Friday, February 23, 2007

Friday Fun:Week Two

I'm planning on writing more often than once a week. This blog will include my favorite software, web sites, photos, tips, and online books...my favorite web finds. Lots of blogs exist with the same theme. They each offer something that distinguishes them from the rest: the author's tone of voice, his/her area of expertise, the design of the blog, unique links, or distinctive writing style. I enjoy them all and can never read too many. I hope I write something that adds to your enjoyment of the Web.

A few weeks ago, I downloaded a free Patience game, written by David Mayne. It includes more than 200 versions of Solitaire. You can choose from multiple card sets, create your own card sets, or keep high score statistics. The game has unlimited undo/redo. Instructions are easy to follow. The download is only 3.66 mb. I highly recommend this software. It is a must have for any solitaire enthusiast.


Friday, February 16, 2007

Friday Fun: Week One

Who doesn't need to take a break and have some fun? On Fridays, I will post about fun things I have found online. I hope you will enjoy them as much as I do. They may be games, videos, books, puzzles, quizzes, fun for kids, and fun for grownups.

Good things come in small packages. A year or two ago, I downloaded several small puzzle games from Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection page. I see that several puzzles have been added since then. The game called Solo is the same as Sudoku. You can play an easy Solo game or an extremely difficult Solo game. You can customize the size of the grid, use pencil marks, and save a game in progress. All Simon Tatham's puzzles are customizable and lots of fun. Even if you download the whole set, you will use only a small amount of computer resources. The games run on Unix, on Windows, and on Mac OS X. They are free of charge.

My favorite game of the bunch, Pattern, is similar to Paint by numbers , a Japanese logic puzzle. Griddlers.net is a good online source of these challenging puzzles. There are thousands of puzzles to choose from, with more being created daily. You can register to save your games in progress and join the Griddlers.net community. You might even become addicted.

Sudoku puzzles are easy to find online. Braingle is one possible starting place. You can choose your difficulty level and play as many games as you want. Braingle can be added to your Google Homepage. Fiendish Sudoku posts five new puzzles every day and offers an archive with hundreds of puzzles. The puzzles are hand created and are easy, moderate, hard, evil, or fiendish. Give them a try. Samurai Sudoku puzzles consist of five overlapping grids. They can be easy to "fiendish". This site has a daily puzzle and a large archive. If you want to pit your Sudoku solving skills against others, try the online speed challenge at Sudoku Fun. You might make it onto the leader board.

This is an image of a Nonomino Sudoku, also known as a Jigsaw Sudoku (and at least a dozen other names.) You can download PDF files of Nonominos at boldts.net. Each file contains 100 puzzles, so there's enough to keep you busy for a long time. I hope I get a printer soon, so I can download, print, and solve all these puzzles.

Take a break today.

Wednesday, February 7, 2007

All Your Notes in One Place With EverNote

If you are looking for a good note-taking tool, I highly recommend EverNote. It is both beautiful and practical. Save any kind of notes, including to-do lists, web or email clips, text notes, notes with images, shopping lists, or anything you can think of. EverNote comes with useful templates which cover many note categories. You can email your notes or send notes via IM. Here is a link to the product features page. You can download EverNote for free or pay for the Plus version. I have the free version, which has all the features listed above and many more. The users' manual can be downloaded from this page. Update: The online EverNote userguide can be found at this link. The guide is just one section of the EverNote forum.

Multiple Note Formats

Intelligent, Multiple Categories

Powerful Smart Search

Web & Email Clipper

To Dos and Note Templates

Emailing and Printing...much more