In this article, let us look at two online guides to check your illness symptoms online, which are extremely easy to use and provide information about probable causes.

Before we proceed, it is necessary to stress that these guides should not be used as a substitute for professional medical advice. It is better that you use these tools as a supplementary resource to get more information, while you may be waiting for your doctor’s appointment, or to learn more about certain illnesses.

Check Symptoms Online With WebMD Symptom Checker

Web MD Symptom Checker is an easy to use interactive tool, where you select specific symptoms and it identifies possible causes.

You start by selecting your gender and age, after which you can specify the symptoms in three ways in the left panel:

• You can identify the symptom by zooming in on the affected body part in the interactive map of the human body on the left.
• You can select from a list of 76 possible symptoms organized in an alphabetical list and a common symptoms list.
• You can search for symptoms using the search box.

If applicable, you can select and add more symptoms. Once you identify the symptoms, the Symptom Checker shows you a list of possible conditions that may be the cause of them. You can check more about any possible condition right within the Symptom Checker.

For each condition, Symptom Checker provides you with an overview, a list of all symptoms associated with that condition, and related articles and videos on the WebMD website.

Mayo Clinic Symptom Checker

Use this guide to discover the most common causes of the most common symptoms. The Mayo Clinic Symptom Checker takes a different approach to isolating possible conditions than the WebMD version.

You first select between Adult and Child symptoms on the first page. For Adults, there are 28 common symptoms listed. After you choose one kind of symptom, the next page lets you select related factors depending upon the selected symptom:

• Details such as persistent/intermittent, started suddenly/gradually, etc.
• Whether it affects both pairs of hands/legs/etc.
• Details of the pain – duration, pattern, severity, location
• Trigger factors such as injury, repetitive use, stress, change in sleeping pattern, etc.
• Relieving factors such as medication, rest
• Accompanying symptoms associated with the selected symptom

Note that this page is specific and different for each of the 28 symptoms listed in the first page. The questions on this page are similar to what a doctor would ask you after you tell him about a symptom. So the process actually feels similar to an actual diagnosis!

After you make the appropriate selections on this page, the next one gives you possible causes of the symptoms. Here, you can see all associated factors or symptoms related to this condition.

Clicking on the condition takes you to the main page for it on the Mayo Clinic website. Here, you will find a wealth of information and resources such as description, causes, risk factors, tests and diagnosis, treatment and drugs, home and alternative remedies, prevention, etc.

For more health-related articles, check out our health category.

Did you find these tools useful? Any other online illness guide that you prefer? Tell us in the comments!

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Sleep disorders, behavior disorders, obesity, diabetes and so many other ailments produce physical pains and emotional reactions that many doctors can predict, but which most of us lack the medical training or expertise to understand. This is why, especially if you’re caring for someone who is mentally or physically ill, it’s so important to track and monitor health factors such as weight fluctuations, mood swings, sleep problems and more.

As the Earth gradually drifts further from the sun and the daylight hours begin to shrink, I would like to focus on an important online resource I discovered that can help you create a mental and physical fitness log to monitor and predict physical and emotional problems and get yourself or someone you love the help that they need before it’s too late.

Here at MakeUseOf, we believe in the importance of living a healthy life, which is why we’ve offered a number of articles with geeky resources that might help, such as the miVitals online system to store and share your medical information, Trusera – a health information social network, and iMedix – a health search engine. The application I’m going to cover today is an excellent online community called MedHelp, which offers a wonderful library of “trackers,” which are tools that can help you monitor every aspect of your health that you might be concerned about.

Tracking Your Mood With a Mental Fitness Log

MedHelp is a health conscious online community that, according to the website, has over 8 million members. The social community itself would require an article all of its own to review, but what I’d like to focus on are the free tools offered for free when you sign up that allow you to log dozens of mental and physical fitness factors. Having some personal experiences in the mental health field, there’s one particular tracker that I found extremely valuable and an excellent resource for anyone suffering from depression or other mood disorder – a mood tracker.

When you click on one of the mood trackers on the main MedHelp page and provide your sign-up information, you’re immediately presented the page where you can modify the particular tracker that you chose. You can customize the tracker depending what type it is.

You can set the tracker to be your own mental or physical fitness log or someone else’s that your monitoring, and you can also make it public – either to just specific friends or completely open to the world (it’s surprising how many people are willing to share their personal logs. You can configure the tracker to remind you to update your mood tracker daily, weekly or monthly (or never), and finally, you can set it so that it’s customized for a particular mood disorder such as major depressive or bipolar.

The major chart area is where you click to insert your log entries, and you can scroll from month to month so that you can see the history.

On your profile page, you’ll notice the community features on the menu bar at the top. You can add friends (or family) who can view your charts, add private or public journal entries, notes, photos and of course post to various message boards about health issues. When it comes to health, having a community to ask questions and share experiences is absolutely invaluable – especially when you’re going through a major medical health crisis. There’s always someone out there who has suffered through the same thing.

When you click the “Manage” button  at the right of the top menu on your profile page, you can add additional trackers to your profile. When you enter this area, get ready to be shocked by the impressive number of tracker apps that are available, including ones to track addictions, anxiety and panic attacks, baby health, cholesterol, diabetes, headaches and migraines, ovulation and even weight and exercise trackers.

Back to the mood tracker example, when you add a new item to the chart, you can choose the update based on what you’re tracking. In this case you can update what your (or your family member’s) overall mood was that day. Not only can you track mood, but you can keep track of a whole assortment of symptoms and other signs that something might be going wrong.

The items mentioned on these menus and screens hint that a doctor or some other medical professional put them together because they really do hit on the items that are relevant to what you’re trying to track.

If you want, you can even type a journal entry for the day to note an event or a situation that you want to remember later on when doctors or anyone else asks what might have caused a condition to worsen. As you enter data every day, you’ll notice a trend line developing on the large chart at the top of the tracker.

While you’re entering in your daily information, little details that may seem inconsequential all get accumulated into the big picture and the tracker shows you, in a graphical format, how all of these things – events, medicine, mental state and physical state – all factor into your sense of well-being. For example, how the change in season and shorter days has a significant negative effect on your mood (so you should plan a fall vacation!)

The MedHelp library of trackers include such a variety of tools that you could use it even if you’re perfectly healthy and just want to start exercising and losing weight. There’s a weight tracker, diet tracker and an exercise tracker that can show you what exercises and food have the greatest impact on your weight and how. Here’s the summary data for an obese, 220 pound guy who sits on his chair all day writing articles (why are you assuming that’s me?)

You can set goals, monitor progress, and troubleshoot your own health with mental and physical fitness logs for every aspect of your life. You can analyze, with real information and real data from your daily life, what works and what doesn’t. By tweaking your daily life – removing what you learn has a negative effect and adding what you learn is positive – you can transform your physical and emotional well-being.

Which of the tracker tools look like they may help you? Do you use any other tools to track and analyze your health? Share your feedback in the comments section below.

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Working as a code churner by day and a writer by night hardly leaves me with any time to exercise those (lazy) muscles, so the only other thing that I can do is limit the number of calories I take in.

That, as you all know, is easier said than done. For example, how are you going to stop yourself from eating that Big Mac (with extra cheese!) for lunch or the Chicken Tikka Masala with Cheese Naan for dinner unless you know how many calories it has before ordering it. Nothing better to lose your appetite than a guilt trip!

That is exactly what Lose It! will help you with.

Lose It! is an iPhone calorie intake calculator that acts as your personal guilt trip service by telling you exactly how many calories each of your meals has and how much you need to exercise to reach your weight loss goals.

When you run Lose It! for the first time the application asks you a couple of questions like your current weight, your goal weight, your height, and how much do want to lose per week. Lose It! will then set a daily calorie budget for you.

Now, as you go through the day, you need to either Add Food or Add Exercise to Lose It!. The goal is to remain below the daily calories budget that you’ve been assigned. Easy enough for you ?

Lose It! has a pretty large database of the common types of food that we eat and the calories that they add. For example, I ate a Big Mac for lunch today. Let’s add that bit of info to the Lose It! calorie intake calculator.

Tap on Add Food and select Lunch. Since McDonalds is a pretty famous name, we’ll just search for it under Brand Name Foods -> Restaurant Foods. Type in McDonalds.

Select what you ate from the list and Lose It! will show you the number of calories that your meal contained, and ask you to enter the quantity that you ate.

As you can see, I’m not doing too well with my diet plans. The Big Mac for lunch and the Burger King Whopper for dinner really doesn’t help me with my goal of losing 1lb a week.

So, let’s exercise a bit and add my workout to Lose It!. I love playing squash and since I have a squash court close to where I live, that’s what I’ll play. Of course, with my current fitness levels, an hour of squash is all that I can last for!

Click on the ‘+’ sign and select Exercise. Browse for the extensive list of sports available, select Squash and move the counter to 1 hour.

Ha! I’m still under 1685 calories for the day! I guess I can reward myself with that dessert!

