5 Intelligent Sites to Boost Your Brain

Even though the internet is largely populated by cat videos and memes, it also has some intelligent stuff. But you need to know where to find it, if you want the web to boost your brain and not blast it.

A while back, we compiled a mega-list of 35 brainy sites for you to read more intelligent content. This new list has only five more, but we find ourselves going back to them a lot. Don’t miss out on these. Read More Intelligent Content in 2016 with These 35 Sites Read More Intelligent Content in 2016 with These 35 Sites We should all read these 35 sites more often. If you are tiring of dumbed-down content make things somewhat more thoughtful this coming year with this super list. Read More

1. Wait But Why (Web): Intelligent Yet Funny

This has fast become one of my favorite sites on the internet. Tim Urban writes about things both profound and trivial at Wait But Why. But no matter the subject, he dives deep into it and understands it from all angles, before offering an informative but humorous take.






For example, take his post on putting time in perspective. He charts recognizable time periods through colored bars to create a wonderful way of putting time in perspective. And then there are the slightly more personal but insightful reads, like the one on “clueyness.”

Wait But Why isn’t updated regularly, but its archives have plenty of reading material on all sorts of subjects. Dive in, you’ll have a great time. It’s one of the funniest reads on the web. 15 Funniest Websites for the Best Humor on the Web 15 Funniest Websites for the Best Humor on the Web The web is a huge collection of humor. You will find a reason to laugh with these 15 top websites that tickle your funnybone. Read More

2. LessWrong (Web): Intensely Smart

LessWrong might just be the smartest portal on the internet. It’s a community of individuals whose entire aim is to improve their reasoning ability.





Start with a series of blog posts that explain the community’s attitude towards rationality and discussing it. You can even download it as an ebook. The essays are an excellent, thought-provoking read.
LessWrong isn’t based around discussing what’s happening in the world right now. It’s a more rounded understanding and discussion of logic and decision-making.

3. Information Is Beautiful (Web): When Graphs Are Better Than Words

Who says you can only learn things by reading? Information Is Beautiful is a data-driven site that puts important numbers and figures into gorgeous infographics.





It’s a new way of looking at information, and more often than not it will register in your memory. It can be a map of what every country is the best at or a summary of all the medical conditions you’re at risk of. Admit it, if you read this as lines upon lines of text, you might get bored or not read it at all.

Use the menu bar at the top left of the site to check out recent, popular, and interactive infographics. Some of them are as gorgeous as the interactive mini-sites made by the BBC. 5 Stunning Interactive Mini-Sites Made by the BBC 5 Stunning Interactive Mini-Sites Made by the BBC The BBC showcases a stunning series of digital experiments. From knowing your body better to interactive chemistry experiments, you'll see it all here. Read More

4. Real Life Lore (YouTube): Animated Informational Videos

If you’ve wondered about some phenomenon, chances are, Real Life Lore has dove into it. The YouTube channel is a bit like XKCD’s What If, in that it gives in-depth answers to weird questions. But it’s not all hypothetical here.

Real Life Lore explores both fantasy scenarios as well as reality. Through short videos, it gives you a detailed explanation of things to broaden your mind. For example, about how the ocean is deeper than you think, or how the world map looks different than what you’re used to.

Like more famous YouTube counterparts Minute Physics or ASAP Science, you can spend hours at Real Life Lore. It’s one of those educational YouTube channels made for marathon viewing. 10 Educational YouTube Channels Made for Marathoning 10 Educational YouTube Channels Made for Marathoning YouTube is now the go-to place for nearly any video you could want -- and that makes it a wonderful educational resource. Especially if you binge-watch the best YouTube channels out there. Read More

5. TED Ideas (Web): The Official Blog of TED

There are some excellent alternatives to TED talks to grow your intelligence, but hey, TED is still awesome. And one of its unheralded stars is the TED Ideas blog.



