What does your home page look like? That is, the one you see when you start up your browser. There are several websites that allow you to customize them to display just what interests you, but my favorite is the one offered by Yahoo!

At the Yahoo! main page, click on the My Yahoo! button at the top and proceed to register (free). You then see a sample custom page that shows you various panels including news headlines, a daily strip cartoon, a stock portfolio summary, a weather report, a sport scoreboard, and TV and movie listings. Each panel can be customized to your particular zip code by clicking a small Edit button in its top right corner and following the simple instructions that appear. Make sure to click the Finished button to save the changes you have made. The result will be a home page with your local weather, movie times, personal stock portfolio list and so on. You can modify your choices any time and even add or delete individual panels by clicking the Add Content button toward the top of the page.

Make sure the result you have created sticks as a regular home page by going to your browser's menu bar, choosing Tools | Internet Options and clicking Use Current or enter http://my.yahoo.com in the text box.

 Call for input: I would appreciate hearing about any favorite website you may send me, especially if you can write an introduction to it. There's no lack of possibilities out there (Google claims to have about 9 billion sites indexed), but I would like to include cool sites found by different people and from different sources, as long as they pretty well fit into one of the categories on the left. Just e-mail me.

I suspect that most readers of David's Links are connected in some way to the Tampa SeniorNet Learning Center at USF and they therefore won't mind my inserting a plug for my other website www.snuglife.org  Hopefully, other visitors also won't mind  but will continue to visit and enjoy David's Links. 

In this November 2005 edition of David's Links you'll find introductions to a variety of great new websites thought to be pretty interesting to senior citizens and third-age folks, as well as to others.  My objective is to select sites that are amusing, curious, whimsical, wry, informative or useful.  In the final analysis, they are sites that appeal to me; I hope you too will enjoy them...

You will see below an interesting new Site of the Month, together with this month's new links in the categories Arts, Entertainment,  Science & Technology, and Search Tools.  Also take some time to review links from earlier editions now redistributed into the categories at the left.

 Some of these sites were encountered in newsletters such as Neat Net Tricks, Netsurfer Digest, and Internet Tourbus.  Others were found in Smart Computing magazine and a variety of other sources.  Suggestions are welcome from anyone, especially from members of the SeniorNet Learning Center at USF Tampa. (That is a group of volunteer senior citizens dedicated to offering computer classes to fellow seniors in a friendly, sociable setting.)  However, if I sometimes forget to acknowledge a contributor, please forgive me; it's probably a senior moment. 

Site of the Month

 For anyone with more than a casual interest in aviation, there's an intriguing site that shows you what's happening in the airspace in the Tampa—St. Petersburg area at Fly2PIE, where PIE is the code for St.  Petersburg International Airport. Superimposed on a map of the area are little plane icons that move as they approach, depart or transit the area. Click on a plane, and its details immediately appear in a Flight Info box, showing the date/time, flight ID, aircraft type, altitude, origin and destination.  If you choose the eighty-mile radius view, it looks like nothing so much as a swarm of ants clustered around their nest--in slow motion. Take your time to understand this display so you won't get too excited if a plane suddenly disappears or looks like it will collide. (Tampa Tribune)
 

Arts   

One of the more scary things I've seen on the Net can be found at Access Project, an initiative of a graduate student at NYU. Just look in the archive and click on Ars Electronica 2003 for an alarming demonstration of something like Big Brother watching you in a public place, constantly following you, and sending you messages, including instructions.  "There is no escape..."  This may be only a test demo, but there is enough here that could be exploited to make us feel that some day there will no longer be any privacy at all. You'll need the QuickTime video viewer. (Netsurfer Digest)

Julian Beever is an artist who doesn't seem to have a personal website; he knows there are numerous sites that reproduce his pavement art, for which he is something of a celebrity around the world. When he has finished a pavement drawing, and it is viewed from a certain angle, you would swear you are looking at a solid, three-dimensional object. The resemblance to, for example, a giant coke bottle lying on the ground is uncanny. The technical term for this is called an isomorphic view; anyway, I urge you to take a look at examples of his remarkable work at this mirror site.

 

Entertainment

 Just for the heck of it, I entered "whooping cough" into the search box at Old Superstitions and came up with five, yes five, entries claiming cures for that ailment, including inhaling horse's breath and tying a dead beetle round the neck. Ugh, and ugh.   It's funny but when I entered feng shui, nothing came up, and there's a superstition if ever there was one. If life's giving you a hard time, why not check out the good luck entries--I counted at least thirty-five simple things you can do to improve matters. (Netsurfer Digest)

Two so-called entertainment categories I'm less than enthusiastic about are horror movies and science fiction ditto. So let me refer fans to a pair of good-looking websites: Classic Horror and SciFi Movies (click the UK/US flag), with some 400 and 700 movies reviewed, respectively, and I'll say no more. (Netsurfer Digest)

