Portent

No, I’m not linking to a very dodgy porn site! (Oh dear, I bet I’ve started a new meme!). Siz|Easy lets you enter the dimensions of common objects and then shows them rendered using Flash with multiple views.

In the example show the objects are mobile phones and a pack of playing cards. The purple is the iPhone, the green a pack of cards and here are three other phones there including two Blackberries. it’s an interesting site and very well implemented though not a site I can see myself using that often!

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Popularity: 2% [?]

I got scammed £52 on phone insurance by a company from Swansea called Sealaway. They get numbers from branches of CarPhoneWarehouse (who buy phone numbers in blocks and let you view a list of available numbers and choose one). The scammers presumably must view this system, guess numbers that have been taken and then phone you pretending to be CarPhoneWarehouse or others offering cheaper insurance. Yeah, stupid stupid me..

Only it’s not real insurance (not underwritten by anyone), I got phoned from 01792306900 and searching the web lead to me WhoCalls Me.com. Just put in a number and see if anyone else has reported it and loads of stories- over 7 pages on that number. So recommended as a place to look if you get phone calls that you don’t recognise. The site is very simple and fast; recomended.

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Popularity: 2% [?]

If you’ve ever wondered how much people get paid at small, medium or large companies then this is the site for you and it’s completely free. You can view companies (over 11,000) generally or enter your own and see a lot more.

What is quite surprising for example that at JP Morgan Chase a personal banker is paid between $30K and $48K with an average of $35K. That’s from 41 submissions. Not everyone who works in a bank gets paid well! It’s an interesting site but as it depends upon people submitting details, so you will get back more if you submit yours. Just be careful not to submit too much or you might accidentally provide enough for your employer to identify you!

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Popularity: 2% [?]

Tube Status Screenshot

I bought an iPhone six days ago and this was one of the first applications to go on it. It’s what you’d call a “Does what it says on the tin” application.

If you travel on the London Underground (The Tube as we call it) and have an iPhone this is a must. It shows you the current status of all the London Underground lines and by clicking on the icons you can see what the problem is. You could use the Safari browser on the iPhone and get this info from London Underground but this packages it up nicely. Highly recommended.

There’s a similar paid app but I haven’t tried that yet.

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(Note: Links go to UK Apple App Store)

Popularity: 2% [?]

You can use this as a bit of fun or more serious.

What I liked about the site was just how well it works and how well thought out it is. If I needed surveys, I reckon this would easily be worth $20 a month. As an example, heres a survey I created with it. Only the first 100 respondents can fill it in (limitation of free). As an example of a good Web 2.0 site, I reckon SurveyMonkey.com is up there with the rest.
Click Here to take survey

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Popularity: 7% [?]

Before the internet if you wanted to access information you had to go to a library, which having limited shelves and storage space had to choose what it had available. The internet has removed that restriction but still, finding information on specialist stuff requires a bit of digging.

Pinouts.ru is one such specialist site. It provides information on pinouts- eg those funny connectors you see on electronic devices as well as inside them. There is a lot here for the electronics specialist or merely the curious. A little bit out of the normal but an excellent resource nonetheless.

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Popularity: 9% [?]

Maps, especially online have always been restrictive in what you can do with them due to copyright etc. But there has been an international movement dedicated to providing unrestricted alternatives and as you can see, this map of my part of London is pretty good. I’ve put a blue rectangle around the area in the top map which the bottom map shows.

Like Google Maps you can zoom in and out and drag the map. No satellite data of course!

Not all streets are currently labelled- mine isn’t, but I could sign up and add it in. As more and more people sign up this becomes more and more valuable. One danger is of course that people will be lazy and copy data from commercial or copyright maps and that could be a problem. It’s not unknown for cartographers to introduce fake streets etc to try and spot when people copy their work.

So if you have a spare moment or two, why not help this map by signing up (no costs) and adding your local information.
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Popularity: 16% [?]

