5 Essential Websites For Planning A Trip To The Beach

A day at the beach is often imagined as the most relaxing vacation possible. But, like any trip, a visit to the beach isn’t always ideal. Coastal areas can have weather conditions dramatically different from those just fifty miles inland and water temperatures may be cold even when the weather is nice.

Just a few minutes of planning can ensure that your day (or week) at the beach is beautiful rather than windy, rainy or cold. Here are five websites that will help you decide when to travel.

Weather.com’s Marine Weather Page

This page is a solid weather source for people living in or visiting the United States who want to know simple, direct information about weather conditions. Just enter a location with 60 miles of the coast and you’ll be directed to not only local weather but also relevant sea conditions like temperature, wave height and tides.

You can also use this site to view the latest fishing forecasts and browse average coastal temperatures at popular locations on the Pacific, Atlantic and Gulf shores. That’s handy if you’re planning a trip for next spring and want to see when ocean temperatures warm to your liking.

BuoyWeather

This website is a worldwide authority maritime conditions. Its key features is a map, powered by Google Maps, that lets users browse conditions by pinpointing an exact location rather than looking up a nearby city.

The site’s focus on sea conditions makes it particularly useful for beach-goers who own or want to rent a boat. Buoy can tell you if conditions or clear or dangerous, and it can do this for any region in world, not just North America.

Buoy’s only downside is limited information and forecasting for free users. If you’d like to see if conditions will be good tomorrow, the free site is fine. But if you want to know about next week you’ll have to go premium by paying $14.95 per month or $79.95 per year.

The CDC’s Skin Cancer Page

Excessive exposure is a serious problem for beach-goers, and while many people know that wearing sunscreen is a generally good idea, most don’t know what kind to buy, or what other items might be useful.

That’s where the CDC’s Skin Cancer Page is helpful. Despite the alarmist name, the page is less about skin cancer itself and more about ways to protect yourself from coming home with an uncomfortable, skin-damaging sunburn. For example, did you know that a wet t-shirt blocks far fewer UV ways than a dry one?

Besides offering useful information, the CDC’s page will let you build a checklist of must-have items like sunblock, sunglasses, portable shades and spare clothing. All of this will make your visit more convenient and keep you from looking like a human lobster.

Bing Travel

Many people who live near a coast will make a day trip, but there’s a good chance you’re not one of those people. That means you’ll need to plan your stay with a hotel and perhaps a flight, and for that you should probably turn to Bing Travel.

By itself, Bing Travel doesn’t offer much. What it does do, however, is act as a launchpad from which the other major travel sites can be reached. This makes comparison shopping easy, and while many travel sites do promise the best price possible or convenient side-by-side shopping, going through Bing ensures you’re receiving the most accurate (and lowest) prices. Plus, it’s tied into Bing Maps, giving you an excuse to enjoy Microsoft’s unpopular but shockingly good Google Maps competitor.

Local Tourism Sites

You’re probably not just planning a trip to “the beach”. You’re probably planning a trip to a beach, which mostly likely resides in or near a town. And that town probably has a local tourism site.

Finding a town’s tourism information is usually as simple as searching Google for “town name” tourism. Entering the state, principality or country can narrow down multiple results.

Local tourism sites can offer a lot of useful information. They’ll point out local businesses including restaurants and hotels, provide directions to the most popular beaches (and often public parks or campgrounds, if nearby) and some will even serve up printable coupons that can save you money on food and lodging.

Finally, local tourism sites can inform you of important trip information a national site would miss including local traffic problem, closures and special events. Nothing can spoil a relaxing, romantic day at the beach more quickly than a family weekend or fisherman’s conference you didn’t know about.

Conclusion

These websites will help you make your trip to the beach as picture-perfect as possible. Do you know of any other helpful resources worth checking out? Let us know in the comments.

Image Credits: Joe Shlabotnik, City of Newport Oregon

The post 5 Essential Websites For Planning A Trip To The Beach appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Nokia Music App For Windows 8

CLICK HERE TO SEE FULL POST



Smartphone users who own Windows Phone powered devices have been enjoying the Nokia Music service for a while now with the help of official Nokia Music app. The premium music service from Nokia can now be enjoyed on your Windows 8 as well using Nokia Music app. Nokia just announced that Nokia Music app will [...]

