You Got Words? Play M-W's Online Crossword Puzzle!

If you like puzzles, you should check out Merriam Webster's Online Daily Crossword Puzzle! It's really cool, and definitely challenging and fun. The interface is intuitive and it's interactive — you can reveal and/or check letters, words or even the entire puzzle as you work through it — and it has a timer (which you can pause when necessary).

It has the ability to save your progress as well. I started a puzzle earlier today, and before I began to write this post I went back and it brought me to the game I had already started. Really nice feature. Get your brain ready, the timer is ready to start ticking... Be forewarned, it can be addictive and it's easy to while away the hours playing.

You'll need Flash 6+ to play (it's ubiquitous these days, except on Linux).

» M-W.com Online Crossword Puzzle
    Be sure to bring your brain!

» M-W.com Home Page
    Dictionary and much more...

Cool Tool: Diagram Designer

I recently needed a free “Visio-like tool” to do some diagrams for our latest project at work, but I don't have Visio, and I don't love using it either. Like most Microsoft tools, Visio's got way too many unnecessary bells and whistles which force you to learn the tool rather than get the task at hand done quickly. I like Graffle, but someone's "borrowing" the iMac I had on my desk so that wasn't an option either.

I did some quick searching and found this little gem, Diagram Designer 1.19 by MeeSoft, on TuCows.com (TuCows Diagram Designer product review/download).

Seek and find. This is a great freeware tool to "create flowcharts, diagrams and slide shows", and other vector stuff. It's light weight at 1.28 Mb, simple and easy to use -- and makes quick work of day-to-day grunt stuff.

The downside is it's Windows only (98 / NT / 2k / Me / XP / 2003 / Vista) no Mac or Linux. Also it saves the vectors in it's ".ddd" file format which I haven't seen before. But, you can import/export your work to other formats like: WMF, EMF, BMP, JPEG, PNG, MNG, ICO, GIF and PCX. It even has user submitted template palettes. Also, Mr. Vinther has released a previous version to Open Source.

» meesoft.logicnet.dk

I got great results -- and I got the job done quickly, so I figured it makes sense to share it. Let me know what you think.

Now if I could only remember where I left my cup of coffee...

:-|

Cool Tool: Ping-O-Matic!

Got a blog? Want to let the community know when you've updated it? Problem solved in just a few clicks and you're done in seconds if you use Ping-O-Matic!

Just drop your blog title, URL, and RSS feed into their form, check the services you want to ping and off it goes. What are they up to and why is it free?

"Why go to all the trouble of setting up a free system that sends out over a hundred thousand pings a day? To play with all the data of course!"

Cool, huh? It's fast and FREE, so give it a try.