Mac vs PC South Park style. A picture is worth a thousand words.

Why won’t the fax machine die? I hate them. Having transmitted images of document with a computer years before the success of the facsimile , I have just never been impressed. This is the age of broad band internet and computers. Does the term email mean anything to these Neanderthals still feeding these machines reams of paper? Why does the fax, an anachronistic 20th century technology still haunt me today? Well, I think I can answer my own question here. You can buy a fax machine now for fifty bucks. They don’t get viruses or spyware and their interface is a phone keypad plus a send button. When it doesn’t work you simply feed it more paper, ink, toner, film or whatever other money sucking thing they need. It’s simplistic and it works. I finally got rid of mine a few months ago and here is how I did it.

In my recent review of free 411 services I stumbled upon a Google SMS, and I personally prefer it to any of the voice recognition services I've tried (I've tried them all). You simply send text a message to 466453 and Google will text you back a result. I mainly use it in lieu 411, but it does so much more. For instance, you can send us population and it will text you back 301,139,947 – send it movies harry potty 29582 and you'll get the next show times for it. It does simple conversions like pints to liters, stock quotes, definitions, weather, and more. For you old fogies out there that don’t use the texting features on your phone this is perhaps a good reason to try it. Head over to Google SMS to read more about this great service. The accompanying photo is what you get if you text mars technologies 29582.

If you’re a South Park fan your should check out the original South Park Creator. South Park’s official site at Comedy Central features an earlier version of the same software. The Zwerg-im-Bikinis Original South Park Creator currently features over 9,000 different body-parts, clothes, and other items – so you can add that personal touch. The characters are great to use as an avatar for forums and applications such as Skype. If you want to create a super-sized version just link directly to the flash file.

Before you head over to the site and start clicking away creating your South Park likeness, you might want have a screen capture application running. The South Park Creator doesn't automate saving your creation to your computer. They give basic instructions on screen which is pretty much to press ‘Print Screen’ and paste it into a graphics program like Microsoft Paint or Photoshop. Screen capture applications can make getting things like this much simpler. SnagIt from Techsmith is the by far the best software for doing screen captures. They have a 30 day trial, but if you don’t want to muster up the $40 for the software after that, the best free screen capture software would probably be Screenshot Captor from Donationcoder.

After just a little digging, the first fact I dug up was that there were about 2.6 billion 411 calls made in the U.S. last year. This translates into a $7 billion a year market. Jingle Networks one of the first to offer a free 411 service took a 6% market share in the U.S. 411 business last year, which appears to have attracted the attention of the likes of AT&T, Google, and Microsoft. Each has entered into the business, mainly by buying a competitor of Jingle.

AT&T purchased InFreeDA and changed the name to 1-800-YellowPages. Google is rumored to have purchased 1-877-520-FIND in October 2006 and officially launch Goog-411 on April 6th 2007. Microsoft purchased TellMe, widely known as the mac-daddy of 411. Jingle is still 1-800-FREE-411. Armed with these 4 champions, I set out to call each and see what all the fuss was about.

This is an absolute classic video that apparently was done as a joke for a sales meeting or something around 1997. Whatever the case Professor Irwin Corey could not have done this better.

I often use the USPS ZIP Code Lookup page to find or verify the zip for an address or city. I stumbled upon Ben Fry's Zip Decode the other day witch allows you to graphically see zip codes as you type it. I've always wondered how they were laid out, and now I know! Cool.

After you get to Zip Decode page click the picture and then just start typing numbers. Use Backspace to erase and start over.

If you haven't purchased a webcam in a while, I recommend you go get one, now. Really, I'll wait. Not only are these devices great fun but with free software like Skype, they are a wonderful way to keep in touch with long distance friends and family. I recently tried several of them to see which one I thought was best. Glad to report that after hours of software installation and testing, the clear winner is Logitech.

Continue reading for more information and a short video demonstration.

This one is definitely worth a click. After the site opens, move the mouse around inside the circle.