For a real treasure house of online radio entertainment, look no further than BBC Radio 4. Listen to dozens of recent program(me)s in a wide range of genres; but American listeners might well pass up politics, comedy, sport and current affairs (you may become confused).  Instead, I suggest you try programs on nature, arts and drama, books, science, medicine, history and, for the particularly adventurous, quizzes. This is but one of the many radio and TV channels available on the BBC's rich websites. (Click TV at the top of the page to see clips of what they are watching on the other side of the pond.) (David Henry)

Randy Cassingham has done it again. This time he challenges us to check out people who did something original to move civilization's ball forward but whose name escapes us, or maybe it's just on the tip of our tongue. Each entry on the list at Honorary Unsubscribe is cryptic, like PC pioneer Adam Osborne, Joyful Sex author Alex Comfort and Faucet inventor Alfred Moen; however, each one links to Randy's concise obituary of that person. Just to be different, he sorts the list by the individual's first name. Don't miss the link to his main site This is True, where he introduces you to weird news stories gathered from the world's press, each followed by his own humorous one-line comment. (Netsurfer Digest)

 

Science & Technology

If you were circling the Earth in the space shuttle and had a camera handy, you would probably want to snap anything you could see that looked interesting. That's exactly what our astronauts have done and they brought back thousands of images that NASA is sharing with us at Earth From Space, Astronauts' Views of the Home Planet. This is a dataset searchable in several ways—for example, by city; however, one of the more interesting ways starts from the (Search by:) Clickable Map button. It shows you a map of the world and lets you zoom in on your favorite area. The thumbnail of a particular image may look dull, but a couple of clicks will bring it to life in a near-full screen image. (Netsurfer Digest)

What happened to all those brilliant--or crazy?--transportation ideas of yesteryear? The flying car, the underground airport, the Freedom Ship with 50,000 residents, monorails, the automated highway... At Transportation Futuristics, you can browse through a collection of posters, designs and models gathered by the Transportation Library at UCal and marvel at the breathtaking chutzpah of those proposing some of the more outlandish vehicles. Some failed for their unrealistic engineering designs, others for purely financial reasons. The jury is still out on the Freedom Ship that offers living units starting at $180,000 but with the enticement of no taxes, as the ship will cruise continuously in international waters. (Netsurfer Digest)

I have just watched a remarkable Quicktime animation that shows the countdown, lift-off, ascent, journey to Mars, landing and deployment of the Mars Exploration Rover, and all the complex actions performed by its instruments. This is a superb piece of work, making the whole fascinating project come to life, even though we know it's artistic license when you hear roaring rockets in space or the sound of wind on Mars. A link connects you to a play-by-play explanation of what's happening in the video. Kids of all ages will love this. (Netsurfer Digest)

Did you know that forty percent of all known mammal species were discovered in the twentieth century? And even that four have been discovered since 1975, with marvelous names like the javelina, megamouth, giant gecko and spindlehorn? You can find their photographs at the International Society of Cryptozoology, whose website is aimed at the layman. I found an even more interesting part was the page of Unresolved Claims, that include brief items on reported sightings of things like sea serpents, lake monsters (like the Loch Ness monster), dinosaur, Sasquatch/Bigfoot and giant octopuses with radial spreads of 100 feet or more. It's fascinating and fun. (St. Petersburg Times)

Because I have a scientific background, I can always continue to marvel at the success of the Apollo lunar landings program. It was so fantastically complicated; it was based on technologies of the sixties and it had a firm presidentially mandated deadline. So it was great to come across several virtual reality lunar panoramas that have been stitched together from still photos taken by those astronauts; both the stitching and VR technologies were quite unknown at the time.  It's almost like being there, especially when you hear astronauts singing to each other as they go about their chores. Panoramas.dk also lets you access many other, terrestrial panoramas from this home page. If this has piqued your interest, why not also check out the Russian moon lander hoax site? (Netsurfer Digest)

Flops, teraflops and petaflops (meaning pretty fast computers to you and me). As of June 2005, the USA (via IBM) has overtaken Japan to become top dog in the ongoing race to build the world's fastest computer, or, more accurately, banks of computers working as one. Read all about the IBM Blue Gene/L system and what the scientists expect to be able to use it for. (Netsurfer Digest)
 

Search Tools

If you are searching the Web for something specific, you can enter your query in a search engine like Google or Yahoo! Alternatively, you can drill down through a formally structured directory as in Yahoo! or Google. If you don't know what you are looking for—that is, you are just browsing from one site to another at random—you may enjoy the experience but also feel you are not really getting anywhere. Halfway between these approaches is the use of a portal site such as refdesk.com. Its home page is structured informally yet is wonderful to wander through and is stuffed with links, some of which you're sure to find useful. It's a bit like impulse buying when you're wandering through Wal-Mart, really, and is tempting enough to consider making it your own home page. (Netsurfer Digest)