Dave’s Guide to the Best of the Web

Walk into any store and you are likely to feel overwhelmed. Doesn’t matter whether it is Target, Walmart, Lowes, Home Depot, or a car dealership. If you are shopping for a vacuum cleaner - there will be dozens. Refrigerators, washers, televisions, dvd players, computers, paint. You name it, everything is available in multiple nearly identical flavors from various companies. How do we decide what to buy? One method I use is Googling the products I am interested in. Many of these products have been reviewed by consumers just like me…But, as regular consumers we don’t have the ability to compare all the options. Oftentimes our reviews outline what we link of a specific product, but not necessarily in comparison to other products. This oven may work well according to our review, but that may be because we haven’t used that oven. What is the consumer to do? Or is there anything they can do?

One of the best-known periodicals that attempts to solve this dilemma is Consumer Reports, created by the non-profit Consumers Union. Consumer’s Union has been arond since the 1930’s and has served the public across many decades. Their accomplishments can be read here. These day the Consumer’s Union now offers a companion website for Consumer Reports. This website is not free, rather it is subscription based (this post does not receive any affiliate or other monetary compensation from Consumer’s Union for writing this review), but the price is extremely reasonable - $26.00 a year. While this may seem like a decent chunk, for the amount it will save you by optimizing your purchases, it is well worth it.

What sort of information can you expect to receive when you subscribe? The website offers several major sections - Cars, Appliances, Electronics & Computers, Home & Garden, Health & Fitness, Personal Finance, Babies & Kids, Travel, and Food. In each of these sections you will find detailed reviews of individual products as well as comparisons of multiple products against each other.

Consumer Reports seeks to ensure that the consumer not only gets the best product possible but also at the best price available.

If you are a fan of print magazines, is also available in this format. I initially subscribed to their magazine, but don’t intend to renew next year. While I enjoy getting magazines, I more want a repository that I can search when I need items rather than something which perhaps prompts me to want to buy an item and perhaps lacks on any given month the actual items I desire.

Note: The image in this post (of a woman shopping) was originally created by caseywest and is available under the Creative Commons Share-Alike license, thus the above resized and optimized image is also available under the same license.

I’m a big book fan but I’ve never been a big art fan. Still, as time progresses I have been changing and finding more joy in art. Recently I visited the website for the National Gallery of Art and after spending some time there found that it was an amazing site which provided useful information in such a way that even I, as a non-artist type, could enjoy.

The National Gallery of Art is located in Washington D.C. and is a government organization. I hope to stop by there next time I am down that way. The site of course includes the usual information - such as on special events, their collections, and supporting the institution. But what really sold me on the site was the portions of the National Gallery of Art available for viewing online.

For adults there is an entire section entitled Online Tours. On this page one can find a wide variety of tours available - such as those focused around specific artists (e.g. Jacopo Bassano, Cezanne, Thomas Moran, Rembrandt, Diego Rivera), architecture, specific pieces of artwork (e.g. Jackson Pollock’s “Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist)” or Pablo Picasso “The Tragedy”), or by theme (e.g. Artists Exchange: Europe and the Islamic World or Dada).

There are also sections specifically dedicated to children. These sections include interactive painting and decorating tools of a web 2.0 nature that allow children to interactively learn about art and create their own art.

Finally, there are sections for educators including numerous resources for educating on art. For example, there is an Ancient Arcade that allows discovery about ancient gods and symbols through art or there is the downloadable “Inside Scoop: Shaw Memorial” that is a “kid-friendly look at the Memorial to the Massachusetts 54th Regiment…”

So, if one day you want to learn a little more about art - here is a great site to begin your journey at. It is beautiful, well organized, and informative. It gives information in bite-sized pieces that aren’t overwhelming and makes the information fascinating. Perhaps someday we will cross paths in the real National Gallery of Art.

CCleaner is one of those little applications that remains largely undiscovered but is extremely useful. Written by Piriform and just one of several useful applications from this company it offers more extensive cleaning and optimizing of your computer than Windows built-in functionality. One also can’t argue with the price - its free.

The application is divided into three basic sections. The first section is entitled Cleaner. In this section you can select the areas of your system you want CCleaner to tidy up by deleting old and unnecessary files. For example, it will in one sweep clean out your temporary internet files, empty the recycle bin, remove memory dumps, delete old prefetch data, and vanquish old windows hotfix uninstallers.

The second section is entitled Issues and searches your registry. The registry maintains configuration information about most software applications that run of your computer and is constantly being referenced by your applications. Sadly, many applications do not do a good job of cleaning up after themselves when you uninstall them. This section will automatically search for issues and let you select to repair or ignore them. I have used it repeatedly on a wide variety of computers and have never had any problems with it deleting anything valuable.