At Ideas, you’ll find essays and articles on diverse topics which still fall under the broad categories of Technology, Entertainment, and Design (TED). Like with most talks, the purpose of these posts is to expand your mind and challenge your preconceived notions. Think bigger!
The Ideas blog is updated multiple times a week, so you will find something new to read easily. You should especially check out the “We Humans” category for some incredible reads about the world around us.

What’s Your Daily Brain Boost?

These sites are excellent fodder for when you want to grow your mind, but you might not follow them daily. Personally, I love learning new things through Reddit’s /r/TodayILearned posts. Where do you get your daily brain boost?
Image Credit: Image Flow via Shutterstock

Source: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/intelligent-sites-boost-brain/

How Do I Download an Entire Website for Offline Reading?

Even though WiFi is everywhere these days, you will find yourself without it from time to time. And when you do, there may be certain websites you wish you could access while offline — perhaps for research, entertainment, or posterity.

For example, if you’re to embark on a 12-hour international flight, downloading an entire website can be a great alternative to ebooks, audiobooks, podcasts, and movies. Examples of good and interesting infodump websites include Michael Bluejay’s guides and Wait But Why. 5 Intelligent Sites to Boost Your Brain 5 Intelligent Sites to Boost Your Brain Want to grow your mind? The web has some intelligent stuff. But you need to know where to find it, if you want the web to boost your brain and not blast it. Read More

But how do you go about downloading an entire website? It’s easier than you think! Here are four tools you can use to do the job for you, nearly zero effort required.

1. WebCopy (Windows)

WebCopy by Cyotek takes a website URL and scans it for links, pages, and media. As it finds pages, it recursively looks for more links, pages, and media until the whole website is discovered. Then you can use the configuration options to decide which parts to download offline.





The interesting thing about WebCopy is you can set up multiple “projects” that each have their own settings and configurations. This makes it easy to re-download many different sites whenever you want, each one in the same exact way every time. One project can copy many websites, so use them with an organized plan (e.g. a “Tech” project for copying tech sites).
To download a website with WebCopy:

1. Install and launch the app.
2. Navigate to File > New to create a new project.
3. Type the URL into the Website field.
4. Change the Save folder field to where you want the site saved.
5. Play around with Project > Rules… (learn more about WebCopy Rules).
6. Navigate to File > Save As… to save the project.
7. Click Copy Website in the toolbar to start the process.

Once the copying is done, you can use the Results tab to see the status of each individual page and/or media file. The Errors tab shows any problems that may have occurred and the Skipped tab shows files that weren’t downloaded. But most important is the Sitemap, which shows the full directory structure of the website as discovered by WebCopy.
To view the website offline, open File Explorer and navigate to the save folder you designated. Open the index.html (or sometimes index.htm) in your browser of choice to start browsing.

2. HTTrack (Windows, Linux, Android)

HTTrack is more known than WebCopy, and is arguably better because it’s open source and available on platforms other than Windows, but the interface is a bit clunky and leaves much to be desired. However, it works well so don’t let that turn you away.





Like WebCopy, it uses a project-based approach that lets you copy multiple websites and keep them all organized. You can pause and resume downloads, and you can update copied websites by re-downloading old and new files.
To download a website with HTTrack:

1. Install and launch the app.
2. Click Next to begin creating a new project.
3. Give the project a name, category, base path, then click Next.
4. Select Download web site(s) for Action, then type each website’s URL in the Web Addresses box, one URL per line. You can also store URLs in a TXT file and import it, which is convenient when you want to re-download the same sites later. Click Next.
5. Adjust parameters if you want, then click Finish.

Once everything is downloaded, you can browse the site like normal by going to where the files were downloaded and opening the index.html or index.htm in a browser.

3. SiteSucker (Mac, iOS)

If you’re on a Mac, your best option is SiteSucker. This simple tool rips entire websites and maintains the same overall structure, and includes all relevant media files too (e.g. images, PDFs, style sheets). It has a clean and easy-to-use interface that could not be easier to use: you literally paste in the website URL and press Enter.





