Chapter 19

Ten Fun Things You Can Do Online

In This Chapter

Taking film-free pictures for family and friends

Checking out short movies, TV advertisements, radio programs, and the comics

Playing games

Finding out the value of stuff you might be thinking of selling

Making the world’s best paper airplane

Taking a look at art museums around the globe

Touring the solar system and creating your own world

Showing faraway friends what’s on your screen

You can use the Internet in hundreds of ways for work and profit. In this chapter, we focus on fun. When you find new and fun things to do on the Net, let us know by sending us an email at [email protected]. If you want to spend your time online doing something more worthwhile — we’re sure you do! — take a look at Chapter 20, too.

Share Pictures and Videos with Your Friends and Family

Email attachments (see Chapter 9) are an excellent way to ship snapshots anywhere in the world for free. You don’t even need a digital camera; your phone can probably take stills and maybe even video.

If you have more than one or two pictures or videos and you want to share them with more than one or two people, making an online photo album is the convenient way to go. If you use Facebook you can upload photos to your account and share them with your friends. Or, create an account at Flickr (at www.flickr.com) or Picasa Web Albums (at picasaweb.google.com), upload your photo and video files, and tell the site who else can see them. You can point your friends to your album by giving them the URL, and they can view the pictures online. You can also use Instagram (owned by Facebook) and Snapchat (which displays your photo for 10 seconds and then deletes it). Chapters 10 and 12 explain it all.

Watch Movies, TV, and Ads

The Internet has created a new way for makers of short and experimental movies to find an audience. Many sites feature miniflicks that you can watch for free. The most popular is Google’s YouTube at youtube.com, whose users upload vast amounts of video, from the profound to the inane. Try looking for airplane landings. You can upload your own videos, too, as long as you made them yourself, they’re no more than ten minutes long, and they follow other YouTube guidelines. TED Talks, at www.ted.com, are short lectures about Technology, Education, and Design, and are almost always interesting.

Hulu, at www.hulu.com, puts television on the web, so you can watch early episodes of shows that you tuned in partway through. The site is supported by ABC, Fox, NBC, and others, so you see the real shows, not chopped-up pirated recordings of shows, although shows are prefaced with advertisements because they’re TV and someone has to pay the bills. Blip.tv (at blip.tv — no .com at the end) hosts shows you may never have heard of because they’re made by independent creators. If you belong to Netflix (www.netflix.com), you can stream videos from its website and watch them on your computer, tablet, or phone. If you have a box that connects your television to the Internet (like a Roku, Amazon Fire TV, or a Blu-Ray player), you can watch Netflix on your TV, too. Chapter 14 lists other ways to watch movies and TV online.

ISpot.tv (www.ispot.tv/browse) features the best current ads and classics. Either way, now you can catch those humorous Super Bowl ads without having to watch the tedious football.

Listen to Current and Classic Radio Programs

Have you ever turned on your radio, found yourself in the middle of a fascinating story, and wished you could have heard the beginning? National Public Radio and Public Radio International in the United States keep many of their past programs available online. If you want to hear the whole program, visit www.npr.org and www.pri.org. You can also use the sites’ search features to browse for stories you missed completely. Some radio shows have their own websites, such as Car Talk and This American Life, shown in Figure 19-1.

Many NPR affiliates and other radio stations have live streaming audio of their programs, so you can listen, live, to stations all over the country — go to Google or your favorite search engine and search for the station’s call letters or the program name. (John recommends his local station at wrvo.org, especially the old shows from the 1930s through 1950s, which they play in the late evening.) Many other radio stations now let you listen to their live programs over the Internet, which is particularly handy in large office buildings with poor radio reception. You can listen to stations from around the world and get a taste of world music firsthand or hear the news from different perspectives.

If you have an iPod or another type of MP3 player, you can download audio files and listen to many radio shows at any time. See Chapter 14 to find out how to subscribe to podcasts.

Play Checkers or Bridge

Or play chess, poker, hearts, backgammon, cribbage, go, or any other board game or card game. The classic games hold up well against the ever-more-bloody electronic games. If you used to play Diplomacy, our favorite board game, back in the 1970s, try playdiplomacy.com. Bring out your fiendishly scheming side.

True bridge aficionados like to think of bridge not as a card game but, rather, as a way of life. You can round up a bridge foursome at bridgebase.com (for free) and okbridge.com ($99 per year after a free trial period). Many free and fee sites are listed at greatbridgelinks.com.

Play Lots More Online Games

Now you don’t need to round up live friends to play with you — you can find willing partners at any time of the day or night at sites such as games.yahoo.com, www.games.com, and Microsoft’s zone.msn.com.

Other good sites for both single-person and multiplayer games are www.addictinggames.com and www.virtualnes.com for re-created classic Nintendo games.

Words with Friends (zynga.com/games/words-friends) enables you to play a Scrabble-like word game with friends and strangers. Download the app for your smartphone or tablet (from the App Store or Google Play Store).

Find Out What Your Stuff Is Worth

You may already know about eBay, the online auction site where you can buy and sell almost anything. (If not, flip to Chapter 15 to read about it.) But you may not know that you can use eBay to find out the value of almost anything — at least, anything that has sold on eBay in the past 90 days — by searching completed eBay auctions.

