I like new technologies, but… they have their downsides, too. One of them is the difficulty of learning the ins and outs of a new product, such as a cell phone. Although I can make and receive calls with no trouble, I’m very aware that my cute little flip machine can do much, much more for me. I’m intimidated by its tightly written instruction manual and am embarrassed to see youngsters texting each other—seemingly without ever having opened the manual! 

Another negative is the limited life before a gadget becomes obsolescent and is overtaken by something newer. Hence the drawer full of old transformers, computer mice, memory sticks, cassettes, floppy disks and phones. Laws limit disposing of them, so I was pleased to hear of what looks like a generic recycling service, at least for computers, LCDs and cell phones with plans for other consumer electronic products in the works. Sign up at Recycle It America and you can print out a prepaid shipping label to return the product securely. You may even be given a reward value based on its condition etc.  

But what about a technology that doesn’t live up to expectations? One of our new five-year-life curly fluorescent screw-in light bulbs failed after a couple of years. When checking out a new one at the supermarket, I mentioned this to the girl. She laughed and said “Have you still got the receipt?”    

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 (in 2006Google claimed 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 OLLI-USF (that includes a group of volunteer senior citizens dedicated to offering computer classes to fellow seniors in a friendly, sociable setting) and they therefore won't mind my inserting a plug for my other website www.OLLILifeUSF.org  Hopefully, other visitors also won't mind but will continue to visit and enjoy David's Links.  

In this December 2008 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 History, Recreation, Reference, 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 Kim Komando , Cyber News 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 OLLI at USF Tampa. However, if I sometimes forget to acknowledge a contributor, please forgive me; it's probably a senior moment. 

Site of the Month

How would you like to send a virtual flower arrangement to your wife, daughter or friend on their special day? At the free flowers 2 mail, you’ll have lots of fun assembling your choice of flowers into your choice of vase by drag-and-drop. Then enter your colorful greeting or message, add an email address and send it on its electronic way.  (Kim Komando)
 

History

Do you know when we celebrate Armed Forces Day? Yes, it’s on the third Saturday of May each year and you can find the story of it at Armed Forces Day. It tells how it was started in 1949, when Harry Truman promoted a single day rather than the separate Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps days – although the latter still also celebrate Marine Corps Days. There’s much illustrated history on this Defense Department site. (Kim Komando)

Hyper History Online is a fascinating set of timelines that display the key historical movements and events from prehistory to the present day in graphical form. Color coded timelines are shown for regions such as North America, Europe, the Middle East etc. with summary text of each event accessible with a single click. Want to dig deeper? Over 250 chapters of Book Text keyed to the timelines provide a full historical narrative, or you can focus on Politics, Science, Culture and Religion. This is a magnificent resource for history buffs. (David Henry)
 

Recreation

One of the world’s great museums for kids—and adults—is San Francisco’s Exploratorium that also has an outstanding website. There are lots of topics like the 2008 total solar eclipse, the life of the Arctic and Antarctic, and the great science lab at CERN. I visited the Mind Center with its promise of forty interactive displays and was rather disappointed to find you need to be in San Francisco to experience them. (Kim Komando)
 

Reference

You don’t have to be a scholar to appreciate the work of Charles Darwin. He wrote a massive amount of material over the years, and much of it has been made available online by Cambridge University. All his published works are here including his Autobiography, manuscript papers, sketches, notebooks and his Diary that is also available here as an audio book. (Parade)

Do you get confused when trying to understand the miles-per-gallon equivalent of liters-per-hundred kilometers, as quoted in Europe? Or their shoe sizes vs. ours? Or the British pint of beer vs. ours? Fear not, just put ConvertWorld in your Favorites to be able to convert practically anything to anything else, using just a couple of clicks. (Kim Komando)

In high school chemistry class, I learned about Mendeleev and his Periodic Table of the Elements, in which all the known elements were sorted into some kind of order that made sense. Since then, many new elements have been discovered that don’t fit in the Table so easily. Anyway, look at the latest version at the Periodic Table of Videos, where even a non-chemist can learn very easily what the various elements were like and what they were used for; this used to take hours of memorization. (Kim Komando)

Who said, “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest?”  If you think Ben Franklin, you are right on. That, and numerous other sayings by famous people, appears in an inspirational slide show at Great Quotes from Great Leaders, accompanied by a soothing sound track. Here you can listen to Winston Churchill, Jack Kennedy, Mother Theresa and Martin Luther King, among others. (Ray Epsky)

We’ve all heard of Joe the Plumber, and maybe also Boyfriend Drop, Robocall and Mass Merchanditis. These new words or expressions have appeared in the language recently and you can find them defined, with thousands of others, in the constantly growing Urban Dictionary. One newspaper says “Urban Dictionary documents the evolution of language in real time.”  It’s an amusing site to browse.  (Kim Komando)

If you want something a bit more compact than David’s Links to point you toward useful websites, why not turn to Lloyd’s 25 Most Useful Internet Sites? It tends to be rather Reference oriented and I think most all 25 can also be found on David’s Links. Still it’s a very handy one page guide. (Ray Epsky)

When I browse my big Random House Dictionary, I’m struck by the number of entries appended to a key word such as heart, with its one and a half columns of heart+ entries. This takes up an awful lot of space, so I wondered if it would be more compact to have a dictionary that left out the simple and straightforward words, and concentrated instead on the unusual ones. Enter The International House of Logorrhea that does exactly that.  (David Henry)

Until it expired in 1975, Life Magazine was a wonderful window on the world for all, as seen through the camera lenses of some great photographers. Thanks to a partnership with Google, you can now access the Life Photo Archive with images from the 1860’s forward, in categories such as People, Places, Events, Sports, and Culture. Many of these never appeared in the print magazine. (Kim Komando)
  

Search Tools

All the recent buzz about the fancy new electronic book reader, Amazon’s Kindle, may obscure the fact that there are other e-readers around such as the Sony reader, and therein lies the rub—of incompatibility. Now there is a website called feedbooks.com that offers us thousands of books in the PDF format that supports your computer’s display as well as these special purpose readers. It seems the most popular download by far is George Orwell’s 1984. You can also contribute your own masterpiece to feedbooks. (Kim Komando)

Can anyone beat Google’s search engine? I doubt it, but a new contender intends to give it a good shot. It’s called Cuil—an old Irish word meaning knowledge—that  in most respects is as fast and comprehensive as Google, but is different in that it claims to search three times more sites. Also the results of its search are more readable, each hit consisting of complete sentences or a full paragraph. (Trevetta Wunderlin)

Google has millions of enquiries every day, and being Google, they keep a count of their enquiries. You can see how a search term varies as time passes and becomes less or more prominent, perhaps depending on related news stories. The variations are displayed graphically over the last four years and can be seen at Google Trends. For example, enter the names of your favorite baseball teams and watch how the interest in them waxes or wanes over the years. (St Petersburg Times)