So, you see, Lose It! is not only a very good application to help you track what you’ve eaten, it’ll also tell you just how much you can afford to splurge on yourself and still be on track to losing those extra pounds.

How do you guys plan your diet? Do you like to keep track of the calories you’re consuming?

Image credit: bensonkua

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But before you order the protein supplements and pre-pay a three year membership to your local gym, you could try to start getting in shape by using the OneHundredPushups method. The pushup workout program is based around your regular standard old push-up, but as it turns out it’s quite a good exercise.

So what is OneHundredPushups? Actually it’s a very basic pushup workout program in which you do a fixed number of push-ups every other day for 6 weeks. In the end, you should be able to complete 100 push-ups in a row. It doesn’t really matter how fit you are beforehand, since you can follow certain tracks with more or less repetitions. If you’re able to do more than 20 push-ups during the initial test, you’re even allowed to skip to week 3 (Anyone? Start bragging in the comments).

The geeky part is that they have a really decent website with an explanation of the pushup workout program where you can keep track of your progress with the Pushup Logger and there is even an iPhone app (it isn’t free, link to iTunes Store here) that helps you reach your goal. Another cool thing is the printable schedule that you can fold into a mini booklet. They call this booklet a pocketmod and it can be found here.

So you’ve printed the booklet, signed up at the pushup logger and maybe even installed the iPhone app. Now it’s time to actually do something. You start out with an initial test that determines how fast you should start in the program. If you don’t manage more than 20 continuous push-ups you start at week 1. You will do three sessions of push-ups a week. You are supposed to reach the final week and do a hundred pushups after six weeks, but in reality you keep doing exhaustion tests that tell whether you should redo a week.

In my experience, it is a simple and easy to follow program. Of course you’re only doing one exercise, but I’ve found that it really trains many muscle groups. A good-form pushup is known to train almost all muscles of your upper body. I noticed my progress pretty fast, even though I already train (somewhat) in the gym. Especially when you stick to the rules and keep doing the push-ups three times a week you will see progress. I’m not sure everyone will reach the hundred continuous pushups, but you will see progress. I think when you really want to make a sincere effort of working on your health you should also start doing cardio workouts and pay attention to what you eat. This program is very good for beginners and others with limited free time because it only takes 30 minutes to an hour a week.

Let us know in the comments if you’ve started the OneHundredPushups pushup workout program. It helpt to share your results and goals with other people. You can also have a look at this Friendfeed group for instance. If it goes well you can also try the Two Hundred Situps program or Two Hundred Squats program. Good luck!

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• SparkPeople – Free Online Health & Weight-loss Community (13)
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Well, I’m no doctor but what I do know is that there are tonnes of web apps and tools that you can use to find ways to stay healthy and physically fit. We’ll look at the three main areas of health that affect us in our day to day lives which can be made easier by our web apps; sleep, nutrition and medication for when all else fails!

iSleepDiary

Any doctor will tell you that a good night’s sleep is extremely important. Sleep allows your body to perform at its optimum level whether you’re running a marathon or fighting off a nasty infection.

Basically, in iSleepDiary, you answer ten questions every day about how you slept the previous night. You can see an example in the screenshot where I was asked about how long and how well I slept and about my routines before I went to bed.

All of this is recorded over time and in a few weeks results start to appear as to whether or not you are getting enough sleep and whether you have a sleeping deficiency. This can all be printed out or simply viewed as an easy to read chart in your account.

TwoFoods

Many of us eat food that we think are healthy but in actual fact, they aren’t. This web app will show you the nutritional value in food that we eat every day and it will also compare them to one another. What’s more, it tells you the nutritional value of items without a label such as apples and fresh bread.

In the example above, we compared apple pie and spaghetti. You can see their calorie and other nutritional information displayed below the item. I found this app useful as it raised quite a few warning flags for me. It turns out that spaghetti isn’t healthy if you laze around afterwards! Who knew?

iPills

Everyone, at some point in their lives will be put on medication. It could be antibiotics, anti-depressants, birth control pills (can’t forget that one!) or something more specific to treating an illness. Normally, you’re given strict orders from your doctor to take them at a certain time each day – obviously one of the most important ways to stay healthy is to take your medicine.

iPills is an iPhone app that acts as your virtual pillbox. Instead of simply setting an alarm, your ‘pillbox’ contains all of the pills that need to be taken that day. When you take it, you simply tap the pill (which can be customized to look different to the others) and it goes into the ‘Taken’ box.

Your pills can be set up to re-occur daily, hourly etc. And because it involves almost no interaction other than tapping the pill you just, it’s easy to use and it eliminates the painstaking procedure of organizing it on your iPhone’s generic calendar.

I have selected the three apps above because they all have one thing in common; simplicity. Health issues target everyone, not just web savvy folks like ourselves. Using these apps will get you on your way to being a lean, mean fighting machine. Just remember to eat your apple-a-day!

Which apps do you use to keep yourself healthy and stay in shape?

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Did you know that in the United States of America, you could be fined up to $15 million for selling recalled items? According to Fox News’ article, New Government Policy Imposes Strict Standards on Garage Sales Nationwide, that could, indeed, happen.

Don’t live in the grand old U.S. of A.? It stands to reason that this law may be coming to a yard sale near you, anyway. Internationally speaking, large countries can set the standard that other countries follow, with respect to law.

So, how do you know if you have a recalled product? Fortunately, a lot of countries’ governments have websites to help you identify hazardous items. That’s what this article is for!

U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC)

The CPSC is the federal commission behind the crackdown on selling recalled items in white elephant sales. Although the law may be hard to comply with, due to the sheer number of recalled products, at least they try to help.

At the site you can search on products, see latest product recalls in the United States, or even send a complaint about a product. More specifically, the CPSC has a handbook to help you out. You might want to download a copy of the 24-page Handbook for Resale Stores and Product Resellers. Warning, it’s a PDF file.

Recalls Australia

The rest of these sites aren’t a whole lot different in content than the CPSC, however, it’s important to list them as MakeUseOf has a lot of viewers from these countries as well.

That being said, Recalls Australia provides some services to help you stay on top of recalls. They provide an email subscription service that provides you with daily alerts about categories that you are interested in. Maybe you’re a parent and want to get daily updates on toys. This would be a good service.

Also, you can subscribe for customized RSS feeds that are updated hourly. Moreover, they now provide advanced search options, so you can narrow down to a product that you are researching. Well worth the time for our Australian friends.

UKRecallNotice

It seems odd that this site appears to be independently run. The United Kingdom’s official recall site seems to be the Trading Standards Institute, however the page dealing with recalls is sadly lacking useful tools. That would be why the UKRecallNotice site is far more popular, according to website statistics.

UKRecallNotice relies on updates from the Trading Standards Institute as well as from searching newspapers. From there, they categorize the notices, making recalls easier to find. They also have an e-mail list that you can join to get the daily recalls.  Hopefully, they’ll branch into providing an RSS feed as well. That’s always nice.

Health Canada

My home country’s site leaves a lot to be desired as well. Note the lame logo. This particular page does have search capabilities, but is limited to consumer products. What does that mean?

Well, apparently it means anything but vehicles, food, drugs and health products, and pest control products. Because we know what a hassle it is to have information like this all in one place. Note the Canadian sarcasm.

To my friends in India, being one of the largest groups of our readers, I’m sorry, but I can’t seem to find a good product recall site for there. I don’t know if it’s because I’m searching in English or not, yet if you know of one, please share it with the rest of the readers in the comments.

I urge all of our readers from ANY country to share their country’s product recall site in the comments. Obviously, I can’t include all the countries but with you adding links, we can compile a good list. Perhaps this list might one day save someone’s life. Wouldn’t it be nice to be a part of that?

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Whether you find out your daughter’s starring in hardcore pornography, your wife used to be a man, or your dad walked in on you and a seventy-year old transvestite – there’s a commonly accepted reaction-protocol.

After you’ve cried like a little baby, smashed your head against the wall and moved to another town, you want to tell someone. It’s because you realise the ‘uniqueness’ of your situation, or just want to wail in self-pity, that you need to share the experience and complain about life.

There are sites that allow you to vent these experiences. To tell them to other people, and demonstrate how much your life sucks — it’s therapeutic. In complete anonymity of course — otherwise you’d have to switch towns again. We’ll take a closer look at three of these sites today.

FMyLife

FMyLife (FML as a double abbreviation) was launched late 2008, and quickly turned in an internet phenomena. It’s a place where you can share stories and complain about your life, always starting with ‘Today,’ and ending with ‘FML’. Thousands of horrible recollections have been gathered on this site, some worse than others, but none pleasant.

All stories can be rated by reader-visitors. You can choose between “I agree, your life sucks” and “you totally deserved it”. Here are some of the all time top stories. Earlier this month, they released the first F My Life book bundled with some of the best stories, some of them accompanied by great illustrations.

Today, I received my passport in the mail. They got my birthdate wrong. Then I picked up my birth certificate that I had sent in with the application. Turns out my parents have been celebrating my birthday on the wrong day for 16 years. FML.