The final section is entitled Tools. It allows you to remove applications that are starting every time you start your computer. For example, AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger, QuickTime, and iTunes oftentimes start every time you start your computer. While this is useful for some people, many would prefer to just open these applications as needed.

The application also includes additional options for cleaning and optimizing your computer, but they are generally less useful than the features mentioned above. The application is also highly options driven - rather than forcing you to take an all or nothing approach it allows you to select what you want to do and how you want to do it - ensuring items you actually want aren’t removed.

Project Gutenberg is one of the most prestigious websites on the internet. Founded by Michael Hart in its nebulous form in 1971 it is one of the longest-lived and largest websites on the internet. Project Gutenberg exists to digitize books in order to distribute and preserve them for all time and does so as a free service.

As such, Project Gutenberg is an exciting and vast library of resources for anyone looking for a good read. One can visit their Top 100 Downloads page to see what books and authors are most popular or browse the entirety of the vast collection - currently clocking in at over 20,000 volumes.

All of the volumes on Project Gutenberg are legally placed there, either because their copyright has expired and they are now in the public domain or because the author/publisher has given explicit permission for the book to be published.

So what sort of books can one expect to find on Project Gutenberg? The variety and scope is amazing. Here are a few samples:

• David Eugene Smith. A History of Mathematics.
• Jefferson Davis. The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government.
• Brother Lawrence. The Practice of the Presence of God.
• Alexandre Dumas. The Count of Monte Cristo.
• Jack London. The Call of the Wild.
• W.E.B. DuBois. The Souls of Black Folk.
• Thomas Henry Huxley. Evolution of Theology: an Anthropological Study.
• Fyodor Dostoevsky. Crime and Punishment.
• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
• E.A. Wallis Budge. The Babylonian Legends of Creation.
• T.S. Eliot. The Waste Land.
• Jules Verne. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
• H. G. Wells. The War of the Worlds.
• Zane Grey. The Last Trail.
• Jane Austen. Sense and Sensibility.

Project Gutenberg also includes search functionality which allows you to query their massive tomes to find the rare and obscure. For example, when I was working on GameSecretary.Com, a website of group games, I found several volumes specifically on this subject such as George Orrin Draper’s School, Church, and Homes Games and May C. Hofmann’s Games for Everybody.

If you are looking for a way to help others out, Project Gutenberg is also an excellent project. There are many quick ways to become involved in the process and the time required is determined by the volunteer. Who doesn’t want to help ensure that texts are archived and available for posterity’s sake and our own?

For those looking to read more about the history of Project Gutenberg, a good article was written by Marie Lebert entitled “Project Gutenberg, from 1971 to 2005” and published over at the Net des études françaises.

Okay, okay - it is hyperbole to say that Apple is the driver of innovation, more correct would be that they are a major contributor to innovation. Apple is one of those companies with a long and illustrious history (in computer years). I remember their early Apple Computers (II, II+, IIe, etc.). I loved them. They oftentimes had no hard drive, external floppy drives, and booted to a command-line prompt - but still they were fun and diverse machines and the choice of many early computer fans. This was followed by a long down-turn for Apple while the majority of consumers moved to IBM Compatible computers (now simply known as PC’s). It seemed for a while like Apple might eventually fade into oblivion - loved only by artistic types for its supposed superiority in handling video and photography. Then…

The iPod came. The iPod in conjunction with iTunes became a brilliant hit and has revolutionized the way people listen to music. There was a resurgence in interest in Apple Macs and this interest continue to expand, as Apple has continued to refine their dominance in style and simplicity. Computers had traditionally been the realm of geeks and oftentimes featured rough edges that were off-putting to the “uninitiated”, Apple sought to change this, bringing about not only features but features that truly “just worked.”

After the iPod and iTunes came the iTV. While the iTV has not experienced the same sort of uptake as other products nor is it a new product in and of itself, Apple has yet again raised the bar for the entire industry by creating (and thus allowing consumers demand) a device that just works.

The most recent Apple innovation to take the world by storm is the iPhone. This phone promises to free consumers from the shackles of hobbled phones from cellular carriers, to increase what can be done on a phone and how simply - and to bring higher quality and simplicity to smart phones.

What is interesting about Apple is not that they come up with innovative ideas unlike anything ever thought of before, but that they are able to refine innovative ideas to deliver quality and usable products again and again. The point for us is not whether they dominate the market, but rather the fact that they serve as a catalyst for better products. If Apple enters a market you can be ensured that every competitor will work double-time to ensure their product is better, whereas sometimes companies can forget that their customer is important…

Apple’s site doesn’t have a lot to do on it - unless you want to buy something. But it is aesthetically pleasing and includes information on one of the hottest companies with the best products.