This is still in alpha so expect bugs, new features etc but it’s interesting. I love the name- it shows a bit of edginess as freebasing is a drugs term (not that I’m an expert!).

Put simply, it’s the web 2.0 Wikipedia. Using clever searching etc to enhance the user interface. I think Wikipedia is big enough to take competition and it might spur them on, although I love Wikipedia the interface is a little dull and searching is not great. Freebase uses its own API (Application Programming Interface) so users who are developers can create their own applications. This is what Facebook, Flickr etc (what is it with websites starting with the letter F?) do.

So an interesting one to watch. What will Wikipedia do in reaction? (If any).
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Popularity: 10% [?]

This is a bit of a gimmick and it shows in Dollars or Euros only (what about £ Sterling!). Enter your salary in and it shows how much you earn each second or minute etc.

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Popularity: 11% [?]

If you want to find out statistics about the UK, jobs, population, etc the National Statistics website is an excellent source. Most of the material there is Crown Copyright which means it can be quoted or used so long as you acknowledge the source and don’t try and do anything stupid like sell it.

While looking for something there I came across the map shown which shows which areas have received the most immigrants (legal ones that is) between 2004 and 2006. Living in the South East it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the whole world lives here but in fact as the map shows, immigrants have settled in many parts of the UK, even 22 in Larne (in N. Ireland) where I took my driving test 30 years ago!

The picture and link below link to a PDF.
PDF Link

Popularity: 8% [?]

This is a bit different from the usual websites. It’s on one topic- about changing peoples minds and has over 2,200 pages on a wide variety of topics. Very nicely organised and laid out.

For instance some of it is about the brain, writing, NLP, theories. It’s difficult to sum up in one phrase except it is about changing minds. Changing someone’s opinion on something is a difficult thing to do. In my experience once someone has made their mind up about something or someone then moving them away from that opinion is a difficult, in fact near impossible thing to do.

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Popularity: 9% [?]

This is not a website to recommend to those of a monotheistic outlook on life (“One God”). But if you’re into pantheism or just interested this has lots of information on Gods from many cultures- American Indian, Chinese and many more, 154 gods in total, 316 with their alternative names.

There’s also a lot of related stuff such as 578 Saintans and their alternative names, ancient numerology, even Lego Gods. It’s very well done.

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Popularity: 16% [?]

I think this is an excellent idea and hope other third level educational establishments will follow- MIT already do this but not on youtube. The University of California, Berkeley has done a deal with youtube to host videos of their lectures.

These comprise biology (39 lectures) , physics (26 Lectures) and search engines(6 lectures) which is a bit of an odd mix. If you want to see and hear what Sergey Brin (co-founder of Google is like), have a look.

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Popularity: 12% [?]

Anyone into sci fi will be aware of both these series (never mind Babylon 5, Deep Space 9 and others) and it’s fun in a way to compare the two main ones to see how they vary in technologies, size, number of planets, political systems etc.

This is an almost academical in its scope but much more interesting reading than most academic papers. It makes a point of sticking to the canonical (ie most representative) sources such as the film and TV series whereas some other sites might cite fan fiction or non main stream sources. The ST v SW debate has been ongoing in one shape or another (via Usenet to start with) for over 20 years and this site is a welcome addition.

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Popularity: 7% [?]

Government websites don’t usually show up here but I think this one on vehicle recalls warrants coverage. (It’s UK) - a database of all vehicle recalls that you can query to see if your vehicle has had anything wrong with it.

It used to be you had to phone or call in a dealer to find out vehicle recalls information- I had to once with a Ford Orion that needed the jockey wheel replaced. This is a vitally important wheel that was originally plastic in the 1.8 Diesel engines and could break. If that went you lost your timing belt and most likely turned the engine into a pile of useless scrap metal. Ford issued a replacement metal wheel.

So if you buy a 2nd hand car you know where to look, to check for vehicle recalls.

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Popularity: 8% [?]