Do You Love Or Hate April Fools’ Day Online? [We Ask You]

It’s now April, which means the one day of the year which celebrates jokers, pranksters, and trolls is over for another 12 months. I am of course referring to April Fools’ Day, an invented holiday that falls on April 1 each year. Some people love it, others hate it; there is very little middle ground.

In the real world most people don’t bother playing tricks on people for April Fools’, a fact we should all be grateful for. But the Web is a whole new ball game. And it seems to be getting worse. As someone who works online and who needs to be able to sort the fake news from the real news, I notice these things to the nth degree, but is it the same for everyone? And if so, does it bother you at all? This topic forms the basis for this week’s We Ask You discussion.

This Week’s Question…

We want to know, Do You Love Or Hate April Fools’ Day Online? It’s a simple question, but one which is likely to prompt passionate opinions on both sides. This probably only applies to those who are addicted to the Internet, because the rest of the population likely just takes a break from the Internet for this one day of the year. At least.

Every April Fools’ Day is the same, with Google playing numerous pranks on the public across its many services. Other companies tend to also get involved, though to a lesser degree. This year saw the likes of Sony, Nokia, Microsoft, Twitter, Netflix, Roku, Toshiba, Virgin, Samsung, and Soundcloud all making an effort.

Some April Fools’ Day gags are easy to spot and shared across the InterWebs by eagle-eyed people. But others are either much more difficult to figure out or don’t get enough attention to be flagged as mere jokes. Here are 8 April Fools’ Day pranks you may have missed this year, but are they entertaining or just annoying?

Do you appreciate these efforts by companies both big and small to troll their users? Or does it instead wind you up to the point that you’d forego using the product or service that the prank is connected to? Do you think we should all embrace April Fools’ Day online? Or rally against it until the culprits are forced to cease and desist?

Drawing Conclusions

All comments will be digested to form conclusions in a follow-up post next week where we will detail what You Told Us. One reader will be chosen for the coveted Comment Of The Week, getting their name up in lights, the respect of other readers, and 150 MakeUseOf points to use for MakeUseOf Rewards. What more motivation than that do you need to respond?

We Ask You is a weekly column dedicated to finding out the opinions of MakeUseOf readers. The questions asked are usually open-ended and likely to necessitate a discussion. Some are opinion-based, while others see you sharing tips and advice, or advocating tools and apps to fellow MakeUseOf Readers. This column is nothing without you, as MakeUseOf is nothing without you.

Image Credit: Sean MacEntee

The post Do You Love Or Hate April Fools’ Day Online? [We Ask You] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Cut The Crap, Facebook – Give Me What I Want To Read

Every since its launch, we’ve seen Facebook change. And change. Again, and again, and again. While many changes are actually for the best, there’s one thing these updates never fails to add to our news feed: more clutter. There’s also something our ever-growing list of friends never fails to bring to our news feed: even more clutter. Between Facebook’s ads, sponsored posts, and upcoming “personalized” news feed, and your friends’ posts about politics, religion, babies, cats, and weddings, it’s getting harder and harder to see the things that really matter.

Are you ready to change that? Don’t get too excited, I haven’t found a magic way to re-design your Facebook feed according to your wildest dreams, but there are ways and tools that can help you focus on what you’re really interested in, while doing away with noise, boring posts, uninteresting people you’re not sure why you ever friended, and unnecessary announcements. Whether you’re only interested in links, in photos, or in a specific group of people, there’s a way to focus your updates on what you want to see.

Facebook’s Built-In Options

There are several ways to use Facebook’s built-in options to de-clutter your news feed. These include changing the way your feed is sorted, manually hiding posts you don’t like seeing as you stumble upon them, customizing which friends appear on your news feed and what kinds of updates you’re seeing from them, and creating Facebook lists that can help you curate your news feed according to how much you care.

None of these things is complicated, but it does take some patience to go through your settings and fix things up. If you’re up for it, head over to Tina’s post about managing your Facebook news feed, and learn exactly who you can perform each of these actions.