You need an eBay account in order to search completed auctions, so start at www.ebay.com and register for a free account if you don’t already have one. Then click the Advanced Search link (we can’t tell you exactly where it is, because website designs change often, but it’s probably next to the Search bar or the Search button). Type key words about your priceless treasure into the Search bar and select the Completed Listings check box. When you click the Search button, you see all auctions with those keywords and the item’s final selling price. If any of the merchandise is similar to your fabulous object, you can see what people are paying for it.

(We’re warning all you Beanie Babies speculators: You may be depressed to find out the current price of your vintage, rare, one-of-a-kind, limited-edition, collectible, new-in-box Beanie Babies.)

Build Your Own Jumbo Jet

Even staid corporate sites have the occasional goodies tucked away. Airbus builds airplanes, including the very, very, very large A380 superjumbo. Normally, an A380 lists for $300 million, but if that number is a little out of your price range, or you don’t have space for one in your garage, Airbus Goodies has some paper versions you can print, cut out, fold, and fly, at www.airbus.com/galleries/goodies/index-cut-outs. It also has some nice screen wallpaper pictures.

Visit Art Museums around the World

Art museums are interesting places to spend rainy afternoons. Now you can visit museums and galleries all over the world by using your browser. Not all museum websites have online artwork, but many do. Our favorites include the Louvre in Paris (at www.louvre.fr; click English in the upper-right corner if you don’t read French), Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (www.mfa.org), Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (www.metmuseum.org), Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (www.rijksmuseum.nl), and State Hermitage Museum in Russia (www.hermitagemuseum.org/html_En). Check out the spectacular color photographs from Tsarist Russia by Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii, digitally reconstructed by the Library of Congress, at www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire, and the amazing American Memory collection of historical photos at memory.loc.gov/ammem (shown in Figure 19-2).

Tour the Earth

The modestly named Google Earth downloadable program (at earth.google.com) lets you fly around the earth and zoom in and out. After you get fairly close to the ground, you find links to pictures contributed by users (including some impressively remote places — try looking for South Georgia), Wikipedia links, and enough to keep you busy for hours, days, or even months, if you aren’t careful.

Or, check out Google Maps Street View: Start at maps.google.com, visit an urban area (try 15th Avenue, New York, NY 10011), and click Street View. You can make a 360-degree pan of the spot to see what it looked like the last time a Google employee was there with a camera.

Lots of other interesting maps are on the web. Watch the “walmartization” of the United States at projects.flowingdata.com/walmart. A wonderful analysis of the red-state-versus-blue-state political landscape is at www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election.

Tour the Solar System

The last half of the 20th century will go down in history as the time when humans began to explore outer space. Probes visited several comets and asteroids and every planet except Pluto. The probes sent back amazing pictures: storms on Jupiter, oceans on Europa, mudslides on Mars, and the Earth at night.

Which generation will get to play tourist in the solar system remains to be seen; here are some fascinating space sites:

• apod.nasa.gov/apod: Be sure to bookmark the astronomy picture of the day.
• antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0011/earthlights_dmsp_big.jpg: Above all, don’t miss the incredible NASA montage of human civilization.

Build Your Own World

Virtual worlds are electronic places you can visit on the Web — kind of like 3D chat rooms. Rather than create a screen name, you create a personal action figure, or avatar, that walks, talks, and emotes (but doesn’t make a mess on your floor). When you’re in one of these worlds, your avatar interacts with the avatars of other people who are logged on in surroundings that range from quite realistic to truly fantastic. In some virtual worlds, you can even build your own places: a room, a house, a park, a city — whatever you can imagine. Other worlds let you make money, gain status, and battle complete strangers. People who enjoy role-playing games can disappear into online games for hours, days, or months at a time. The biggest, most successful online worlds are World of Warcraft, which costs money, at us.battle.net/wow, and RuneScape, which is free, at www.runescape.com.

Most virtual worlds require you to download a plug-in or special software. Some are free, whereas others require monthly or annual subscriptions. For example, Second Life, at secondlife.com, lets you create your own part of a shared online world, including spending real-world money.

Web-based online worlds are an outgrowth of MUDs (which stands for Multi-User Dimensions or Multi-User Dungeons or various other names, depending on whom you ask), which were text-based virtual online worlds long before there was a web.

Read the Comics

Why get newsprint ink on your hands just to read your favorite comic strip? Ours are

• Dilbert, at dilbert.com (Okay, you knew we were geeks!)
• Doonesbury, at doonesbury.washingtonpost.com
• Foxtrot, at foxtrot.com

GoComics (at www.gocomics.com has lots of other comic strips, including vintage Peanuts strips.

We also like web-only comics, such as xkcd.com (three comics a week, occasionally PG-13; we frequently resort to explainxkcd.com to understand the humor). You can find thousands more; the best way to find good ones is to follow links from comics you like and check out the comics they like.

Share Your Screen with a Friend

If you’re doing something interesting on your computer, or if you need a friend’s help to make your computer cooperate, you can allow your friend to see your screen. Many video chat programs also provide screen sharing, including Google Hangouts (plus.google.com), Skype (www.skype.com), and Zoom (www.zoom.us).

For example, if you sign up for a free Zoom account (which limits you to 40 minutes, but that’s long enough for most meetings anyway!), click the Share Screen icon at the bottom of the screen to allow the other people in your video conference to see your whole screen or a specific window.