Mac's Picks is a collection of family friendly interesting and useful sites, updated weekly. These sites may be search engines, medical resources, household hints, educational resources, recipe sites, sites I call "head scratchers", and/or new sites dealing with all kinds of things of use to the general internet community. To find the criteria I use, simply click on the "Why and How Info" link on the right side of this page.

This page is updated on a weekly basis, each Monday evening Australian (Queensland) time (GMT + 9 hours according to the world clock). Please come back and visit often.

Important Note: If you are returning to my page, welcome back! Please click your "Refresh" or "Reload" button on the top of your Internet browser to ensure you are seeing the current week's page of my "Picks of the Week". Also, I would love for you to make my site your home page. Simply click on Tools - Options in Explorer, or Edit - Preferences in Netscape, and click Use Current and it's done.

You will note a new site that I have as a link on my page on the right side of this page called Flookie Blog Search. This is a site in its infancy but the idea has merit. The rational is that it is trying to become a real search engine, but one that only searches for Blogs. If you have a blog, let this site know about your blog and it will most likely be listed. If you don't have one (and why not? it's simple to do) then this search engine may turn up a blog you've been looking for. Give it a try and see what you think. I think it's a great idea.

You'll know that many famous, and some infamous folk pass on to the next plane of existence each year. Some are spoken of at events like the Academy Awards ceremony, but many would go unnoticed by you and I. The one blog that talks about those who have passed on but should be remembered and why, is called The Blog of Death. Now I know that name won't be everyone's cup of tea, but the purpose is to give you an insight into the many wonderful people who have made that final journey but that you may know very little about, including the fact that they have passed on. An interesting blog to say the least. Hop over and have a browse around and make up your own mind as to its goals.

There are more recipe sites on the net than you could possibly ever try something from. However one, which is a search facility, is called the FoodieView Recipe Search Engine and it presently boasts that it has 250,000 different recipes, and counting. You have to be able to find something tasty there to tempt your taste buds.

If you are using Windows as your operating system you're no doubt aware that Microsoft has an ongoing service of supplying you with security patches and downloads. To find out what is currently available, I did a search at Microsoft for Windows patches and add-ons and the results are at the Microsoft Download Center Search Results site, which purports to show you all recently released MS downloads and upgrades. Now that's not bad. Check it out and see if your system is missing anything.

If you have younger members of your family, trying to find worthwhile books to help with their reading or indeed, to simply read to them can be a chore. Hop over to Carol Hurst's Children's Literature Site site which says "This is a collection of reviews of great books for kids, ideas of ways to use them in the classroom and collections of books and activities about particular subjects, curriculum areas, themes and professional topics". Hopefully that's a help.

Have you ever had an occasion where you wanted a distant friend/relative/colleague to have a very large file, but you are reticent to attach it to an email as it would most likely overload the recipient's email box? Then the answer might be to visit dropload, drop it off there, and let them download it at their leisure any time over the following week. This site's own description says that "Dropload is a place for you to drop your files off and have them picked up by someone else at a later time. Recipients you specify are sent an email with instructions on how to download the file. Files are removed from the system after 7 days". Now that surely is worth a bookmark for future use. Oh, did I happen to mention that this is all free as well? *smiles*

Men are notoriously bad at looking after their own health. Indeed, even when diagnosed with a malady of some sort, many have no idea what it really is about or how to care for themselves (listens to his wife in the background saying "Amen to that"). Thus, the MedlinePlus Men's Health Topics site could be worth passing on to any male you know who could use the information here. The range is reasonably vast so if a male you know has a particular condition or disease, send them here to find out more about it.

So you finally have broadband. Yes, it's faster, but how safe is your personal computer seeing as it is now constantly connected to the net (and yes, the robot spider programs crawl over the net looking for computers just like yours)? Is your firewall up to scratch and hiding you from intrusion? One way to find out is to hop over to the broadband " Port scan site and let it scan your computer and give you a result. Yes, I've done it and my report said "Conclusion: Healthy Setup! We could detect no interesting responses from any of the commonly probed TCP and UDP ports. It would be difficult for an attacker to know where to start without further information". I think that's good enough for me. Does your result sound that safe? For your own safety, do try it out yourself.

We've all heard the expression that someone was caught in some crime holding The Smoking Gun. Well, now there is a website that keeps you up to date on some pretty horrible things that were just that, the Smoking Gun. It's pretty easy to see who was guilty with that kind of evidence. Please note however: Some of the stories on this site really aren't for your younger family members to read about. Have a look and you'll see that the stories are true, but some could upset some folk. However, it still is a good site for the information it gives.

If you are in the USA, you'll know that there are two representative sections of the government, called the Congress and the Senate, who decide on various issues of national importance. However, do you really know how your own representative voted on anything while in office? The Washington Post newspaper does. In fact it keeps a record of just that type of information and publishes it online at the Congress votes database washingtonpost.com site. Check it out and see if your state representative voted the way you would have wished or not, or indeed, if they bothered to vote at all. Useful information to have handy for the next election I'd say. *smiles*

Are you, like me, sick and tired of phoning a company and getting a robotic answering service that asks questions of you rather than a real human being for you to ask questions of? If so then bookmark the IVR Cheat Sheet(tm) by Paul English site as it is useful knowledge about how to find a human at many companies. And yes, you can find most of them here. Definitely worth a bookmark to return to when you need to speak with someone and not a machine.

If you, like most folk, have passwords that you need to remember to access your computer or various websites, then you might at times wonder how strong that password is and how easily it could be broken by some unscrupulous person trying to use your login to gain information. I constantly find it amazing to find folk that still use ridiculous *passwords* like 12345 or asdfg and think they are safe. Please don't do that, and indeed, hop over to the Password checker site from Microsoft, and enter your various passwords to see how good (or bad) they really are. Thankfully they also give you hints on how to make your password more secure. Indeed these are the things that I teach folk to use as well. Keep in mind that no password is totally and completely non-hackable, but hey, why not make it as difficult for those who would hack yours as possible? This site will help you do just that.

And finally to round out this week's selection of sites, one that is simply called Monty Python's Completely Useless Web Site. Actually it's not completely useless as it contains some jpg images of scenes from their more popular shows and movies, and a few sound bites for you to have handy as well. If you're a Python fan (as I am) then you'll enjoy this site. Have fun.

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