Unwhatever.me [Chrome]

Unwhatever.me is only one of nine different extensions that can help you clean up your news feed easily. The extensions are available for Chrome only, which is a shame, but do a swift job of purging certain keywords out of your Facebook life.

After installing the extension, specify the keywords you want to filter out in the extension’s options, and watch the magic at work. You can also set up a photo feed to replace the posts that get filtered out. The extension comes with an Instagram feed already built it (grumpy cat), but you can easily change the tag to show pictures you’d like. If you change your mind and what to see a hidden post, click “undo” to view it.

If you’re too lazy to specify your own keywords, sibling extensions such as Unbaby.me, Unpolitic.me, Unfoodpic.me, and Unwedding.me can you help you get rid of common annoying subjects you may not care about. All extensions are available for Chrome, and can be downloaded from the Unwhatever.me page.

Social Fixer

Social Fixer is a Facebook-cleaning old timer, and can be used for much more than simple news feed filtering. The extension is available for any browser you can think of, besides Internet Explorer, and adds various tweaks and features to Facebook.

One of the features Social Fixer offers is filtering. This isn’t as simple as Unwhatever.me, but if you’re willing to spend a few minutes on tweaking it, you can set up your news feed to really show only the things you’re interested in. You can filter our certain people, apps, keywords, etc., and set up different actions for your filters.

You can use Social Fixer to create different tabs for your news feed, and filter your content into those tabs. You can then ignore certain tabs for as long as you want, and explore them only when you feel like it.

Learn more about setting up Social Fixer and creating filters.

The New New New News Feed

Facebook’s news feed keeps changing, and the latest iteration will offer another built-in way to filter your news feed. Want to see only photos? No problem. Only music-related updates? There’s a feed for that. As it looks right now, there’s not going to be a way to create actual personalized news feeds, except for the already-existing lists.

Will the new news feed help silence the news feed noise, or increase it? That remains to be seen, but you can go a long way to getting a de-cluttered and focuses feed even without it.

Know of other ways to see only what you care about on Facebook? Share in the comments!

Image Credit: Funnel image via Shutterstock

The post Cut The Crap, Facebook – Give Me What I Want To Read appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Desktop Notifications for Google Voice

Some readers of this blog spotted a new feature of the Google Voice extension for Chrome: desktop notifications. I didn't notice it, since Google Voice can't be used outside US.



"I've recently started getting notifications from the Chrome Google Voice extension every time I receive a SMS to my GV number. Of particular interest is the icon, which looks like an amalgamation of communications services' icons. Is it a harbinger of the new unified messaging service rumored to be on the way?" says Alec, a read of this blog.

Apparently, Google works on a new product called Babel that integrates Google Talk, Gmail Chat, Google+ Hangouts, Google+ Messenger. "You'll get a seamless messenger experience across Android, iOS, Chrome, Google+ and Gmail. From what we have seen, there is no mention of Google Voice or other services outside of the five we just mentioned, but that doesn't necessarily mean they won't be there at some point. As of now, this is being tested internally as a cross-platform service," reports Droid Life.



{ Thanks, Alec and Evan. }

Improved Gmail Search Suggestions

A recent post from Gmail's Google+ page mentioned 2 new Gmail search features: enhanced contact suggestions with thumbnails and suggestions from your Gmail search history.



"If you've searched your email for 'supercalifragilisticexpialidocious' or other lengthy phrases, it just got easier to find what you're looking for. Autocomplete predictions in Gmail may now include your past Gmail searches. Past searches as well as the new contact thumbnails shown below are rolling out to all Gmail users globally, including Google Apps for Business customers, over the next few days."

Are contact thumbnails in Gmail search a new feature? Not if you've previously joined the Gmail Field Trail, which adds many other cool features that integrate Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive and Google Search.

Updated Google Search Interface for Tablets

Google updated the search interface for tablets to make it look more like the desktop interface. There's now a "search tools" button that replaces the wrench button, "more" is a regular menu and the icons for specialized search engines have been removed.



Here's the new interface:

... and here's the old one (screenshot from October 2011, when Google tested this interface):

This is a much more recent screenshot: