wiseGEEK Widgets

From wiseGeek, a couple of great widgets for your blog or website.

Did You Know?

This Day in History

I follow the site on Facebook as well as subscribe to it in my reader. They have all sorts of categories with some fascinating facts (and to be honest, some NOT so fascinating) For example, from today's posts, this question is posed:

Why Does It Hurt to Pull Off an Adhesive Bandage? They give you the explanation and also ask if you knew this fact: Did you know about 1.5 million injuries a year are caused by removing adhesive bandages? It's not just trivia; in this case, they explain the most pain-free way of removing a bandage.

Great site, great widgets!

Amazon Cloud

I got this email from Amazon the other day:

You may have noticed that songs from 11 CDs you have purchased from Amazon were added to your Cloud Player library. This means that high-quality MP3 versions of these songs are available for you to play or download from Cloud Player for FREE. You can find your songs in the "Purchased" playlist.

In addition, we're excited to announce AutoRip. Now when you buy any CD with the logo, the MP3 version of that album will instantly be delivered to your Amazon Cloud Player library for FREE.

I've been aware of the Cloud Player, but since I don't have a device (other than this computer) to play my songs on, I didn't use it.  I download free music from Amazon all the time and have purchased quite a few mp3 albums as well as a dozen or so CDs.  I can't remember when they started the Cloud feature, but I reached the limit quite some time back and deleted a lot of the songs that were in my Cloud as so to make room for new ones.  I already had them on my computer and couldn't see the need for my Cloud except as backup. 

It's nice that my purchased CD tunes are now in my Cloud. That will save me from having to rip the music to add to my mp3 jukebox.

On my Cloud page it says I have room for 250 more songs.  I could get more space if I bought it, but...The best thing about it is that it's much easier to download the songs now.  The settings were confusing and seemed to change on their own and when I got new songs, they sometimes didn't download to my computer but were instead put into my Cloud  Here's what's in my Cloud right now.

There are some duplicates in my mp3 jukebox, but I've been working to get rid of them. Some are dupes that happen to be on two albums by a particular artist or band and some are freebies I got from Amazon that happened to be in different collections. At last count, I had over 21,000 songs. Before updates to Windows Media Player, it tallied up the total size and time of all the mp3 files and I had enough to listen to music non-stop for a couple of weeks.

Scroll Clock

Another cool clock - Scroll Clock

(graphic below is a screen capture of the actual clock)



Scroll Clock

Hank Skinner Interview

The latest Skinner interview, in two parts

Goin' For The Win

You Are a Two Point Conversion

You are an adept risk taker. You love to go for the glory. You do what others are scared to do, and it pays off! You have no fear, and because of this, you're able to look at the odds rationally. You've taken enough small risks to get ahead in life, even if every risk hasn't panned out.

What Football Scoring Method Are You?

Wild Thing - The Troggs

R.I.P. Reg Presley

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