Sunday, October 28, 2007

Free Online Nostalgic Games.

Well before computer gaming and games like World of Warcraft and Halo became popular in the early 90s', children and adults alike enjoyed hands-on family games such as Scrabble and Rubik's cube. These simple but highly enjoyable childhood games of yesterday provided endless family fun and are making a comeback where games like Tic-Tac-Toe and Pictionary can be played online for free.

Scrabble
The online version of the popular 1948 board game can be found at scrabulous.com and can also be added to your Facebook account as a third-party application. Scrabulous, however, allows players to make a move in their own time, which means no pressure to come up with a word pronto. Users can also look up words in internationally recognised word-lists. With the intention of trying to keep the game alive by offering everyone a chance to play it online, Scrabulous is a massive hit with more than 375,000 Facebook users adding the game to their accounts.

Pictionary
Remember giving a miss on a game of Pictionary when you are unable to gather a group of friends to play? With it's online presence, you no longer have to miss this highly popular game and friends can be miles apart but still be able to guess what is being drawn. Running on Shockwave, the game provided by isketch.net is hassle-free as no account is needed. You are also given the option of choosing the level of difficulty before you start a game, by either joining an ongoing game or setting up your own.

Hangman
If you fancy a challenge the old school way then try playing Hangman online, a game that was usually played on the blackboards of my school when i was young. A simple but fun game where players have to guess a word by calling out letters one by one, where the more wrong guesses the players make, the faster they "kill" the man on the gallows. Available at theproblemsite.com, the website also has a dictionary of about 17,000 words and allows users to customise their game - you can choose the length of the words you want to guess and the number of wrong guesses allowed.

Scissors, Paper, Stone
Who can forget this simple game that has provide endless hours of childhood fun. Played not only to while away time, the game was also often used as a fun way to settle disputes. In this game, two players compete by throwing out hand signals of three different kinds - scissors, paper and stone. Stone beats scissors, paper beats stone and scissors beats paper. The online version version gives players a chance to pit their skills against computers and other players around the world.

Tic-Tac-Toe
Another popular childhood game, Tic-Tac-Toe is played by two players on a three-by-three grid. The winner is the first person who has place three marks - using either an "X" or "O" - in a horizontal , vertical or diagonal row. Aptly suited for young children, the online version allows you to choose from five levels of difficulty.

Rubik's Cube.
Who could forget this intriguing game, the cube with six different colours on each face, that made waves in the 1980s. Players aim to return the cube to its original form, with each face of the cube in one solid colour. The online version not only allows you to play with different designs of the cube such as brick and wood but there is also no manual twisting either, as a click of the mouse switches the positioning of any row of the cube. You can also scramble the cube into five different permutations, for e.g, to have one face pre-solved, making it easier to solve the rest of the puzzle.

*Related post : Free Games Downloads.

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Sunday, October 21, 2007

AddThis - Free All-In-One Bookmarking Widget.

Do you sometimes find your sidebar cluttered with too many social bookmarking buttons like Digg, Del.icio.us, Technorati, Stumbleupon, Google Bookmarks and many others? Instead of helping your readers bookmark your blog or site, they looked messy, creates confusion and takes up valuable space.

AddThis, launched in Sept 2006, aims to remove all this clutter and makes it really easy for your readers to bookmark your site or blog and subscribe to your feeds. It is a simple and free universal button that sends bookmarks and RSS feeds to the most popular social bookmarking and news reader services and does away with the need for individual buttons for each of these services.

Not only is AddThis widget convenient and simple to use, it also provides valuable data showing what content your visitors bookmark the most on your website or blog, over various time periods. It is also well-supported with fast load-balancing servers and is extremely fast.

Available in two modes, including a drop-down widget, AddThis makes it easy for web publishers to share and distribute their content and is a nifty and free web service that i highly recommend.

Related Post : Free Web Service For Consumers Refunds.

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Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Scan Your Hard Disk For Free.

Lying at the heart of every PC is the hard disk and just like it's human counterpart, periodic scanning of it's health will alert you to impending failure and prevent catastrophic loss of data and the severe inconvenience of an unavailable and dead PC. While modern hard drives are much more reliable than the disks of yesterday, they are still extremely complex electronic devices with moving parts that are subject to wear and tear. Acting as an early warning system, it will be prudent to use the following free diagnostic tools to check on the health of your hard disk :

HD Tune
A free hard disk diagnostic utility for Windows, HD Tune uses SMART ( Self Monitoring And Reporting Technology ) to check on the health of your disk, scans the surface for errors, monitors its temperature and even shows detailed information of your disk in graphical form.
It is one of those nifty utilities that could be very handy if you suspect that your disk is fast deteriorating. Works with Windows 2000 and XP and it requires 10MB of free disk space.

HDD Health
A full-featured hard disk failure-prediction utility, HDD Health monitors your drives and provides detailed information about them. From your system tray, HDD Health uses SMART to assess your hard drive's condition, displays detailed information and send you alerts when there are any problems. Light on system resources, it works on Windows NT, 98, ME, 2000 and XP and has a file size of 901KB.

HDDLife
Besides providing excellent real-time analysis and reports of potential issues of your disk's health through SMART, HDDLife also comes with an unique feature that can cut your power bills by reducing your disk's power consumption and has a silent mode which reduces your disk's noise level without sacrificing performance. Supports most hard drives like IDE, Serial, ATA, SCSI and even external USB disks.

Related Post : Free Online Data Storage Services

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Saturday, October 13, 2007

Free Web Service For Consumers Refunds.

With online shopping getting increasingly popular, a new web service launched recently helps consumers take advantage of store price guarantees offered by many online retailers to refund the difference in price of purchased items, if the price drops following your purchase. Retailers like Amazon.com and Best Buy offer such policies to encourage you to make a spontaneous purchase rather than waiting to see if the price of an item will come down. Naturally, most of us don't really bother to check if the price of our purchases goes down.

Priceprotectr, launched in July 07 after a 5-month beta period, aims to keep track of your purchases, monitor the prices of products you had purchased and see if they go down. In the event of a price drop within the time period specified by the retailer, they will then notify you and you can collect your refund from the online merchant. The company has put together a very simple and easy-to-use website where all you need is the product URL from the online store that you had made your purchases and your email address.

While sites like refundplease.com and amazingrefunds.com also provides price monitoring services, they lacked depth as only purchases from Amazon.com are being tracked. Priceprotectr monitors more than 50 online stores including Amazon, Best Buy, Sears, Future Shop and Circuit City.

As consumers rarely monitor the purchased price after buying, using Price Protectr might just save you a bundle of money and with the site's declaration that it has notified users to the tune of $346,000 in savings, based on over $6million worth of tracked purchases, it is a free web service worth using.

Related Post : Free Online Books Cataloging Services.

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