Ask Calvin’s Dad

Calvin’s dad (from Bill Watterson’s comic strip Calvin and Hobbes) is the coolest comic character I ever came across. Whenever Calvin asks him question he often makes up outlandish answers. Here is a collection of some quotes from the comic strip.

Astronomy

Q. Why does the sun set?
A. It’s because hot air rises. The sun’s hot in the middle of the day, so it rises high in the sky. In the evening then, it cools down and sets.
Q. Why does it go from east to west?
A. Solar wind.

Q. Why does the sky turn red as the sun sets?
A. That’s all the oxygen in the atmosphere catching fire.
Q. Where does the sun go when it sets?
A. The sun sets in the west. In Arizona actually, near Flagstaff. That’s why the rocks there are so red.
Q. Don’t the people get burned up?
A. No, the sun goes out as it sets. That’s why it’s dark at night.
Q. Doesn’t the sun crush the whole state as it lands?
A. Ha ha, of course not. Hold a quarter up. See, the sun’s just about the same size.
Q. I thought I read that the sun was really big.
A. You can’t believe everything you read, I’m afraid.

Evolution of Technology

Q. How come old photographs are always black and white? Didn’t they have color film back then?
A. Sure they did. In fact, those old photographs are in color. It’s just that the world was black and white then. The world didn’t turn color until sometime in the 1930s, and it was pretty grainy color for a while, too.
Q. But then why are old paintings in color?! If the world was black and white, wouldn’t artists have painted it that way?
A. Not necessarily. A lot of great artists were insane.
Q. But… But how could they have painted in color anyway? Wouldn’t their paints have been shades of gray back then?
A. Of course, but they turned colors like everything else did in the ’30s.
Q. So why didn’t old black and white photos turn color too?
A. Because they were color pictures of black and white, remember?

Theory of Relativity!!

Q. Dad, will you explain the theory of relativity to me? I don’t understand why time goes slower at great speed.
A. It’s because you keep changing time zones. See, if you fly to California, you gain three hours on a five-hour flight, right? So if you go at the speed of light, you gain more time, because it doesn’t take as long to get there. Of course, the theory of relativity only works if you’re going west.

How things work?

Q. Why do my eyes shut when I sneeze?
A. If your lids weren’t closed, the force of the explosion would blow your eyeballs out and stretch the optic nerve, so your eyes would flop around and you’d have to point them with your hands to see anything.

Q. How do bank machines work?
A. Well, let’s say you want 25 dollars. You punch in the amount and behind the machine there’s a guy with a printing press who makes the money and sticks it out this slot.
Q. Sort of like the guy who lives up in our garage and opens the door?
A. Exactly.

Simple Physics

Q. What causes the wind?
A. Trees sneezing.

Q. Why does ice float?
A. Because it’s cold. Ice wants to get warm, so it goes to the top of liquids to be nearer to the sun.
Q. Is that true?
A. Look it up and find out.
Q. I should just look up stuff in the first place.

Secret of omniscience

Q. How come you know so much?
A. It’s all in the book you get when you become a father.

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Firefox Smart Keywords

Most firefox users know about bookmark keywords - shortcuts you can assign to bookmarks so you can access them from the location bar.

For example, to add a keyword for www.slashdot.org, you’d add a bookmark with the following values:

Whenever you type /. into the location bar and hit enter, you’ll go to slashdot.org.

Old news, right? Well, I was very surprised to learn that quite a few firefox geeks don’t know about the versatility of firefox keywords - specifically, smart keywords.

The basic idea is that instead of adding a keyword for a simple URL, you add a keyword for a search box. You type the keyword followed by your search terms into the location bar, and Firefox re-writes the saved URL to perform the appropriate search on the appropriate site.

For example, say you wanted to add a smart keyword for Wikipedia. You’d right-click on the search box, and click “add a keyword for this search”.

You can make the keyword anything you like. I generally use short keywords - like w here - for sites I use a lot, as a time saver. You might also notice that I’m saving this bookmark in a folder called Searches - I find it helpful to keep all my smart-keyword bookmarks together, just for the sake of tidiness.

Now, to use your smart keyword, you simply type w foo in the location bar, where foo is your search term, and you’ll be handily redirected to Wikipedia’s article on foo.

Neat, huh?

