The summer heat and the holidays make life boring. The WWW has some fun places buried deep that feature the popular culture and other interesting stuff. It makes passing time much easier. Here I’ve compiled a list of the world’s most engrossing places on the web that can help to while away time like there was none.

Popurls

A huge live list of the best stories around the world. Gets the data from famous social bookmarking websites and the best blogs.

One place for popular links.

Jimmyr

A home made version of popurls started by Jimmy Ruska.

Digg

The most popular social bookmarking website with loads of stuff to discover. Digg introducing some new social features, a sneak peek in the following video:

Cracked

Funny starts here. These people know what’s funny and what’s not. The most experienced humor website on the planet. Must see the funny lists and videos.

Icanhasinternets

No one other than the author of this website knows what the name means. But, its pretty funny to just read it. You’ll wonder where these people get som much LMAO stuff to post daily. Just click the randomizer button on the right pane and have fun.

Funny Or Die

Another Cracked.com styled website. It features loads of original funny videos. Famous for parodies of literally anything in this damned world. Updated daily.

OMGPOP

Play higly addictive multiplayer games here. Even if your despise online flash gaming, its a must chek out (Apparently you are searching for something to pass your time with so no other go. Go to OMGPOP now). Must play Missile command now.

Addictive multiplayers, fast load times, slick OS kind of interface, real players, Facebook integration.

Kongregate

A place where you find the cream of flash games from around the world. You’ll end up spending hours on this website. Some of the games you must try for sure are indestruc2tank, continuity, tower defense games, robot wants puppy, red remover, stacker series, filler and many more. Sign up and level up.

Addictive flash multiplayers, best flash games around, leveling up system, neat design. Nothing more you could ask of a flash games website.

That was the first part. I don’t keep drafting stuff and adding more and more to it before publishing. One sitting should convert at least to one post for me. We’ll see another such list pretty soon before you are done with this one.

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Youtube is testing a new service. The Youtube Disco. It is a one stop for all your music needs. Where you can listen to all the full music for free with videos. What’s more? There is a tab on the second page that finds you similar artists to the one you entered on the first page. Similar artists are found using some algorithm that comes from user choices. It has some very good advantages over other such services like last.fm and Pandora. Pandora isn’t even available in India.

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Any other way (in terms of system resources and time) of downloading  youtube videos cannot be more efficient than just changing a letter of the URL. The following method allows you to generate direct links to download the video in flv format or iPod friendly mp4 format. To download a Youtube video follow the follow the simple instruction just once. The next time you won’t have to look at this.

Instruction:

Change the “y” of “youtube.com” in the youtube URL to “3″. Like this:

Similarly adding “kick” before youtube in the URL does the same thing. (But typing 3 more letters is comparatively less efficient). The pwn youtube method no longer works directly, but still redirects you to a useful place. Using download manager and other plugins are mathematically less efficient too (system resources). Cheers.

Okay, I have hundreds of pictures to arrange into a collage. I’m too lazy to arrange so many of them into a collage. What do I do?

Solution:

I download this free software that automates the process of creating a collage from number of pictures. Leaves absolutely nothing for you to do and gives you a finished professional looking collage. It’s called shape collage. One great feature of Shape collage is that you can make the collage in a desired shape. The software also has an online version, that allows you to work directly on the cloud.

Some great features:

Create picture collages in less than a minute with just a few mouse clicks

Create collages in the shape of a Rectangle, heart, circle, letters, or even draw your own shape.

Adjust the collage size, size of the photos, number of photos, and spacing between photos

Change the background, the colour of the border, and more

Edit the final image in Photoshop by saving it in PSD format.

[Shape Collage]

Make sure your computer has java runtime environment installed.

Google now will officially allow uploading any file into the cloud. If you used to use Gmail drafts to save some work online, you can now stop doing that and use Google Docs. You don’t have to carry a storage device with you anymore. All the data you need to access somewhere else can be simply uploaded to Google Docs. The file size limit is presently 250mb. This is a threat to other such paid services, which don’t allow storing more than 2GB without payment.

You can also use a shared folder to share the files with anyone else. For more information, check out our post on the Google Docs blog.

If we look in the past, Gmail changed the way we used our email. It came in with a serious blow to yahoo. The email storage space and attachment size it could provide at that time was the largest in the market and made people to shift to it. Even presently Gmail gives huge storage space which  increases every second. I can see a similar trend building up in the cloud storage section again.

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