Google Transit Trip Planner Adds 5 New Cities

Wednesday Google announced that 5 new cities had been added to it's Transit Trip Planner. In addition to Portland Oregon, the new cities include: Eugene OR, Honolulu Hawaii, Pittsburgh PA, Seattle WA, and Tampa FL.

With Transit you can use Google to plan trips using public transportation, and in some cities, compare the cost of public transportation with the cost of driving. You can also specify when you want to leave or arrive, and see different route possibilities.

Create PDF Files for Free

PDFCreator by pdfforge is a free tool to create PDF files from nearly any Windows application.

Medical Image Database

MedPix™ is a free online Medical Image Database, provided by the Departments of Radiology and Biomedical Informatics, Uniformed Services University, Bethesda, MD. All public content is peer-reviewed by an Editorial Panel.

Music Discovery Service

"Pandora is a music discovery service designed to help you find and enjoy music that you'll love. It's powered by the Music Genome Project, the most comprehensive analysis of music ever undertaken. Just tell us one of your favorite songs or artists and we'll launch a streaming station to explore that part of the music universe."

Pandora takes your input (artists, songs) and feedback ("I like this", "I don't like this") and uses the Music Genome Project to create stations that play songs that are musically similar to what you've told them.

Released earlier this summer, Pandora Backstage is a searchable database with information on various artists and their music.

Another more inclusive searchable music database is AllMusic.com.

Most reliable search tool could be your librarian

"Your child wants to learn more about Martin Luther King Jr. You might consider consulting a librarian instead of Google, AOL or Microsoft search engines." -- Elinor Mills, CNET News.com

WikiBooks -- Free Open-Content Textbooks

A collection of editable (Wikimedia) books on a variety of topics, some available as downloadable PDFs from the folks who gave us Wikipedia. Click here to go to the All Books page.

Free e-Textbooks and Study Aids

"Freeload Press, Inc. is liberating the textbook so students from all financial backgrounds can use these important learning tools."

"We publish and distribute premium textbooks from the best authors in their respective fields. We then deliver our textbooks using an innovative combination of commercial support and direct fulfillment. This allows us to provide the textbook as a free e-book. Print versions are also available for reasonable prices – typically 65% less than competitive textbooks!"

American Folklore and Folktales Website

"This folklore site contains retellings of American folktales, Native American myths and legends, tall tales, weather folklore and ghost stories from each and every one of the 50 United States. You can read about all sorts of famous characters like Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, Daniel Boone, and many more." -- Sandy Schlosser, American Folklore creator and author.

Designing e-Learning Courses

Michael Feldstein (SUNY Learning Network) and Lisa Neal (e-Learn Magazine) have written Designing Usable, Self-Paced e-Learning Courses: A Practical Guide.

If you are planning to develop e-Learning courses this is an excellent place to start.

Mathcasts: Math themed screencasts

Mathcasts.org was created to give students a library of math tutorials and problem solutions and to give teachers a place to share their methods for teaching & learn from others. It's also a place where students & teachers can contribute and organize sets of movies for others or themselves to use.

Votes Database

Washingtonpost.com's U.S. Congress Votes Database, is a deep database of every vote in the United States Congress since the 102nd Congress (1991). It lets you browse votes in a variety of ways -- both in aggregate and for individual members of Congress.

Browse the database by drilling down to a particular Congress (e.g. 109th Congress) or particular member (e.g. 109th Congress senators).

This site publishes an RSS feed of recent votes by each member of Congress, and a feed of the most recent votes in both chambers. See the RSS page for full details.

This site is generally updated every day, although there is a delay between a vote in Congress and its appearance on the official Congress Web sites.

Moscow's Rising Skyline

A slew of new structures—including Europe’s tallest building—are sprouting up around the Kremlin to form a modern backdrop in Russia’s capital.

Congress Looks at P2P in Academia

"College students: while they excel at both binge drinking and mumps-spreading, they're also voracious media consumers. Like the python which can distend itself to eat an entire deer, college students show an almost unlimited appetite for music and movies, so much so that they are Public Enemy no. 1 on the entertainment industry's Most Wanted poster." -- Nate Anderson (Ars Technica)

Cable TV Without a Tuner - Free HBO, Fox On Your PC

"With the beta release of the TVU Player, you can get live Digital cable, streaming over the Internet to your PC, for FREE. Watch HBO, Disney, FOX, ABC, all the big networks and more for no charge!" -- Digg

Sony e-Book Reader To Ship Next Week

"Sony's long-rumored next-generation e-book reader has now been officially announced with expected availability on October 1, coinciding with the opening of Sony's online e-book store and its 10,000 books from the six largest publishers in the US." -- Ars Technica

Software makers learn that improving disability access helps everyone

Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system offers several ways for people with disabilities to tweak the software. Problem is, very few people know about them. That is about to change.

