Wordle

Create a cloud of words using a website or text document as input. Style it how you like and then astound your friends and family with your skills. This could be useful if you want to create a tag cloud, or maybe if you want to find out the important elements in a story without reading it... Or (more likely) it could just be something to play around with for a couple of minutes and then throw away.

Tone Matrix

A really nice melody maker. Click on the boxes to light them up, and then listen to the music it produces. Toggle more boxes on and off until you've got a tune you're happy with and then... um, well there's not really a then - you can just listen to it. Anyway I thought it was really cool, and it uses the pentatonic scale which is also cool.

The Reviewing Pages

Finally a review site with local reviews on! It's based in the Staines and Egham area, although some of the reviews reach even further afield. If you ever wanted to know which estate agents are worth looking at, or where a good place to get furniture from is, then The Reviewing Pages is the site you're looking for.

True Knowledge

A search engine with a twist. The engine knows lots of facts, and learns more. The clever bit is that it then uses these facts to deduce even more facts. You can see some examples of how it thinks on this page.

It's not very clever yet; there are a lot of facts to learn in the universe. However, it could potentially become a useful tool for fast fact finding.

Chore Wars

The most amazing idea for getting housework done more frequently. Each house member creates a character and each time they complete a household chore they gain experience points!
The person who sets up the list can set up a list of "adventures", each with a corresponding number of points for completing it (it should be roughly one point for thirty minutes of work). The person with the most points each month should ideally be rewarded in some way, but that can be agreed upon by the household.

If only we'd found this at the start of the year!

IQ Test

So this blog has been going much longer than I imagined it would. This is post number 100! (That's an excited 100 as opposed to 100 factorial which is a lot bigger). To tie in with the one hundred theme here is a game where 100 is the average score - an IQ test. Admittedly it's an inaccurate measure, and favours more numerate people rather than more intelligent people.

The picture is from my first try, for which I scored 160/160, without understanding several of the questions. Good luck!

TyperA

After a recent conversation I realised there is a need for people to be able to type faster. This will improve efficiency not just in essays and emails, but also in other mediums such as MSN. How good would it be to boost the amount of procrastination you could do per hour, without it taking any extra time!
Apparently I type at about 44 words per minute, although I made nine mistakes when doing it. This is much better than QWERTY Wars (which was recently posted on here) for training typing skills, because you don't need to hit enter after every word.

The Unsuggester

Enter the title of a book you loved, and it will give you a list of the top 100 books you probably won't like.
It's worked out from a database of people's libraries, by comparing the expected number of people owning both (worked out from the individual book popularities) with the actual number of people owning both, and comes out with some quite surprising results!
The same site also has a 'Suggester', but that's just not quite as exciting really.

Ashes Alarm

I'm not sure of all the rules on this one, but basically the BBC are offering a text service to recieve scores from the Ashes series down under. You send a text to a number (at usual text price), and they'll send you the live score, at whatever time of day you choose. Consequently I get woken up at 7:30 on the dot with news of England's latest.

Thanks to Paul for showing this one to me!

Make Moving MSN Emoticons

Create you own animated MSN emoticons with this animated gif tool. Upload the pictures you want in the animation and then save the result to your computer. Go to the "Create..." option on the MSN emoticon viewer, and select the gif file you produced (Nb. The emoticon will come out 50x50px - so don't put too much detail into the original pictures).
 

Counties of Great Britain

Which counties have you been to? I think you have to have stayed overnight at the place to have 'been there', so places along the M6 you've driven through don't count.
Here's my map though I've forgotten a couple of places from when I was younger.

 

Visited Countries

Make a map of countries you've visited (like on Paula's blog). Here is mine, and here is an old one of mine from 2005. It should blatantly allow you to distinguish between the bits of Great Britain, because I've never been to Scotland or Northern Ireland.

 

Surname Map

Plot maps of surname frequency. See how your surname has dispersed between 1881 and 1998. Probably most people will think this is really sad, but I thought it was neat. Bonus points for anyone who can work out who's surname is in the picture here!

 

Face transformer

Ever wanted to change the way you looked? Well now you can! You need a photo of a face on your hard drive to upload, and away you go.


 

ReadPlease

I hate to do this, because it's a shareware program, not freeware, but this is a tool which I've found most useful for 'reading' excessively long blog entries (*cough* Sarah *cough* Laura *cough* Naomi *cough* Paula *cough* etc...) Just copy and paste the text, and away you go! The woman has an annoying american voice, and sounds like a bit of a harlot, but you can download a British add on pack.

Christmas Carol Maker

Click on notes at the right time to write a Christmas carol, listen to a load of elves sing it, then send it to a friend.