MyLifeIsAverage

MyLifeIsAverage works on the same principles as FMyLife, though with milder stories. The site’s recollections focus on the pointlessness of life’s experience. The site’s not nearly as popular as FMyLife, but it’s an entertaining spin-off and another great place to complain about life.

In reality, instead of extreme happenstances, MyLifeIsAverage houses apathic users who are extremely unsatisfied with their lifes (and often with reason). Like on FMyLife, you can vote for the stories to be either “Average”, or “Meh”.

Today, I realized the word bed actually looks like a bed. MLIA.

Ventnation (Beta)

Ventnation is probably the most extensive site in row. You must create an account to ‘vent’ your message, after which anonymity is an option. Vents can be enriched with videos and pictures, and classified in a number of categories. These messages can then be commented on, or rated by other users. Additionally, Ventnation also allows users to give advice to others.

This site is obviously way more seriously about its cause. It houses people who have bottled up frustrations and a daily need to shout them out to the world. The positive side here is that people can actually ‘complain productively’ about life, if they get other people to react. If you constantly use Twitter and Facebook to vent your problems, this site is your alternative.

Payday, and i can’t seem to find cash to burn cus the government is taking it before i get it

Do you know any other great and helpful venting sites? Don’t be shy and let us know in the comments section below!

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Now, I’ve gained some, but not all, back. I’ve become a little more serious lately and hope to work my way closer to my ideal weight again. As I’m about to doze off into a carb-induced coma, I realize why I’ve gained some of my weight back.

No matter the amount you want to lose, it can be very difficult. A “weight loss” search is likely to yield a myriad of websites trying to sell you gimmicks, pills, powders, or exercise equipment. You rarely find free weight loss sites that are actually free and helpful when it comes to weight loss.

After scouring the internet, here are some of the best free weight loss sites to help you on your weight loss journey. Remember to consult with a doctor before beginning any special diet or exercise regimen.

The Mayo Clinic weight loss website provides some basic, yet useful information. Count on this medically oriented site to guide you reasonably and safely on your journey. If you are a beginner, this is a key place to start. If you have hit a brick wall in your weight loss, this is a place to return to the basics. Sometimes just doing that will spur your weight loss once again.

WebMD has a Healthy Eating and Diet Center, which much like the Mayo site, provides doctor approved tips and tools. There are calculators, galore and a “Diets A-Z” section that includes the low-down on various diets like the Cookie Diet, the Atkins Diet, and the Cabbage Soup Diet (never mind that retching sound in the background – just gimme a sec).

A cool feature of this site is their free Food and Fitness Planner. You enter the basics and the Planner takes you step-by-step through providing a meal and exercise plan to reach your goals. The Planner’s settings only allow you to pick modest goals, but research has shown that slow weight loss equals longer term success.

As a huge (no pun intended) fan of “The Biggest Loser”, I am disappointed in their “official” site. It appears simply a sales and marketing tool. Almost any selection will take you to products you can buy. There are a few free resources, like an occasional recipe here and there, but nothing substantial. However, going to NBC’s Biggest Loser website will provide better results. The site has video, blogs, recipes, exercises and tips – all free!

If you think you need community motivation, try The Biggest Loser League. This is free to join, and requires a simple registration. Complete your profile, set your goals, and track your progress. There are League challenges that you can sign up for and earn points. You can set up your own individual challenges or form a team with family or friends and create challenges for the team. Points simply allow you to move up in rank in the League, but earning points may keep you losing weight. The variety introduced through the challenges will keep your journey fresh.

You can upload your photos, and view a weight loss time-line. The site’s targeted feature is that of creating community, or building a team. The added accountability of partners may be all you need for motivation.

Prevention Magazine is a Biggest Loser partner, so it’s no surprise that their sites are linked. However, Prevention itself offers some additional resources. The coolest thing I found was their Weight Loss Simulator for women. This offers a 3-D comparison of your “virtual” body now versus what you might look like when you lose weight.

You enter specifics about your body, including height, current and goal weight, and you can even change your avatar’s look. To save the profile you have to register with My Virtual Model, which is a free process. Since Prevention is primarily targeted for women, many of the tools, like the Simulator, are geared for women, but there are charts, calculators, food diaries, and many other free resources anyone can use.

Weight loss is about the basics – intake versus output; keep your online weight loss tools basic and you will see results! Remember, when using weight loss tools like calculators, be honest! You have to have a true assessment of where you are now to accurately measure results.

Which weight loss tools or free weight loss sites do you use to plan and track your diet progress? Let us know in the comments.

Image Credit : jmacphoto.com

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• SparkPeople – Free Online Health & Weight-loss Community (13)
• Lose Weight For Free With The Daily Plate (9)
• OneHundredPushups – A Geeky Pushup Workout Program to Get In Shape (19)
• MedHelp- A Mental & Physical Fitness Log to Monitor your Health (15)
• Lose It! – A Calorie Intake Calculator for the iPhone (6)

Was it near water? Did he spill gasoline on it? Maybe it was super defective? Um, no. He left it on his sofa, thus blocking off the ventilation and causing it to overheat. Which, in turn, burnt his home and him. Seriously, check it out.

So it seemed to me that if this person could have that happen, then there has to be a few more people out there that might do something similar. Hence this post on computer health and safety. Not safe computing as in saving your data, but safe as in saving your life. The apocalypse is upon us.

1. Provide Proper Ventilation for Your Computer and Peripherals

Well, that should be obvious after that article above. If you’re not sure what a peripheral is, it’s anything that plugs into your computer.

Does your power cord have a big black block on it? It needs to be cooled by air too, so don’t cram it under those dust bunnies. Are your computer fans growing beards? Blow them out with canned air. Canned air – not an air compressor. You’re blowing dust, not torquing rusty lug nuts man! Dust is beyond flammable – it’s actually explosive.

On the topic of laptops, that’s not really a good name for them. You should use them on a hard surface and that does not include your lap. I don’t care how many times you’ve done the P90X program, your lap is not the kind of hard surface I mean. One, it could overheat – the laptop I mean. Two, it could overheat – your boys I mean, if you are a guy. Apparently using a notebook on your lap for too long can lead to a decreased sperm count.

2. Avoid Computing Near Liquids

Fun fact for you – most liquids are excellent conductors of electricity! And your computer runs on….electricity. I actually had a user tell me it was okay to drink around his laptop, while he used it, because it wasn’t plugged in. Have you ever touched a 9 volt battery to the tip of your tongue? Hold it there awhile and you’ll find out why a laptop that isn’t plugged in is still dangerous.

Spill-resistant keyboard? That’s for emergencies. Meaning if you accidentally spilled something on it, it might stop the liquid from getting into the vital parts. Maybe. Might. Possibly. In an accident. An accident is supposed to be something that doesn’t happen very often.

3. Don’t Try to Fix Your Own Computer

The exception here is if you are a computer professional, electronics technician, or something where you can identify the parts in your computer. Sure, you might know enough to not stick a butter knife in the power supply, but can you identify a capacitor? Do you know how to safely discharge a capacitor? Capacitors hold electrical charge, even after the device is unplugged. Think about the 9 v battery on the tongue again.

What if you create a short in a wire accidentally and it ignites something in your computer? Again, not a cool situation. Let me tell you a story of my misspent education. In electronics lab, we used to get a kick out of charging up a small capacitor and leaving it on the workbench until someone grabbed it. Zap! Just a little shock. Maybe 50 milliamps. Still not that bright, right? Sure, but practical jokes always escalate, as did the amperage. Did you know that it only takes about 2 amps to kill a human? Well, we didn’t go that far, but we did almost get kicked out of the class. ‘Nuff said.

4. Abuse is Not Tolerated Well

You’ve seen the videos where some person loses their mind and whacks their monitor with a keyboard? Well, that does happen. Sometimes it just gets you fired. Sometimes it results in smoke billowing from the back of your monitor. I saw it happen. Really. I was working for the Audio-Visual department of a college and saw someone smack the side of a CRT monitor. Rancid smoke started to come out of the top of the monitor.

You know, these things have dangerous heavy metals in them like lead and mercury that are stable, when they aren’t burning! I immediately unplugged the monitor and cleared the library. Disaster averted.

5. Dispose of Your Computer Properly

Remember what I said above about heavy metals in computer equipment? Yep, well that’s why you must dispose of old computers properly. Don’t incinerate them, don’t use them for a boar anchor, and, it’s probably not a good idea to make some sort of pet cage or fishbowl out of them.

If you didn’t know, lead and mercury accumulate in your body and lead to all sorts of nasty things – including death. Well, and all those environmental hazards too. Can’t forget those.

If you can just follow these tips that some might consider common sense. you can enjoy safe computing too. And remember, he who geeks safest, geeks longest!

Image credits: rust.bucket, eurleif, annnna.

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There isn’t much we can do about it, flu season will come, people will get sick and have the common flu symptoms, and flu season will go and then we’ll go about our Christmas shopping. But maybe we can get a bit of a heads-up and get our favourite remedies to help prevent, or at least get us through it a little less miserably. Here are some sites that could help you prepare for flu season.