The Pensacola Jr. College LRC has a text-only web site that meets ADA standards for web site accessibility.

Beautiful Music!

Talented 14 year old classical guitarist plays Paganini.

Free on iTunes: Battlestar Galactica - The Story So Far

With the premiere of Season 3 just two weeks away (October 6th), Sci-Fi Network has released a free retrospective episode of the first two seasons of Battlestar Galactica in hopes of enticing new viewers, as well as reminding current fans just where the series left off -- Macenstein

Intel announces plans to launch 4-core microprocessor in late 2006

"Intel Corp. plans to begin shipping microprocessors that have four computing engines on a single chip... The first chip, the Intel Core 2 Extreme quad-core processor, will be available in November." -- Northwest Florida Daily News (9/26/06)

Create Custom Paper CD Case

Use this website to create a PDF file which can be printed and folded to create a paper CD case.

A Swarm of Angels: P2P Powered Film Model

"A Swarm of Angels is a project that aims to create the first community driven film. The Film will be written, funded and distributed over the Internet. The plan is to gather a group of 50.000 people who each contribute £25 ($47.5) to join the project." -- TorrentFreak

Collaborative Notes Site By Students For Students

NoteMesh is a website that allows students in the same class to collaboratively build a definitive set of lecture notes for that class. Miss a lecture? Misunderstood the key concept? Need to fill out your notes? Why not work with others in your class to create a definitive set of lecture notes that everyone can use?

Google Calendar Launches New Features

Updates include weather forecasts, moon phases, and support for 17 new languages.

How to Cut Your Tech Bills

"You like chatting online and you spend too much time on YouTube. You're addicted to your cellphone. And what's a Sunday night without HBO? But even if you're tied to your Internet, phone and TV services, you can still find ways to pay less for them." -- Dan Frommer (Forbes.com)

Free Pizza From Google

Computer Science students can become a Google Ambassador and get free pizza. Requirements include a one year commitment, good study habits and pizza eating skills.

Is a Picture Worth a Thousand Words?

Picture-History.com has compiled a collection of thousands of the most important photographs of the last 150 years. Browse the images by Theme, or use the search tool to find a picture or period of interest.

Visualize Size Differences with Sizeasy

Sizeasy is a visualization tool designed to give you an idea of how big something is.

College Life By the Numbers

"As colleges reopen, here's a statistical snapshot of life on campus – from tuition costs to faculty politics – without any calculus thrown in." -- Christian Science Monitor 9/13/06 edition

Maps - Satelite, Street and Theme Maps from National Geographic

Great map tool from National Geographic.

Free Consumer Information Publications

"The Consumer Information Catalog is made available through the Federal Citizen Information Center and includes 200 free or very cheap (as in one dollar) publications on consumer issues. For example: Medicare Prescription Drug Coverage: What You Need to Know and Introduction to Mutual Funds. Many of these would be useful to have in your libraries in your consumer resources section."

"To get a free copy of the catalog of materials, do one of three things:
Visit www.pueblo.gsa.gov to order a Catalog, or to read or print these and hundreds of other Federal publications for free."

"Send your name and address to Consumer Information Catalog, Pueblo, Colorado 81009.
Call toll-free 1 (888) 8 PUEBLO. That's 1 (888) 878-3256, weekdays 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Eastern Time." -- (LibrarianInBlack Sept. 18, 2006)

University of California: Calisphere Website

This free Web site [www.calisphere.universityofcalifornia.edu] offers educators, students, and the public access to more than 150,000 images, documents and other primary source materials from the libraries and museums of the UC campuses and cultural heritage organizations across California.

Search the Web Offline

"Webaroo is a free software program and service that lets you search and browse real web pages without a connection. Webaroo's advanced technology makes it simple for you to take the web with you -- and find what you are looking for anywhere anytime."

New Shakespeare Search Engine

Shakespeare Searched is a search engine designed to provide quick access to passages from Shakespeare's plays and sonnets. We cluster search results by topic, work, and character to make it easy to find exactly what you're looking for.

Another good Shakespeare resource is Open Source Shakespeare

The 46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities

There are a lot of great freeware products out there. Many are as good or even better than their commercial alternatives.

Video Closeup of the New MicroSoft Zune Player

A video showing some of the features of the Zune Player. Rumored release date Nov. 14, 2006.

Some Zune specs are available at the Zune Virtual Pressroom

Check out these promo videos at ComingZune.com

500 Greatest Albums Of All Time

Rolling Stone's 500 greatest albums of all time.

Essential Yahoo Search Shortcuts from A to Z

"Using Yahoo Open Search Shortcuts (OSS) you can turn Yahoo into the ultimate "one box" search tool. You won't need to go anywhere else to search your favorite sites - even Google or MSN Search." -- (Steve Rubel)

Lost City of Chernobyl Picture Tour

Photos of the abandoned city of Chernobyl made by Alexandr Vikulov while on a tour of the city.

