Bahn conversion
Easter holiday-booking time is fast approaching, and no matter how many budget fares the airlines throw at you, there is nothing that can beat the romance of travelling by train. A shining testament to an increasingly united Europe, the German Railways site (available in English, German, French and Italian) will provide you with every last piece of information you could ever need for planning your great railway journey, wherever you desire to go - its timetabular tentacles extend to Great Britain, mainland Europe, Scandinavia, Russia and some parts of Asia. Delightfully clear and simple to use, the itineraries can be printed out and are wonderfully detailed, showing information on types of train, onboard services, border crossings and intermediate stops. I've spent ages trying to catch it out, and I've failed. Without a doubt one of the most impressive and useful sites on the web.
http://reiseauskunft.bahn.de
Blogs for dogs
It was probably only a matter of time, really. Two of the prevailing memes on the internet of recent times - that of the if-you're-my-friend's-friend-then-you-can-be-my-friend type site, and the seemingly never-ending phalanx of websites with names ending in -ster - have come joyfully together and spawned Dogster, the first community site for dogs. Growing at a rate of around 150 new members a day, at the time of writing Dogster boasted 5,000 pooches, each with a little homepage of its own (an alarming number of which are written in the first-person dog-voice), complete with picture, a biography, list of likes and dislikes and a facility for linking to the pages of his or her "puppy pals" elsewhere on the site. Even if you don't have a dog, the pictures are cute.
www.dogster.com
The whole sleuth
Should you find yourself lost for words, you could do worse than take a look at The Word Spy, which describes itself as "devoted to lexpionage, the sleuthing of new words and phrases". The site doesn't quite have the authority and gravitas of the OED, but it won't list words unless they have appeared multiple times in print or on the web. It is a mine of Zeitgeisty linguistic gems, which if you haven't found yourself saying already, you most likely very soon will. Recently added concepts begging to be dropped into conversation include mucus trooper (n. An employee with a cold or the flu who insists on showing up for work; also mucus troop v.), shouting head (n. A loud and aggressive person, particularly one who is a television pundit or commentator. - adj.) and Seabiscuit candidate (n. A political candidate who comes from behind to win an election).
www.wordspy.com
Free books
Read It Swap It is a new service for bored book lovers, which enables you to swap read books for unread ones. Browse the collection of available tomes, choose one you want and the system then alerts the swapper that they have a potential swap-ee; if the swapper can find a book on your up-for-the-swapping list that they like, the exchange is on. At this point the system will inform each party of the other's address, and you sort out the posting of the books. In order to address concerns about swappers not fulfilling their promises, the site employs a rating system similar to that used on eBay so that you can see how reliable other users have found your swapping-partner before making a decision. The matchmaking service is free until April, when £1 will be charged per swap.
www.readitswapit.co.uk
More free books
Science-fiction writer Cory Doctorow has released just his second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe. Nothing unusual in that, but what singles Doctorow out for special mention is that as well as the book being available in bookshops, it is also available to download - for free. And you have the author's active encouragement to copy it and pass it on. If you then feel so moved, you can invest in a hard copy and then Doctorow will get his royalties. This method was tried with his first novel, Down and Out In The Magic Kingdom, which despite being downloaded hundreds of thousands of times sells offline very nicely too. Doctorow has relaxed his copyright licence on Down and Out still further, and you can now use it for any non-commercial adaptation that you'd like.
http://craphound.com/est
New & noted
Stunning free icons and desktop images to download
www.pixelgirlpresents.com
Six of the best: Time-wasting games (heavy on the Flash)
Fling the Cow: a classic
www.flingthecow.com
BookWorm: chain-words
www.popcap.com
Yeti Sports: featuring the much-memed "Smack the Pingu"
http://yeti.e-medien.com
Gridlock: visual-spatial skills to the fore -
www.corwin.ca/gridlock/gridlock.html
Fowl Words: Scrabble with chickens
www.miniclip.com/fowlwords.htm
