I got this link from From Weblogtools Collection: 30 Things you Didn’t Know You Could Do on the Internet.

I’ve sifted through the list for just the free and generally useful stuff and here’s what’s left:

Google Facelift - Google offers more than a dozen services, but most are hidden. The GoogleX interface makes all of Google’s goodies–such as Gmail, Froogle, Maps, and more–accessible via a nifty Mac OS X-like toolbar. Originally designed by a Google researcher, the toolbar disappeared shortly after being posted on the Google Labs site (most likely due to objections by Apple), but not before some plucky Netizens saved a copy for your use.

DeathClock - We all have to go sometime–and the DeathClock purports to tell you precisely when. Just plug in your birth date, gender, height, and weight; the site predicts the day of your demise based on average life expectancy, and even displays a ticker that counts down to the big day in seconds.

Mail2Web - get your POP mail from anywhere - You say your ISP doesn’t offer a Web interface for your e-mail inbox? Don’t fret. With Mail2Web you can access any POP3 or IMAP4 account, read and respond to messages, and attach up to 10MB of files from any Web-connected computer. And don’t worry, your mail will still be there ready to download when you get back to the office.

Tech Support Guy - If Windows is having another bad hair day, but you’re unwilling to spend $35 to be aggravated by Microsoft support, the Tech Support Guy can help. Post your question to the site’s two dozen forums or search more than 300,000 threads to find an answer. It’s not as fast as a call to tech support, but it can be more fruitful and less frustrating.

SpoofStick Home - That Web site may look just like your bank’s, but is it really? Find out by downloading Corestreet’s free Spoofstick applet. It displays the real domain of the site in your browser toolbar, regardless of what the address window says–an invaluable tool for fighting phishers. The toolbar is available for both IE 6.x and Firefox 1.x.

The WayBack Machine - Wonder what Yahoo looked like during the dot-com boom? Dial up the Wayback Machine, and you can view cached copies of popular Web sites dating back to 1996. For quick nostalgia trips, add a Wayback bookmarklet to your Firefox or Opera toolbar or Internet Explorer favorites; clicking the button will call up the archive of the site you’re viewing.

Anonymous Emailer - Maybe your boss has bad breath, or a close friend is in serious need of an ego trim. You can slip them a word in secret using Sharpmail’s anonymous e-mailer. You can send your message in plain text or HTML, or you can send an SMS message to someone’s cell phone. (But don’t even think about sending abusive or spammish mail, or Sharpmail will pull your free account.) Who knows? Maybe you’ll receive an anonymous message taking you to task for your passive-aggressive e-mail tendencies.

Surreal Quote Generator - Is your Web site a tad, well, dull? Ravenblack’s random surrealism generator will spark it right up. Just copy the site’s free HTML code to your home page template. Each time your page loads, it will display a different Dali-esque comment (”A saucepan a day keeps the banana away”). Words to live by.

Have fun!

One utility that has been on the internet for a long time — but of which I have just recently discovered the use — are anonymizers. What’s an anonymizer?

It’s a website where you can go and enter a URL to browse. It’s like a browser within your browser, but instead of broadcasting your IP address to the sites you’re surfing, it gives the anonymizer’s address instead. Anonymizers were first developed for security reasons, so that spurious sites cannot remember your IP address and do malicious things to your server or provider. It also makes you untraceable.

For the uninitiated, your Internet service provider (ISP) gives you an IP address each time you connect to the internet. This IP can be the same each time you log in (static), or it can be different every time you log in (dynamic). But either way, your IP address is a way you can be traced, as it will reveal who your ISP is and its location.

Using an anonymizer takes away that possiblity.

But another use I’ve discovered for the anonymizer is getting on to websites that somehow I cannot access with certain ISP’s. I have had, for the longest time, intermittent problems accessing batjay’s and gelay’s sites if I surf to them direct from my browser. However, if I use an anonymizer, I can see their sites no problem.

Also, I discovered that iCable IP’s have been banned from Haloscan, as well as a few other commenting systems because iCable runs an open proxy. But if I comment on haloscan through an anonymizer, my comment gets published.

The Anonymous Browsing Quickstart Page can be found here. From here you can choose from several anonymous browsers. My personal choices are Anonymouse and Anonymizer because their frames are unobtrusive and the ads negligible.

It’s worth a try, especially if you’re having the “domain expired” problems while accessing some sites, and clearing your browser cache doesn’t work.

This anonymizer is, of course, different from those who write ugly comments on other people’s blogs under the name “Anonymous”. Good thing about WordPress is that it logs commenters’ IP addresses, the same way Haloscan does. I’ve never used Blogger’s commenting system, so I wouldn’t know if Blogger logs IP’s too. If you ever get any spurious comments on your site, find out what the IP address of the commenter is. Chances are you might find out where it came from.

Unless, of course, the commenter used an anonymizer.

The keyboard shortcut ctrl+c has become notorious these days. Much has been said about the bopis incident, but since I was also a recipient of the crusading email, allow me to add my own two cent’s.

There are other keys on the keyboard, other than ctrl+c and ctrl+v. The other 99 or so keys are so that one can write, among other things:

“shamelessly lifted from insert-sourcename-here“
“this isn’t my own work, I copied it from insert-copied source-here“

But best of all, the other keys are there so that one can proclaim:

“This is my own work. 100% d’original. Beware of imitation.”