Net Sieve

After my craigslist post, Nathan from Craig’s Little Helper wrote to let me know about another, better site. Well, I checked it out. It is better, but since he opened it up, he has to hear my opinions.

The helper would be even helpier (Of course that’s a word. You don’t think they’d let me have a blog if I just made words up all willy-nilly, do ya?) if it had an option for “All States” instead of requiring me to click each one. O’ the agony. And there could be a note near the keyword form saying that the CL post had to match all keywords. It doesn’t say that until the search results.

Otherwise, right on Nathan. The help section is muy well done. And here’s what the site says about itself:

“At Craig’s Little Helper , we strive to improve your search experience without compromising craigslist’s spirit of local community. Rather than parsing a pile of craigslist cities and showing you some formatted version, we send you to the authentic craigslist results pages for your search. That way you get to view your results in the format that Craig intended.”

Time to talk up one of my favorite free tools - XE.com’s Universal currency converter. This thing has been online at least as long as I have (too damn long) and rightfully bills itself as the world’s most popular currency tool.

The UCC is fast, up-to-date and has currency rates for about 100 countries. No shit. This thing is priceless. I wouldn’t suggest buying an MP3 player from Hong Kong without running your shipping charges through UCC.

Tired of driving alone? Are you afraid of pulling up to a stoplight in the dead of night in an otherwise empty car to touch up your lipstick, but are too tired of wiping dog spit off the windows to bring him with you all the time? Insurance company Sheilas’ Wheels has the answer - an inflatable male passenger brought to life by the flip of a switch. It’s called the “Buddy on Demand” and I’m thinking seriously of getting one to put in my cube at work for those after meeting naps.

Anyway, this tip is from CarInsurance.com who provides automobile insurance quotes for all 50 states, an easy comparison service and the possibility of proof of insurance in your hot little hands in under 15 minutes. Sweet.

Australian Man May Have Sent 2 Billion Viagra Spam E-Mails

An Australian man is under investigation for sending more than 2 billion junk e-mails in one year to promote Viagra, an official said Wednesday. The Australian Communications and Media Authority began investigating the man, whose identity was not immediately released, after receiving a tip from Dutch authorities last year.

Thanks to NoNags for this illumination.

For some reason, Craig-o doesn’t like this sort of thing, so grab it-use it-love it before it gets shut down.

Global Craigslist Search Engine

You can search for terms in different catagories; jobs, for sale, lonely geek seeking lonely geek (OK, I made that one up.) with specific search words. Now tell me Craig, what’s so bad about that?

Hot! This is one of the best free downloads I’ve found in years. It’s made life with Windows and mp3s - and that sweet Chinese iPod knock-off - a breeze. Now I can listen to my favorite Indie artists just as if they were actually available for purchase somewhere online. (!)

Let’s allow the developer Jackie Franck a few words:

Audiograbber is a beautiful piece of software that grabs digital audio from CDs. It copies the audio digitally-not through the soundcard-which enables you to make perfect copies of the originals. It can even perform a test to see that the copies really are perfect. Audiograbber can also automatically normalize the music, delete silence from the start and/or end of tracks, and send them to a variety or external MP3 encoders… Audiograbber can download and upload disc info from freedb, an Internet compact disc database. You can even record your vinyl LPs or cassette tapes with Audiograbber and make wavs or MP3s of them. There are a lot more functions in Audiograbber, but to put it simply: Audiograbber has the most features one can wish from such a program!

Another great thing with this software is that it does not put a single file in your windows directories! No DLLs, OCXs, device drivers, spyware, adware or whatever else that messes up the computer. Not a single entry in the registry or win.ini. If you delete the Audiograbber directory it’s all gone, that’s it!

Product Details:
File Size: 1626 kb
Version: 1.83
Last updated: Apr 25, 2004
License: Freeware
Windows: Win (All)
Requirements: None (Note: Needs LAME encoder for quality above 56kbits/s)

Download Audiograbber free from SnapFiles.

Jeffrey Zeldman’s “A List Apart” is a very pointed, opinionated and often hilarious look at what makes up this whole sphere we’re living in … whatever name it’s going by at the moment.

His article “Web 3.0” offers an entertaining and informative poke in the guts of Web 2.0 and what it is. With headers like “A Taste of Ass” and quotes like “Web 1.0 was not disruptive. You understand? Web 2.0 is totally disruptive. You know what XML is? You’ve heard about well-formedness? Okay. So anyway—” you know this is not going to be the Wall Street Journal’s view.

Enjoy!