SignalMap uses Google Maps to allow people to report there cell phone signal strength in different locations.  Using this site you could post your cell phone carrier and signal strength, compare with other people and other carriers, and determine who you should or should not consider for your cell phone service.

Signal Map

SpyPig is a simple email tracking system that sends you a notification email as soon as the recipient opens and reads your message.

SpyPig allows you to embed a small or invisible picture inside an e-mail.  When that e-mail is opened in an e-mail client that supports loading of web pictures (most modern e-mail clients) SpyPig logs that access and allows you to see when that e-mail was opened.  Actually works the same way a lot of advertising and spam e-mails work, this is how they know your e-mail address exists.  Now you can  use the technology for yourself.

SpyPig

Having trouble finding a place to recycle or dispose of your electronics, batteries, computers, etc?  Earth 911 allows you to search your local area for disposable areas and recycling centers.

Also provides environmental friendly advice, tips, etc.

Earth911.org

A site called FreeRice.com is offering the chance to learn and help feed the world’s hungry.  Goto the site and you’ll have a word, and 4 possible definitions.  Every time you choose a correct answer, they will donate the equivalent of 20 grains of rice to the UN World Food Program.  The money is provided by the advertising on the site and everything earned is donated.  Go, play, learn, and feed people.

FreeRice.com

“Which raises the question, at least in Matthew White’s mind: “What is the most fragmented that North America could have been?” White’s website (from the mid-nineties, but still online) serves up several ‘alternate history’ maps, that use a POD (point of divergence) somewhere in the past to construct a present slightly (or wildly) different from ours. White’s Balkanised North America, with 1787 as the POD, is by far the most interesting exercise.

“In this alternate reality, the westward expansion of the Anglo-American people proceeded pretty much as it did in our reality,” White writes, “but the United States government just couldn’t keep up. Every national identity crisis resolved itself in favor of the separatists instead.””

http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2007/11/1…alkans-version/

A virtual Lite-Brite to play with.

Virtual Lite Brite

This Politics Test is impartial and explores your ecomonic and social ideas, and then places you into a 2-D spectrum of political thought.

Many people get too caught up in our current 2 party system, or say they’re a part of a party when their beliefs don’t actually match up.  Take this test and see where you actually lie.

The Politics Test 

Polls suggest Americans are concerned primarily with a few key issues in the 2008 presidential election. USA TODAY researched candidate positions on those top issues — Iraq, immigration and health care — as well as a few others that may influence the election. We then came up with 11 multiple-choice questions that would help differentiate the candidates and their stances.

As you answer the questions, you can roll over each color bar below the candidates’ heads to find background on their positions. Your answers are matched with the positions of the presidential hopefuls to reveal the candidate (or candidates) closest to your views. The sliders on the right allow you to assign relative weights to match the importance that you place on each issue.

Play the “game” here 

Google Earth has long been a great time wasting program for looking at the Earth and looking at the stars.  Now they’re adding more usefulness to the program.  I mentioned the Congress spending feature in my previous post.  Now they’re including a weather layer with sub-folders for clouds, radar, conditions and forecasts, and information. The clouds information is updated hourly with data from the Naval Research laboratory in Monterey. The radar information is updated every 15 mminutes, while Weather.com provides forecasts.

You can also download KML files showing the last 24 hours of cloud data or 6 hours of radar data.

Google has also added the MDG Monitor, a layer that shows how countries are doing in meeting the Millennium Development Goals to do things like combat poverty and hunger, improve education, fight HIV/AIDS.