The Story of Stuff

A friend sent me an extremely interesting video on American Consumerism. It is a 20-minute video, but it is an very nice video, very relevant to today's world. The video can be found at http://www.storyofstuff.com/

Glary Utilities

Glary utilities is a very nice program to keep your Windows machine clean. The program can be downloaded from here. I found it to be particularly useful to track large files and to remove temporary files. It contains a host of other utilities as well, so its well worth trying out.

buxfer.com

I have been using buxfer.com for over a year and a half to track my personal expenses, but the best part of the software is to settle shared expenses. Each person involved in the transaction is a different buxfer user. Each time you make a shared expense for home, say splitting money for lunch, all you do is to enter the amount, how much each person owes and thats it. Every one involved in the transaction gets an email informing them about the expenses. Its basically a sophisticated excel sheet to track common expenses. My roommates and I have found it to be very useful tool. The website has a wide variety of analysis tools and can give you an idea of where to cut down the expenses. Another nice thing is that you do not need to sign up if you have an AOL, Facebook, Openid, google, yahoo or msn username, which makes the sign up process significantly easier. I think its a great tool for personal and shared expenses.

Freerice

A friend of mine introduced me to this website http://freerice.com. The concept of the website is simple. You must find the meaning of a word displayed on the screen and guess from 4 options. Every correct answer donates 20 grains of rice to the United Nations Food Program. As you keep playing and answering correctly, the difficulty level of the game increases. Each wrong answer reduces your vocab level by 1, whereas you must answer 3 consecutive words correctly to increase the vocab level of 1. Officially, the highest level is 55, but anything above 40 is pretty impressive. The rice program seems like a really good initiative and a worthwhile thing to do.
However, as with any new initiative come the skeptics. I found quite a few websites questioning if freerice.com is indeed a philanthropic initiative or is it another money making scam? The links below seemed to alleviate my fears and suspicions, so I think this is indeed a genuine program.
Article in BBC
Video on World Food Program website
You can find more info about this at the freerice.com FAQ. So go ahead and click to make a difference.