Fibonacci Spiral, made simple

The beauty of mathematics :)

[via Digg]

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WOT: a must-have browser security tool

WOT is a free browser security add-on I've been tirelessly recommending to anyone who has contacted me over the years asking for help on online security. If you're also concerned about your online security, this tool is for you.

Web of Trust is a unique community-based safe surfing tool that uses an intuitive traffic-light style rating system to help Internet users stay safe as they search, browse, and shop online. The WOT security add-on provides safety ratings to search results when using Google, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, and other popular sites, helping people protect their computers and personal information. Web site ratings are continuously updated by millions of members of the WOT community and from numerous trusted sources, such as phishing site listings.

Currently, Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome are supported and bookmarklets are available for Opera and Safari. Once installed, a new WOT icon will appear on your browser toolbar. When you browse the internet, this little icon will change its color from green to red, depending on the website's reputation.

The color of the icon will change based on the website's reputation

When you attempt to visit a website marked as dangerous, WOT will issue a warning.

Ratings will be also shown in your search engine results.

WOT ratings are based on shared knowledge, meaning that anyone can contribute and benefit from the community. Millions of users participate updating the ratings of well-known and newly created websites every day. By relying on its huge userbase, WOT works better than other security tools, in terms of accuracy and speed ( new websites are often reviewed in a matter of hours).

Speaking from my first hand experience, this terrific tool has saved me countless times from online scams and malware-infested websites. As I said in the beginning of this post, I wholeheartedly recommend it to all the readers of this blog.

Download WOT

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Online dictionaries

As an English learner, I come across a lot of new words and idioms everyday and looking up every single word in the dictionary is often tiring and slow. So, over the years, I've found myself using online dictionaries more and more to the detriment of paper dictionaries. Why? In a nutshell, using online dictionaries save me a lot of time, as typing a few words in a search box it's much faster than manually leafing through a dictionary. Today, I'll write about two online dictionaries that I ended up using regularly because their tremendous usefulness.

My favorite online dictionaries

Wordreference.com: one of the best and ever-growing bilingual dictionaries on the net.

• They support lots of languages, including English, Spanish, French, Italian, Chinese, Arabic, Portuguese,etc. 
• Definitions are straightforward, simple to understand and they often include examples.
  
• Spanish, French and Italian verb conjugators are available as well.
• There's a forum where you can ask native speakers about your grammar and vocabulary doubts. It's sort of a free language exchange community. You help the others and the let the others help you.

TheFreeDictionary.com : an excellent monolingual dictionary.

• Support for English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian, Greek, etc.
• Medical, legal and financial dictionaries.
• Idioms dictionary and thesaurus.
  
• Encyclopedia.

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Get Paragon Partition Manager 10 Personal for free today [expired]

One of my favorite websites is Giveaway of the Day. Every day, they offer a commercial application as free download for 24 hours. Today, the giveaway is Paragon Partition Manager 10 Personal (current retail price: $39.95). For those of you who aren't familiar with the program, Paragon Partition Manager is an easy-to-use and comprehensive hard disk partition management tool. In short, its main features are:

• Ability to create, move, resize and backup partitions.
  
• Works on Windows 7, Vista and XP.
  
• Support for a wide range of file systems on Windows (FAT, FAT32, NTFS), Linux (Ext2, Ext3) and Mac (HFS+).
• File system conversion: Paragon Partition Manager converts a partition from one file system format to another without having to reformat.
• Advanced partition defragmentation and error checking.
• Boot Manager
• Repairs corrupted MBRs.
• And much more...

Download Paragon Partition Manager 10 Personal (64-bit version here)

Learning to love classical music

With the amount of music styles we have nowadays and new songs coming out every day, I wonder how many of you listen to classical music, a music genre that is certainly not very popular, especially among the young people.

Personally, I'm really fond of songs written in the XIX century, during the so-called Romantic era.  And as a classical music lover, I often ask people why they don't like this type of music; the most common response I get is "classical music is boring". Well, if boring means beautiful, emotional, sensitive, calm and refreshing, I agree. :) I understand their view, however. Classical music isn't for everyone. Also, the sad, underlying truth is that our fast-moving society just seems to be incompatible with anything that transmits peace and calm. That said, I believe that by following a few basic steps anyone can enjoy the wonders of classical music.

Learn to enjoy classical music
Classical music is often difficult to understand for the untrained ear, so I'm writing this little guide to help introduce you to this wonderful music genre:

1. The time of the day matters: the best time for listening to classical music is in the afternoon or in the evening.
   
2. Prepare your room: get yourself comfortable (i.e lying down on your bed). Soft lights are a big plus.
   
3. Listening to classical music requires a change of mentality: it's EXTREMELY important that clear your mind completely and forget everything in your life before you hit the Play button. Once the music starts playing, close your eyes, breath calmly and open your mind. 
4. Let the music transport to a new dimension.

Today's recommended song
Ave Maria, by F.Schubert (beautiful and breathtaking song, often used in weddings and funerals)