Google Flu Trends

Google has done something pretty interesting with their search statistics. It seems that they analyze what people are searching for, and if they are searching for flu-related subjects, it takes into account where they are searching from and trends that out.

Although the trends are not based on any medical evidence, Google professes to be able to, “estimate flu activity in your state up to two weeks faster than traditional systems.”

It’s an interesting system, and easy to use, as most things Google are, however it’s geographically limited to the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Mexico.  Hopefully this will grow into a global system that can help us prepare.

FluTrackers

This could be the most extensive site dedicated to influenza. Mostly it functions as a forum for journalists, medical professionals, and average folks to discuss influenza.

There are plenty of authoritative articles on flu prevention such as a videos titled Prevent Illness – Wash Hands Video and How to Sneeze in Public – Video. It’s amazing how many people just let it fly when they sneeze, or sneeze in their hands and then open a door.

The DoD Worldwide Influenza Surveillance Program

Since an army runs on it’s stomach, I suppose it can’t run well on a vomiting stomach. That’s why the Department of Defense has it’s Global Emergence of Infection System.

Although a lot of their data is restricted to tracking military personnel cases, it can still be a reliable indicator of what’s happening in your area. They also publish their influenza care guidelines and policies which could be very useful, should the flu get out of control. Forewarned is forearmed.

World Health Organization

The World Health Organization is a UN creation that is intended to track disease and provide policy on disease control. So you can imagine what kinds of resources they have at their disposal to do this.

With great fact sheets that summarize things related to influenza, the WHO can be a good resource for the non-medical professional as well.  Personally, I found the ten things you need to know about pandemic influenza article to be pretty enlightening, if not a bit alarmist.

Centers for Disease Control

One can hardly mention the WHO without mentioning the CDC. Although the WHO is an international organization and the CDC is an American organization, it seems that they function together to help keep the world healthy.

The CDC has a great resource in their Influenza section of their website. There are some excellent free downloads on influenza including information on what it is and various flu symptoms. You can share the downloads with your family, or maybe your workplace, or child’s school.

Also interesting is their Weekly Flu Report. Currently, it’s saying that the number of incidences and such are well below epidemic levels for the last week. That’s good to know.

Do you know of any other online sources for preparing for flu season?   Let us know about them in the comments.

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I guess that got me to thinking,  “If I found a pill in my kid’s bedroom, how would I go about figuring out what it is?” I suppose the easiest answer is to just ask them. But easy doesn’t make for a good article. My quest began.

I found three really interesting free sites to identify prescription drugs, and one that is free…but only to medical professionals and students. Let’s take a look at them, shall we?

Drugs.com

The layout of this site is very nice. I can figure out exactly how to do what I want. I can identify unknown drugs, find out more about them and see what they might not interact with very well.

First I hit the Pill Identifier. Ha! The first line in the text reads, “Worried about those capsules you found in your teenager’s room?” Apparently I’m not the only paranoid and invasive parent out there. Let’s see what turns up.

I’m just going to give it some random information to work with and see what happens. I gave it the parameters of maroon and round. Hmmm….3 results. Docusate sodium-senna, Marinol, and Phenazopyridine hydrochloride. 2 of the 3 came with pictures which would help me to further verify what the pill is. Let’s look at Marinol.

You can go further to find out what the drug does. Aha! Check this out. “Dronabinol is a man-made form of cannabis (marijuana is an herbal form of cannabis).” I knew the little punk was up to no good. Wait ’til he gets home from school. Oh, yes, this is a hypothetical story. Sorry about that. Got a little carried away.

There are other fine features on this site to help you answer your questions about drugs. You can go through a list of drugs from A to Z, search for drugs based on the condition they treat, and of course, there is a community which you can join to interact with other people interested in how drugs interact with their health.

RxList

RxList does pretty much the same thing as Drugs.com, but in a bit different way. In addition to the ability to identify unknown drugs and identify prescription drugs based on the condition they treat, RxList also adds informational slideshows and a pharmaceutical dictionary to help you understand some of those fifty-cent words.

Lets take a look at RxList’s pill identifier and see what more trouble I can get my hypothetical teenage son into. Odd, maroon is not a listed colour. Well, let’s try red and round. Phreaky pharmacy Batman! There are 50 results ranging from over-the-counter medicines like Acetominophen to the anti-depressant Wellbutrin. Yet, Marinol isn’t listed. Hmm. Well, we can conclude that using both of these sites is going to give us a better chance of identifying that mysterious pill.

The RxList search results don’t show pictures for each pill either. That could make narrowing it down a little more difficult as well. In order to see a picture of the drug, you have to click on it’s name, then when the drug information page comes up, you need to click on another link to see the images – if there are any.

Overall, it’s still a very good resource.

PDRHealth

The real-world book, the Physicians Desk Reference (PDR), is now online. Unfortunately, the service costs a fair bit of money to access. Fortunately, it is free to access for medical professionals and students within the United States of America.

The PDR is the defacto standard for helping doctor’s and nurses find out all they need to know about almost any drug in existence. Yes, it uses a lot of medical jargon, so it may take a while to understand if you are not so inclined. Nonetheless, if you can break the code of medicalese, there is so much to be learned from this online tome.

However, Thomson Publishing has put together a bit of a layman’s site for those that want to find out more about what they are putting in their gullets everday. It isn’t quite as extensive as RxLink or Drugs.com, but, like all good research, it is another resource to help you confirm or deny what you are learning.

It is kind of nice that they breakdown medicines into three categories though: prescription, over-the-counter, and herbal medicines. Herbals aren’t specifically identified on the previous two sites.

PDRHealth does go beyond just medicines and looks at surgery and clinical trials as well. All are apart of a well-managed health care plan, in my opinion.

Hopefully, this breakdown will help you to be more involved in managing your health care and starting conversations about drugs, both good and bad, with your family. After all, it’s just like that six-inch philosopher GIJoe said, “Knowing is half the battle!”

What medical websites do you look at?    Here’s ones that Jackson recommends.

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One of the first steps in being healthy is changing how you spend your time, which will include getting rid of some bad habits. For many, this will mean no more snacking on potato chips, popcorn or soda. For others, it means quitting smoking or consuming alcohol; and still others will have to do all three. Either way, Ryan recently found a website called Joes Goals and this is a good place to start if you’re trying to break a bad habit. He also wrote about the best workout websites that combine technology and fitness. Both these articles are great and I hope they will come in handy.

However, there’s another website dedicated to helping their community to lose weight and feel great – SparkPeople.

SparkPeople’s motto is “Lose Weight. Get Fit. Look and Feel Great!” and they have really done a fantastic job at developing a site that has multiple tools and features to help you achieve your weight loss goal! It has everything from:

• expert advice
• blogs
• weight calculators
• fitness videos
• meal planning
• custom workouts based on your goals

SparkPeople is a HUGE website so I suggest checking out the Getting Started Guide to learn how to use the site.

After you sign up, you will see the main area with three primary tools:

• Nutrition Tracker – create a menu and shopping list based on your goals.
• Fitness Tracker – create a workout based on your goals.
• Weigh-In – calculate your calorie and nutrient needs based on your weight loss.

Each of these tools is a link to various options and features. For example, when you click on the Fitness Tracker, you can view an auto-generated workout based on your goals. One of the nice features with SparkPeople is you can also watch a demo on how to do each exercise.

There is also a section where you can modify an auto-generated workout or create one from scratch.

Notice the screen shot above is just showing the exercise options based on “crunches”.  There is a plethora of exercise options based on selections, such as: upper body, lower body and core. Furthermore, each of those areas have beginner and advanced sections.

For those who are looking for expert tips and video workouts for the home or gym, SparkPeople has a free video section as well.

I have only skimmed the surface of what the SparkPeople website has to offer you on losing weight and feeling great. I have not yet started to get into the: blog, message board, receipes, teams and other SparkPeople tools; you can even create your own Sparks web page.

If you use SparkPeople and have a favorite section that I did not mention, please let us know. Also, if you use a different site to help you lose weight, share with us in the comments.

Image credit: N!el from Flickr

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The rapid mutations are also the reason why the swine flu is now able to efficiently spread to and between humans. And that is the key issue. It’s not a mutant form of a previous influenza strain that has been spreading between humans before. So first of all, humans, unlike swines, have little innate resistance to this virus. Secondly, there are no specific vaccines. The vaccines already on the market offer only marginal protection, if any, because they were developed against different i.e. human strains.

It takes approximately three months to develop a new vaccine for humans. In the meantime the virus can spread and could develop into a pandemic killing millions of people worldwide. Although there is no reason to panick, there is definitely reason to be catious and prepared.

Here are the key online resources for your protection.

Swine Flu Information

World Health Organization

The Wold Health Organization coordinates global health issues. Here is where you will find up to date information on the situation, with number of cases and deaths reported around the world.