One nifty feature is the ability to save the download to a file, then use that file to download the same exact files and structure again in the future (or on another machine). This feature is also what allows SiteSucker to pause and resume downloads.
SiteSucker costs $5 and does not come with a free version or a free trial, which may be its biggest downside. The latest version requires macOS 10.11 El Capitan or later. Older versions of SiteSucker are available for older Mac systems, but some features may be missing.

4. Wget (Windows, Mac, Linux)

Wget is a command-line utility that can retrieve all kinds of files over the HTTP and FTP protocols. Since websites are served through HTTP and most web media files are accessible through HTTP or FTP, this makes Wget an excellent tool for ripping websites.
While Wget is typically used to download single files, it can be used to recursively download all pages and files that are found through an initial page:

wget -r -p //www.makeuseof.com

However, some sites may detect and prevent what you’re trying to do because ripping a website can cost them a lot of bandwidth. To get around this, you can disguise yourself as a web browser with a user agent string:

wget -r -p -U Mozilla //www.makeuseof.com

If you want to be polite, you should also limit your download speed (so you don’t hog the web server’s bandwidth) and pause between each download (so you don’t overwhelm the web server with too many requests):

wget -r -p -U Mozilla --wait=10 --limit-rate=35K //www.makeuseof.com

Wget comes bundled with most Unix-based systems. On Mac, you can install Wget using a single Homebrew command: brew install wget (how to set up Homebrew on Mac). On Windows, you’ll need to use this ported version instead. Install Mac Software From Terminal With Homebrew Install Mac Software From Terminal With Homebrew Install (almost) any free Mac app by typing four words and hitting "Enter". Read More

Which Websites Do You Want to Download?

The bigger the site, the bigger the download. We don’t recommend downloading huge sites like MakeUseOf because you’ll need thousands of MBs to store all of the media files we use. The same is true for any other site that’s frequently updated and heavy on media.

The best sites to download are those with lots of text and not many images, and sites that don’t regularly add new pages or changed. Static information sites, online ebook sites, and sites you want to archive in case they go down are ideal. The Best Websites on the Internet The Best Websites on the Internet An enormous list of the best websites on the Internet, in fourteen handy categories. These are considered to be the top-of-the-line sites that will get you what you need. Read More

Which sites are you trying to download? Are there any other tools for copying websites that we missed? Share them with us down in the comments below!
Originally written by Justin Pot on April 20, 2013
Image Credit: RawPixel.com via Shutterstock


Source: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-do-i-download-an-entire-website-for-offline-reading/

Seven Sites With Free Photos You Can Use However You Want

Great photos can really make a website pop. They catch the eye, yes, but can also help you get your point across.

If you’re building a site, you could learn how to take good photos, but sometimes that’s not an option. Happily, there are all sorts of sites out there full of free images you can use for any purpose: commercial or otherwise.
Photos on these sites are usually contributed by volunteer photographers looking to get their name out there, or simply looking to contribute something useful to the world. Using these sites help make building beautiful websites a lot easier, so here’s a few we think are worth checking out.

Unsplash: Beautiful Photos Organized Well

Unsplash offers over 200,000 beautiful photos that you can use for whatever you want. The search functionality works quite well in our experience, and you also can browse by category. The images themselves range from landscapes to portraits of people and animals. There’s not a lot of filler on this site: most of the photos are really high quality.
Unsplash’s license is quite permissive, allowing you to use the photos for any purpose you want other than creating a competing stock photo service. You don’t even need to attribute the photographers, though doing so is always appreciated.
Create an account to upload your own photos, or curate your own collection of photos already on the site. You can even follow photographers you like on the service.

