Readability Bookmarklet Makes Reading a Clean Experience

If you are like me, you find your favorite websites or blogs more and more cluttered each day. I usually find articles and news items in websites like CNN, or blogs in a slender column on the left of the browser page, with a smattering of ads, links, flash widgets, Google ads, and other such annoyances all over the body of the article and to the right of the article. 

The Readability Bookmarklet has taken care of this headache for me. Save this bookmarklet in your browser link bar and click it when you want your reading to be a "clean" experience. It simply removes the clutter around the main body text you want to read, changes to font to a larger, easily readable one, and provides a clean white background. I am not kidding, it makes a world of a difference. And not to forget, its a much cleaner format should you decide to print the article too. (Added benefit, you might save some trees by not printing the random junk a.k.a. ads, and banners etc)

You can customize your bookmarklet to show you your article in any of the following formats: Newspaper, eBook, Novel, and Terminal. It allows you to select your text size, and the margin widths. I suggest you check out the Readability experiment website, the video within, and follow through to the bookmarklet setup page. You wont regret it. 

And now to show you an example, I am uploading a screen shot of the browser with a news article open on CNN.com. The first picture is the regular webpage. The second one shows what the Readability Bookmarklet does to enhance your reading experience. 

BEFORE:

AFTER:

New meaning to jump suits

Short post here at midnight. Check out this video of guys jumping off cliffs wearing wing suits.

R2 D2 will wake you up: Clocky

Toin and I have been waking up using the alarm on my BlackBerry. While it does the job, you cannot imagine how painful it gets to maneuver the trackball to hit snooze. But can't try the snooze stunt with this little monster: Clocky. Clocky is kinda cute and freaky at the same time. The alarm clock will wake you up with a beeping alarm, and then after some time to keep you from snoozing, it will jump off the table...no seriously, I am not making this up...it really will jump up, and scurry away into a hiding place. Yes, you guessed it...it will beep and tweet like mad from its hiding place. But I can't buy it, Toin will kill the damn thing once she finds it the first morning. Not sure? Why not check out this pesky gremlin in action at YouTube.

Keep them questions coming - Prashnottarang

This is the kind of stuff that makes me feel guilty...guilty of spending countless hours on the internet and not coming up such ingenious ideas for bridging the gap between the illiterate and the Internet. Prashnottarang or the Question Box is a very simple telephone intercom which requires no computer literacy (in fact, not even literacy). A user simply presses the green button, talks or asks a question, an Internet user (a volunteer) on the other end browses the web for an answer, and responds to the user of the box. This has started as a non-profit project in India (in two villages). These boxes are placed near a shop where people have easy access to it. Well, wont spoil the fun...read all about it here, Question Box. While you are at it, check out their Flickr page too.
Some ways I imagine the villagers would use it would be: to find out weather forecasts for the region, cricket scores, which politician has what agenda, and most of all, symptoms of diseases and other healthcare related information, etc etc. I am sure the list is infinite.
Mobile?: On the for-profit side, I thought I had heard of services where you can just call a service and get someone to find something out from the web. I have called my friends or my brother on numerous occasions to find out about an address on the web, or listings of movies in the area....i sure could have used a Question Box. Could there be a potential for a company like ChaCha (the search engine where a live quide chats with you) to have a version of their service accessible via a regular phone call. Those damn tiny qwerty buttons on my Blackberry don't make it fun to browse the web on the mini screen!

Quite Fast on FastCompany

You know a social networking effort is in its infancy when my blog with only two posts shows up as one of the Featured Blogs! A few weeks back I had talked about how FastCompany had jumped on the social bus, with social networking type features including a blogging engine for anyone and everyone to write. So in a fit of experimentation, I started one on there. But quite amusing to see how it made it to the "top of the charts" so to say. So take a look at the screen shot to the left of this post in case you are too lazy to follow the link - and follow the link if you are really interested in knowing what I am writing about. Leave a comment or two. 

Staple Free Stapler: No more "Where are the staples now!?"

