, waste away!
Do you find yourself frequently searching a site, and annoyed that you can't search it directly from Firefox's search box like you can with Google, Yahoo and the other default search providers? It turns out there's a way to add the ability to simply add a search provider to the Firefox search box with the click of a mouse. You just need the Add to Search Bar Firefox Add-On, pointed out by Lifehacker.
Using the extension is as simple as right-clicking in the search box on the page that you'd like to add to Firefox, and choosing "Add to Search Bar..." from the context menu. As soon as you've done that, the new search provider will show up in Firefox ready to be used.
Watching our friends play SimCity on their Nintendo DSes got so frustrating that we finally went out looking to see if there's a free version that can be downloaded. We didn't get that far, however, because a quick trip to Wikipedia informed us that Maxis - the original publisher of SimCity - offers a version of SimCity Classic that you can play online.
Unfortunately, it looks like this has been up for a really long time, as evidenced by the following error you are greeted with if you visit the site with a Firefox browser:
SimCity Classic Live requires Windows 95/98 or Windows NT with either Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 or higher or Netscape Communcator/Navigator 4.0 or higher.
So your choices for popular modern browsers boil down to IE, and well, that's it. Oh, and the other big downside is that to play the game, you have to register giving a username, your first and last name, and a valid email address. And you have to consent to some legal mumbo-jumbo that we didn't read... you should probably read it and let us know if we owe Maxis our first born.
Game play is just as you remembered it - classic and bare-bones, but in full color glory. And it's still really hard.
Have you ever wondered how many diseases there are in the world right at this moment? Wondered to the extent that you would like it broken down into noncommunicable diseases, and infectious diseases? How about how many injuries of the various most common types (traffic accidents, falls, drownings, poisonings, etc) or how many deaths have happened?
The World Clock at Poodwaddle is a little different than your average world clock. This one attempts to estimate a whole bunch of statistics calculated based on recent estimates. You can control the time frame you are looking at - either year to present, or maybe just this hour... it's up to you.
It seems like the kinds of things that have large bodies of statistics available to put together a project like this are all quite morbid. Or maybe it was a conscious decision on the part of the developer to make us think a bit more. In any event, it's kind of creepy.
Google's long-rumored and eagerly anticipated PowerPoint clone has finally shipped. Although we've only had a chance to have a first look, here are some impressions:
Google has done a very good job of making this new Presentation application (based on code from Zenter) fit in with Docs and Spreadsheets. It looks right at home, and the functionality is about what you would expect from another Google App. File versioning and collaboration functions work exactly like they do for Docs and Spreadsheets, which is to say just fine.
Google Reader has become a very popular RSS Reader, but despite being a Google property has ironically never contained any baked-in search functionality. It seems this little cloud has been hanging heavy over the Reader team, and they've finally done something about it.
Good news! They've done a heckuva great job on it. The search field contains a drop-down list allowing you to search on all of your feeds, or within a specific folder, or even within one specific subscription. And of course you can search either your starred or shared posts.
Once you've entered a search term, a green border shows up around the main content area in Reader to signify that you are are viewing search results. There is also a tab added to the top right of the interface so that you can switch between your search results and your regular Expanded or List views.
The typical Google Reader Ajaxy goodness is there too, so you can scroll down your search results to your heart's content, and more results will continually load at the bottom.
Finally. A search feature from Google. What took you so long?
Ahh, the days before cell phones. It used to be that when your favorite rock band broke into their heart-wrenching power ballads, everyone would pull out their lighters and wave them above their heads. These days, the beautiful warm glow of actual fire has been replaced by the cold, hard glow of cell phone screens.
Well it's time to stand up and fight fire using fire. Or, something like that. If waving your cell phone over your head just doesn't feel as good as burning your fingers by holding your lighter's flame on for a 6 minute song, consider navigating your phone's browser to Rock Lighter. There you will find the last flickering flame of yester-year, immortalized in all of its digital glory.
Man, oh man. If ever there were a time waster with a name that could evoke innuendo and double-entendre, it's one called Balls. It's excruciatingly difficult not to comment about playing with them or that this game scratches a real itch. Staying strong, we'll steer well clear of commentary like that.
Balls is a very simple game in which you play the part of a little grey ball, trying to touch a large hollow ball until it disappears. Complicating matters is the black ball, which chases you and when it catches you, makes your small grey ball grow. This in turn makes it harder to evade the black ball, and the walls which are continuously closing in on you. The game simply repeats over and over again with this simple formula, making it seem a bit like a bad dream. But somehow it's an enjoyable and addictive bad dream. Try it and you'll see what we mean.
When we told you about the new Google Sky feature in the latest version of Google Earth, what we didn't know is that this version actually contains an Easter Egg, of sorts. It turns out that if you press Ctrl-Alt-A on a PC, or Command-Option-A on a Mac (making sure that the focus is not in a text field), you'll enable a flight simulator. It's not particularly well hidden, and once you've successfully flown one of the planes it actually shows up as an option on the Tools menu in Google Earth, but still it's a pretty cool feature.
In fact, it's one of those "why didn't we think of it?" types of features. It seems obvious to use Google's satellite imagery and on-the-fly (sorry for the pun) map loading technology in the context of a flight sim.
So, what is the experience like? Better than you might expect. You get the choice of flying either an F16 jet or an SR22 prop plane, with the obvious speed difference. The controls are pretty delicate and difficult to master, particularly on a keyboard. It appears that Google Earth actually supports joystick input for the flight sim mode, although we haven't had a chance to try it yet. Most of the world's biggest airports are represented in the list of starting spots, but you can also choose to start at the current position you were viewing in Google Earth before invoking the flight sim mode.