The WHO offers an RSS Feed for the Swine influenza.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

CDC provides extensive resources including detailed information about the virus, antiviral drugs, taking care of a sick person or which facemasks and respirators to use. Furthermore, there is a record of all cases and deaths confirmed within the USA, prominently displayed on the H1N1 Flu mainpage.

For everyone worried about catching the virus, CDC has a collection of sites dedicated to the Seasonal Flu. Although these recommendations were not specifically written for the swine flu, they apply just as well. There is a fact sheet of Good Health Habits that can help stop germs, a list of Symptoms, resources on possible Treatments and how you can Take Care Of Yourself.

The CDC also broadcasts on Twitter.

Swine Flu in the News

To keep an overview of a variety of Swine Flu related topics that may not be covered on the pages above, I recommend the following news sources.

Reuters

Reuters reports from around the globe with articles, pictures and videos. The bottom of the page dedicated to the Swine Flu shows a world outbreak map. Scroll over the countries to view more details.

BBC News

The BBC features a set of thorough features, views and analysis. A slideshows explains the WHO pandemic alert phases and when following the links into the Q&A section another slideshow visualizes how the outbreak emerged.

The BBC records an interactive outbreak map, which can be scrolled through by from the first to the most recent case reports to see when and where cases appeared.

The Guardian

Finally, if all of this is simply too much information, I recommend the simple FAQ from the Guardian. It’s straight forward and all key questions and facts are collected and answered on a single page.

They could have added that eating well-cooked pork is safe, though. So there’s no need to cancel that BBQ!

Image credits: Zoofy TheJi

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The best way to lose abdominal weight, or even just to control your weight overall when you can’t seem to get much exercise, is through controlling your diet. However, keeping track of what you eat and the calories you consume can feel both overwhelming and annoying. Who wants to waste time jotting down the calories of every little snack or drink?

Being a geek who’s always interested in Internet resources that will do all of my work for me, naturally I decided to turn to the Internet for my weight loss needs. MakeUseOf has touched on weight loss solutions in the past, such as Tina’s article listing 6 cool sites to help you keep New Year’s resolutions in 2009 as well as a number of calorie and weight loss calculators.

Lose Weight for Free With the Daily Plate

If you perform a Google search for “how to lose weight,” you’ll get back an entire truckload of weight loss scams that will leave you as fat as ever. Why don’t diets work? Because, as any professional dietician will tell you, there’s no magic formula that’s going to make you magically lose weight. Physics still comes into play. As a biological creature, if you take in more energy (calories) than you expend, you’re gonna plump up like the Goodyear Blimp.

So what’s a body to do? It’s simple. The best way to lose abdominal weight is to find an easy way to keep track of the food you eat and the energy it holds. By doing so, you can control the way you eat in order to get to your ideal body weight. I’ve found that there are foods that can help me lose weight by suppressing appetite, but ultimately you need a tool that will help you lose weight for free by tracking and calculating the total calories in the food you eat. The DailyPlate does just that.

Keeping Track of Calories and Nutrition

Once you get through the one-page registration, you can immediately get started tracking your food intake, looking up nutritional information, taking part in the DailyPlate forum community, or, heaven forbid, calculate the calories you’ve burned by working out (in an alternate universe).

The food diary is fast and easy, and by using it you never have to count a single calorie again. After each meal, you simply click on “My Plate,” search for the food you’ve eaten and add it to your diary.

One of the things that surprised me was the accuracy and size of the DailyPlate food database. For example, when I searched for “multigrain bagel,” I not only found thousands of results, but I found the exact bagel from Dunkin Donuts that I’d purchased that morning. To my dismay, it turned out that a Dunkin Donuts multigrain bagel is one of the most calorie saturated bagels in existence.  Luckily, the website application also offers suggestions for foods that can help me lose weight.  I can use all of the advice I can get.

Once you click on the item you ate, all of the data gets loaded into your “daily plate,” including calories, fat, carbs and all other nutritional content. The website automatically tracks all of the nutrition that you eat during the day.  As you add the food, the items show up on your My Plate page.

Cool Features For Lazy People

You probably got to this point because you’re too lazy to get on a treadmill, let alone constantly keep a log of the food you eat. That’s why The DailyPlate is perfect. To make the process even easier, the folks at The DailyPlate created a few extra, cool features to the site. The first of these is a “meal” system, where you can pre-load specific meals that you eat often.

Now, when you click on your “Standard Work Lunch,” it automatically loads the ham and cheese sandwich, pickle, and chips that you eat almost every day.  Underneath this widget in the right menu, you’ll also find the “What I Eat Often” box, where the foods you recently entered are listed.

After a while, you’ll find you can simply log into the system, click on the foods you eat often, and then log out – in a matter of seconds.  There are a few calorie management systems out there that are as easy as this. The right menu bar also saves the exercise and activities that you add to your daily calorie log, also for easy point and click use.

As you add items to your log of food and activities, the system gets easier and easier to use, because all of those items get loaded into these right menu widgets.  As you add the food you eat, and the exercises that you’ve done (if any), the page lists your calorie and nutritional totals at the bottom.

As the day goes on, each time you log in you can see how much of your daily calories and nutrition that you’ve already consumed. As you can see above – I love salt.

Monitor Your Progress With Graphs & Charts

Everyone loves a good chart, especially when you’re not the one who has to put it together. The cool thing about the DailyPlate is that as you’re entering your food consumption and activity details, the website constantly keeps track of your progress. Just check out the charts, calorie goals or weight goals at the top of your My Plate page.  As an example, I’ve clicked on my weight history for a graph of my weight from the beginning of 2008 into 2009.

Okay, it’s obvious I’ve been on the wrong track.  But a guy has to start somewhere right?  The system also tracks the calories you’ve consumed versus your calorie goal (based on your weight and activity level).  This progress is displayed on a dot chart.

Best of all, from the main page, you can monitor a pie chart that instantly updates as you add the food you’ve consumed. Just above that, you can even monitor how much water you’ve had throughout the day, to make sure that you hit the daily recommended limit (about 1.9 liters a day).

All of the information on your My Plate page, and the charts and data in the background, are constantly updated and tracked as you quickly click on the foods you eat throughout the day.  Counting calories has never been this easy.

Do you have a favorite website or application that you use to keep track of your health and fitness goals? Share your insight in the comments section below.

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Walking is probably the best exercise for me, but I get bored. So I tried listening to music. But I love country music and that’s generally fairly slow. So I tried to find country music that had the range of beats to keep me going. That’s how I found Best Workout Music

Best WorkOut Music is one man’s effort to bring you your own brand of workout music.  Thank you Amnon! His site has some great features such as a music database that you can search by beats per minute and music genre. Although Tibetan Throat Singing doesn’t return many results.

Didn’t find songs that turn your crank? That’s okay, Amnon wrote some neat software that will scan your own music library and give you the beat count for each song. It’s called….BeatScanner. Clever name, eh?

BeatScanner

As you can see above, BeatScanner lets you scan your music collection. Then you can have it automatically find the beats by clicking Find Song Tempo. Sometimes that doesn’t work though, and then you can click on Detect to manually determine the beat.

You can then move on to creating your playlist. To get the best playlist, enter the beats per minute (BPM) that you are looking for as well as the range, which is a plus or minus value.

Okay, my tastes are a little eclectic. Now, just check the songs that you want to have in your playlist. As you do this, BeatScanner will show you the total playlist time. Nice for tailoring the length of your workout. Once you choose a song the Save Playlist button appears. You know what clicking that will do.

Now that you have your list, you can sort the playlist to your tastes and then save it with a custom name, genre and description. I like the way that you can either save the songs directly to a disk or MP3 player from here, or just save the playlist within BeatScanner.

With my wide and varied tastes, and short-term memory issues, I sometimes can’t recall what I called the playlists. Under the Find Playlists tab, you can search through them by keywords.

But wait, there’s more! Go to the Recommend Playlists tab and update to the website. This feature allows Best WorkOut Music to create a better song library and some nice pre-compiled playlists. Doing this can earn you an activation code, valued at $24.95, for Repacer – Amnon’s software to tweak the beat of your music.

Really like Enya but can’t exercise to it? Repacer! How about your wedding dance song? Repacer!

Using Repacer is as simple as 1-2-3! Pick your song, pace your song, and save your song.

Pick It!!!

Pace It!!!

Save It!!!

(Ron Popeil would be so proud!)

I tested Repacer with Bon Jovi’s Wanted Dead or Alive. Bon Jovi rocks, on occasion. The song is 50 BPM, so I pumped it up to 100 BPM. It sounded like some crazy bluegrass song gone wrong, so I wouldn’t recommend changing the pace of any song by more than about 20%. Although, it should be noted that the pitch of the song did NOT change! I’m impressed.

With all of the tools at Best WorkOut Music, you can get your sweaty groove on to what ever music fits your fancy. Next thing you know, you’ll be shaking your svelte-self on the dance floor too! Go on over and let Amnon know who sent you.

Which apps do YOU workout to?

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Google Health still has a beta tag after having being launched in the early part of 2008. Those who are still unfamiliar with what it is all about, here is a walk around the service.

