So it's back to college again! Let's talk about some interesting websites that should keep you occupied in the days to come — during your leisure time, of course.

Perfect pronunciation

Test your pronunciation skills at www.howjsay.com, an online English pronunciation dictionary. The main page has a text box where you type in a word.

When it appears in pink (if it's in the dictionary maintained by the website) just hover your mouse over it and it reads the word out for you. Simple! At the time of compiling this list the online dictionary had 103,976 entries.

World news

If you like reading international newspapers then www.newseum.com will interest you. As the name suggests it works as a museum of news. The website displays more than 400 front pages taken daily from newspapers in 44 countries.

These are presented in their original, unedited form. Our own Gulf News along with Iran Daily, Al Riyadh and several other newspapers make up the list for the Middle East.

Sky is the limit

Now that Google has conquered Earth the company is looking skyward. The search giant, riding on the success of its Google Earth, has come out with a new tool called Google Sky www.google.com/sky, which lets you explore the universe.

So now you can find the position of your favourite planet or even watch the birth of distant galaxies. To add to the fun it has some stunning images from space.

Make travel fun

Most of you will be away from Dubai during Eid holidays. www.tripatlas.com will come in handy as it is an online travel directory which will help you plan your vacation.

The site has loads of ideas, destinations and activities that can add that extra zing to your travel plans. An impressive list of travel agents is also included.

Interesting extras include adding your own blog entry to the 'Recent Blogs' section on the main page.

An interactive map under 'Destinations' lets you select your destination and gives relevant information about the place. The 'Did you know?' section is an interesting one.

It tells you some lesser known facts; for example, "Thimpu (Bhutan) is the world's only capital city without a single set of traffic lights."

Search with a difference

For most people, especially Firefox users, Google is the ultimate search tool. But sometimes the volume of information which the search engine returns overwhelms you. And this is exactly what the creators of the innovative search engine www.clusty.com must have thought about.

Clusty combines the results taken from several top search engines and generates an ordered list based on comparative ranking. Similar results are grouped into clusters that help you see your search results faster and by topic.

Apart from the clusters you can also see the sources, which are actually the search engines that Clusty queried, and sites with the domain extensions.

When I searched for Dubai, the search engine returned clusters such as hotels, UAE, property, photos, desert, and jobs. The 'sites' tab showed the number of .com, .ae, .org, etc, domains that referred to Dubai.

The writer is a guru of tech who runs a trading company in Dubai

By Inam Abidi Amrohvi, Special to Notes

Articles from the author

Best of the web