I will add this to the list of things I don't need but I badly want.
As with the other stuff on my list of things I don't need, I didn't know such a device existed. Remember the Ginsu knife that can cut through a shoe? Well, now add this to the collection. A stapler than staples up to 5 sheets of paper without staples. We might as well call this the Stapleless Stapler, or better yet, Stapleless-er!
ThinkGeek :: Staple Free Stapler

Happiness Quotient - Astoundingly unhappy millionaires

This is an article many of us just simply need to know by heart. So the next time, we feel compelled to buy or acquire that one extra thing we feel gives eternal happiness, we can pull a print out of this article and read it out aloudto it. And for those amongst you too lazy to read this...here are some good excerpts:

"Psychologists have spent decades studying the relation between wealth and happiness," writes Harvard University psychologist Daniel Gilbert in his best-selling "Stumbling on Happiness," "and they have generally concluded that wealth increases human happiness when it lifts people out of abject poverty and into the middle class but that it does little to increase happiness thereafter."

In a typical survey people are asked to rank their sense of well-being or happiness on a scale of 1 to 7, where 1 means "not at all satisfied with my life" and 7 means "completely satisfied." Of the American multimillionaires who responded, the average happiness score was 5.8. Homeless people in Calcutta came in at 2.9. But before you assume that money does buy happiness after all, consider who else rated themselves around 5.8: the Inuit of northern Greenland, who do not exactly lead a life of luxury, and the cattle-herding Masai of Kenya, whose dung huts have no electricity or running water. And proving Gilbert's point about money buying happiness only when it lifts you out of abject poverty, slum dwellers in Calcutta—one economic rung above the homeless—rate themselves at 4.6.

"Americans who earn $50,000 per year are much happier than those who earn $10,000 per year," writes Gilbert, "but Americans who earn $5 million per year are not much happier than those who earn $100,000 per year."

(Curiously, although money doesn't buy happiness, happiness can buy money. Young people who describe themselves as happy typically earn higher incomes, years later, than those who said they were unhappy. It seems that a sense of well-being can make you more productive and more likely to show initiative and other traits that lead to a higher income.

The last excerpt above is my favorite.
Why Money Doesn’t Buy Happiness | Print Article | Newsweek.com:
Technorati Tags: wealth, money, economics, happiness, life

Google sued! (yawn!), but for crimes against humanity (Wow!)

I wonder if there is a website that tracks all dumb lawsuits. I know there is one that lists all the dumb laws. In any case, if you find a dumb lawsuits websites, this one definitely is for the hall of fame. Dylan Stephen Jayne is suing Google for crimes against humanity -- he claims his social security number when turned upside down, and de-coded spells Google! How creative! I wanna smoke what he is smoking since that might help me solve a few sudoku puzzles!
A bit more amusing I found was the copy of the lawsuit filed....written by hand, but still legal.

YouTube - Human face fish

This is a bit freaky!
YouTube - Human face fish

Checkershadow Illusion

This is really cool. Squint your eyes, take back a few steps and marvel at the way your mind plays games with you.
Checkershadow Illusion
I think I should go home now.

Gmail on the go - super fast Gmail app for your phone

Google says it's new and fast - I say it's absolutely smashing! Made my day yesterday when I was browsing through Techcrunch and found the announcement for Gmail App. Quite frankly, it wasn't something I was waiting for or even expecting Google to come up with....in fact, I had not even thought about a Java app that would do email for me. But for those who are still wondering what this Gmail app is, in short, its a Java app that you download from www.gmail.com/app , install it on your phone, and use Gmail. Why is it better than checking Gmail on your browser you ask? Because its FAST!!! Enough said!
Here's what Google says about it:

Download it once, and start accessing Gmail on your phone with just a click or two. You'll also like it because:

• It has the same Gmail interface you know and love
• Your account stays synchronized whether you access it from your computer or the phone
• You can easily view attachments such as photos, documents and .pdf files

Yes, the last bit, I tried. I could view the text in a PDF file I received as an attachment.

A kid you wont regret giving drums to!

I am not only stunned by this, I am overjoyed to see this freak of nature! Yup, that's what I would call this kid,...a freak of nature. All of 4 years old, and plays drums better than the drummer of Def Leppard could at the peak of his career!
Child Drummer 4 Years Old