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Tech: Fun Science/Tech Projects – MakeZine

http://www.makezine.com

MakeZine is a companion site to Make Magazine.  Its a resource to find out how to make fun science, tech, and other kinds of do it yourself projects that allow our minds to wander outside of the drudgery of day to day tasks. If you ever have to deal with kids, this site has plenty of activities to keep them entertained.  They profile projects that are shared by other make groups and you can also purchase kits if you are interested in building one of their featured projects such as a blubber bot. The blubber bot is an inflatable helium bot which responds to cell phone signals by singing and dancing.  When you are searching through projects, you will be directed to the Instructables site.  The projects are sorted by category, popularity, and most recent.

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Tech: Too much time on your hands? – Hack A Day

http://www.hackaday.com

Hack A Day is a blog zine which provides coverage of various unconventional tips and instructions on putting together a cool device, software, or retrofitting various mainstream equipment to serve your purposes.  So if you want to build a fembot or manbot to cater to your every need, they might have something for you.  Its an entertaining site especially with some of the crazy hacks like converting a Roomba into a poster printer or a wii remote firefighting bot.  The wii remote firefighting bot uses the bluetooth transceiver to communicate back and forth with the host computer which controls it.    If you successfully build one of the hacks, you can brag to your buddies and up your IQ points by a few thousand. There’s quite a bit of postings on building robots, some can be quite sophisicated but don’t expect to build a robot like ASIMO.  There’s also plenty of coverage on retrofitting and hacking your wii, IPOD, playstations, gameboys, cameras, and other common electronic equipment.

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Tech: Your own Personal OS – YouOS

https://www.youos.com

I had to profile this one because I had too much fun playing around with the demo Operating System on its site. YouOS is a personalized “Operating System” on the web. It made it on PCWorld’s list of top 20 most innovative sites and its a well deserved award. Its not quite a full fledged Operating System but the concept of having an OS on the web  gets me all warm and fuzzy. So here’s a running list of the features:

• UNIX like shell which recognizes some commands
• Chat application
• A Flickr RSS plugin
• A web file manager for your folders and files
• Office Apps – There’s a wordpad like editor called YouEditor and YouSticky for your sticky notes.
• Customizable Panel – You can customize your home OS panel.
• Web Browsers – There are some lightweight browsers and RSS Feed manager for your RSS feeds.
• A list of 732 of pluggable Applications that you can include in your OS such as YouPhotoshop, pluggable games such as MarioWorld (I succumbed and played it for a few minutes), YouProxy, NES simulator, and a whole lot more.

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Career: Even the Geeks don’t know all the answers – Geek Interview

http://www.geekinterview.com

Geeks have it hard, they usually have technical interviews where they are expected to know everything. Well, even the smartest ones sometimes get stumped. It doesn’t mean they don’t know it, they just got caught off guard. Well, GeekInterview is ready to rescue the geeks and get them the job they deserve. GeekInterview provides job interview questions and answers to those difficult technical questions. Visitors and registered users can post questions and answers to perplexing, brain busting, and downright embarrassing interview questions. It covers many different technical areas, here’s a sample of some (this is a short list since they cover way to many areas):

• Web/Internet Development
• J2EE
• Data Warehousing
• Management
• Networking
• Databases
• CRM

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Tech: Looking for Tech Software Advice? – DownloadSquad

http://www.downloadsquad.com

Download Squad is a weblog which provides news and commentary on the software and web products which are interesting and useful. I have to admit, sometimes its overwhelming with the number and variety of life and work productivity tools out there. Who knew there is a site named Homeslyce which provides online tools to build a perfect dorm with your roomate? You can create a shopping list for your dorm, make a decision on what to buy with your roomate online, and split the tab. Well, you find out about these cool little knick knacks from Download Squad. There’s a group of contributors to the site and there are some real gems that are very useful. This site profiled BlackDust, a Google proxy search engine which allows you to remain anonymous when you do your searches.

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Tech: Gizmodo

http://gizmodo.com

Gizmodo is a weblog about electronics and gadgets owned by Gawker media. There are a group of writers which find the latest and greatest electronics and post them on the weblog. Some of the finds are through their readers or organizations who submit product information. Ultimately, the staff at Gizmodo decide if the product is worth a review on their weblog. They also take submissions even if the product is not yet released and an employee secretly sent the information to Gizmodo. So, you may find out about a product which has not been publicized or well known. In their FAQ page, their focus is on consumer electronics so don’t expect to find much about software. There’s a category named Dealzmodo which lists the best deals in electronics.

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Tech: All about Microsoft – Bink.nu

http://bink.nu

Bink.nu is a site focused on the latest news on Microsoft and its products. It lives and breathes in the Microsoft hemisphere. If you work in a Microsoft IT shop as an administrator, developer, manager, or any IT role; this is a must read as they have the pulse on the latest patch updates, beta offerings for the various products/servers, and new products.

They have a mapping of the Microsoft codenames to its various products. They have 16,000+ registered users who contribute to their forums, so if you have a question chances are there’s someone out there who has an answer. You can click on the KBArticles link and it will give you all the latest Microsoft KnowledgeBase articles for the various OS platforms.