Kaboom Pics: Browse by Color Palette

At first glance, Kaboom Pics seems pretty similar to other sites, offering a wide range of searchable images that you can browse by category. But they provide one standout feature: a focus on color. If you want photos that fit your project’s palette, Kaboom lets you browse by color. And this focus on color goes both ways: every photo offers a color palette, allowing you to match your design to the photo if you like.
Kaboom also lets you see the entirety of a particular photo shoot, so if an image you find isn’t quite perfect, you might find a similar one from another angle.
Images are free to use for personal or commercial usage, including blogs and social media. Redistributing or selling photos isn’t allowed without permission.

Morguefile: Free to Use Forever and Ever

With over 350,000 completely free to use photos, Morguefile is another solid option. Just be aware: you’ll sometimes see links to iStock and other paid image sites when your searches don’t yeild results.
Still, Morguefile has lots of images that are free for commercial usage and remixing, though you cannot sell or redistribute the images exactly as they are without alteration. So, don’t use this site to build your own photo repository.

Pixabay: One Million Photos and Counting, Plus Videos

Pixabay offers over one million images—all free to use on your website—and, unlike other services, makes free videos available as well. The site boasts a pretty good search engine, and also offers Android and iOS apps, which is nice if you’re a mobile-first kind of person.
All images on Pixabay have the CC0 License, meaning you can copy, modify, and distribute them without permission. But Pixabay does place a few of their own caveats on top of this license. You can’t sell or redistribute the contents on a competing service without permission, and you can’t use “any content from Pixabay for pornographic, unlawful, defamatory, or immoral purposes” without permission.

Stocksnap: Curated Collection With a Lot of Choice

Stocksnap adds hundreds of new photos every week, all free from copyright restrictions. Photographers are only allowed to submit five photos at a time, the idea being that everyone only uploads their best work. The result is a neatly curated selection of photos.
As with other sites listed here, attribution is not required, though as their FAQ page says, “it’s always appreciated when you can provide attribution.”

Negative Space: High Resolution Images of Just About Everything

Negative Space is another collection of high-resolution images you can use however you like, thanks to the CC0 license. Search for images or browse the collection by category—you’ll find plenty to choose from. The site is cluttered with ads for and links to Adobe’s stock images service, but that’s only a minor complaint about a pretty good collection of free to use photos.

Shot Stash: Landscapes and So Much More

With a beautiful layout and a variety of categories, Shot Stash is well worth bookmarking if you want more options for photos. The collection isn’t massive, but everything looks great and is categorized in a way that’s easy to browse.
As with other sites listed here, attribution, while not required, is appreciated.


Source: https://www.howtogeek.com/320506/seven-sites-with-free-photos-you-can-use-however-you-want/

Best web browsers of 2017: Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Opera go head-to-head

We take a look at the performance and features of the big four internet browsers to see which one will serve you best in 2017.

The web browser is by far the most important piece of software on your PC—at least for most users. Unless you’re at a workstation crunching numbers or editing the next Star Wars you probably spend the majority of your computer time staring at a web app or a website.
That’s why it’s important to make sure you’ve always got the best tool for the job, and in 2017 that does not include Internet Explorer. If you still want the built-in option for Windows that would be Edge, but it’s hard to stick strictly with Edge when you’ve got other choices including Google’s Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera.
Let’s take a look at the four major (and modern) browsers to see how they stack up in 2017.

[ Further reading: Your new PC needs these 15 free, excellent programs ]

(If none of these internet browsers strike your fancy, head over to PCWorld's roundup of 10 intriguing alternative browsers.)

