Organic food in Fife, Scotland – shop, farm, boxes & cafe

+ A great place to go for organic food in Fife is ‘The Pillars’ farm, shop & cafe (they also deliver organic boxes.)
+ ‘The Pillars’ comes highly recommended by many and were nominees in last years ‘Spirit of Scotland‘ awards.
+ The shop/farm/cafe is located just outside Falkland.
+ There’s also an entry in the Soil Association directory about them, if you want to know more.

Easy way to find recipes for the ingredients you have

• Research Buzz has a tool to help you find recipes for the ingredients you have.
• You enter the ingredients in a search box and the site uses the terms in a special Google search. When you run the search you get taken to a Google search results page for recipes with those ingredients.
• For example, click here to see recipes that use ‘Chicken, wine, tomato’.
• Very handy

Blogging for profit – get more people to your site

• Simple, little article about blogging for profit
• In summary, it recommends doing a bit of ‘blog promotion’ to get lots of users to your site, rather than just doing lots of posts to get your site to the top of blog directories

Get rid of headaches, relax, and more with ‘Brainwave Generator’

• Free (limited version) program that lets you play computer generated sounds that are designed for e.g. getting rid of headaches (worked for me), relaxing, focusing attention etc
• You can also create your own tracks (the interface takes a bit of getting used to – let me know if you want any help on this)
• If you get the full version, you can download a ton of extra tracks that people have created themselves
• WARNING! – certain people shouldn’t use the program (see bottom of page) e.g. those with pacemakers
• You can read the background theory for the software here

People sharing their secrets anonymously by post card…

- VERY cool site where people send in postcards with their secrets written on the back
- Some are quite intense/adult in nature (you have been warned!)
- Cards are usually done in quite an arty way
- Site claims it is ‘the largest advertisement-free Blog on the Web’ (hit counter shows 74 million + visitors)

Cool (though a little weird) pics of ’sculptures’…

Nice little collection of pics on someone’s blog. Some are pretty gothic, using skulls and bones etc. The site (uncommonpictures.blogspot.com) has some other arty pics as well.

House price crash in Spain?

The BBC have an article on this.

Uk’s richest get 20% richer in a year!

Click here for a BBC article on this.

How Tos and Instructions

Click here for general how tos and here for instructions on making things
Two fun and useful how tos/instructions sites are Instructables & WikiHow. Both have loads of articles on different topics. Instructables focuses on making things while WikiHow covers a broader range of how tos. WikiHow has over 18,000 articles.

Becoming/being self-employed… hints and tips

*Becoming/being self-employed article here*
Especially aimed at web-workers, a nice little summary of ‘best practices’ for the self-employed is available at WebWorkerDaily (lots of other interesting posts here as well.)

Low calorie food pics… what 200 calories looks like :)

*Low calorie food pics here*
Someone’s put together a collection of pictures that show what 200 calories of food looks like. They start off with a picture of loads of celery and work all the way down to a tiny bit of oil in the bottom of a glass. The pictures were taken with the same camera and using the same setup, so the portion sizes can be easily compared. V cool!

Free traffic! Increase web site traffic for free.

Get some free traffic to your blog / web site (through a site called ‘ipings’.) All you do is fill in 4 boxes on a form (name, URL etc), and click submit. When you do, a bunch of sites get notified that you have new content for them to come and index. Its a dead easy way to increase traffic to your web site / blog.

**WARNING! – you should only use the service when you add new content to your site. Pinging without having new content “probably will get you banned or ignored”!!

If you want to know about how the site works and what happens when you ‘ping’, check out the ‘about‘ and ‘to ping or not to ping‘ pages. Well worth reading IMHO – there are good explanations of how web spiders work and how pinging can help you get listed on major search engines!

Do you Digg?… Digg this post at Digg.com

Digg is a GREAT place to go to find out what cool/interesting/fun sites people have come across. Its a major (ranked 88th most popular site in the world! at Alexa.com) ’social bookmarking’ site, where members submit ‘content’ (weblog posts, news articles, etc.) Other users then check out the content themselves and if they like it they ‘Digg’ it.