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Tech: Slashdot

http://slashdot.org/

Slashdot is a technical news site for nerds (I would think it would be geeks but oh well). It covers a wide range of technical news about Apple, Gaming, Hardware, IT, Linux, Microsoft, Politics, and Science. It covers the news with breadth and depth. For example, at the time of this writing, slashdot profiled the GNU gperf tool for command-line processing of C/C++ code. Slashdot is the place for everyone to increase their technical IQ points and transform you into your inner nerd.

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Tech: Engadget

http://www.engadget.com

Engadget is a weblog on the latest tech gadgets and gizmos. At the time of this writing, they reported on GPS equipped spy squirrels. Where else can you get this kind of news? Its a fun weblog to read which covers topics ranging from cell phones, robots, wireless devices, household electronics to cameras.

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Tech: Need to send a Fake Email? – Deadfake

http://deadfake.com/

If you are up to some mischief, deadfake provides a fake email service. If you want to send email under another address, you would use this service. However, as stated on the site, its not meant for illegal or spam purposes so please stay away from the dark side Darth Vader.

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Tech: Say goodbye to spam – Dodgeit

http://dodgeit.com/

Dodgit is another disposal email service that helps the rest of us escape from the evil clutches of spammers. It has a clean and simple interface that isn’t cluttered. You will use this service when you need to register for a site or to access some resource that requires an email address. You simply create your own local part or username of the email address and use @dodgit as the domain name when you provide the email. For example, we would use sharemysite@dodgit.com. Once you give the email, you go to the Dodgit site and enter the email you just created to access any confirmation or emails you receive from the site when you registered. Keep in mind, the information sent to the temporary email is not protected so do not use it for personal or sensitive information.

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Tech: No more spam – mailinator

http://www.mailinator.com/

Tired of getting spam mail in your email inbox? Well, mailinator to the rescue, this site provides temporary emails that you can use to register for sites or whatever else you need to prevent getting spam. You do not need to register or provide any personal information, just create the local name or username of the part of the email address and use the @mailinator as the domain name. For example, we would use sharemysite@mailinator as our temporary email. They also provide randomly generated email addresses if you don’t want to create a custom one. Please note, when you access your temporary email inbox to access any confirmation messages sent by the site you just registered, the information is public and not private. Please use your judgment in determining if you should use the disposable email since the information is not secure.

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Tech: Solution Watch

http://www.solutionwatch.com/

Solution Watch is a weblog that provides detailed reviews of products and/or services offered by internet companies. It was started by 20 year old Brian Benzinger in 2005. he products and services profiled are usually for personal productivity and the site has a clean and professional looking interface. Some of the internet companies profiled are not mentioned in TechCrunch. One of my favorite ones is his review of MyMileMarker which is a site to record and analyze auto gas consumption. Another one is Competitious which is used for analyzing your competitor.
I’ll let you visit his site to get the details of those sites mentioned above and many more.

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Tech: TechCrunch

http://www.techcrunch.com/

TechCrunch is a weblog which covers the latest internet companies and it also provides news on existing ones. TechCrunch usually has the first dibs on the newest companies and does a good job reporting on them. For example, they recently covered 9 different social networking sites and created a detailed matrix comparing them to each other. Now that’s going above and beyond, whoever did that gets an A+ with a red smiley face.

If you look at the list of internet startups or areas they have covered (under company names), its a huge list with a lot of funny sounding names like Auctomatic, sloggen, slapvid (I didn’t check this site out so I hope its not some site I wouldn’t want a kid to see), zingee, zipingo, and the weirdo sounding names keep going on. Damm Web 2.0. So if you want to get the last zingee on the last zipingo without a lot of sloggen, check out TechCrunch.

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Tech: GigaOm

http://gigaom.com/

GigaOm is a site that covers internet and telecommunication industries. Its a serious professional weblog that has a large reader base. There’s a team of editors and writers that contribute to this site and the founder of the site is Om Malik who is a veteran in the tech reporting industry. Its a must read for any technical and business professional in the web and telecommunication industries.

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Tech: The Elder Geek (Windows Vista)

http://www.theeldergeekvista.com/

This is the second Elder Geek site which is focused on the system administration for Windows Vista. So far he has information on how to install, upgrade, set up a dual boot, and install Vista Release Candidate 2 on a virtual PC or machine. The author is very detailed in discussing the problems as well as laying out detail steps to the solution. For example, the author created a table to help you decide whether its advisable to upgrade or to do a clean install for the different versions of Vista depending on the version of your Windows platform. He describes the different versions of Vista and what each version offers. My favorite is he gives advice on how to get a genuine Microsoft CD/DVD for Vista instead of getting a recovery CD or a hidden partition on your machine.

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Tech: The Elder Geek (Windows XP)

http://www.theeldergeek.com/

The Elder Geek is a windows system administration site for Windows XP that gives great advice on troubleshooting, administering, and installing Windows XP. Here you’ll find a multitude of topics from slipstreaming Windows XP Service Packs, hard drive partitioning, windows tweaks (such as changing the text on the start button), registry changes, and the list goes on.
I used to visit this site quite often as it useful for anyone who has to administer their windows xp system at home to professional system administrators at work.

The author of the site also recently launched the Elder Geek for Windows Vista.  Be sure to check out that site too.

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