A new year, and I have some new toys, thanks to Sheepish Annie. Thank you, Sheepie!
She pointed me to a Mac widget that will play any of the BBC radio stations. That was all fine and good, but while I was on the Apple widget page I discovered lots of other fun and free toys.
A weather widget from The Weather Channel (pictured is the sample from the Apple site); a daily factoid widget, just the thing for a geeky nerd/Jeopardy-wannabe like me:
An e-mail checker and a thing to convert on thing to another; I'll have to let you know if it will convert, say, degrees Celsius into volume or anything cool like that:
A translator:
The aforementioned BBC radio thingie:
Sun clock:
I can read my favorite comics every day, a handy thing for someone who doesn't get a daily newspaper*:
I already know how to access many of these things on the Web, but this is a quicker way -- our DSL, which seemed blazingly fast when we got it five or six years ago, is now not so speedy. I am especially enamored of the weather widget given how often Smokey says to me, Check the weather for me, would you? No more opening a new tab in Firefox, going to weather.com, waiting, typing in our zip code, waiting, clicking on the radar or the 5-day forecast, waiting, and finally getting to what we want to see.
The BBC widget only works well when no one else is hogging bandwidth (Andrew, I'm looking at you) but it will be fun sometimes. I also found a widgets for a dictionary, person look-up, international shoe size converter (yes, I needed that; shut up), a timer, a system monitor, a flight tracker, and sticky notes. Oh boyoboy, fun...
* I read the Minneapolis (Star &) Tribune for 30 years, but they do not make daily deliveries to our current location. If I subscribe I get it by mail at least one day late. The St. Paul Pioneer Press will deliver daily, and we subscribed for a number of months, but as a newspaper it is, imho, far inferior to the Strib and not worth the money. In the search for a good daily paper I even tried getting the NYTimes for a while; same problem as the Strib with getting it a day or three late. So we gave up on subscribing to a daily newspaper. I get my news from the web.
* * * * *
Thanks for all the apprciative comments on yesterday's 2008 in pictures post. I need to credit Vicki Knitorious for the idea; it was outstanding.
A couple commenters expressed regret that there were no elevator adventure pictures. I have castigated myself repeatedly since that episode for not taking any photos WHILE I was in the elevator. That would have been blogging at its best. But I was too busy thinking and trying things. Next time...
