October 29, 2006

Welcome to Issue #247 of the Internet Legal Research Weekly, a newsletter that delivers relevant and timely legal research information, and other fun stuff, to your inbox every Sunday. If you like what you read, please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested, and encourage him or her to do the same! To subscribe, all you have to do is visit Inter Alia and fill out the subscription form -- it's free!

Easy Photo Resizing
Occasionally you have photos you want to resize, either to mail to others or to post somewhere on the Internet. Buying an expensive product like Photoshop isn't practical for you. I usually recommend the free download IrfanView -- it's a great program that's really easy to use. But say you don't want to install anything on your computer, period. That's where Resizr comes in -- just choose a picture file from your computer, enter the preferred image width, confirm the image rotation, and Resizr takes care of the heavy lifting. There's also a Firefox extension available, if you'd like to resize photos directly from your browser toolbar.

Mix Up Your Passwords
Let's face it, we can all do better on setting our passwords. At a recent meeting of techies like me, I discovered that none of us had very difficult passwords, preferring instead the passwords that are easy to remember. Maybe it's just because we don't want to have to think up new passwords. Enter SafePasswd. This easy-to-use password generator will create a rock-solid password for you, up to 512 characters! You can specify how many characters you'd prefer, and the types of characters you want in your password. It's a great random password generator.

Roll Your Own Google
For some time now, I have been a big fan of Rollyo, the Web 2.0-ish search tool that allows you to create your own search engine. As usual, when a new web search tool debuts, it's not long before Google comes right behind with its own version. And so it is with Google's Custom Search Engine. Creating your own search engine is easy: just select a name and a topic for your search engine, choose some keywords for Google to use, and then include the specific sites you want to search. With Google's tool you can choose to have Google search only those sites, or emphasize those sites while still searching its entire index. Your new search engine is a bit different from Rollyo; it's designed, in part, to serve as a public search engine for others to use. You can share your new search engine with others, or keep it to yourself. Give it a try.

Top Ten Research Tools?
CNet weighs in this week with its listing of Top 10 Research Tools -- actually, there are 11. Probably not surprisingly, Google is well-represented, with 5 of the 11 sites. Even more interesting to me is the $49 Encyclopedia Britannica as the #1 research tool. I was also pleased to note that FeedDemon made the list, although many would characterize it as more of a research organizer than resource, like the other sites on the list.

Your Personal Post Office
Sure, the U.S. Postal Service provides a page on its website where you can calculate postage for letters and packages. If you don't want an online solution but still need something to figure out how much that package will cost to mail, try PostCalc. For $11.99 you can calculate postage for Express Mail, Priority Mail, Parcel Post, Bound Printed Matter, Media Mail, and First Class Mail.

Blawgs of the Week
Here are a few of the law-related weblogs I featured on Inter Alia this week:

Here's my regular, periodic reminder on how to avoid being scammed by phishers, those dastardly people who send realistic-looking email purporting to be from your bank, your credit card company, PayPal, or eBay. Typically, these emails will alert you to a "problem" with your account, and urge you to click on the link to log into your account. There you'll fill in all of your confidential information, only to find out later that you weren't really at your bank's web site, and you've given up your account information to someone else. Fortunately, there's a really easy way to avoid getting scammed. If you ever receive an email from your bank or credit card company:

Do you have a question about searching the Internet or your computer in general? Drop me an e-mail at tom(at)inter-alia(dot)net – I’ll post your question (don’t worry, I won’t use your real name) and try to get an answer for you!

United Cerebral Palsy
UCP is the leading source of information on cerebral palsy, and serves as a pivotal advocate for the rights of persons with any disability. You'll find some great resources here, from the menu across the top of the page. The topics provided include Education, Employment, Health & Wellness, Housing, Parenting & Families, Products & Services, Sports & Leisure, Transportation, and Travel. Each area contains helpful links to additional information, both practical and legal.

Society of Corporate Secretaries and Governance Professionals
When I first saw this, I thought it was an organization for administrative assistants. But its purpose is different; the members of the Society deal with public disclosure under the securities laws and matters affecting corporate governance. Unfortunately, most of the information is available only to members, and it looks like great information -- including a selection of Core Documents, Nuts & Bolts Practices, an Audio Library, a mailing list, discussion group, and more. There is a nice page of related Internet sites that anyone can use, as well as the Society's periodic newsletter.

Celesq ($$)
Every now and then I like to mention a company that provides online CLE to lawyers, and Celesq has been around for a while. You can listen to the various seminars (over 1,600 of them) online, or purchase CDs or audiotapes -- the costs run from $60-$80 on average. It looks like the seminars are approved for nine states -- Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, New York, Texas and Washington. Celesq is now offering live webcasts in conjunction with West's LegalEd Center.

Business Research Assistant
Here's a high-tech way to start your book research on business issues. The University of Vermont Libraries put together this guide to help people learn which reference source best fits their search needs. Just specify whether you're looking for Company, Industry, or Marketing Information, and you'll get a series of questions that allow you to narrow your search. Once you're done specifying the terms you want to include, you'll get a listing of books that may contain the information you need. The listings also include where the books are located in the UVM stacks, which isn't particularly useful unless you happen to be in Vermont. But it's still a good start that you can take with you to your local college library.

Center for Law and Social Policy
CLASP is a national non-profit that works to improve the lives of low-income people. From the main page you have access to links on all sorts of related links -- Child Care, Child Support and Fathers, Welfare Policy, Civil Legal Assistance, Prisoner Re-Entry, and Disconnected Youth, among others. Each category offers free, topical articles for download -- even better, each category has an RSS feed as well as Podcast feed, so you can keep up-to-date with that category whenever new information is added.

Here's an interesting Google Maps mashup for you -- Neighboroo takes a number of different demographic categories and lays it all out for you, geographically.

You're mobile and you want to get a message to someone, but you don't want to interrupt them. Try Pinger -- it's instant voice messaging for your mobile phone.

Well, that’s it for Issue #247 – I hope you liked it! If you did, pass this along to anyone you think might be interested, and encourage him or her to subscribe. Also, feel free to drop me an e-mail any time if you have questions, or if you have websites or other topics you want included in a future issue.

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