I ♥ How to Type

I really do ♥ How to Type.net.

How to Type is a great reference on how to type symbols, accents, special characters, and weird punctuation.

How to type Heart ♥

On Windows:

Hold down the ALT key and type 3 on the keypad

On Mac OS:

Hold down the Command and Option keys while you press T. This will display the Character Palette. Choose the symbol and click the Insert button.

In HTML:
♥ or ♥

VirusTotal

Worried that the file you're about to download might be malicious?  Have the file scanned with over 60 antivirus engines BEFORE you download it - all with one single online tool.

Just go to VirusTotal and paste in the link of the file you want to download.  Note:  That means the direct link to the file, not the page the file is linked from.   (Right-click the link and select “Copy link address” in Chrome, “Copy Link Location” in Firefox, or “Copy link” in Edge. Check your own browser's Help section for instructions) The file will be scanned and the results will tell you how many, if any, of the antivirus engines had a problem with it 

There are also browser extensions for the service available for Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer.

As always, don't depend totally upon one tool to protect yourself and your computer. Your best bet is to make sure you're getting your programs or files from trusted sources.

Don't Throw it Away!

At least not where someone can slip on it.

You can use the inside of a banana peel to polish leather shoes and silverware and stop mosquito bites from itching. Some people eat the peel.  Others use them for acne, cleaning their teeth and pain relief, among other things.

When I was a young man, it was thought you could smoke it, too.

 

What Is My Movie?

Whatismymovie.com

From the site:

Describe a movie

Use your own words, or search with titles, actors, directors, genres etc. We find movies for you to watch.

Search tips

Describe any aspect of the movie content you are looking for, and we will find the best movies for you.
Search for example:
find all Harry Potter movies
find me James Bond movies with Sean Connery
show me parody films scifi movie about space battles and laser guns
eastwood protecting the president
romantic scifi movie comedy in hawaii
ridley scott columbus expedition

OR
Search by typing exact movie quotes using quotations marks:
"may the force be with you"

Best way to find actors is to use full name with quotation marks.

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I stumbled across this site while trying to think of the movie The Genius Club (which I had reviewed a few yrs. back, but since I couldn't remember the title, couldn't find it using the Blogger search feature). I plugged in "Geniuses hostages printer ink" and the name popped up right away!

Keep It or Toss It?

Wondering if that jar of horseradish is still good to eat? Find out at StillTasty, your ultimate shelf life guide. There's a fridge-full of other info on the site with answers to many common perishable food questions:

Can You Safely Drink Milk After the Sell-By Date?
Is it OK to Put Hot Food Directly Into the Fridge?
Are Eggs Still Safe After the Expiration Date?

(yes, yes, yes, but as for me re: the milk-ONLY after intensive sniffing and extremely cautious sipping. Personally, I would rather get slapped in the face than drink sour milk.)

StillTasty.com

Music from Film

Music from Film helps you identify music from movies and TV shows by explaining what was on screen when the songs were playing.

There are plenty of websites on the internet listing the songs that feature in TV shows and movies. But if there's a choice of many you still won't know which is the one you want.

You could try asking on message boards, searching the lyrics on Google, listening to loads of songs on iTunes, etc, but that's time consuming and often unsuccessful.

We present the songs alongside the scene information so that you can quickly identify the track you're looking for.

Music from Film

Does It Go Bad?

From the website:

DoesItGoBad.com is a place where you can find information about when (or if) a particular product will expire or will be unfit for consumption. If you have a product and you can’t use it in a couple of days, or simply you don’t know when it’ll go bad, DoesItGoBad.com is the place where you’ll get the information you need.

http://www.doesitgobad.com/

unhearit

I was complaining on Facebook yesterday about hearing The Little Drummer Boy at the grocery store and not being able to get it out of my head - it became an "earworm".  While it eventually went away, I could have used this website.