Consider Google Health to be our personal medical records folder, with the contents well protected and secure. With just a Google account we can store all our medical records online in one central place and access it from anywhere.

With web access being just a click away, Google Health helps us systematize and record all the tests and treatments we have gone through and keep them up to date. Of course, it is not a replacement for the original paper records but a backup in the event of an immediate information need.

In an age when accurate information is the most vital key, Google Health addresses it by providing its own abundance of accessibility, convenience and user-control by putting out some functional features.

Create health profiles

All you need is a free Google account to log in and start creating profiles – records of your physical measurements, conditions, medications, allergies, surgeries undertaken, test results and immunizations if any.

Create multiple profiles if need be. The information can be added manually or selected from a comprehensive list. Handy reference links also have been provided for further information regarding symptoms, causes, and treatments.

Import medical records from hospitals & pharmacies

Google has partnered with about 15 healthcare providers which helps you to securely import your pre-existing medical history from these services. This further enables centralization of all your health records in one place. Though the list seems to be short, for a beta application it can be considered as a wind up.

Manage your health with integrated health services

Google also has an online health services directory – a list of health service providers who provide consultations, health management and drug information services. You can grant permission to these services to read your health records and provide recommendations based on your medical history. Google has no financial arrangement with any of these third parties.

Share health information

In the truest tradition of the new age web, Google recently updated the service with a Share this profile feature. This enables you to share your personal medical history with trusted contacts like your family members or your doctor.

Include the email addresses of your inner circle and they will receive an e-mail with a link to your profile. They alone will have access to the information stored in your health profile.

Sharing health information assumes importance during medical emergencies when the user himself is under medical attention and unable to give out his historical details.

In the interests of security, the trusted contacts will only be able to see and not edit the records. Also, the link will automatically expire after 30 days though sharing access does not expire till you decide to stop it. A user activity report which monitors the visits to your profile adds another level of confidentiality.

Information on drug interactions

Google Health also correlates the medications being entered into the profile and finds possible causes of conflict between the drugs. It gives a generalized suggestion via a drug interaction checker from SafeMed which should be followed up with the physician.

Add your medical contacts or search for a doctor

In this section you can manually add details like that of your family physician. A Find a doctor search box allows you to find a doctor by speciality and area.

Print your records

The print feature gives two choices – a wallet-sized option that prints out a card with the user’s medications and allergies or a larger letter-sized PDF document with the user details.

Graph your health

The graphing feature gives you a visual cue of your health trends over time by outputting the data from your medical tests on a time scale. With a look a user can make out the progress of a treatment.

Is Google Health worth a log-in?

Yes, as a personal health record service it is in beta and still a bit rough hewn. Security of online health information is a debatable touch point. An important note is that Google Health does not come under the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act, though some of the third party service providers listed do. Google Health as of date remains only fully relevant for the United States.

The discordant noises aside, Google Health comes with a lot of possibilities. As Google continues to add functionalities (don’t they always do!), we could see the evolution of another widely used web app from the Google stable. Who knows one day, we could schedule doctor appointments by syncing our Google calendar with Google Health.

What do you think of this Google service? Do you think that sharing health information in a centralized space is important for safeguarding a life in case of an emergency? Give us an opinion.

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While few people will be so careless as to attempt using a computer while taking a bath, poor online & offline habits can certainly shave years off of one’s life.

By simply modifying your own behavior, you can use your computer in ways that will keep you in good health rather than putting you in an early grave.

Stress Kills

Furthermore, no matter how technologically-prepared you are, computer equipment is sure to malfunction as soon as you touch it.  Doubtlessly, you will want to smack your computer and perhaps even get fired from your job for doing so.

However, you should learn to handle your stress in productive ways instead of letting it get the best of you.  Avoid visiting sites that are sure to make your blood pressure rise, routinely backup important documents, and train yourself on how to deal with minor glitches.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Don’t Slouch

Slouching is easy to do when surfing the internet.  Nevertheless, there’s no reason to break your back while online.

Just as your mother probably scolded you to do as a child, you should sit up straight while using a computer.

Even slight maladjustments in good posture can cause severe backache over the long haul.  You should be careful not to strain muscles in your neck, by correcting the bad habit of craning your neck to read fine print or check out content of interest to you while you’re working on your PC.

Consider typical scenarios:  if you’re using a handheld mouse,  you’re probably leaning at an angle in the first place in order to wiggle the little creature around a mousepad; if you’re using a chair with wheels, you may not remain fixed at a stationary spot as hours slowly pass; if you’re resting on a sofa, you’re likely to be tossing all of this useful advice out the window in exchange for the freedom to rest on soft pillows while still putting stress on your muscles.

Googling Toward Blindness

Staring at the sun is a foolish thing to do.  Staring at a bright computer screen for hours is only slightly less foolish.  While experts conclude that computers give off little if no harmful radiation, users frequently forget to use common sense when staring at their bright PC screens.

For example, eye strain is quickly caused if a user forgets to blink regularly while sitting in front of a computer.  Similarly, just because you want to use the computer for hours at a time doesn’t mean that your body is ready to let you.

Perhaps you’ve been up too late, or you’ve got a bad case of jet lag.  In both cases, your eyes may be taxed by trying to read through pages of search results, all buried beneath the glare of your computer screen.

Throw Your Hands in the Air

Why give yourself carpal tunnel when you can navigate the computer with your voice?

Although clicking a mouse hundreds of times per hour may not seem to pose a great health risk, doing so causes fatigue in small muscles or tendons in the hand. Furthermore, typing or texting can create undue stress that can easily be avoided if a user resorts to a little common sense.

By using free speech macros for Windows Vista, offered by Microsoft, you can feel free to throw your hands in the air & accomplish most of your work with voice prompts. You won’t need to give up using your mouse or keyboard, but you can save yourself a little energy by using speech to supplement your handiwork.

Set Yourself Free

Sometimes, you should remind yourself that you are not a slave who is bound with chains to your computer terminal.

• Get up & take a walk.
• Stretch at your desk periodically.
• Pour yourself a glass of water.
• Take a break to call a friend.

Simply enough, let your computer be of service to you rather than living simply to serve your computer.  Remember that the computer is a man-made invention that was designed to enhance your life rather than to deprive you of life.

Go forth, add favorites to your bookmarks, & prosper.

Photo Credits: Adi Setiawan, Exiree, robad0b, enggul, massdistraction, Daniel Greene

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Besides being a persevering medical student, I’m also addicted to the Web. And so, whenever I can get myself away from my books, I’ll be online to find more sources of study material. Here are some of the better sites for medical students I’ve managed to come up with so far:

MedicalStudent

You will find a huge repository of free online medical textbooks along with links to other helpful and informative websites regarding Continuing Medical Eduction (CME) & Board Exams, free medical journals, programs for handheld computers (Palm, Windows), professional medical organizations/societies and patient simulations. This is the “all-in-one” site for every medical student.

MedicalMatrix

Similar to MedicalStudent, this medical site is a source of links to all free (and paid) online textbooks, medical journals, CME and lots more. MedicalMatrix is more thorough and offers specific links based on specialty i.e. clicking on Gastroenterology will return links to textbooks, journals, news, practice guidelines, cases, image repositories, CME, forums and patient education regarding Gastroenterology only.

FreeBookCentre – Medical Books

This site doesn’t only provide free e-books for Medicine, it also includes books for Computer Sciences, Web Technology, Languages and Networking among many others. Their medical database is divided by specialty and comprises of textbooks, handbooks, guidelines, manuals, and journals.

Student Book World

Student Book World is actually a project which aims to catalogue and compare the prices of every book available, in order to allow their readers to find the books at the cheapest prices online. Fortunately, they also have a sizable collection of free e-books related to Medicine.

NCBI Bookshelf

The National Center for Biotechnology Information was established as a resource for molecular biology information, so this is a great source for Biomedical books related to topics like Viral Molecular Biology, Bacterial Nomenclature and Biochemistry. However, their library is slowly expanding to include books about General Medicine and Surgery such as Immunobiology, Human Molecular Genetics, Neuroscience, Parkinson’s Disease and many others. The NCBI also provides a few books in handheld (MobiPocket) format.

The Merck Manuals

The Merck Manuals for Healthcare Professionals is completely available online for free. The Manuals are basically a series of healthcare books for doctors on Diagnosis and Therapy based on disorders. There is also a version targeted at consumers for home medical reference.

eMedicine

eMedicine is undoubtedly one of the most concise, free medical references available online. Its website has been upgraded recently to feature printer-friendly pages and quicker navigation. All of their articles cover every aspect of both Internal Medicine and Surgery and are extensively peer-reviewed before publication.

The New England Journal of Medicine

The NEJM is a collection of every one of their publications since 1996 and covers almost every known disorder.

RCGP Medical Abbreviations

The Royal College of General Practitioners published an online listing of some of the main standardized abbreviations that may be used when writing patient medical records. These abbreviations come in very handy because most doctors will use them when speaking.

