Dhivael/Anne’s Hyperactive Blog

It’s been awhile since I visited Wowio.

When I first visited, you had to sign up and you could download five PDFs for free every day. This was great! Then they changed it to three PDFs. Okay. Not bad. Still great! Then it was 3 PDFs for a maximum of 30/month. Not great, but still not terrible.

I went back today, after having forgotten for awhile. It’s changed again. I am sad.

Now half the things on my download list (from last time) aren’t even downloadable. The other half, I can read them online but I have to pay from $1-20 to get the PDF. $20? What’s up with that? I could probably get these titles for half that, used, on Amazon or eBay.

Wowio went from a great place to get things to read when I’m bored to a place to mostly only visit when I REALLY want something. Now.

At least I still have the PDFs I downloaded already. HA! Including the awful Star Trek comics, woo!

Despite the name of the site, Sugar Free Games has a good deal of games to play that are… unique. The Fafu the Ostrich game is quite strange and, seemingly, easy to play. You collect eggs and then trade them for things (like weapons). Unfortunately, one of the things you must do is leap over alligators and I haven’t been able to do that very well. Oh well. There is a nice Mahjong game I just found. I like Mahjong.

Okay, perhaps not directly. But I have signed up with Wowio.com for free PDF eBooks. And all the books that I’ve downloaded so far have either been sponsored by Wowio itself or Verizon.

I’m not entirely certain how long Wowio’s been around, but they have a pretty decent selection of books to choose from. I’ve been downloading them and reading them as I can. Some are pretty good, some obviously never sold much when they were in print.

Unfortunately, you’re limited to 5 downloads per day. This isn’t bad when you’re downloading full-length books, but they also have comic books that you can download. I finish those in a few minutes. I’ve got a bunch of books on my waiting list, including ones about history, math, science fiction, art and photography as well as several sets of comic books.

The only downside is that I recently learned how to add ebooks to my iPod mini (not a video iPod) and Wowio PDFs are encrypted, so I can’t add them to read later.

Ah well, free books are still nifty.

I have several cell phones, which I suppose is awfully silly since I can only use one at a time. But one is a Cricket phone - dull, boring and you can’t do much with it. But it has unlimited minutes, so that’s certainly good.

On the other hand, I also have a Virgin Moble phone. While it isn’t the greatest of phones, being a K10 Royale, I can still send and receive text messages, download games and ringtones and browse the internet.

Today, I found out about a new place I can download ringtones from called ‘CellFish’. At CellFish, you can upload your own pictures, movies and sounds which you can then download to your cell phone. I wanted to test it out, so I uploaded a picture of one of my cats:

As you can see, you can click on the picture of my cat and send it to your own phone if you like. She’s a cute cat, so why not? Since CellFish is free to use for this stuff, there is no reason why you can’t create your own account to add your favorite media file (picture, video or audio for ringtone) to your own cell phone. It’s fast and super easy to do.

Although there is tons of free content to browse through, CellFish also has some premium content that you must pay to download. Either way, before you download ringtones, you can preview them online (by moving your mouse over the ringtone) to see if you like it.

Either way, next time I need a ringtone, I’m going to CellFish.

About 3 minutes ago, I was almost certain that my blog was dead. It wasn’t loading any pages at all and was just showing white pages. Thank goodness it was just a server glitch! But I’m also glad that I started doing blog backups with BlogBackupOnline. This free service lets you back up almost any blog, no matter where it’s hosted.

You don’t need to hand over your blog password or anything like that. The site crawls your blog, like a search engine would, to find all your old posts. Once that initial backup is done, then it checks once a day via your RSS feed to see if you have any new posts. If you do, it saves them.

Blog Backup Online really is a nice and hassle-free way for me to backup my countless blogs… and you get 50MB of backup space for free. This particular blog has over five hundred posts over the past two years and it’s not quite one MB worth of backups.

There is currently no way to backup any posted images (which would greatly increase the amount of space your backups use), but they are working on it. Pretty nifty, for a (so far) free service.

Do you remember the early days of the internet, where just about every site was giving away something really cool, for free? Unfortunately, there aren’t as many free offers around any more, which is why you need to find a site that will tell you what free samples there are available. At The Freebie Source, find free samples, free offers and even clothing freebies.

Why haven’t you gotten your free stuff yet?

Here’s something that’s pretty cool, a site that offers free podcast hosting. A pod cast is like a radio show, only over the internet. If I had a decent microphone, I might try out doing a few podcasts. The site even says that you can make money by putting your podcast on their site. That’s pretty cool. Maybe I’ll think about getting a good microphone and doing that.