Cricket games online

Today I will deviate from my usual boring theme of "useful utilities", so here are a couple of cool websites to play flash based cricket online. The best of the lot in my opinion is Stick Cricket. Highly addictive, it has various game modes depending on how much time you have to waste! I strongly suggest creating a free login to track your progress. Another nice website with some cool flash based cricket games is Krish Cricket. The coolest part about this website is it also has a flash game for Book Cricket! I can't remember how many hours we have spent in school playing book cricket. I wonder who on earth came up with the game! For the uninitiated, here is good summary of the game.

Stroke It

In some sense, this is an addition to my earlier post about Mouse Gestures. Since I am quite addicted to mouse gestures, I wanted to find a program which can do the same thing on other programs, or applications such as Google Chrome, which does not have a mouse gestures add-on as of now. I found StrokeIt. Its a downloadable application, which runs in the background, and can mimic the actions of mouse gestures on Firefox. It can be customized for various applications, and the help on the website is fairly comprehensive for different applications. Let me know if anyone finds this useful.

Credit Reports & Score

The importance of good credit can not be over-emphasized in the American economy, particularly in the current economic climate. Everything from home loans to auto loans to credit card applications depend on your credit score. The credit score is a number based on statistical analysis of the credit reports, and gives an indication of how creditworthy a person is. Here are a couple of useful websites to keep track of your credit.

Every person with an SSN is eligible to receive a free credit report once in 12 months from the three major credit agencies - Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. According to the Federal Trade Comission website, the official website to obtain this is annualcreditreport.com. Other websites seemingly offering free credit reports, come with fine print requiring signing up for other services. I have not comprehensively reviewed all the other websites, but the website mentioned above is the best one to use.

By law, the above website does not have to provide a credit score. It only provides a comprehensive list of activities on your credit. A good website to get your credit score is creditkarma.com. Most other websites require payment for a credit score, but this website generates revenue through ads. After creating a profile, you can track changes in your credit score with time. It also provides a credit simulator to project changes in credit score with various actions such as taking a loan, getting a new credit card etc. It has a whole bunch of other nice features worth trying out.

Desktops

I recently wanted software to create multiple desktops, similar to an utility which exists on Linux machines. The reason I needed this was I was cluttering up my taskbar with too many programs, including programs which I wanted open, but wasn't actively using all the time (read as browser window with cricinfo.com refreshing the score!). I found this utility called Desktops by SysInternals. It looks like it is endorsed by Microsoft, so I'm quite confident about the reliability of the software. Its very simple to install and an icon in your system tray gives control over the 4 desktops. The other cool thing about the software is the ability to switch desktops using keyboard shortcuts, which I find easier than navigating to the system tray to change desktops. A must try for everyone who finds their screens too small, but can't afford to use multiple monitors.