Browsers in brief

Table of Contents

• Chrome
• Firefox
• Opera
• Microsoft Edge
• Benchmarks

Show More

Chrome

Google

The current people’s champion, Google Chrome tops the metrics charts of both StatCounter and NetMarketShare by a huge margin. Google’s browser has built a dedicated fan base thanks to its massive extensions library, and the fact that it just gets out of your way to put the focus on web content, not the browser’s trimmings.
Chrome isn’t quite as simplistic as it once was, but it’s still very easy to use. There isn’t much to Chrome except a huge URL bar—known as the OmniBar—plus a space for extensions, a bookmarking icon, tabs, and that’s it.
Yet Google still finds a way to hide all kinds of features inside the browser, including deep integration with Google’s services. This allows you to sync your bookmarks, passwords, open tabs, and more across devices. Chrome also has multi-account support if you need it on a family machine, a built-in PDF viewer, built-in Google Translate functionality, a task manager, and the always handy Paste and go context menu item.
If there’s one complaint people have about Chrome it’s that the browser eats up available memory. Our browser testing in 2015 showed that Chrome was definitely a memory beast, but two years later it fared pretty well in our tests.

Firefox

Mozilla

For users who love extensibility but want greater privacy than a Google-made browser can provide, the open source Mozilla Firefox is your best bet. Firefox paved the way for other browsers to become extensible, and while Firefox’s add-on catalog is pretty good, it now pales in comparison to the Chrome Web Store. Like Google, Firefox has a sync feature.
Where Firefox has really shined in recent years is with the browser’s incognito mode. All browsers have a private mode that lets you browse without any of your activity being logged in your saved history. But most of the time these private modes still allow websites to track your activity for that specific session. Firefox does away with this by including an ad and tracker blocker when using incognito mode.

Opera

Opera

Before Chrome, Opera was a popular choice among power users—a position former Opera CEO Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner is trying to take back with Vivaldi. Opera today is really one of the more under-rated browsers around. It’s based on the same core technologies as Chrome (the Blink rendering engine and the JavaScript V8 engine), which means it can run many Chrome extensions—there’s even an extension for installing extensions from the Chrome Web Store.
Opera’s also got a few unusual features like Turbo, which saves on load times and bandwidth by compressing webpages on Opera’s servers. It’s also got a nice security feature called domain highlighting that hides most of the URL so that users can see easily and clearly if they’re on Google.com or google.com.scam.com—with scam.com being the actual website.
More recently, Opera introduced its own take on the social sidebar with one-click access to services such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Telegram. Like Chrome and Firefox, Opera also has its own cross-device syncing feature.

Microsoft Edge

Microsoft

Microsoft Edge is still a work in progress. You'll see below that its performance is getting better, but that’s not all there is to the browser in 2017. The Edge extensions library is tiny, its sync functionality is near nonexistent, and it doesn’t get updates nearly fast enough—though that is expected to change with the Fall Creators Update.
Despite its shortcomings, Edge has several helpful features that will appeal to some. Edge is deeply integrated with Windows 10’s inking capabilities, as well as with OneNote, making it easy to clip a webpage, annotate it, and save it to a notebook. Cortana is also a big part of Edge. You can use Microsoft’s digital assistant to quickly search for information, compare prices, or get a quick calculation.
Like Chrome, Edge has a casting feature. There’s also a nifty set-aside tabs feature to stash a collection of websites, the ability to read ebooks (great for tablets), and an MSN.com-ish new-tab page.
Read on for our benchmark results and our pick for best browser.

Benchmarks

That’s enough of an overview for our four contestants, let’s get down to business. To see which browser is worthy of your bandwidth in 2017 we used a variety of testing tools. For judging JavaScript we used JetStream, and the now unsupported Octane 2.0 and SunSpider 1.0.2 benchmarking tools. Then we turned to WebXPRT 2015 and Speedometer to challenge our browsers under simulated web app workloads.
Finally, we took a look at CPU and RAM usage. Similar to what we did in 2015, we loaded a set of 20 websites in a single window in quick succession using either a batch file or the command line depending on the quirks of the browser in question. Once all tabs began loading, we waited 45 seconds, and then checked the CPU and RAM usage. The idea was to see the amount of system resources the browser would use during a heavy workload.
One difference from 2015 is that Flash was turned off for each browser—benchmarks were done with and without the plugin in 2015. In recent years, most browser makers have de-emphasized Flash, enabling it as “click-to-play” and blocking nonessential website elements that use Flash. Since the web is moving to a Flash-free existence we decided to live the dream right now.
For these tests our rig was an Acer Aspire E15-575-33BM laptop loaded with Windows 10 Home (Creators Update), a 1TB hard drive, 4GB RAM, and an Intel Core i3-7100U. Each browser was tested over a hard line internet connection.