Online Medical Dictionaries

The two most popular medical dictionaries which are Dorlands and Stedmans can be found and referred to online so that you won’t have to clumsily flip through those pages or worse, carry them with you wherever you go.

Medical Mnemonics

Beyond a shadow of a doubt, Medicine is extremely taxing and difficult to study. There are hundreds of classifications to memorize and terms to familiarize ourselves with. Mnemonics make it just a little bit easier to remember these little details. MedicalMnemonics is a database just for this. It has online, printable and handheld versions (Palm only) of the database ready at your disposal.

Medical students, I hope you find this listing helpful in your studies. It certainly has helped me along the way. I don’t think I could have survived without eMedicine and a printout of MedicalMnemonics by my side.

If there are any more medical sites for students out there that you know about, please share it with all of us in the comments!

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Have you ever taken a minute to just close your eyes and take a deep breath after an hour of work? Ever stopped to just stretch your legs and walk around? That’s your mind telling you that you have to rest. Ideally, we should take short breaks every 15 minutes and a long one after every hour. But most of the time, it doesn’t happen. We’re usually too drowned with work to bother about resting – that’s how certain diseases occur, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome for example. It can be easily prevented by taking frequent short breaks and stretching.

Besides taking breaks to reduce work-related physical strain, it can also increase your mental acuity if you job demands for creativeness. Stopping for a moment to recollect your thoughts and setting your mind at ease will actually let the ideas flow in much easier.

Enter Dejal Time Out. This application runs a counter in the background. After a preset amount of time, it will bring itself to focus and dims the screen. Break Time! Initially, I got pretty annoyed with it because it kept popping up every 10 minutes telling me to take a 15-second break. But you know what? Once I gave in and took a break every time it told me to, I sort of worked with a more relaxed mindset. For me, the breaks prevented my stress from building up. In the long run, I was more productive because my train of thought flowed better.

Dejal Time Out works like this: there are 10-minute Normal Breaks which occurs once after 50 minutes; and Micro Breaks which lasts for 15 seconds every 10 minutes. You are able to configure all of these numbers to mold a break schedule to fit you and your capabilities.

When it’s time to rest, Time Out will slowly dim your screen and its meditation logo will be brought to the foreground, along with a timer to show you how long your break will last. If you’re in the middle of something important, you can delay that break by postponing it by 5 or 10 minutes. Again, these times are totally configurable.

Time Out also can also be set to automatically play your iTunes when a break is taking place. Just make sure that the playlist is already set to something soothing because it only sends a Play command to iTunes. It will then pause iTunes when work time resumes.

Try Time Out to see how taking frequent breaks actually improve your attention span and productivity. Not to mention, it will also save you a lot in doctor’s bills.

Dejal Time Out is available for Mac OS X for free! If you’re running OS X 10.2, use Time Out 1.2 instead.

If you’re running Windows, Saikat wrote about Workrave which is a similar type of application.

How do you cope with long hours of work? Are there any other techniques you use besides taking breaks?

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Workrave is a handy free software application that can be used to prevent those intentional bad habits. The program alerts the user at certain intervals to take momentary pauses, rest breaks and restricts the user to a daily computer usage limit.

The importance of curing or preventing Repetitive Stress Injury (RSI) cannot be over stressed (pun unintended). Whether it is our aching eyes or our aching limbs, this software can help us take those much needed breaks in between the keystrokes.

Workrave goes beyond just being a simple timer logging your time spent on the computer. To start off, Workrave has three timers for three durations of rest. Also, Workrave logs the actual time you spend on the computer. The software does not record the actual pauses you take in the midst of your work. As the little screenshot shows, the three timers are -

• The micro-break timer

The default prompt setting is for every three minutes and the break lasts for 30 seconds. A pop-up prompts the user to simply pause typing and look away from the screen. Just for fun, try clicking on the pop-up and it pops away from you, enforcing you to go for the break.

• The rest break timer

This prompt is for a slightly longer period and you maybe can use this time to sneak in a cup of coffee or go and chat with your crush in the next cubicle. But here is a little fun part. Stay in your seat and you could opt to do some exercises with an animated character. ‘Miss Workrave’ would love to take you through some simple exercise routines.

The onscreen display and the lil’ dudette will help you with some routines for the wrist, neck and eyes. You might end up being labeled the office nut but these exercises will surely help if you are working assiduously on the computer throughout the day (and night).

The daily limit timer

This timer monitors the complete amount of time you spend on the computer. The default time is 4 hours. At the end of this time, the software prompts you with a message. You can ignore this and continue working and in a few moments the prompt comes again. The reminders are just a gentle way to say – “hey, there’s a life beyond this digital box you know!”

Getting into the skin…

The timers and the breaks are completely configurable. This is really handy because the default break times given for the three functions seem relatively short. For the three breaks, the user can set :

• The time between breaks
• The break duration
• The length of the postpone time
• The number of prompts you want the application to give you.

When the break time is prompted, you can hit the ‘Skip’ or the ‘Postpone’ function (I have a sneaking hunch most of us will do just that!).

The timer can also be set in a ’suspend’ mode when the computer is inactive.

If you feel that you prefer to hit the gym rather than do the calisthenics in the cubicle, you can also choose to ignore the exercises altogether or just do a pre-determined number of them through the configurable settings.

Another really useful setting is the option to set the software to a ‘block mode’. Using this you have a choice to let the software automatically block any keyboard input when break time hits or to block both the keyboard and blank out the screen. It’s rather like taking a break with a gun on your forehead. Of course, you can just as easily switch it off by using the ‘No Block’ option.

A usage statistic screen comes in handy for the history buffs. The software logs all data related to breaks taken, daily computer usage, prompts given and even the distance traveled by the mouse. Talk about details!

RSI is a reality. Go for the download. At about 6.9MB and free of charge, it’s certainly more worthwhile than a visit to the doctor.

Workrave is open source software and is available for GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows.

Do you have any other pieces of software for helping you to take breaks from the computer or for helping you to manage your time in front of the computer? Let us know in the comments?

(By) Saikat is a techno-adventurer in a writer’s garb. When he is not scouring the net for tech news, you can catch him on his personal blog ruminating about the positives in our world.

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You sit in front of your monitor and the light from the screen shines directly at you. Due to that, your brain doesn’t recognize that it is currently night-time so your sleep cycle is disrupted. One night’s work turns into a nightmare the following day – your energy level is low and your attention span is shortened.

One way to curb this issue is to constantly remind yourself that you’re working at night; and at some point, you’ll have to go to bed.

Nocturne is an application for Mac which sets it to “night mode”. It dims the screen, inverts the colours and sets it to monochrome. That way, you’ll have an impression that it is night-time on your computer and you’ve got to do what you’re doing quickly.

Switching the screen to monochrome doesn’t exactly makes everything dull but it does make it look less exciting. For me, it makes me sort of less interested in what I’m reading if I’m surfing, so I don’t sit in front of the computer as long.

It also reduces the amount of light which you are receiving so your brain knows that you’re actually working past your bed time. You’ll eventually feel sleepy and that’s when you know you’ve done enough work for the night.

Nocturne has got a couple more interesting features:

It can hide the desktop background so that your wallpaper won’t be inverted and monochrome, and replaces it with a simple black desktop. That adds more dark areas to your screen, making it less bright and obnoxious.

It can also add a tint to the screen (if black is not your thing). I find that adding a red tint converts my screen to a better colour and actually increases my productivity while still making me realize that I’m working in a low-light environment.

There were some refinements in the latest version of Nocturne which removes the drop shadows of application windows, which were apparently unpleasant when inverted because they seem to “glow”.

Development for this application is currently going on steadily. They are planning to add some features which users requested like:

• Adding a keyboard shortcut to turn on “night mode”
• Inverting only selected applications
• Automatically muting the sound in night mode
• Ability to automatically launch Nocturne then the display’s brightness is set to a particular level (personally, I think this is a very cool feature)

Nocturne is created from the makers of Quicksilver and is available for free on Mac OS X.

(By) Jackson Chung is a full-time medical student attempting to perform a juggling act with relationships, studies and his future.

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One way Gyminee does this is through user-created workouts. Create your own workouts by specifying exercises, activities and selecting the total time you should perform each exercise, the target heart rate and details such as altitude (for running) and weight (for lifting); If you can’t really think of a great workout, browse through the millions of user-shared workouts for one that fits you and your lifestyle.

Set personal goals for yourself and track your progress with a convenient calorie intake logger. If you feel proud of your progress, share it with your Facebook buddies with an easy-to-use widget! Join other groups to meet people who share your interests and add them as “Gym Buddies”. I know I’m just listing here, but I hope you get the point that Gyminee has a broad range of user-specific tools that fit you. With the tools listed above, I’ve barely scratched the surface!