You can add smart keywords for practically any site with a search function. I use one for Google Maps

The Wayback Machine:

And even Urban Dictionary:

If you’re browsing through some sophomoric blog comments and come across an unfamiliar term, it’s certainly a great deal quicker to type Ctrl-T Enter ud feltch Enter than it is to laboriously look up the term by hand.

But, perhaps the most interesting aspect of smart keywords is their versatility. For example, I got a little frustrated with my Wikipedia shortcut - if I misspelled the search term even slightly, I’d end up on a productivity-killing error page. For example, w the last of the mohecans would give me:

This is especially galling, seeing as a Google search for that exact term instantly recognizes what I’m looking for.

Now, this gave me a bit of an idea; why couldn’t I use Google’s search engine in a smart keyword for wikipedia?

It’s possible, but takes a little bit of tinkering. First, create a new smart keyword based around google’s search box, but give it a keyword you want to use for wikipedia.

Now, open up this new smart keyword bookmark’s properties (under Bookmarks > right click > properties). We need to edit the Location property. It should look something like http://www.google.ca/search?q=%s. There may be some other information in there - it’s not important, we’ll be replacing it in a second. The %s value is the part that is replaced by your search term when you use the smart keyword. All we need to do is add some information to tell Google we’re only interested in pages from Wikipedia, so we paste http://www.google.ca/search?q=%s%20site%3Aen.wikipedia.org&meta= into the Location box. Now, when we enter gwiki widget into Firefox’s location bar, we search google for widget site:en.wikipedia.org - every wikipedia page that contains the word widget.

We’re almost there. All we need to do now is tell Google that we don’t want to be shown a search results page, but instead we want to go directly to the first result. We do this by adding &btnI onto the end of our URL. This code tells Google we’re doing an “I’m Feeling Lucky” search. So, the final URL for our smart bookmark looks like http://www.google.ca/search?q=%s%20site%3Aen.wikipedia.org&meta=&btnI.

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39 Web-Based Tools That Don't Require Registration

Online Conversion
FLVIX simply lets you convert video from URL source into a file that you can keep on your desktop and play it on your PC, Mobile, iPod etc. Copy the link of the page with the video on it and paste it into FLVIX textbox; Choose desired format : AVI, MOV, MP4, 3GP, MP3; Click on the convert button, and download the converted file.

Convert text to audio file with vozMe to use free on your site or blog. It is really don't get easier than that: Copy-paste the text that you want to convert onto their textbox, and generate yourself an audio file within seconds.

It's the fastest way to resize and convert your pictures and images. You can apply rotation, add some effects, and more. Just select your picture file, choose some process to apply and click on OK. Fixpicture comes in two versions: Flash or HTML.

Convert any file with the powerful ZAMZAR - Free online file conversion. Select file from your compute or URL to convert, choose the format, and receive converted file by email.

Update:
Convert websites to PDFs with active links and embedded video. htm2pdf is a very, very simple to function app that convert webpages to PDFs!

Generators
Web20Badges is a free set of cool web badges. Choose your desirable badge shape, text and color, then generate your badge, and download it to your machine.

With the famous Loader Generator service, you can generate and customize GIFs that you can use free in your site or blog.

Strip Generator - Fastest way to create a stripe. An Ajax-driven diagonal stripes background tile generator.

Online favicon.cc generator is an editor that allows you to create transparent icon graphics for your site or blog. Choose a color; Click on the squares and paint your icon; Download when you're finished, and put the favicon file into your webserver directory.

LinkBunch lets you put multiple links into one small link which you can share over IM, Twitter, email or even a mobile phone. When the recipient clicks on the tiny LinkBunch link, he/she will be presented with a page that contains all the links that you put in the bunch.

If you own a blog you must know how important is to tag your post with relevant tags. You also know how annoying it can be sometimes... But with Turbo Tagger you can instantly create Technorati tags for your site or blog without spending too much time and effort.

Utility that will evaluate an image and give you the image's primary and complementary dominant colors of an image, how many visually unique colors are in an image, and the top ten visually unique colors in an image.

QuickRibbon is a completely free generator which lets you create a custom ribbon, insert a link in it and place it in the top right corner of your website. It will take you less than 5 minutes to generate your own website ribbon with this trendy widget and add a stylish Web2.0 look to your page.

Create a web 2.0 button in only 4 steps. You can paint your button with preloaded web 2.0 icons, or upload your personal icon and customize the font of the text inserted.