Edge makes big gains

Looking at both Jetstream and SunSpider, Edge won top marks by a wide margin. SunSpider has been deprecated for some time and is no longer supported, but the result was still surprising. For Octane 2.0, which is also no longer supported, Firefox and Opera vied for top spot, with Chrome the laggard by a wide margin. For this set of benchmark scores higher is better with the exception of SunSpider.

Melissa Riofrio/IDG

The JavaScript test Jetstream shows Microsoft Edge hanging tough.

Melissa Riofrio/IDG

SunSpider also shows Microsoft Edge with a performance edge, loading JavaScript quite a bit more quickly than others.

Melissa Riofrio/IDG

Chrome makes the poorest showing in the Octane test.

Moving on to the more modern Speedometer test, which quickly iterates through a bunch of HTML 5-based to-do lists, Chrome came out on top. Google’s Blink-based cousin Opera came in second, with Edge and Firefox way behind. The numbers were much closer for WebXPRT 2015, which uses a wide number of web apps, from photo collections to online note-taking to data sets. Edge came out on top there, while the others were closer together with only a few points separating the back three. Again, higher is better for these tests.

Melissa Riofrio/IDG

Chrome narrowly edges out Opera in HTML-5-based tasks.

Melissa Riofrio/IDG

Edge makes another good showing in the web apps realm.

Finally, we come to the memory and CPU test. Slamming an average PC with 20 tabs of mostly media rich sites all at once is certainly going to chew up a good chunk of CPU and memory. These browsers did not disappoint in that respect.
Despite its reputation, however, Chrome was tops here, using less than 40 percent CPU power, followed by Edge. The results were similar for memory with Chrome using the least. Take those impressive Edge numbers with a healthy dose of skepticism, however, as during testing the PC froze, and we couldn’t access task manager as swiftly as with the others. The fact that the whole PC slowed to a crawl suggests Edge’s numbers don’t tell the whole story. Based on that experience, power users with multiple tabs open in Edge would feel some serious pain trying to get work done.

Melissa Riofrio/IDG

It's true that running media rich content in multiple tabs will tax your system's CPU.

Melissa Riofrio/IDG

As with the CPU test, Chrome's reputation as the biggest resource hog is undeserved these days.

As for Firefox, you may notice that the browser chewed up CPU usage, but was relatively low in memory usage. The reason for that, as Mozilla reminded us, is that Firefox alone is transitioning from one browser process to four. Whereas Chrome and Edge use multiple processes for each tab. The idea behind the latter is that individual tabs running on separate processes won't take down the whole browser if they crash. That approach does use more memory, however. Mozilla is trying to find a middle ground. On the one hand, Firefox helps maintain overall PC performance under heavier workloads, but it's not great if you want dozens of sites to load as quickly as possible.

And the winner is...

So who wins? Here’s the way we see it.
Once again, Edge gets honorable mention for making some serious gains in performance and earning some truly impressive scores. But when you factor in customizability and how Edge fared in the live site stress test, it still has some work to do—like offering a wider extension library and the ability to sync across devices.
As in our previous showdown, Chrome continues to capitalize on these strengths, and even improves in the performance department by addressing its past resource issues, making it, once again, our first choice.
Opera again earns second place since it performed relatively well in the live stress test, and can be set up to take advantage of nearly all the same conveniences Chrome can.
As for Firefox, it’s also a fine choice. Mozilla’s browser definitely gets the job done, it’s very customizable, and its open source roots puts the browser in a league of its own.

Source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/3213031/computers/best-web-browsers.html