Portent

(from Wikipedia) The Forbidden City was the Chinese imperial palace from the mid-Ming Dynasty to the end of the Qing Dynasty. It is located in the middle of Beijing, China, and now houses the Palace Museum.

Built from 1406 to 1420, the complex consists of 980 surviving buildings with 8,707 bays of rooms[1] and covers 720,000 square metres. If you can’t visit it in person, you can now, thanks to a collaboration between IBM and the Chinese authorities take a virtual tour on your PC (Windows, Mac or Linux). The software is a largish install (over 200 MB for Windows) which installs the front end to a 3D world. if you register, you can take snapshots of the virtual world and email them as postcards.

This is not just running on your computer but you are in a virtual world and can interact with other visitors. You can just observe, take part in activities or follow a tour guide. I haven’t explored more than a fraction of the world but it installed easily, was easy to use and because there are lots of tour guides and it’s easy to lose yours, if you drift off it will pull you along.

When you run the software, you have to login and then wait about a minute while it downloads data. You get atmospheric music. Controls let you have different point of view,including zooming in and you can put notes (and your “photos”) into a scrapbook.

The default viewpoint is third person, ie seen from behind and movement but you can view yourself from above, or looking at yourself or a first person view. It takes quite a while to move about but if you view the detailed map you can click on places and instantly be there. There are activities such as helping an archer practise archery. You control the strength and direction etc.

As a piece of free educational software this is remarkable but note, you will need an Internet connection. Highly recommended.

Link

Popularity: 1% [?]

This is particularly impressive. Wikivid is a collection of free videos that show or teach you how to use Software. The range is very impressive and the links go all over the web. The number of viodeos varies, so something like Flash has a lot of instructional videos from the likes of lynda.com, vtc.com , teach-ict.com. creativecow.net and lot’s more. The open source package nvu for creating websites has 11.

It’s still in “alpha” stage, content is limited to software tutorials only, but their vision is to add video uploads and more. As it’s a wiki, you can add your own video links, edit existing pages, etc!

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Popularity: 8% [?]

One weekend each year in September, London throws open its houses to anyone who wants to visit them. Not all houses, but designated buildings and houses. Lets face it London is full of them, but here you can go in places that are often never open to the public. But just for one weekend until next year.

They have a google maps and a half decent search, you can even see which are more children friendly (and visit the rest!). About the only annoying thing is the intro splash screen which is so 20th century and should be dropped immediately. I’ve linked directly to the search, not the intro page because of that.

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Popularity: 8% [?]

Although it is written completely in English (in a charming if not exactly 100% perfect style!), this is actually (as best as I can tell) a Russian website. It isn’t the fastest website but then if you’re into chess you have probably learnt to have a bit of patience!

The site has a lot of resources about chess, including downloads and reviews of books etc plus articles on chess. I can play chess (self taught so not great) and I think there is a lot here- but it takes a bit of digging. Russia is of course home to some of the greatest Chess grandmasters (Kasparov, Karpov etc) so well worth a look.

Link

Popularity: 5% [?]

From ages 9-14, my childhood was spent building Airfix kits. At one point I had 83 aircraft hanging from my ceiling, mostly 1/72nd WWII but also a few modern aircraft including the Hercules transporter. For a kid with asthma this was probably most unwise, as model aircraft are a dust magnet, but every three months my parents got out the step ladder out and dusted the whole lot. No wonder my wife says I was spoilt!

Sadly Airfix went into receivership yesterday with 31 out of 41 of Humbrol’s employees (the owner of the Airfix brand) laid off. I wonder if the present Govt. will send in people to destroy all plans of the TSR-2 aircraft kit (shown) that was new this year, just like a previous Labour administration did with the real aircraft plans in the early 1960s. (To prevent any chance of a future Conservative Govt resurrecting it)!

Link (To Airfix Website)

Popularity: 18% [?]