We’ve heard a lot about some renegade microbes in the news lately. The Swine Flu hysteria closed down many schools across the country and continues to be an issue worldwide. With all the press that H1N1 has gotten, you might think that all microbes are harmful. In fact, the vast majority of microbes are not at all harmful, and many are downright helpful. At Microbeworld, you can discover the abundant positives of microbes.
I’ve always preferred the bumbling around method to learning, whether I’m using a new piece of software or I’ve just bought a new gadget. However, sometimes you’re faced with the choice of reading the manual or causing irreparable harm to yourself or your new toy. By this point, though, you’ve relegated the manual to a shoebox at the bottom of your closet underneath the boxes containing your camping gear and your winter wardrobe. You could try to track down the manual on the company website, or you could simply go to The Manuals, a website containing more than 5 million free owners manuals for everything you own.
Want to try out the advanced features of your SMART Board? Download the instructions and get going. Struggling to hook up your fancy new digital projector for class? No problem. Whatever you need to know, there’s a manual for that. Well, probably. There’s 5 million of them, and I haven’t had time to look through them all. But with that many, your odds of finding what you need are pretty good. -BILL FERRIS
Discover how to open mystery file extensions at OpenWith.org
Photo credit: Telstar Logistics on Flickr.
Word Source is a site that calls itself “the social dictionary,” and at first, that made me very skeptical. It’s not that I dislike people, but I believe some things are better experienced alone. Is there a more blissfully solitary activity than looking up a word? Discovering its origin? Its subtle shades of meaning? Why does my dictionary have to be social now, too?
Of course, using reference sources isn’t so exciting for everyone, and that’s precisely why Word Source is great. The site lets you tag and rate each word, indicating that you like or dislike it, that you can say it five times fast, that it caused you to fail an English test, or that it makes you feel “all warm and fuzzy inside.” Searchers can then see how other users feel about a particular word. How many high school students would love to exact revenge on a prickly SAT word by tagging that it makes them nauseous?
There are other features that even this anti-social librarian loves, like the advanced search options, which let you search an exact word, a prefix, or a suffix, and which allow the use of wild card characters when you’re not quite sure how a word is spelled. And for those who don’t like bells and whistles, you can look up a word without even visiting the website, by typing word.sc/[your word] into your browser’s address bar. For example, try typing in word.sc/social.
Word Source also does a simultaneous Flickr search to find photos of your word, which is great if you’re searching for a noun, and not so great if you’re searching for an adjective. A search for “Pomeranian” yielded, of course, thousands of adorable photos of dogs, but a search for “concomitant” yielded an out-of-focus shot of someone’s bare foot. The Flickr-searching feature is cute, but it only works as well as people’s Flickr tags. Which is to say, unfortunately, not very well.
Still, there’s lots to like about Word Source, especially for those students for whom “look it up” sounds like a prison sentence. -EMILY JACK
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