(This is the Online column, written for The Southland Times)
Every time the internet is mentioned in the news these days it seems to be bad news but take heart, there’s more to the net than spammers, scammers and paedophiles.
If you’re connected to the net, you have the ultimate reference library at your fingertips.
- For help with all things wordy, dictionary.com provides a good dictionary and thesaurus.com, not surprisingly, is an online thesaurus.
- For those who are into word games, Word Plays will be a firm favourite with its selection of word games and puzzle-solving tools.
- If you’re looking for an encyclopaedia, try Encyclopedia.com or Microsoft’s popular Encarta encyclopaedia.
- Another option is Wikipedia, the encyclopaedia anyone can edit. Go on, give it a go.
- With so many United States-based sites on the net, it can become a bit confusing dealing with imperial measurements. Online Conversion has every conversion you can think of, from distances and temperatures to Roman numerals and radiation.You can even find out your age in dog years. I’m 6.25 years old.
- Time zones are another tricky area easily sorted online. Time and Date features the time in pretty much any city you can think of and allows you to set up a personalised world clock.
- If foreign currencies are your thing, Oanda has a useful converter onsite. If you’re buying online this one could save you a buck … or 38p.
- And if you want to know everything the CIA knows about any country in the world, take a look at the CIA World Factbook. No, it’s not as sinister as it sounds.
- Gardening gurus will appreciate Know Your Gardening’s online plant encyclopaedia. I spent an hour of so on this site finding out the names of some of the plants I’ve killed over the years.
- Project Gutenburg and Bartleby both have a comprehensive range of books on their sites.
- Of course, the most important reference site is F1 Live. Are you counting down to the first race of the season on March 6 yet?