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.

Ear wax

The topic of this post might not be the most interesting in the world, but here is some information regarding this. Apparently, it appears that using a cotton swab everyday as a matter of practice for general hygiene is not encouraged. I guess I must stop my habit of using a swab each morning. Here is a summary of information I found at www.webmd. com.

Earwax is a naturally produced substance that protects the ear canal. It is a mixture of skin, sweat, hair, and debris (such as shampoo and dirt) held together with a fluid secreted by glands inside the ear canal (ceruminous glands). The ear canals are self-cleaning. Earwax helps filter dust, keeps the ears clean, and protects the ear canal from infection. Normally, earwax is a self-draining liquid that does not cause problems. As the skin of the ear canal sheds, the wax is carried to the outer part of the ear canal and drains from the ear by itself.

Earwax is normally produced only in the outer half of the ear canal and will not become deeply impacted unless it is pushed in. The ear canal may become blocked (impacted) when attempts to clean the ear with cotton swabs, bobby pins, or a finger push wax deeply into the ear canal. Impacted earwax may cause some hearing loss or other problems, such as ringing in the ears (tinnitus), a full feeling in the ears, or vertigo. Poking at the wax with cotton swabs, your fingers, or other objects usually only further compacts the wax against the eardrum.

CCF settlement

A lot of people have been getting postal mails from this group called CCF Settlement. It looked like a sure scam to me, since it seemed like free money for nothing in return. After some extensive googling and cross verifying between various webpages, I came to the conclusion that IT IS NOT A SCAM. The website for this is http://www.ccfsettlement.com. In any case, all they need from you is your address, which they already have in case you received a postal mail and the estimated number of days you spent outside the US between 1996 and 2006. So, you don't have much to lose and possibly atleast $25 to make. They have 3 options, Refund Option 1 for a flat $25, which is for people who have traveled abroad for less than 1 week, and this seems like the best option. Refund Option 2 is where you declare the number of days you traveled, where you could make more, but finally might be less than $25. Refund Option 3 is for corporate travelers, who have official documents to support their claims. In any case, for options 2 and 3, your claims can be audited, while option 1 seems like the safest.
Some links discussing this issue are:
Arizona Tribune
LA Times
Hattiesburg American
The last link has some nice tips to be aware of potential scams riding on this legitimate law suit.

FlickrDown

I found a utility which can be used to download snaps from friends and family from Flickr. Its called FlickDown and can be found here. After you authorize your account and enter the name of another user, it lists all the albums and photos available for download and it saves the images to your disk. A neat utility for all Flickr users.