Google Earth

Google launched another amazing hit: Google Earth.
It's basically Keyhole 3 (a company that they bought a while ago) except they dropped the subscription rate so now it's totally free (there is a pro version that you can buy if you really feel like it).
The concept is very similar to NASA's World Wind but the user interface and speed are MUCH better.
And the download is only 10MB (vs. a couple hundred for NASA's program).

This totally cool program lets you zoom around a 3D representation of Earth that is constructed out of satellite photos.
It lets you fly around the globe and zoom in to just about any spot in the world. Many areas have high resolution images so that you can even see cars on the streets.

In addition to viewing 3D images of your favorites spots in the world you can also overlay different information on the map like roads, international boundaries, terrain, 3D buildings, crime statistics, schools, stadiums, restaurants, gas stations, atm machines....

It will also let you pick two spots and it'll show you the driving directions between them.

Totally amazing!

Bowline

The Bowline (bo-lin) is considered an excellent knot that is perfect for tying a loop in a string or rope.
The bowline's benefits are that its loop will not slip once drawn tight (which makes it ideal for dog leashes) and in its ability to be untied easily no matter how tight you've pulled it.

This site shows you an animation of how to tie a bowline.

Gotta Know

Here's a cool list of 100 things every guy must know.

These are some of the highlights:

• How to win more coin tosses: Always call tails. On U.S. coins, the heads side, with its big, solid portrait, weighs infinitesimally more: In the course of 10,000 tosses, the lighter tails side will come up an extra 50 or so times.
• To ward off diseases, wear gloves, not a face mask. Handshakes transmit viruses seven times more effectively than sneezes do.
• Chocolate screws up dogs’ hearts. It can be lethal to our canine pals—one Hershey’s bar is more than enough to kill a puppy.
• You flip a steak one time-and one time only.
• If you hurt yourself in the wild, clean your wounds with your urine When it leaves the body, it’s sterile, which is more than you can say of any water you’re likely to find.
• How to pick a ripe watermelon: Color’s the key. Look for a melon whose dark bands are wider than its light bands. The higher the ratio of dark to light outside, the darker the color (and the sweeter the meat) inside.
• How to gauge the doneness of a steak without slicing into it: Press your forefinger into it lightly, as if picking up ink from a fingerprint pad, then touch your head and compare their firmness. A well-done steak should feel as firm as your forehead; a medium steak, as firm as your chin; and a rare steak, as firm as the end of your nose.

Now we really know everything :)

5 Years

Today guymal.com is 5 years old!

We've come a long way baby (that's a cached version of guymal.com from May 2001, almost one year old).

Abandonia

Abandonia.com is heaven for old school gamers.
It offers information about tons of abandonware but mainly old games (abandonware is software which is no longer being sold or supported by its copyright holder).
You can see the year that games were released, screen shots of different levels, and the best part (get this): you can download the old games!

I went over some of the categories and ran across LOTS of games that I spent hours playing.
The list of familiar games (games that I played for at least several hours each) was so long that looking back makes me feel like I spent too much time on the PC (and I can remember at least 10 more games that I used to play but didn't find there).

Check out this list of games that I used to play back in the day (and I found there):
Aladdin Alley Cat Altered Beast Arkanoid Blues Brothers Bubble Bobble Bumpys Arcade Fantasy Cd Man Dangerous Dave Golden Axe Mortal Kombat Operation Wolf Paperboy Prehistorik 1 Prehistorik 2 The Simpsons - Bart vs the Space Mutants Ugh Zool A Nightmare On Elm Street Airborne Ranger Castle Wolfenstein Double Dragon Flashback Ghostbusters 2 Prince Of Persia Prince of Persia 2 Wings of Fury Wolfenstein 3d Lemmings Simcity Classic Michael Jordan in Flight California Games II Budokan The Incredible Machine Ski or Die Summer Challenge Skate Or Die Bouncing Babies Rampage

Hitman

Hitman offers a variety of assassination services and contract killing options.
They are the industry leader in innovative killing techniques and manage a network of freelance assassins on five continents, available on short notice, around the clock.

Their tagline is "Permanent Solutions to Common Problems!"
And don't worry, Hitman is a cruelty-free organization. None of their services have been tested on animals.

Check out their site, they have testimonials, a page where you can donate organs, and they even have gift certificates!

Age Project

Wanna know how old people think that you are?
Just submit your photo to the ageproject and people will be able to say how old they think that you look in the picture.

You can, obviously, rate random pictures of people who've submitted pictures of themselves (anybody can rate other people's pictures, you don't need to sign up for it).

Deathclock

I'm sorry to inform you but I'm dying.
Well, actually we all are, the only question is when is it going to happen.

Hop on over to Deathclock, enter some details about yourself, and your lifestyle, and the death clock will tell you when you are going to die (and how many more seconds you have left to live).

My personal day of death is Sunday, September 4, 2050.
That leaves me with about 1,426,230,327 seconds left to live.

Nice knowing ya'...

iGuy

I don't own an iPod (at least not yet :) but if I did then the iGuy would be for me.

I don't really care what it does, it just looks cool.

Burn Baby Burn

Remember when you were a kid how much fun it was to burn ants with a magnifying glass?
(ok, at least the boys remember)
Now you can take it up a notch and play god with a magnifying glass.

