• A username lookup site that actually seems to work: http://www.usernamecheck.com/ #
• Very nice Wikipedia searching site: http://chir.ag/wiki/ #
• Find coupons before you buy: http://www.gotodaily.com/ #
• The long and convoluted history of Unix: http://www.levenez.com/unix/unix.png #

• Google Maps election mashups: http://maps.google.com/help/maps/elections/index.html #
• Stay up on latest election projections: http://www.pollster.com/ #
• Take a short quiz to help find out which candidates you side with: http://glassbooth.org/ #

• Social file sharing: http://wua.la/ #
• Web based alarm clock with really annoying alarm sounds: http://sleep.fm/ #
• Simple group task management: http://www.scrumy.com/ #

• PDF to Word conversion: http://pdfundo.net/convert/ #
• Helps you make up your mind: http://www.godesignate.com/ #

• Get to know rm: http://www.labtestproject.com/linuxcmd/rm.html #

• Compare neighborhoods between cities (cool but needs more cities): http://neighborhoods.homethinking.com/ #
• QuickStart, an Ubuntu configuration assistant: http://quickstart.phpbb.net/ #

I finally got my big desktop computer organized and rebuilt to the latest version of Ubuntu. The computer has two 500GB SATA drives on it, so I also put Sun's Virtualbox on it and am now downloading Open Source operating systems like crazy. I have already got two Linux distributions and one Unix installed and about five or so more downloaded.

I want to get back into trying out all kinds of distributions again because for about the past year I have stopped hopping from one distribution to the other and settled on Ubuntu. So I am a bit out of touch on non-Debian based operating systems.

I have been taking some notes on my experience installing and playing with these systems and I will post my thoughts here as I get time.

• Strip websites down to the basics: http://finch.ploogy.net/ #
• Information modeling tool: http://www.paterva.com/maltego/ #
• Older versions of IE on Linux, I really need to check this out. http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/ #
• Book to check out: http://www.dreamingincode.com/ #
• Science podcasts: http://www.sciencepodcasters.org #

This site just lets you quickly encode and decode a string so it can be passed in a URL without messing it up. I am glad that people host these kind of simple tools. It saves me from having to throw together a quick script myself.

http://www.albionresearch.com/misc/urlencode.php