**To Digg this article, click here **

Mortgage refinancing. Get the best mortgage rate!

Mortgage refinancing can “substantially slash mortgage repayments” – this article details five easy to follow steps to help you get the best mortgage rate you can, and to pay your mortgage off early.

Robots in our future

Scientists are predicting that in the very near future (within 5 years) we’ll have robots for things like child-minding, care-home work, and prison monitoring! This is according to an article in the Daily Mail, a large UK national daily paper… “Are we safe from robots that can think for themselves?“

The BBC also have some interseting articles on this subject. An article written yesterday talks about future robots being autonomous, decision making machines. It also talks about ‘robot rights’! amongst other things. There are some other good robot articles in the right hand column as well.

Blog marketing – get your blog known

If you want to do a bit of ‘blog marketing’ and get your blog known, there’re a whole bunch of blog directory sites where you can get your blog listed. There’s a good list of them at Google, and another list here from IsPopularOnline. The IsPopularOnline site also has a big list of sites (on the same page) where you can submit the RSS feeds from your blog.

(a few of the links seem to be down, but most of them are good)

Its a small world – video

Very cool video about how small the world is. Not your normal kind of ‘its a small world’ – this video shows how small the earth is in comparison to other planets and stars (almost 100,000 views and 4 star rated at YouTube.)

Car Insurance

Car Insurance is a big area these days with loads of companies to choose from. There’s a site called reviewcentre.com that lets users rate companies on different criteria, then shows them all in a list. If you’re looking for car insurance it may be worth having a look here. The AA look to be one of the best rated – if you scroll down the list, they’re the first company with more than 10 reviews and they manage a decent rating of 7.7 (at the time of writing this.)

The site also has reviews for a ton of other stuff

Funny Cat Pictures

Funny cat pictures… LOADS OF THEM!! There are around 2,500 pictures of cats in all kinds of funny poses over at the ‘Kattalogen.’ Some have funny quotes on them, and some are just plain funny pictures.

NB. all of the pictures are thumbnailed on one big page!

Reiki healing for free

Free Reiki healing is available at The Reiki Experiment. All you need to do is leave a comment on the ‘Request a healing’ Page and someone will ’send’ you a healing. There’s a Wikipedia entry on Reiki if you want more info about this type of healing.

Online checkers with power-ups

Awesome 2 player web based ‘checkers’ game with tons of power ups and squares that can be raised and lowered (you’ll see what I mean.) This game could get to be VERY addictive

Click here for the quick video tutorial.

To get started, enter a guest name, click ’start’, then click on a few names in the opponents box and someone should give you a game fairly quickly.

Crazy gadget pics (slippers with headlights etc)

The Daily Mail has pics of some very unusual gadgets. After the slippers with headlights, my favourite is probably the ’shuffling shoes’, which might actually be quite useful?…

Have you caught the latest bug?

‘Who is sick?’ is a site where users record their illnesses. The data gets plotted on a Google map so, for example, you can see if you’re the victim of the latest bug going around. There’s a bar chart showing whether reports of different types of sickness are growing or falling, various search functions and a discussion forum. The site’s still in its infancy but this could well be an interesting site to come back to once its been going for a while. Remember to ‘Digg’ it up if you like it

Online ‘Peer to peer’ style loans

There are at least 2 websites on the go at the moment that facilitate a ‘peer to peer’ style lending & borrowing system. The UK site is called Zopa, and the US site, Propser. ‘Prosper’ has had a whole host of positive press coverage, and Zopa also looks to have been highly rated, e.g. ‘What Investment’ magazine rated it product of the month in Aug ‘06.

Does anyone have any experience of these sites?.. This seems like a great idea to me.

What makes us happy in the long-term?

The BBC has an interesting acticle on this subject, which follows on from a recent European survey. The summarised answer is “To be well off, have a better work-life balance and good public services, and, possibly, to lower our expectations” The comments are quite interesting as well.