This game gives you a view of a city from above and all you need to do is focus your magnifying glass on people and cars and burn them.

Heh heh, fire...

Attack Of The Wasps

Take a look at my home page.
Wasps have taken over!

Curveball

Time for another online flash game.
Curveball is a remake on the old classic Pong only in 3D (well sort of).

It's very simple and a lot of fun: you and the computer take turns hitting the ball back and forth each time trying to put a spin on it so that the opponent misses.
There's also a speed element so that you get more points the faster you win your opponent.

Give it a run.
I made it to level 7 with 23,670 points.

Speedtest

The Internet speed test does just that: it tests the speed of you Internet connection.

Not something that you'd visit daily but could come in useful every once in a while to make sure that you're getting good download speeds.

Ear Wax Candy

Ear wax candy is a plastic ear filled with yummy candy ear wax.

The wax looks totally real but it's really fruit-flavored gel.

And you scoop up the ear wax with a lollipop "Q-Tip".

Looks tastey ah?

RAD Video Tools

Since my Olympus digital camera only outputs video in mov format I was looking for a way to easily convert mov files to a better format.
And along came RAD Video Tools.

RAD Video Tools does exactly that: choose a mov file, click on "Convert a file", choose the output type (I use avi, which is also the default), and click "Convert".

The one small annoyance is that it installs something called "Bink and Smacker" that you don't really know what to do with and seems confusing.
If mov converting is what you want then just ignore it, use the "Convert" function, and you'll be fine.

Oh yea, RAD Video Tools is absolutely free so you can't go wrong.

Knives

Is it just me or is the designer of this thing a bit psychotic?

Free Fonts

If you're the type of person who can never have enough fonts (you guys know who you are) then I'll do my duty and feed your addiction with searchfreefonts.com.

As the name suggests, searchfreefonts.com gives you access to tons of free fonts (and some commercial ones that I didn't even bother checking out). According to their claim the site contains over 7,000 free fonts and over 12,000 commercial fonts.

You never know when you might need a Gothic font so bookmark this one...

Sudoku

A Sudoku is a number puzzle that is currently taking over the world (at least my neck of the world).

Websudoku lets you play tons of sudokus (sudokais, sudoks?) online, at three different game levels.

The rules of a sudoku are pretty simple: you have a grid of 9x9 and you need to place each digit from 1 to 9 into the grid so that every column, every row, and every 3x3 square must contain one of each of the nine digits.

Totally addicting...

Squares

Squares is one of the simplest online flash games that I've run across.
But that doesn't make it any less fun.

The game rules are simple: using your mouse catch the black squares without touching the red ones.

That's it, game on...

Scooba

Those cool folks at iRobot, the company that brought us the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner, now have a new robot to help us decrease fights with our spouses: the Scooba.
While the Roomba would buzz around our floors and vacuum up all the dirt, it's new younger brother, Scooba, skids around and vacuums, washes and dries in a single pass!
It even leaves a dry floor after it.

Check out that link for a short clip of the Scooba in action.

Who ever knew that cleaning could be so cool?

The Sith Sense

The Sith Sense is a fun site that was created by Burger King as part of their Star Wars promotion.

They basically took the old 20 Questions online game and created it so that Darth Vader is reading your mind.

For those who aren't familiar with 20 Questions, you need to think of any object and Darth Vader will start asking you questions about it.
Darth Vader can ask you 20 questions and at the end he (usually) can know the object that you were thinking of.

The game is quite impressive since it's a learning machine, which means that the more people play it the smarter it becomes and the more accurate its guesses are.
Don't forget to turn up the sound.

Don't Click It

dontclick.it is an interesting experiment in user interface.
Throughout the entire web site you won't find any buttons or other items that you'll need to click on. Instead you navigate using several different methods of moving your mouse over interface elements.

Once you play around there a bit you start to get the hang of it and learn more about the different concepts that are demonstrated there.

BTW: so you forget that you aren't supposed to click then every time you accidentally do click on something you get a "subtle" reminder that you shouldn't.

Something's Starting

If you haven't noticed, the major search engines have constantly been looking for new and innovating ideas to increase their usefulness (and stickiness).

Just a few weeks ago Google announced that you can now customize the main Google page (very similar to what all the traditional search engines did a few years ago when they became "Portals").
Yahoo has, of course, had this for a while with their My Yahoo!.

Well now, you guess it, MSN is coming out with something similar.

It's basically an online RSS reader and you can access it (the beta version for now) at: http://www.start.com/3/.

It seems that everybody's working hard on adding drag 'n drop to organize the layout of your custom page (very nice interfaces BTW).

Nerds Make Better Lovers

This one has been posted all over the net (cuz we all know who controls the net) but I still couldn't resist: The New York Daily News has an article claiming that Nerds Make Better Lovers!

And to quote from the article:

"A nerd is an excellent provider and a guy who puts you first...","He'll turn out to be a great father and a great husband."

633|<z r|_|l3!

[Via Slashdot]

Yahoo! Mindset

Yahoo introduced a new twist to searching called Yahoo! Mindset.

The idea is that after you search for something you can view the results according to your mindset: whether you are looking for something more commercial or more informational.
They let you choose your mindset by a slider that dynamically changes the search results according to the position of the slider (very cool and intuitive).

This thing is not available on the regular Yahoo site, it is still in Beta and is part of the Yahoo Research Lab.