Google Earth Gets Featured Content

"Today, Google announced the addition of Featured Content for Google Earth, which consists of multimedia overlays from different content providers." -- (Ars Technica)

Get Google Earth

Researchers: 'extremely serious' vulnerabilities in e-voting machines

In a paper published on the Web today, a group of Princeton computer scientists said they created demonstration vote-stealing software that can be installed within a minute on a common electronic voting machine. The software can fraudulently change vote counts without being detected.

Google Launches Banned Book History Site

"Google Book Search is our effort to expand the universe of books you can discover, and this year we're joining libraries and bookstores across the country to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Banned Books Week – a nationwide initiative to help people learn about and explore banned books. You can start by browsing these 42 classics – books we couldn't be more pleased to highlight."

Breathing Earth

Breathing Earth displays a simulation of the carbon dioxide emission levels of every country in the world, as well as their birth and death rates - all in real time.

Introducing LibraryThing

Catalog your own books online, set up your own personal library, connect with people who read the same things you do, get recommendations, etc. You can enter up to 200 books for free. To enter umlimited quanties it is $10 a year or $25 for a lifetime.

New iPods now, Apple iTV coming in early 2007

Ars Technica reports on the new offerings announced yesterday by Apple.

Windows Live Search Service Leaves Beta

Microsoft Corp. today announced the release from beta of Live Search and of Live.com in 47 markets worldwide, and final availability of Live Local Search in the U.K. and the U.S. Microsoft also announced that Live Search will now power the Web search capability on MSN®, the company’s media and entertainment portal, attracting more than 465 million unique users worldwide per month.

By using Live.com as their personal search home page, customers can harness the power of Live Search to find, customize and track news, images, video, RSS feeds and blogs across the Web. They can try it at http://www.live.com.

Ground Zero, Freedom Tower Rises

Wired News article on the new Freedom Tower that will replace the destroyed World Trade Center. Some great pics are included.

EasySchoolSearch.com

A freely browsable database of over 130,000 US public and private elementary and secondary schools with grades kindergarten through twelve.

The data provided includes characteristics such as school size, school level, geographic region, community type, program emphasis, and, where available, other data such as religious orientation and association membership. Schools are mapped using Google Maps.

British Literature Resource

BritLit is a great website about British literature, useful for teachers and students. Many authors are covered, with texts, sample assignments, teacher's notes, readings of the texts, and interviews with the authors. The focus is on resources for high schoolers, but a small number of resources for middle school and primary school are available as well. It's a small collection, but what is there is very, very useful. -- (Librarian-in-Black)

Web 2.0 Bible

eBible, a free web 2.0 site with "live" searching of the Bible, commentaries and references is out of beta and open to the public. -- (Digg)

Amazon Kindle: Meet Amazon's e-Book Reader

Say hello to the Amazon Kindle, their take on a book reader device that comes equipped with a 6-inch 800 x 600 display (which we can only assume is e-ink), 256MB internal storage, smallish two-thumb keyboard cursor bar, scroll wheel, standard mini USB port, 3.5mm headphone jack, SD slot, and get this: EV-DO data! -- Engagdet

Airport Wireless Internet Access Guide

A definitive, comprehensive guide to airport wireless connections in the USA. Which airports offer wifi, who offers it and how much is it.

FineTune: Create Your Own Playlist, Listen, Share with Others.

FineTune is a web based service that lets you create playlists that you like, listen to them online and share it with your friends. You can choose from 2 million sound tracks that already in Finetune library.

Surf Guitar Versions of Classical Themes (MP3)

Here's the great Japanese guitarist Takeshi Terauchi with his band The Bunnys adding the fuzz to eleven well known classical themes from his LP, Let's Go Classics.

Big in Japan Right Now: The Tarako Cupie Girls

Watch them if you dare.

Electoral-Vote.com Returns For 2006 Elections

"In the 2004 Presidential race, the website electoral-vote.com tracked individual state polls, providing a map of the changing political scene. The map, updated daily, was a phenomenal success. The site is back for the 2006 Congressional elections. It is providing descriptions of the top 40 House races, and all 33 Senate races, as well as valuable information for prospective voters." -- (SlashDot.com)

Useful Reference Sites From VirtualChase

"LEGAL RESEARCH GUIDE: Finding Facts from Virtualchase is a
compilation of electronic reference sites. Some of the sites included
here are: Airport & City Code Converter, helps to convert airport or
city codes to airport or city names and vice versa. It also provides
market data including the number of domestic markets served, the daily
average number of passengers, the average price of a one-way fare, and
the daily average number of miles flown. Another site City Search
(Find a County) provides a utility for looking up counties by city. Enter
a city name to find a list of matching counties. Alternatively, you can
display all cities within a state and the counties in which they reside.
If you follow the link for the county name, the utility displays a list
of all cities within the county." -- (LIS News)

Why the iPod Is Losing It's Cool

"The iPod, the digital music player beloved of everyone from Coldplay's Chris Martin to President George Bush, is in danger of losing its sheen."

YouTube To iPod

There have been several programs that promise to grab Youtube videos,convert and import them into iTunes but then pull a fast one and ask you to pay for a license. iTube and PodTube do all the work for free.

One is for Windows, the other for Mac OS X.

The Best Web-Based Computer Applications

Welcome, boys and girls, to the computing world of tomorrow! Desktop programs are a thing of the past, replaced by free, simple, Web-based apps that do everything from spreadsheets to e-mail--and more!

Philadelphia Opens High-Tech School of the Future

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - Philadelphia on Thursday opened a public high school where students work on wireless laptops, teachers eschew traditional subjects for real-world topics and parents can track their child's work on the Internet.

Called "The School of the Future" and created with help from software giant Microsoft ..., it is believed to be the first in the world to combine innovative teaching methods with the latest technology, all housed in an environmentally friendly building.

Read another article about the school from CNN.

Amazon Unbox Download Store Opens

"Shows may be purchased or rented. For purchases, TV episodes are $1.99, most movies are between $8 and $15, some are $20. Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing is $36. Rentals are $1.99 or $2.99."

"Videos may not be burned to DVD (other than as backup - they will not play in a DVD player. Also, for rentals, you must view a video within 30 days of downloading it, and within 24 hours of beginning to watch it."

Online Alarm Clock Can Be Used At Any Computer

A very simple Web Application that can be used on any computer (with Flash installed) and with any browser. A good app for a student in a computer lab who needs to get to class on time.

Gamers Generation Have a Different Approach to Learning


Will Wright explains how games are unleashing the human imagination.

Kids and Tech: How Much is Too Much?

As technology creeps into more and more areas of consumers' everyday lives, the risk of overexposure to gadgets, content, games and high-tech services rises. How much is too much?

A Simple Guide to Understanding and Buying Printers

Of Zen and Computing presents a good guide to understanding and buying printers.

Google News to Offer Archive Search




"Google is expanding its controversial Google News service with a searchable archive that spans articles from the past 200 years.
The Google News Archive Search, which launched today, will allow consumers to find articles on historical events of interest - such as the England 1966 World Cup win or President Kennedy's assassination - that were written at the time.
Searches can be expanded to show coverage from a time period, or be narrowed to articles from a particular publication." -- Guardian Unlimited

Play retro video games online. Asteroids, Donkey Kong, Duck Hunt, Frogger, Moon Patrol, Pac Man, Pong, Simon, Space Invaders, Star Castle, Tetris, and Tic Tac Toe.

Satellite Images of Earth at Night

Undoctored satellite images of earth taken at night.

Steve Irwin's Career 1962 -- 2006 (Photo Gallery)

A look back at Australian wildlife warrior Steve Irwin's career in photos.

Google Labs Releases Tesseract OCR Into Open Source

Google has announced the release of the Tesseract OCR engine into Open Source. It was originally developed by Hewlett Packard Laboratories between 1985 and 1995. It is touted as one of the top OCR performers. Tesseract is available for free download from SourceForge.

New Yorker Magazine's Entire Archive Available On Hard Disk

The New Yorker magazine announces the release of The New Yorker’s entire archive, February, 1925 - April, 2006, on a palm-sized portable hard drive. Over 4,000 issues are included with room for future updates.

The U. S. Edge in Education

"Even as they welcome students back to campus, our country's colleges and universities are deluded by their own historical excellence, and their many contributions to U.S. strength may be eroding. That, at least, is how a special commission of the U.S. Education Department sees it."

Read the Washington Post article on U. S. education by Richard Brodhead, President of Duke University.

And the Best Anti-Virus Is ...

What is the best anti-virus available? Virus.gr tested the leading anti-virus programs and here are the results.

Free Printable Highway Travel Guides

Got an upcoming road trip planned? Check out MileByMile.com's bonanza of free, printable highway travel guides for the US, Canada, and Mexico.

Just pick where you'd like to go and click; you'll see the most popular scenic drives with pictorial detail and .pdf routes for download. Not all locations have a ton of detail (Mexico seems to be lacking a bit), but overall it's a good resource.— Wendy Boswell

The Size of Our World

Want to feel REALLY small. Check out this website.

Apple Store Fifth Ave: Virtual Tour

Take a 360 degree QuickTime virtual tour of the Apple Fifth Ave. Store in New York City.

Browzar does not require any installation or registration and does not save information from any websites visited while using it. Cache, history, cookies and auto-complete forms are all automatically deleted, protecting your privacy while online.

According to users, web sites may load slower when using Browzar.