Managing you time

Hey!

I think this time-table is a great way to manage your time during the day! See what you think of it!

Please comment!

Physics, Chemistry and Biology experiments

The school I used to go to was rubbish, and the lab was a sad excuse for a run down shack fit for a wannabe repairman, but that did not stop me from getting to know the different experiments that I would be tested on.

I took both Physics and Chemistry, and in my quest to find decent websites that gave accurate information regarding the experiments, I found two: one for Physics and one for Chemistry.

Practical Physics is a site that has a vast array of topics on which the experiments are based, ranging from optics electromagnetism.

Practical Chemistry is a site made by the same foundation, the Nuffield foundation. This is equally adept at explaining the chemistry experiments.

Practical Biology is also a part of the trio and is just as rich in resources as the previous two!

These sites both place greater emphasis on GCE A levels. But, there are plenty of areas where they can be useful for the people studying IGCSE. Enjoy!

Anything and everything about Physics

The Physics Hypertextbook is a site which is dedicated entirely to Physics and pretty much has everything you would ever want to know about Physics, the stating of which I would not dare to give.

I find the explanations here elaborate and very useful for students of all ages from IGCSE to University level; Glenn Elert misses absolutely nothing here.

So go ahead and try out tis website, I can at-least assure you that you will not be disappointed.

Checking out movies

Often when I was doing my IGs, I would not know about the contents of a movie until I had actually watched it, or had heard what my friends had to say. Often, these movies have a lot of nasty scenes in them, that you really do not want to watch, and often what seems like a decent movie will turn out to be the opposite.

To solve this problem, IMDB (Internet Movie Database) has made a very useful page for every movie called the 'Parent's Guide'. The parent's guide can be found in 'Additional Details' section.

For example, you want to know if there is anything inappropriate for your little brother or sister in a movie, here is what the Parent's guide would look like for Iron Man 2.

Enjoy whatever movie you want to watch now in peace!

Improving descriptive writing

One of the best descriptive writers that I found was Christopher Paolini. This guy is simply a genius; he published his first story book at the age of 15. His inheritance cycle, of which he has published three books is one of the best books to study descriptive writing. And what more, unlike Tolkien who often fails to make his descriptions appealing, Paolini thrives in his ability to make his pieces both informative and at the same time interesting. The story in itself is a great one.

His three books: Eragon, Edest and Brisingr, are all great reads, and if anyone wants to improve their writing abilities, I believe that reading his books does wonders.

Before my English as a First Language exam, I started reading his books, and it did me a lot of good, especially because I found descriptive writing often hard and pointless.

You can find many of the e-books on several torrent sites. And the Audio books are available on Demonoid.com.But, I would request you all to buy the original books if you can, because this really is a great piece of work, and I believe it is well worth the money. Just doing a google search will get you many links to his books and Audio books.

Free internet security

Hey you guys! This is my first post after a long period, so I hope to make it a good one!

One problem that I repeatedly had when I was a student was a problem with my anti-virus. I was never satisfied with paying so much for an anti-virus programme.

But Avast solved that problem. Avast is a free anti-virus programme that has a complete suite of scanners. It is by far the most comprehensive free anti-virus suite available today, and I use it myself. I have tried it out, and I believe it to be absolutely amazing. Here is what Cnet had to say about Avast.

I have often been told that Avira or AVG is a good choice, but I think nothing beats Avast at the free level because it has simply so many free scanners, it is the most comprehensive free anti-virus suite available.

Avast Free 5 is probably the strongest, free antivirus currently available.

Seth Rosenblatt from Cnet

If you need any help with Avast, you have to create an account here, and there will be a dedicated team of experts to help you with your problems!

But Avast just has the anti-virus. What you need with it are two main things:

1. A safe browser
2. A firewall software

I found that the best firewall software came down to two candidates. Comodo firewall and Zone Alarm. I myself use Zone Alarm free firewall, but I believe that there are so many blogs out there that have compared the two, I find it prudent to leave this decision for you to make. I chose Zone Alarm because it has a lot more downloads, and the firm that made the product has been there fore a very long time. On Cnet, more users prefer to download Zone Alarm free firewall as compared to Comodo.

I think that both are very good programmes. To get a review of all the firewall software available, please visit this site.But both will give you a little trouble initially. There will be a lot of pop-ups at the beginning, but after the first few hours, there should not be any difference to before you installed the firewall software.

Now for the browser. The safest browser out there from independent test is Internet Explorer 8, with the highest malware catch rate. So if you want a safe browser, that is the best choice. But I personally use both Chrome and Firefox and have never had a serious problem.

If you have all those, then you have yourself a free internet security suite.

Where I’ve been

Hey you guys! I just wanted to say sorry for my absence. But I have been sick for the past few days, and I hope to be back posting again in full swing after Eid!

Till then, Eid Mubarak to you all!