Before taking to the sky, it is worth reading through the Flight Simulator Keyboard Controls, but if all you want to do is get off the ground, press Page Up repeatedly then press the Down Arrow key a few time as the plane's velocity increases. This will effectively pull back on the plane's joystick and vault you into the air. Good luck!
Ugh - just as fast and hot as the love affair started, it is starting to fizzle. Facebook opened its doors to add-on apps, and while we just can't wait to be invited to become a zombie, pirate, or post on YAFW (yet another Facebook wall), enough is enough already.
If you're feeling Facebook App Overload (we're thinking of copyrighting that term... no, not really), then you need the Facebook Profile Cleaner Greasemonkey script.
In our testing, the Facebook Profile Cleaner does a fantastic job of getting rid of all of the gunk. Maybe, in fact, too good. It seems like some parts of Facebook itself are also getting blocked (most notably the mini-feed), but if you're like us and totally overwhelmed with nonsense on Facebook, maybe this "less is more" approach is worth considering.
Thanks to Lifehacker for pointing out this lifesaver.
If you have a Mac with a remote (and almost all of them ship with one these days), you might have been slightly dismayed to realize that other than controlling media playback there's not a lot you can do with it. As usual, someone has solved this problem.
iRed Lite is a little utility that you can run on your Mac that will listen to commands from your remote and control other programs, like iPhoto, Keynote, PowerPoint, or basically anything else you choose. In our experience configuration can be a little finicky (we never did get the Mouse Control plugin to work properly), but overall it performs as advertised in its current beta state.
Not to generalize too terribly badly, but if you have young kids then you probably have some damaged CDs around your house. If they happen to be important data disks, you may be able to recover some of the data from them using ISOPuzzle.
Don't be put off by the very basic landing page; ISOPuzzle is a nifty little utility that will take whatever readable data that is on a disk, and dump it into an ISO disk image file, which can be opened using a number of tools. Of course, if the damage is severe, don't get your hopes up too much. It's not going to magically read or piece together missing information. If it's gone, it's gone. But what it will do is allow you to access the rest of the data on the disk to see if there is anything useful still available.
Most laptop computers have a microphone built in, allowing you to use voice chatting applications like Skype or Google Chat without a headset. Unfortunately, it sounds pretty terrible when you do this. Although this tip isn't going to replace just using a decent headset, it will make the sound more bearable to the person on the other end of the line.
Since you have stereo speakers on your laptop, what you want to do is identify where the microphone is located. If it's in the middle, you're basically screwed; there's nothing we can do for you. But if it's to one side as many are, all you do is set your computer's audio balance to only play audio out of the speaker that is furthest from the microphone, as pointed out by LifeClever.
Of course, while you might not have a headset handy, you can probably get a set of headphones. Using headphones instead of your computer's speakers will help immensely, and you may well find that you can use the microphone in your laptop for chatting.
Momentum Missle Mayhem is a Flash-based arcade shooter with a funky physics concept and great action. You play the part of the Gravity Launcher, which is basically a fixed structure. You can shoot out different projectiles in a slingshot fashion, and hit the attacking machines and either damage them, or push them around. The goal is to defend the left side of the screen from the waves of attackers coming from the right.
Of course there are all sorts of upgrades available as you move on, giving you different weapons to deploy and the ability to use some alternative strategies. One tip when you're getting started is to note that more damage is caused by the attackers colliding with the sides of the arena or even each other than by taking direct hits. So it's valuable to aim as if you're playing pool - make the attacking machines bounce into each other, and you'll cause far more damage.
Most mobile users are interested in knowing just how well their battery is faring. On the Mac, a great (and thankfully, free) option is a utility called coconutBattery. 
If you can't keep your hands off your nephew's Mr. Potato Head, you might enjoy playing with 
Have you ever wondered how many diseases there are in the world right at this moment? Wondered to the extent that you would like it broken down into noncommunicable diseases, and infectious diseases? How about how many injuries of the various most common types (traffic accidents, falls, drownings, poisonings, etc) or how many deaths have happened? 
Ahh, the days before cell phones. It used to be that when your favorite rock band broke into their heart-wrenching power ballads, everyone would pull out their lighters and wave them above their heads. These days, the beautiful warm glow of actual fire has been replaced by the cold, hard glow of cell phone screens. 
Man, oh man. If ever there were a time waster with a name that could evoke innuendo and double-entendre, it's one called 
Ugh - just as fast and hot as the love affair started, it is starting to fizzle. Facebook opened its doors to add-on apps, and while we just can't wait to be invited to become a zombie, pirate, or post on YAFW (yet another Facebook wall), enough is enough already. 
If you have a Mac with a remote (and almost all of them ship with one these days), you might have been slightly dismayed to realize that other than controlling media playback there's not a lot you can do with it. As usual, someone has solved this problem. 
Not to generalize too terribly badly, but if you have young kids then you probably have some damaged CDs around your house. If they happen to be important data disks, you may be able to recover some of the data from them using 
Most laptop computers have a microphone built in, allowing you to use voice chatting applications like Skype or Google Chat without a headset. Unfortunately, it sounds pretty terrible when you do this. Although this tip isn't going to replace just using a decent headset, it will make the sound more bearable to the person on the other end of the line. 
