Pandora is an internet radio station site, but with a twist! It knows what you might like, before you’ve even heard it! You simply type in the name of a song or artist, and it generates a playlist of similiar sounding songs and artists! It bases its findings on musical similiarity, not popularity, only the music counts!

It’s part of the ‘Music Genome Project’ an attempt to group thousands of songs by musical similarity. Everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It’s not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records – it’s about what each individual song sounds like. You can even give a “Thumbs Up”, which makes that song and songs that sound like that song play more often or “Thumbs Down” bans that song from that station, and makes songs that sound like that song play less often.

It’s a great way to discover new music based on what you already know you like. I like how they even provide links to more info on each band or artist, so if you find something you like you can easily learn more info!

Start listening right now by going here!

PhotoRec is free software for recovering deleted files from your computer. Yes, even if you’ve emptied your recycle bin! This works because the files still exist on your computer,it’s just that all links to them are gone. It can recover lost files including video,documents and archives. It works with hard disks and removable media such as digital camera memory cards. It can even recover data from scratched cds in some cases! It recognizes more than 80 file types, the whole list is available here.

I know from experience that there’s nothing more annoying than losing photos from a digital camera memory card or from your hard drive, because they’re pretty much irreplacable! So if something like that happens to you its well worth checking this out! It’s freeware, so you have nothin’ to lose (and hopefully your files to gain), by going here for more info and the download!

Munnin is a desktop client for all eBay platforms, including USA, Canada, UK, Australia, Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It keeps itself fully synced with the online database of Ebay.

It allows you to watch desired items using drag-and-drop, manage your search favorites and repeat them at the touch of a button, calculate shipping costs using the integrated shipping costs calculator, plus many more features.For example,’Hot Items’ searches for items with more than 25 bids.

Its available in several versions, Light, Advanced, Professional and Business, Light being free, but this version has some restrictions when compared to the paid version of course!

It’s worth checking out for anyone who takes their ebaying really seriously or who makes a living out of buying and selling on it! For the rest of us its not really necessary.

Check out the site here for more detailed info.

Ever wondered if your Internet connection speed even comes close to what you pay for each month? I do! So i was happy when i found Speedtest.net, a cool looking site where you can choose from a selection of servers around the world and check your upload and download speed.

I kinda felt like i was planning for nuclear war with the flashy graphics, luckily for us all, i wasn’t!

It’s a cool site to go to if you wanna check just how fast your connection is going. See if it’s as fast as your provider claims, although results can vary at different times due to internet conditions.

It’s also a handy and useful tool for anyone who does things such as internet gaming,where having a fast speed is necessary for some games.

Speed on over to the site to check it out.

If you every have to give a webpage address to someone, its pretty easy to just copy and paste it, right? What if you had to write it down and it was long and complicated or worse, had to give it over the phone?

Now imagine if it was this one: ‘http://local.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=white+house&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=26.991659,68.994141&ie=UTF8&om=1&z=16&ll=38.89763,-77.033515&spn=0.012909,0.033689’ …

Well, good luck!

Or how about you could just change that into this? http://stickythis.com/thewhitehouse

That’s where Stickythis comes in. It changes any URL into ‘http://stickythis.com (whatever you want it to be)’

You can go check it out here and add it to your collection of useful bookmarks!

This is a really cool program i found that gives you virtual driving lessons, complete with virtual driving instructor! It’s based on driving in Europe, so left side of car and driving on the right! At least that was the case in the version I tried although i think they have other versions, but the site is a little confusingly laid out. Don’t let that put you off though. This is a very good program and you almost feel like you’re really driving,as you have to pay attention or you’ll break the rules of the road or even cause an accident!

In the version i played around with, you can choose from 4 driving instructors,
three car cockpits, three motorbike cockpits (Hornet, Scooter and a cool Chopper). It starts at beginner level with basics such as indicating and stopping at traffic lights, giving right of way, etc, all the way up to…well almost real life conditions!

I had the pleasure (and pain) of going on a road trip across Europe not so long ago, so i can say that the scenery and experience is pretty accurate in some ways! I’d recommend this for anyone learning to drive or planning on driving in Europe. It’ll give you a good chance to become familiar with the various rules of the road! All from the safety of your chair! (Seatbelt not included)

You can find out more info here

Every once in a while i come across a unique program that promises to teach a useful skill,through the magic of some well thought out yet simple technique. This is one such program.

Speed reading is simply the ability to read very fast by learning to scan the words rather than thinking about them or pronouncing them in your head. I’m not sure how well this works if you have something important to read as scanning things doesn’t really focus your attention on them, but anyway!

Acereader uses two techniques, Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (R.S.V.P.) and Tachistoscopic Scroll Presentation (try saying or even reading that 3 times!!!). It’s pretty easy to use, you can open any text file inside it or copy and paste. It has different grades from beginner to advanced and you’ll be amazed at how naturally you read fast using the method of having the words appear and scroll in front of you. It’s won a bunch of awards as you can see here for being “best educational software”, so it’s not as crazy as it sounds!

Go check out the demo and a lot more detailed info here.

Flash has long established itself as the standard for animation on the Internet. Its everywhere you look, banners, games, flash movies, even entire sites! So, there’s two ways you can go about making flash stuff, one is with the official Flash program from Macromedia, and the other is with programs such as this! The second option is usually a lot easier than learning Flash.

This program is great for making some pretty impressive stuff that would take hours to make in Macromedia Flash, you can make some very decent stuff with this thing. When you first use it, it walks you through a tutorial which makes you feel comfortable pretty quick. It has a simple to use interface and for the more experienced users it has a pretty good advanced mode too. They have a lite version of this program too, called ‘Flashy effects’, that mostly focuses on just text effects and banners. You can check them out by going here.

If you spend long periods of time at your computer, you have a pretty good chance of developing a repetitive strain injury over time.This can show in ways such as a backpain, sore fingers or eyestrain. So whats the way to avoid all this or help yourself out if you’re already affected? Spend less time at your computer! Too much to ask for? Then at least take regular breaks!

Try out RSIGuard to help you achieve this, it schedules regular reminders for you to take a break. It can show exercises and stretches, which can optionally be disabled. In fact everything about this program is very configurable.It also has tracking and reporting of statistics to help you know how you’re doing. If you find yourself ignoring the breaks you can make them harder or even impossible to ignore.

I highly recommend this program as i think its designed well and does what it does well. Although being reminded to take a break can be a little irritating at times, but isn’t that the whole point? (but not as irritating as developing aches and pains, so it’s worth it in the long run).

Check it out here for more info and a trial

Spam! What more can i say? We all get it, we all hate it! Spam Motel allows to create disposable email addresses, that way the mail gets forwarded to you from your spam motel account, the spammers never get their hands on your real email address! All you gotta do is sign up, totally free, and it generates disposable email addresses for you to use from now on when you sign up to anything online or use forums, etc. You can use the same account for multiple places and your account on the Spam Motel site will keep track of it all. You can even download a tiny program that you can use from a desktop shortcut, for instantly making new addresses.

I highly recommend this for anyone sick of recieving spam, it won’t help your current email account if it’s already getting spam, but if you’re making a new email account, be sure to use this instead of giving out your real address to things you dont trust!

You can sign up here and read more info In the faq