Many of us are familiar with the social revolution that Orkut brought about-allowing you to share photos, video, catch up with friends, and their friends, and your friends’ friends’ friends-online socialising. But if you want to listen to and share your audio files with like-minded people, there’s no site like last.fm. The site, unlike other online radio places, where all you can do is tune into a preferred genre, lets you listen to songs from a particular artist, album, complete with tracks, tags, and labels.
A radio sites you just can’t afford to miss
The site builds a detailed profile of your tastes by installing small plugins in your media players, and then recommends similar artists. This profile is used to customise the Web site according to your music preferences. Let’s say your playlist contains mainly hip-hop; after you install the plugins, the site reads your tastes, and displays various albums in the genre. In order to show you more music that you may not have heard of, the site lists music that other people with similar tastes have liked-you can also manually recommend songs, artists, or albums. Last.fm boasts of a stock of more than 1,00,000 songs for free download. Music producers and artists are drawn here as they can promote themselves, and this translates into an ever-growing variety of music for us.
Music from big record companies obviously cannot be downloaded, but you can listen to 30-second previews of songs to decide whether or not you want to buy the album. If the label has authorised it, songs are also made available as low-quality streaming audio, which means you can use the site as your streaming audio jukebox as well.
Information about artists is maintained in the spirit of a wiki, so you can edit and add your own comments. Some of the other tabs on an artist page will let you browse through pictures of the artist or concerts, and even pictures you have taken can be uploaded. You can click the Events tab to see where they’re performing next, the Albums tab to see if you’ve missed any for your collection, and much more. Overall, Last.fm is a wonderful site every music lover should visit.
www.cookingbynumbers.com
There are thousands of wonderful Web sites dedicated to cooking, but none of them can hold a candle to this site. Anyone who cooks on a regular basis will testify to the lack of feasibility of other sites-any recipe on another site will inevitably end-up with you having to dash to the market to get that missing ingredient, or just ignoring the recipe and doing-your-own-thing.
Hungry? Say what you have, and up pops a recipe
Cookingbynumbers.com, on the other hand, lets you tell it what you have in stock, and then whips up an interesting and tasty recipe. All you have to do is select what you have stashed in your cupboard and fridge, and the site will find recipes for you from the items you selected. If this isn’t enough, click on “Skillsbynumbers” on the same page to improve your cooking skills. Here you’ll find detailed instructions on various must-know cooking skills. How to… chop an onion, make breadcrumbs, seed and cut a pepper, boil an egg, peel a tomato, cook rice… it’s all here. The site is a must-visit for those who cook on a daily basis, and a must-see for those bachelors who need to learn how to cook from scratch after shifting away from home.
www.scitoys.com
Do you feel an itch whenever you see electronic toys? Have you ever wanted to build your own science toys, but were never able to do so because you didn’t know how to? Head to scitoys.com. The site teaches you how to make electric and electronic toys using common household materials, and all in a few minutes.
You can experiment with magnetism and electromagnetism-subjects you (never) learnt in school-create an electric motor in 10 minutes flat, or your very own rail-gun!
Destructive or constructive-you choose
You can get your hands dirty with electrochemistry, and create your own hydrogen bomb (well a little one, at any rate!) or a hydrogen fuel cell. If you’re not into world domination, perhaps you could try to build your own radio… There are many more projects that might interest you, based on thermodynamics, aerodynamics, light and optics, biology mathematics, computers and electronics, etc. Everything is explained in exquisite detail, with the requisite diagrams and photos that make it easy to understand.
This site will explain the “How” and “Why” of every principle as well, so even beginners or science novices will understand what they’re doing. Overall, it’s a great resource for that summer project that you have to do for your school or college. If not, there’s always the human nature to be inquisitive, and to build… go here and satisfy that urge.