Message Tools
Send free postal mail letters (to anywhere in the US) right from the browser. eSnailer automatically prints, envelopes, stamps, and mails your letters within 24 hours.

forlater is an easy to use e-mail reminders. Just enter your message, your e-mail and a date. forlater will then remind you at the right time.

Note2email is a web application designed to send quick text notes to any email address in the world. No need for password or username. Note it down and send it, as simple as that.

Have fun with your note. Send innovative messages contains photo, video, and music. Share your Onesenss e-cards with family and friends via email.

Video-Mail
Mailmotion is a video-mail platform that enable anyone with a webcam to quickly send video to family and friends. Record a short message (or upload a video file), specify recipient email(s), add some text to you video-mail, and define date to send.

voxlite is a great Flash-based video-mail application that allows you to send a video card using a webcam and a mic. Note that you have 20 minute recording time limit (which is A LOT)

GabMail is a free, easy-to-use video email service that enables anyone with a webcam or video camera to send, reply to and forward messages to anyone with an email address. Each recording can be up to 5 minutes long.

Easy Storage and Sharing Files
TinyLoad, a service that allows you to upload files to multiple services at the same time. With their new Bookmarklet you'll be able to upload files in no time to: MegaUpload, MediaFire, RapidShare, DivShare, BestSharing, SendSpace, Uploading, FileSend, EasyShare, and Amazon S3.

Senduit's service provides users with the ability to upload a file via HTTP-Protocol and receive a custom URL address to download the file from Senduit's servers. This address can be shared by the user freely and can be used to download the file a reasonable number of times.

3 step process to upload large files which can be sent to another person. Your recipient will get a link where he/she can download the file to his/her computer.

FlyUpload is a service which allows you to share video, audio and photos online. You may share anything with FlyUpload. Share files (up to 2GB), Unlimited downloads per 24 hours, Unlimited downloads (2000MB).

with Wikisend you can upload and download lots of files, big files, small files, data files, media files, archives or backups - any files. Share files with your friends using e-mail, MySpace page, your blog, forums etc,.

esyURL purpose is to turn long complex URLs to short easy ones, so they can be shared in blogs, forums, e-mails and so on. Furthermore, you can upload files (in a limit size of 2Mb per file) and receive an esyURL to access it, fast and without registration required.

Text Tools
Orangoo spell check application lets you check for spelling mistakes from any system or computer that has Internet access. You can Spell check text (in 27 languages) or a whole website page (English only).

Textris is a sweet little site for manipulating text in different ways. Alphabetizes, sorts, formats, changes case, uppercase, lowercase, even tools for coders.

In case you need another notepad... EditPad is pretty similar to the one you have on your desktop, web-based version.

TextSnip convert your text into a clean tabbed format allowing you to easily past text/code examples into a blog, form, or any website.

shortText is a simple tool to post text online, with minimum fuss. Write whatever you need and shortText will convert it to easy-to-share URL. You can also add pictures and video to your text.

Quick Statistics of your Site
A tool to check at-a-glance the link popularity of any site based on its ranking (Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Technorati etc.), social bookmarks (del.icio.us, etc), subscribers (Bloglines, etc) and more. You can also generate a state widget to place on your blog.

BuiltWite is a massive tool that providing all the technical analysis and SEO optimization info you need to know on a site.

Picture this...
If you need an avatar for one of your favorite social network, mypictr helps you to get it in few seconds. First upload your picture, select and crop yourself from it, choose which network, and click 'picturit' to get the result!

A simple tool that turn your photos into cool reflecting images.

kwout allowing you to quote part from any web page as image with an image-map. You can upload the results directly to Flickr, Tumblr, or website. A new feature called 'my-kwout' will let you show the collection of the sources that you quoted via kwout.

Online tool for making anti-aliased rounded corners, for avatars and images.

ResizR is a very useful little helper that allows you to resize an image from your local computer or the web, then download the results to your computer - Free.

Pixenate is simply a great online image editor, that enable you to edit your image with lots of effect tools. When you finish, you can upload your creation directly to Flickr, Myspace, Web, or your own computer.

Last service is my favorite one, I use it constantly so I highly recommend it:
It is actually a Wii application, but it works great on the web as well. Just pick your favorite artist/band, and finetune will play hours of music based on your taste.

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