Workouts on the Gyminee website are created by professional athletes and just people who like what they do and want to share it with other users. In fact, the other day, an interesting workout caught my eye: “The 300 Workout”, featuring a picture of a bulky body-builder. Upon further examination, I read that the 300 workout was actually the exact workout performed by the actors of the movie “300″. A lot of these workouts can definitely provide expected results, as long as you persist in doing them. If you have a set of exercises you like to do, you can make your own workout, with a full list of stretches, activities and lifts to choose from. Add a description and title to make your workout more noticeable and helpful!

Once you’ve made your own workout, browse through hundreds of groups to find people who share the same interests as you. With groups with titles ranging from “Runner’s Only” to “Body Builders”, Gyminee has a group for everyone. Within group discussion areas, you can talk with other athletes and compare techniques and training equipment. If you really get to know someone, add them as your “Gym Buddy” and workout with him or her.

Another great tool featured is the Food Diary and Dietary Tracker. Log your day-to-day dietary information and track your dietary intake and look back to see exactly how many calories you consumed last Friday. Before you exercise, track the amount of carbohydrates, fats and proteins you consumed and if you like your pre-workout snack, save it as a “Favorite” and pull it up with a click of a button!

Regardless what types of exercise you enjoy, whether it’s hard-core cardiovascular workouts to if you’re just trying to stay fit, Gyminee is a great community for you to join and share your stories with. Plus, membership if free and the basic membership includes all the tools profiled above. In addition to all of this, if you’ve ever been sitting in a restaurant and can’t decide what foods are most healthy, check it up! With the new Gyminee application for the iPhone, you can log your dietary intake anywhere!

(By) Anthony is a student, blogger and a distance runner. In his free time, he enjoys running track, and sifting through the web. Drop by his blog at Radicitus, Dude!

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FINANCES

Mint – Get control of your budget and finances with minimal effort. Mint is a fully-automated, all-in-one online personal finance tracker.

Here are some of the things that Mint can do without your intervention:

• Track and organize your spendings by category (utilities, grocery shopping, entertainment, etc.).
• Alert you about the account payment due dates.
• Analyze your credit card and bank accounts and tell you if there are any better (more rewarding) alternatives.

It’s also quite secure. You can read a detailed Mint review here.

FRIENDS

Spokeo – One tool to keep track of all your friends from over 30 major networks. No matter whether they are on Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg, Flickr or Myspace, Spokeo will find and monitor their profiles for you. As soon as there is something new on their accounts you will see it.

Again, Spokeo is fully automatic and takes about a minute to setup. More on Spokeo.

TIME

RescueTime – Ever wonder how do you spend your PC time? How much time do you spend checking your email account, socializin’ on Facebook, watching movies, etc.? RescueTime can help you find it out. Once installed, it tracks all running programs and logs all visited websites, and afterwards presents that information in an easy-to-digest graphs. Available both for Mac and Windows PCs.

GOALS

43Things – It’s a new year, so probably you made some resolutions and set a number of new goals. Regardless of how big or small your goals are, 43things can make it easier to get there. It’s a very active online community where you can set, track and share your goals. For instance, if you set your mind to pay off your credit card debt by the end of the year, 43things will not only connect you with other folks who plan to do the same but also with people who did it. It’s simple, fun, and most importantly it works.

On the other hand, if you need something less social than check out our jumbo comparison of To-Do managers.

WELL-BEING

iRateMyDay – Find out how happy you are and measure overall well-being by rating your days for a certain period of time. Just select most suitable mood face for the day (from Great to Worst) and add an optional comment. Do it for a couple of month and you’ll be able to see how many days on average you felt great, terrible, indifferent and so on.

By looking at points that are well below or above the average you can also get a summary of ups and downs of the month. What went wrong? What was great? and What can I possibly change to improve it?

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(1) HealthVault
Service that many US families should find really useful. In simple terms, HealthVault is an online safebox for all your medical records. It’s not just a storage place to keep medical history but also to share records with doctors, place to where medical documents can be faxed and auto-archived, and lots more.

(2) Windows Live (Office Suite)
Long-awaited online office offering from Microsoft. I know, there are plenty of other online office suites, but many of us are still hesitant when it comes to compatibility issues. What if the document won’t open? What if text styling gets messy? … Well, who if not Microsoft can guarantee 100% compatibility with Microsoft Office. Although the service is yet to go public, you can opt-in now and get notified as soon as it’s launched. (Update: Some people have suggested that it’s going to more like a document storage and sharing service rather than online office suite)

(3) TellMe
Tellme is a free alternative to costly 411 directory service. Lets you quickly obtain contact details and directions to local businesses (repair shops, pizzerias, restaurants, etc.). You can access it via toll free number, text messaging, or TellMe mobile client. Check out TellMe video demo here.

(4) Windows Live (Safety Scanner)
Online Windows health check-up and maintenance center. Includes virus scan and removal, hard drive space recovery and performance tools. The only drawback, it doesn’t work with Firefox and thus you need IE to access it.

(5) Tafiti
Looking for a comprehensive research tool? Check out Tafiti. It’s a single application that integrates multiple search engines, visual search, webpage sharing, and a handful of other features for online research. Tafiti will work on any browser but you do need to have Microsoft Silverlight (free).

Software

(6) Win XP Powertoys – PowerToys is a set of tiny all-purpose apps that add to your Windows experience. Currently, the package counts 15 different programs, including ‘Alt+Tab’ replacement, all-in-one unit converter, right click image resizer, and virtual desktop manager.

(7) FolderShare – Simple and memory-friendly program with a bunch of cool features. FolderShare lets you access your PC remotely, share files with others, and synchronize files across multiple computers and mobile devices. It’s a pretty useful app to have on your arsenal.

(8) Sysinternals Suite – Over 60 troubleshooting utilities bundled in one suite. Most of the bundled apps are rather techy and may require technical skills. Although some of the apps are 100% automated. For instance, PageDefrag (excellent paging-file defragmenter) is one of such apps.

(9) ConferenceXP – Live screen sharing and collaboration application for groups. Highlights include local screen streaming, browser screen sharing, and live collaboration sketchboard.

(10) Windows Live Pack – Brings Windows Live services to your desktop. Cool part about it, you have an option to choose which services to get. Package includes, Family Safety suite, web photo gallery, online storage service, Windows Live Writer blogging tool, and some more.

Got another Microsoft goodie ? Let us know in comments!

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iRateMyDay

Fun website which can help you find out how happy you are. You can measure overall happiness by quickly rating your days for a certain period of time. The rating system is fairly simple, just select most suitable mood face for the day (from Great to Worst) and add an optional comment. Do it for a month, and you’ll know how many days of the month you felt great, terrible, indifferent and so on. Do it for a year or half and you’ll pretty much know whether you’re a happy person or not, and why is it so.

Emotionr

Emotionr is a slightly more social alternative to iRateMyDay. Not only does it let you track and share your emotional experiences with others, but also browse through mood photos uploaded by other community members, check out happiest countries, share your daily mood score on your blog, and even get a world mood score for the day.

FlickaDay

Flickaday offers something rather different, the basic idea behind it is to let users take a snap photo of themselves on a daily basis, compliment it with an optional comment and share it with others. To enable sharing FlickaDay provides a handy widget which can be used to show off these daily mood photos on you blog or web profile (i.e. Myspace). By default widget shows only the most recent photo but users can also check out all of your daily pics in calendar-like manner or play the whole set combined into Flick (movie animation) accompanied with a background song of your choice.

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Visual

(1) Color Vision – check whether you’re colorblind

(2) Spot It – cool 2-min exercise for your eyes: spot O among hundreds of Q’s, 6 among 9’s and so on.

(3) Framing Game – test whether both of your eyes TURN ON at the same time.

Hearing

(4) FreeHearing – 1. simple hearing test, 2. simulated hearing loss, and 3. bunch of environmental sounds (jet plane, crowd, rain storm, etc.)

(5) Hearing Frequency Range – most people can hear sounds within 15-20.000 Hz range, see if you can hear beyond it.

(6) Pitch Perception – 6 min. long test to measure your pitch perception ability

Other

(7) Running sheep | Background changes – 2 fun tests to measure your reaction speed. Running sheep also shows how well you have performed among all the other testers.

(8) Fake Smile – find out whether you can spot the difference between a fake and a real smile.

(9) Senses Challenge – some of those moments when you brain tricks your eyes …

(10) Sensitivity to Disgust – 20 question (10 min) test to measure your sensitivity to disgust.

Feel like something is missing? Do everyone a favor and add it in comments.

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where:

• ‘healthmaps’ – provides complete visual info map on diarrhea, such as causes, risks, tretament and etc.
• ‘broaden search’ – lets you broaden your search
• ‘narrow search’ – lets you find specific info on diarrhea (ex; only causes of diarrhea)

Another useful feature is Health Channels, which serve as one-stop resource for top articles, news, healthmaps and some other info related to a particular term. To get an idea check out health channel for heart disease here.

There is no need to register to use healthline, however if you become a member you will be able to (1)tag and save your search results and (2)write reviews of articles and rate other reviews. If you are using Firefox you can also search on Healthline right from your browser by installing this Firefox plugin

Overall, it’s a good service and definitely worth a bookmark.

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