bored.com do you really need more?
So there you are, sitting at your computer late at night twiddling your thumbs, and what do you do? Type in “bored” and press [Ctrl] [Enter], of course. Good move. Bored.com is good enough for such times. We should warn you, though, that it’s only good when you’re really bored. It’s quite silly otherwise!
Play games online here-jigsaw puzzles, tic-tac-toe, Sudoku, and many others, or get links to hundreds of online gaming sites. Music (not yet) on your mind? There’s a section called “musicmania” to entertain you-learn how to play music on a cell phone by punching in numbers, find the lyrics and meanings of songs and other such silly pursuits.
Of course there’d be a jokes section on such a site. A sampler: the best excuses for being late for school, work, church, and more. If this weren’t fun enough, there’s even a separate category for fun. Here, “fun” means fun of the silliest kind-be warned-but then, you’re bored, aren’t you? Type in a word or phrase and watch them spelt out in different fonts or photo collages. Then there’s an age-guessing game: figure out the true age of the person in a photo. Challenging, even mildly addictive.
If you’re up late at night because you’ve been dumped and are feeling suicidal, read through funny yet real “Bad Date Stories.”
About enough of a review-you get the general idea. The site’s design and layout could have been better, we must say. It’s animation-less and not-so-colourful to boot. Having said that, the site is constantly updated, and there’s a section called “Coming Soon” on the main page. More inane stuff… but fun in an unhealthy kind of way!
This is a free online library where anyone can publish and discover documents that are non-copyrighted and not considered illegal in the United States. These documents could be personal documents like school papers, PowerPoint presentations, research articles, funny pictures, free online books, commentaries, spreadsheets… whatever you can think of. Scribd started off as a project to share documents in different file formats residing on different systems, viewable online without the need of a particular software on the viewer’s system. You can upload documents without signing up. This encourages casual users to share stuff, in turn making Scribd a large storehouse of information.
Apart from potentially benefiting the world, why publish? Well, a need to make public a piece of writing arises when the subject or document is controversial, when a review is needed for an article, to promote unpaid work, and so on. You can publish documents in the Word, PowerPoint, PDF, Excel, and PostScript formats (loosely speaking), and to view the documents, you just need a Flash-enabled browser.
Scribd also allows you to upload a document and keep it private. When this is done, you get a secret URL that can be shared with whomever you’d care to include in your privy group. Only, you need to sign up to be able to do this, but that process isn’t time-consuming or difficult in the least.
Other than uploading and viewing documents online, you can also convert between the Word, PDF, plaintext, HTML, JPEG, PowerPoint, and Excel formats-and even convert documents to audio (text-to-speech)! The audio format is MP3, allowing you to put it on a portable player.
“How to design a good API and why it matters,” and “Why men won’t dance.” Those were the two documents at the top of the list exactly when we wrote this. It’s as random as it gets-and it’s not a blog either. You’ll get a clearer picture when you visit the site. There’s a search, so don’t worry.
“Life tips” sounds vague; it could sound like the site might lecture you on how to lead a good life. The thing is, these are actually tips-as in “tips and tricks”-for almost anything you can think of, insofar as you’re a regular human being. The site boasts of more than 95,000 tips. Advice is in all the typical topics-like entertainment, events, food and drink, home and garden, and such. The cool thing is, you get specific pointers. Did you know bedrooms at between 20 to 22 degrees C are good for promoting sleep in people suffering from allergies? If you’re buying a vacuum cleaner, what exactly should you keep in mind? Need to understand the signs of a cheating spouse?
There are tips on serious stuff like Business, Employee Management, Religion and Spirituality, and more, as also in unheard-of categories like “Gay Marriage tips,” “Cigar tips,” and “Body Jewellery tips.” Tips can be rated and commented upon, too, to add to the fun. Registering allows you to submit your own tips, and send tips on the site to your friends and feed them to your MySpace, Google, Yahoo!, and Friendster pages.
The site takes itself pretty seriously, which we can’t fault: you can compile your favourites to create an e-book that you can download for free. You can have this e-book printed in paperback with your name and a personalised message on the cover, and have it sent to a friend for a fee!