From the site: We created this site for those of you that have a song stuck in your head and you can't get it out no matter what you do. Using the latest in reverse-auditory-melodic-unstickification technology, we've been able to allow our users to “unhear” songs by hearing equally catchy songs. So really all we're doing is making you forget your old song by replacing it with another one... sorry.

unhearit

The Toxic Avocado

At least they are to some animals, such as horses, cattle, goats and birds.

From the ASPCA website:

Avocado leaves, fruit, seeds and bark may contain a toxic principle known as persin. The Guatemalan variety, a common one found in stores, appears to be the most problematic. Other varieties of avocado can have different degrees of toxic potential.

Word Hippo

From the website:

Find Similar or Opposite words at WordHippo!
Oh ... There's a bunch of other stuff you can do too.

Word Hippo

Diffen

I found Diffen a few days ago while searching for the differences between a Psychopath vs. Sociopath (and I'm happy to announce that, while I have a few of the traits of both, I'm fairly certain I can't be classified as either.).

From the site:

What is Diffen?

Diffen lets you compare anything.

What is the difference between DVD+R and DVD-R? What is the difference between a pub and a bar? An alligator and a crocodile? What is the difference between 401(k) and IRA? Treasuries and bonds? AMD Turion and Athlon processors? How is a Pentium Core 2 Duo different from Pentium Dual Core? How does the work environment at IBM compare with working at Microsoft? How does living in Seattle compare with living in Amsterdam? What is the difference between a Plasma TV and an LCD TV? Cal Tech and UCLA? Yankees and the Red Sox?

You can find or write all these comparisons on Diffen.

Diffen

Is It Down Right Now?

After a few attempts at accessing my Feedly reader, I decided I'd check the site to see if the problem was mine or was with the website.  Using the Is It Down Right Now? site, I found out there was a problem, but it wasn't on my end.  Searching the news, I saw Feedly Hit With Denial Of Service Attacks with some person or persons attempting to blackmail Feedly.  I hope the perps are caught and prosecuted.  Personally, my own form of punishment would involve a hatchet and their hands, but that's just because I'm a savage, callous knuckle-dragger who is sick and tired of spammers and scam artists taking over the 'net. 

That said, Is It Down Right Now? is a great resource.  From the site:

"Is It Down Right Now" monitors the status of your favorite web sites and checks whether they are down or not. Check a website status easily by using the below test tool. Just enter the url and a fresh site status test will be perfomed on the domain name in real time using our online website checker tool. For detailed information, check response time graph and user comments.

Is It Down Right Now?

Can You Hold It?

Originally published May 27, 2009.

"The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder." - Alfred Hitchcock

I saw that quote earlier and it reminded me of this post; I did a quick search and found it and this and several other posts came up in the results.  I hadn't realized there were so many "pee+movies" posts...just goes to show you the basic substance of this blog.

I checked the site and it looks like they've done away with their listings on their site, instead going to apps for phones and PC. 

---

I bet everyone has had this problem; you're at a movie you've been wanting to see for a long time and thanks to the tanker car-sized drink you bought to wash down your popcorn, you find yourself needing to go pee.

Before you go to the movie and then have to" go", go to the website RunPee.com. Find the movie you're going to go see and they'll tell you the best time in the movie to make your pee run, missing only those scenes that are not integral to the storyline. They'll be quite specific, giving you the time and a description of the scene that will be your cue to head for the potty.

A nifty feature of the site is how they won't reveal any "spoilers", instead scrambling the part you missed; click a button to reveal a short synopsis of the scenes that are going on while you'll be gone.

It's a new website, so not all movies are indexed, but they do have a decent listing of older movies...although, if you've rented the vid, you could just hit the "Pause" button, couldn't you?

ACME Planimeter

ACME Planimeter has got to be one of the best online web tools I've ever used.  I love to look at real estate ads, then find them on Google Earth or Bing Maps, but the Google Earth measuring tool has limitations - at least in the free version I use - in that I can use it to outline the dimensions of the property, but then have to use my calculator or an online acreage calculator to figure out the total area.  That takes time and often isn't all that accurate, the cause of which is not completely my incompetence.

