July 2002

The Online Books Page is far more than just one page. It's an ever-growing catalog of over 16,000 online books from all over the Web, covering nearly every conceivable topic. You can browse by category, author, or title, or use the site's own search engine.

Spoofee.com lists online coupons, rebates, sales, and generally great deals on a wide variety of merchandise, with an emphasis on PC hardware and software. (For deals on Macintosh goodies see dealmac.)

Everyone starts out as a beginner – especially where computers are concerned. The handy list of Computer Training Tutorials from the Central Kansas Library System covers everything from buying a computer to defragmenting your disk to using Microsoft Word.

Any developer needs help from time to time, and others working on the same problems can often be the best source of inspiration. CodingForums.com provides online discussion forums for Web developers working with HTML, Javascript, CSS, ASP, and other web technologies.

Most weblogs are personal journals, or collections of items that the author finds interesting. But other applications are waiting to be explored, as discussed in Using Blogs in Business.

On my last day on Earth, I want to fill up my car at The Duke of Oil, have lunch at The Dead Cow, do my grocery shopping at No Name Nothing Special Produce Co., and finally be put to rest by the fine folks at the Amigone Funeral Home. All these strange (but real!) business names, and more, can be found at Roadside Art Online.

Who didn't dream of having a treehouse as a kid? Well, some very lucky youngsters got more than they bargained for, when Dad took a couple of packing crates and some angle iron and fashioned a BattleMech straight out of MechWarrior. Read all about it in The Making of a BattleMech.

I've mentioned weblogs before – this site is a weblog, after all. If you've a hankering to start your own blog, you could do worse than to peruse the Blogging Software Roundup to get an overview of the tools available to you.

Bored? Need something to do? Try this simple Paper Folding Project.

The proposed TIPS program would recruit "millions of American workers" to report "suspicious and potentially terrorist-related activity". There has been much hue and cry about the proposal to have US citizens, in effect, spying on other US citizens, and it appears now that the idea is unlikely to survive Congressional scrutiny. Overheard on the line at the Jones Household provides a humorous look at how the program might work.

If you're both an Amazon customer and an AOL Instant Messenger user, you'll find this interesting. Add AmazAgent to your Buddy List, and open a conversation with him. Type "help" and send the message to get a list of all query types. Then just send query-type search-words to get a list of the first ten Amazon products that match. For instance, books foundation asimov retrieves a list of books in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, while dvd stargate will produce a list of DVDs from both the Stargate movie and TV series. Neat!

Given a valid U.S. postal address, the National Address Server "attempts to rewrite the address in the proper format along with the ZIP+4 code. If it is successful, you can retrieve a Postscript or a GIF file of the address for printing, with a barcode! You can also view a street map of the address, from 2 different Internet map sites (MapBlast and MapQuest)."

Search engines are indispensable tools for today's serious researcher. The Guardian article "When size does matter" discusses the sizes and strengths of several of today's search engine power houses.

Green Fire is a work of collaborative science fiction, featuring Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and Grace Hopper as protagonists in the story of the legendary (and probably apocryphal) Philadelphia Experiment.

As a Windows user, you're familiar with the Programs and Settings menus that are available under the Start menu. But you can Add Cascading Menus to the Start Menu on your own, allowing you to access the contents of the Control Panel, printers folder, and more with ease.