Speedcine is an index of about 13,000 full-length movies you can legally watch online. Some of the sites it links to offer free movies, such as Hulu and Fancast , while others charge, such as Amazon’s Video on Demand. While still in beta, Speedcine warns that not all movies are listed in the alphabetic index on the front page; some can only be found by title search.
Are cluttered to-do lists, multitasking, and unlimited browser tabs taking their toll on your productivity? Some experts are calling single tasking (focusing on one task at a time) “the new multitasking.” If you want to give it a try, NowDoThis offers a new twist on the old fashioned to-do list. Type in a list of items, and then instead of displaying the entire list for you at once, it only displays a single task with a simple “done” button. Now, you have no choice but to just get it done.
Have you ever seen a collage made of hundreds of little photos and wondered how it was done? One way is with Shape Collage, a free, easy utility for both Windows and Mac. Simply download Shape Collage, pick a shape, point it to your photo folder, and watch it work its magic.
If you’ve never created a personalized homepage, or custom start-up page for your browser, there are a lot to choose from. My personal favorite is iGoogle but Pageflakes looks interesting too. A custom homepages is a place to gather all the news, feeds, email, gadgets, widgets and apps that are important to you, to give you a single place to start your web sessions from. For a closer look at fourteen different homepage services, read Mashable.
Footnote.com, a social-networking genealogy and history site, recently released an interactive version of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall . You can search for a particular solider, or view the annotated, clickable wall by browsing. Registered users (a basic account is free) can add photos, comments, and story pages to any solider on the Wall.
OnGuardOnline.gov is a federal website with practical tips on securing your computer and guarding against Internet fraud. Information is delivered with videos, tutorials, and games designed to test and expand your knowledge. Topics include laptop security, social networking, malware, identity theft and much more.
Although it is a common misconception that Google Earth images are real-time, they are not. There are, however, two ways to view nearly real-time satellite images on Google Earth. For three-hour old weather images, look for the Clouds layer, found under the new Weather layer folder. NASA also has a layer called DailyPlanet which shows the entire Earth, continuously updated in real-time at a medium resolution. For more Google Earth tips, read the Google Earth Blog.
Rasterbator is a free service that creates huge mural-size images from any picture. Simply upload an image, and then download and print the resulting multi-page PDF. Re-assemble the pages and you will have an extremely cool looking poster that can be as tall as sixty-five feet. If your original image is more than a megabyte in size, you’ll want to download the free Rasterbator Windows utility instead of using the online service.
Read This To Me is a free reading service for the blind, powered by volunteers and Internet collaboration. The blind person faxes a document to be read to the toll free ReadThisToMe fax number, and a volunteer reader (with the faxed document on his screen) will call the client and read it to him. Have a few minutes to spare while in front of your computer? Visit the website to sign up as a volunteer.
Polling is a fun way to take the pulse of a community. And if you have a webpage, blog or profile on a popular social networking site, BuzzDash makes it easy to create and distribute a your own custom poll. Polls can have from two to five answer options, can be skinned in a variety of themes, and can optionally be shared on the BuzzDash site.