Well, I want to believe that, anyway.

Here's the outline of a property I'd love to own near Quitman, Texas. (home town of Sissy Spacek) The listing says it's 50 acres and using the ACME Planimeter gives the exact same figure.

It's really easy to use. From the website:

Drag the map with your mouse, or double-click to center.
Click on the map to place points.
The enclosed area is shown below.

The page remembers your most recent position/zoom/map-type for the next time you visit. If you haven't visited before, it tries to figure out your location based on your internet address. The area computation is done using spherical geometry, so it's correct for large regions.

ACME Planimeter

Cat Age Calculator

How old is your cat in human years ?

To find out enter your cat's age by clicking the cat years and cat months options and your cats age in human years will be automatically calculated.



A little bump from 4/28/09. The Beej is 77 now and really starting to show it.

PrintFriendly

Make any web page print friendly all while saving money and the environment!

From the website:

PrintFriendly cleans and formats web pages for perfect print experience. PrintFriendly removes Ads, Navigation and web page junk, so you save paper and ink when you print. It's free and easy to use. Perfect to use at home, the office, or whenever you need to print a web page.

PrintFriendly has been one of the best bookmarklets I've ever found. I use it nearly every day saving recipes, although I'm sure it would be useful for saving other pages to print, too. It's saved me a lot of space on my hard drive by not having to save the entire page along with an associated folder full of javascript, stylesheet and image files as well as saving time and effort by not having to save the text of the recipe to a Notepad document, then saving the photograph of the dish. (and sometimes triggering one of those "no-right click" scripts)

PrintFriendly is extremely easy to learn how to use and with one click you can delete any text, banner ads, comments or anything else you don't want to put into your PDF. You can print it right then and there, email the file or save the PDF to print later. They also offer a button for your website or blog and recently have begun offering an "Email This Page" button to put on your website.

Print Friendly

Concrete Calculator

Handy widget for figuring how much concrete is needed for a project, such as a walk, driveway or pad/patio.

MailDrop

From the website:

Save your inbox from spam. Use MailDrop when you don't want to give out your real address. Make up your own e-mail address.

No signup required - MailDrop is free for anyone to use when you need a quick, disposable e-mail address.

MailDrop is a great idea when you...

...want to sign up for a website but you're concerned that they might share your address with advertisers.

...are required to provide an e-mail address to a mobile app that shouldn't be sending you messages.

...are making a one-off purchase from an e-commerce site where you don't want followup spam about their "latest deals" in your inbox.

...publish your e-mail address in a place that it could be picked up by address-harvesting spam bots.

...give your address to companies that have a track record of less-than-stellar security.

MailDrop

Moon Phase Widget

Courtesy of Joe's Web Tools

An explanation of Lunar Phases

Countries in the different hemispheres see the Moon from a completely different vantage point from each other. In the northern hemisphere the first quarter looks like a growing D, while in the southern hemisphere it looks like a C. In the northern hemisphere the last quarter looks like a C, while in the southern hemisphere looks like a D. 

A handy memonic device to figure out if the moon is waxing or waning in the Northern Hemisphere is by thinking "DOC" as to the current "shape".
(D first quarter O full Moon C last quarter)

In the Southern Hemisphere it would be "C O D"
(C first quarter O full Moon D last quarter)

testmy.net

Take a "truly accurate speed test" at testmy.net.

From the site: TestMy.net is the first and only fully HTML5 & PHP driven speed test online. Unlike other connection speed tests that require third party applications like Flash or Java, TMN uses only your web browser. This makes TestMy's speed test more sensitive to browser misconfiguration and is an excellent way to highlight performance differences between browsers. Users of TMN can see all browsers are not created equally.

Why Should I Test My Speed?

Simple, to make sure you're getting what you pay for. This speed test is useful if you feel a connection slow down or want to see how your Internet is performing. This isn't like any other broadband speed test. TestMy's proprietary method is proven to help identify issues other speed tests fail to detect. The TMN Speed Test shows your true speed.

testmy.net