It's 2:00 in the morning and the phone rings. You roll out of bed and go grab your phone just in time to hear the person on the other end hang up, realizing it's the wrong number. You stumble back to bed and the phone rings again. You put a pillow over your head and fall asleep dreaming of what you'd do if you knew where that obnoxious caller lived. TP2Location can help. Well, to a degree. It won't give you a street address, but if you type any phone number into this web tool you'll get geographic information describing where the call came from. While this may not help you track down the person keeping you awake at night, it might help you decide whether you should place that overseas business call now or wait a few hours until the sun has risen on the other side of the ocean.
TP2Location also has a semi-useful Google Maps feature, which will bring up a map of the country corresponding to the phone number. While this would be great if you were looking at a country the size of Vatican City, the results for New Jersey and California phone numbers are identical: A map of the entire US.
So you've got the Monday blues, and are looking for Download Squad to find you something stimulating, perhaps even intellectual to waste some time with? Look no further for we've got the perfect thing for you. "How Many Countries Can You Name" is a very simple, yet effective game in which all you need to do is think of, and type into your browser, as many countries names as you possibly can. In five minutes. With nearly 300 countries in the world, it's just as much a game of 'how fast can you type?' as it is 'just how many countries can you name?'
In the name of research (honest!), we've been playing with this a little, and managed to get the number of remaining (i.e. un-named) countries down towards the 200 mark, but we're sure that readers can do better!
Think you can point out Idaho on a map? Then you're probably from Idaho. For everyone else, Statetris is a surprisingly challenging little game that lets you play Tetris with the US states.
Okay, the easy setting is pretty simple. States fall from the top of the screen and you have to put them in position. Since you fill the US from bottom to top, there really aren't that many possible choices for each tile.
But once you hit the medium and hard levels where you have to decide of a state is right side up or sideways, you'll wish you'd paid more attention during elementary school when it was time to memorize the states and capitals. Either that or you'll just decide to move to Canada where there are only 13 provinces and territories.
Test your knowledge on where things are, with this Geography Knowledge quiz. You can test yourself on everything from bodies of water to states or even continents. You get three chances to guess the correct answer, and the more questions you answer correctly the higher your score gets. It even gives you the maximum possible score that you can get next to your score, so you can figure out how well you did.
Where do you live? Can you correctly guess the places surrounding you? There are a lot of places in this world, good luck getting them right!
Panoramio is a Google Maps mashup that lets you map your photos. It also lets you check out foreign, and local, destinations and images that others have submitted. With Panoramio, users store up to 2GB worth of digital images in their free account, and pinpoint the exact location they were taken, care of Google Maps. This could be a great way to walk your friends through a recent hiking trip in Arizona, or a European vacation route, or quite simply your path to work. I love these kinds of social mashups. They provide a ton of insight into geographical locations, and make me think more about locations that I might want to check out one day, and reminisce about locations that I once was. Not too many places are listed at the moment, but once this catches on, I'm sure its going to provide a lot of great content.
Placeopedia is a brilliantly-executed Google Maps-powered site which aims to create a map of all the articles in Wikipedia which correspond to a real-world location. The site is attractive and slick and adding a new place from Wikipedia is extremely easy: you just start typing the name of an article and Placeopedia autocompletes as you type—a functionality that should be built into Wikipedia (Greasemonkey, anyone?)—and then you click on the corresponding location on the map. There's also RSS and raw XML data for the 50 most recently-added places as well as KML files for Google Earth. My only gripe with Placeopedia is that you have to click on a link in a confirmation e-mail after every single place you add; perhaps a necessary evil, but it would be nice to be able to add, say, five at a time.
