o Languages: A website where you can find a lot of activities for beginners to learn French and Spanish for free can be found at http://www.frenchspanishonline.com/beginnersfrench/freefrench.html

o Reference: Bartleby claims to be "The preeminent Internet publisher of literature, verse and reference with unlimited access free of charge". The reference section at http://bartelby.org/reference/ is certainly comprehensive.

o Bridge players: www.bridgebase.com is a site enabling players of all levels to play live with people from all over the world whenever they like. It¹s a site well worth looking at and even learning from. (Thank you Val Clowes - U3A in Kennet, UK)

o Current Affairs: We are now at the halfway point of the UN's Millenium Development Goals - see http://www.undp.org/mdg/ - and U3A Online Australia are creating an Online Course to explain these. For further information email Kathleen Rossini at kathleen@rossini.id.au

TECHNICAL TOPIC

o Need to send occasional faxes? Here's a genuine free service allowing up to 2 free faxes to over 30 countries per day. Compose fax online similar to an email or upload a file. http://www.freefaxbutton.com/

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o Got a spare room and also internationally-minded? What not join HOST UK and give a foreign student a few days of your hospitality? See http://www.hostuk.org.uk/ (Thank you Debbie Reardon – U3A Burscough, UK).

o Wellness Made Easy: 365 Tips for Better Health. A booklet from the University of California, Berkeley Wellness Letter can be found at www.WellnessLetter.com

o The ‘About Seniors’ website has a wide range of articles at http://www.aboutseniors.com.au/index.php/articles/category including an excellent Technical section.

o An alternative search program to Google (simpler to use when researching a single word) can be downloaded from http://www.answers.com/main/download_answers_win.jsp (Thank you Omer Roucoux – U3A Luton, UK).

o Ramblers: The 60-mile Wat’s Dyke Heritage Trail on the Welsh Border is open after nine years of planning. To learn more see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/mid_/7608768.stm

TECHNICAL TOPICS o Preserve your sanity. Easily create a logon password protection disk for your computer in case you forget your password. The alternative is an entire system reinstall. Learn how at http://sites.google.com/site/u3asitedemo/

o REALLY useful tip: Hold down Ctrl and rotate the wheel on the top of your mouse to increase or decrease the document size on the screen. Works with IExplore, Firefox, Opera.

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o Social/local History Groups: The Mitchell and Kenyon collection is an amazing visual record of everyday life in Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century. For a 1901 example see http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=duspZzvrIKo and "Unwanted Guests" at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeBn60WWTDU&NR=1 is very educational!

o Health: WisdomCards make it easy for you to find the most useful health resources for any health topic. Click on http://organizedwisdom.com/Home

o Tutorials and Demonstrations: See http://www.jingproject.com/ The video explains it nicely and you can see a very good demo of it at http://screencast.com/t/VnIGxR07

o Songza http://www.songza.com/ is a search engine that gives you easy access to streamable MP3s across the Web. Enter a song, artist, or both and Songza serves it up free of charge.

TECHNICAL TOPICS o Thinking of running classes in website design? For site design tips and web design tutorials see http://www.boogiejack.com/

o Drop.io - http://drop.io/ - is the simplest way to share files online. Simply set up a private space to drop any files by phone, email, web, widget or fax and then share them with whoever you want via a variety of outputs.

o Martin Lewis' free (and advert-free) money advice website has proved useful on many occasions. It now has a page devoted to reviews of free office software and utilities. Click on http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/shopping/free-office-software (Thank you Peter Ridgway - U3A Spelthorne, UK).

o Music Groups: WorldU3A are very pleased to announce their new interactive website for classical music lovers. Click on http://u3amusicgroups.pbwiki.com and to join the DISCUSSION you will need the password "bach".

o Fernando Gómez-Pinilla, a fish-loving professor of neurosurgery at the University of California believes that appropriate changes to a person's diet can enhance his cognitive abilities, protect his brain from damage and counteract the effects of ageing. http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11745528 (Thank you Shafeeq Siddiqui U3A London).

