Techreluctant.com

There are thousands of recipe sites on the Internet but I always keep coming back to allrecipes.com when I’m stuck for what to have for supper. You can browse, or type search by the ingredients you have on hand. If you find something you like you can check out recipes that are similar to it and best of all the reviews tell you if the dish is really tasty, and if something can be done to make it even better. I have a few recipe books but more often than not, I’ll go to allrecipes.com and do a quick search.  I even have it as an app on my iPod Touch. If only allrecipes.com could cook for me too.

I love Gary Larson’s The Far Side comics. I think I have every anthology and have many, unforgettable favourites. Unfortunately, Mr. Lawson doesn’t want his cartoons displayed online so I can’t provide a cartoon here (search for Gary Larson Far Side on Google images and you’ll find lots). His humour is hard to explain. Thinking outside the box, was a phrase probably invented to describe his cartoons of looking at things in a way we never thought of before, from squid playing “tentaclies” under the table at a restaurant, to what a dog really hears when you talk to him, to how we seem to insects, to what that scary thing behind you is. I think his comics sometimes made me cringe as much as they made me laugh, putting people or creatures in the most difficult of circumstances. If you love The Far Side then you can’t get enough of it and some people really love The Far Side, to the point that they would reenact a Far Side cartoon and put the results up on the Flickr Far Side Reenactments group. The rules of the group are clear: no real cartoons since you don’t own the copyright and you must “reenact the cartoons with your own little camera and photoshop fingers”. Like this one I love from The Rocketeer:

Whether you’re a Far Side fan or not, this is worth checking out just to see how creative some people can be.

Everyone needs a little silly sometimes and facebook has recognized this. Even many tech-reluctants have signed up for facebook so the next time you check in on it, change your language settings… to pirate. Why check your Inbox when you can check your Bottle O’ Messages and who wouldn’t rather have Me Hearties than Friends? To start walking the facebook plank, just

1. Scroll to the bottom of your facebook page;
2. On the bottom left corner, click English: US (next to Facebook © 2009);
3. When the language selection appears, click English: Pirate;
4. Check out your Home Page, er, Home Port. Arrrrhhhhhh.

I’ll admit that Twitter and all the talk of Twitter is getting on my nerves (but that won’t stop me from twittering that I have this new post up). So anything that makes me feel that there is something interesting and different related to Twitter makes me happy and Twistori is just such a thing. Twistori is based on another very cool website called We Feel Fine which sets about “harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs” (really, it’s worth it to drop by We Feel Fine and just see all the cool ways you can maneuver through all the information on the site). Twistori does the same thing with Twitter posts and limits the feelings to Love, Hate, Think, Believe, Feel and Wish. It’s interesting to drop by from time to time and just check out the kind of things people are twittering about. There’s also a very cool Twistori Desktop for Macs that lets you create your own Twistori and choose certain words you want to see but unfortunately there is no such program for Windows at this time.

Don't you just love "I wish that I could rinse off my eyeballs"?

(Special thanks to Dale Jarvis for bringing this to my attention)

I have to admit, I am a sarcastic person by nature although I do try to control it. Case in point is that I have never used Let Me Google That For You, no matter how many opportunities to do so. Maybe you won’t be as reserved. If someone asks a question that should be pretty easy to google, you can go to Let Me Google That For You, type in the search they should have done themselves, then send them the link for the results. They will actually get to see an invisible typer type the search, and the site will also show text that says “Was That So Hard?”  Check it out in action.

Since we talked facebook yesterday, today I want to tell you about Lexulous, one of my favourite things about facebook. Lexulous used to be Scrabulous on facebook but the Scrabble people didn’t like that they used their game and sued for copyright and trademark infringement. This went on for a while until Scrabulous was eventually yanked with cries of “noooooo” from plenty of us who loved the game. Then Scrabble came out with its own game on facebook. And I think I can speak for many people in saying we did not like it. It was slower and just not the same as Scrabulous. Then a while ago, out came Lexulous which was Scrabulous’s real replacement. The guys at Lexulous had even saved the games we were playing when Scrabulous was yanked from us. Now, Lexulous is not Scrabble. Lexulous has eight tiles not Scrabble’s seven and the tiles have some different values (Z is 12 in Lexulous and 10 points in Scrabble). See the difference? All I know is that Lexulous is fun. You can have as many games going as you want and you can get to it whenever you find the time. There is a dictionary lookup for cheating, a two-word list, you can message inside the game, and if you try a word that’s not real, Lexulous will stop you. If you are on facebook and you like a game of “not-Scrabble” Lexulous is your game. I love it even though I may fall behind on some games and need to get a nudge now and then from my opponents.

I know a lot of writers. They can weave stories and give you in-depth looks into the latest news but some of them can’t spell that well. And many of them, myself included, get mixed up in certain words or phrases. It can happen to the best of us and often does. I know it seems kind of boring to think about grammar these days in the time of the much overused apostrophe S for plurals (my pet peeve of late–there’s a large sign on my way home from town that says something like Quilt’s For Sale and I feel the urge to scream every time I see it) and when the spelling I see on  Facebook makes me fear for the future of our world, but some people care about how they say things, even on the Internet and for you I have a great website.

When in doubt about the correct use of a word or phrase, I turn to Paul Brian’s Common Errors in English. It has saved me some embarrassment. I almost submitted a manuscript with someone having her brow furled. It didn’t seem right so I went to Common Errors in English and phew, that would have been silly because, as Brian points out in his furl/furrow entry,  “If you can furl your brow you belong in a sideshow.” Even if you’re not too concerned about getting it right all the time, I bet if you go to his site, you will learn something you didn’t know before. If you do care about grammar and spelling, you should bookmark Common Errors in English as your go-to place when you’re just not sure.

There are lots of fun things out there in the tech world. Sometimes they just tickle you and you’re glad you found them. They make life easier, more pleasant or just more fun. For me, one of these things is the Analogy screensaver by Jesson Yip. It’s clean, it’s simple, it’s free, and it’s just great to look at. Described as a digital, analog clock, the analogy screensaver will liven up your screen from the flying windows or the 3D text that you may have on there now. Yip says that the screensaver “…presents an everyday object with a fresh twist” and that is exactly what it does. What more could you want?