o Better than GOOGLE? Certainly a lot easier to use, and VERY attractive. Type 'searchme' in your browser address bar and hit 'Control-ENTER' and that should bring up www.searchme.com

o Openwriting Web magazine - http://openwriting.com/archives/ - features a feast of words from regular columnists, U3A writers and other authors. Every day there is something new. (Thank you Peter Hinchliffe - U3A UK).

o http://www.bonzer.org.au/ is The Australian Online Monthly Magazine by, for and about Wise Elders. Regular features, plus an area for submitted articles on a theme.

o http://books.google.co.uk/ and http://booksearch.blogspot.com/ Browse books online Book Search works just like web search. Try a search on Google Book Search and if the book is out of copyright, or the publisher has given us permission, you'll be able to see a preview of the book, and in some cases the entire text. If it's in the public domain, you're free to download a PDF copy.

TECHNICAL TOPICS

o Adeona - http://adeona.cs.washington.edu/index.html - is the first Open Source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop that does not rely on a proprietary, central service. This means that you can install Adeona on your laptop and go - there's no need to rely on a single third party. (Thank you Juli Davis - U3A Maidenhead UK.)

o Please clickon http://worldu3a.org to see (and join?) our project MY U3A and also clickon the 'Cooperation' button for our new project 'International Links'. o Gardening Groups: Lots of free advice (on slideshows) on designs http://www.applegategardens.co.uk/acatalog/online_garden_design.html o An American teachers resource website - 3,000 Lesson Plans can be found and downloaded at HOTCHALK. Lots of good ideas to be found at http://www.lessonplanspage.com/ o Photographic Groups: The Ordnance Survey want a pictorial record of England, and you can help them. Please have a look at http://www.geograph.org.uk/search.php (Thank you RWG7NDT) o Leave the car at home and investigate the world of free or very cheap bus travel - it may be lots cheaper than you think; see http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/TravelAndTransport/PublicTransport/BusAndCoachTravel/ o Free Audiobooks! LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files back onto the net. The goal is to make all public domain books available as free audio books. Clickon http://librivox.org/ to learn more. TECHNICAL SUPPORT o Hard Drive Failure? - maybe you can recover those files. See the advice at http://askbobrankin.com/hard_drive_recovery.html o Checking each non-Microsoft program on a Windows machine to see if you have the latest version is time-consuming and annoying. There's a solution at http://filehippo.com/ (Thanks Mike Godfrey)

o A new website from Third Age Press with some excellent links to organisations of particular interest to older women -- click on www.wwwow.info

o Full information about all U3A Online Courses can be found at www.courses.u3a-info.co.uk/

o The Massachusetts Intitute of Technology is a long way away but their "OpenCourseWare" is so good it merits a mention. FREE downloadable courses and course materials on an astonishing range of subjects can be found at www.ocw.mit.edu/ocwweb

o Bibliophiles may find that the author of their current or recently- read book has recorded a short video-clip about it. There are many hundreds, possibly thousands, of entries. 'Curiously addictive' said the Sunday Times, www.meettheauthor.co.uk

o If you are travelling abroad later this year, you will find the Geographia website useful for cultural and historical back- grounds to many countries. See www.geographia.com

o http://www.heavens-above.com/ aims to provide you with all the information you need to observe satellites such as the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle, spectacular events and other spaceflight and astronomical information.

o For both men and women, the bigger the belly in relation to the hips - otherwise called the waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) - the greater the likelihood of arterial calcium in the heart. See http://news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/20070814/hl_hsn/potbelliespointtoheartrisk

o Art and Art History: An excellent resource, fully indexed, can be found at http://www.artdaily.com - the first Art newspaper on the Internet. One interesting area is "Art In Motion", where 22 buildings, statues, or famous places are described, with a 3-D animated view of each section. Or check out "This Day in History."

o http://www.educationindex.com/education_resources.html seems

to have everything for any subject group.