I never watched the original series of Melrose Place; I was eight when the series came out and unlike Beverly Hills 90210, I don’t remember ever coming across the repeats. This new version of it looks pretty good though: it’s like Gossip Girl, but with characters actually my age!

[Watch on MissGeeky.com]

I love Studio Ghibli’s movies and this latest one looks cute! I’ve seen almost all of Hayao Miyazaki’s movies (including Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle); I think I’m only still missing one of them.

Ponyo (known as Ponyo On the Cliff in Japan) is about a 5 year old boy and his relationship with a goldfish princess who wants to become human. I blogged about the Japanese trailer ages ago, but this US one shows much more and is easier to follow. It’s a bit jarring though to hear the English dubbed voices; I prefer the original voices and usually avoid all dubbings. It just doesn’t sound right!

Ponyo – Release Date: August 2009 (US)

Google Apps and Virgin America have teamed up for today for the “Day In The Cloud” Challenge, the first online scavenger hunt played simultaneously in the air and everywhere else. For the entire day of June 24th you can enter the one-hour game and try to earn as many points as possible. If you become a top scorer (and are a legal US resident), you can win a “Year In A Cloud”: a brand new HP laptop, 1 terabyte of Google Account storage, and a year of free flying and free wifi on Virgin America (actually what this means though is 12 one-way tickets on Virgin America and 12 complimentary wifi passes, slightly less impressive than “a year of free flying”).

The idea is to solve 9 rounds of tasks, within one hour. The tasks range from Googable questions and trivia, to word puzzles, to using specific Google products to find an answer, like Google Calendar and Google Books. And I think also a special creative round where you have to do something, well, creative.

I didn’t get that far though. I wasted too much time in the first round, so only made it to Round 6 with 9500 points. The tasks can be pretty fun though, and especially the more puzzle like ones were nice to solve. If you try it out though, keep in mind you only have 1 hour to attempt all the rounds.

Check out Day In The Cloud for more details.

During my trip to the Netherlands last month, I finally visited the optician again to get my eyes checked for the first time in two (maybe even three) years. It was a bit of a surprise how much worse both my eyes had gotten; I’ve now got -4.00 in my right eye and -4.50 in my left (with a cylinder of -1.75 in both).

I got a complete new set of contact lenses, but didn’t really want to shell out +£50 for a new pair of glasses. I mean, 90% of the time I’m wearing my contacts anyway, but I do need a set to wear during the evening. Wearing contacts the entire day and staring at a computer screen, means (with me at least) that by the end of the day my eyes are dried out and I need to take my lenses out.

I kind of gave up on getting a new pair of glasses and thought I’d had to live with using a set with the wrong strength. But then I stumbled on an offer from SelectSpecs. For only £5 you could get a set of full rimmed glasses: frame, lenses with UV Protection, Anti-Reflection, and Scratch Resistant Coatings, add to that £3.50 for shipping, and for £8.50 you’re done.

I ordered the following pair (the Jacranda design) this morning:

Of course, the downside is that I wasn’t able to try them on and see how they fit, but for only £8.50? It’s a much better solution than keeping on using my current glasses with the wrong prescription, or buying an expensive pair which I won’t use that often. I’ll let you know how the quality of the glasses are once they’ve arrived, but they seem pretty okay.

I’m not sure how long this offer from SelectSpecs is going for, but even then their normal glasses are pretty cheap compared to other places. Check out their website for more details.

Interesting links for June 17th through June 23rd:

• Plastic Flashback: A visual history of the credit card. – Interesting little piece on the backstory of the credit card.
• The Uniform Project – 1 Dress, 365 Days. Cool project from a girl who's wearing the same dress for 365 days, but uses accessories/layers to create different outfits (not sure, but I also think there's the rule: no using the same accessory twice)
• The Usability of Passwords – Great post about the security of passwords. If you've never understood why simple words like "sun" won't do as a password, read this. It also explains why "pass-phrases" are better than random letters/numbers.
• Grilla styling – Blog about the Grilla styling "game". Two girls, two cameras, 52 cards with random colours, countries, styles, etc on it. Walk into a store, take 2 cards and you've got 10 minutes to create that look. I loved the combos the cards create like "Welsh Navy" or "Gold Emo".
• Alice and Kev – Brilliant experiment about Alice and Kev, two homeless characters created in Sims 3. It makes me want to try out Sims 3 for myself and create my own characters.

I’m starting a new set of recurring blog posts: Fashion Focus, where I’ll write about the cute dresses/shoes/makeup/hairstyles that I come across. I’ve been meaning to do this for some time, but (again) never got around to it.

To start things off, here’s a product I adore: Lush’s Honey Trap Lip Balm. It contains honey, white chocolate and shea butter to give you smooth and deliciously yummy lips. It’s by far the best lip balm I’ve ever used and it smells gorgeous.

I’ve also tried the other two lip balms (Lip Service and Whipstick) mentioned on the Lush site, but they didn’t suit me as well as Honey Trap. Lip Service is specially for dry, rough lips and it really moisturizes a lot. The main ingredients are cocoa butter, shea butter, and tangerine oil. Whipstick is for those people who are allergic to cocoa butter and lanolin, and smells like chocolate orange. I’m guessing I’m not that much of a fan of these two, because of the orangey/tangerine smell they have. If you don’t mind that though, I suggest trying them out, cause (smells aside) they’re great lip balms.

There were also two other balms, but I can’t find them on the UK site (they are still available on the US site though and I saw them last week in one of the actual store). Lip Squeak smells like apple pie, and contains apples, vanilla, lemon and poppy seed oil. Lite Lip is a lighter type of lip balm which contains marshmellow herb, rose and cocoa butter.

Each of the lip balms cost £4.40 ($8.75), a bit pricier than your standard Nivea/Labello lip balm, but completely worth it. If you want to try them out, just go to one of the Lush stores; the store clerks are always helpful and ready to let you try out stuff (if you’re not too sure about a product, just ask for a sample to take home; they’re really great with that).

Lush Lip Balms – UK Store, US Store

I don’t have that much to say about this new series; it doesn’t look particularly new and exciting. The only thing that has got me slightly curious is that it has Scrubs’s favourite janitor, Neil Flynn. For the rest though: boring.

Here’s the trailer:

I adore some of Roland Emmerich’s older movies: Stargate, Independence Day, even Godzilla. But then came The Day After Tomorrow and 10,000 BC. And while they had just as a crappy plot and cool special effects as his older movies, I always felt something special was missing that those older moves did have. (Theory: I was 10-14 when those first 3 movies came out, and 20-24 when the other 2 were released. It’s highly possible that my age did have something to do with it)

Anyhow, now comes his newest movie 2012. About the world ending in 2012. Cue a ton of disaster sequences, well-known landmarks collapsing, and lots of panicky people. The cast includes John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Amanda Peet, Thandie Newton, Oliver Platt, Woody Harrelson and Danny Glover.

I think the trailer look awesome, although again it gives waaay to much away. Seriously Hollywood: cut back on the plot summary trailers. We don’t want to see the entire movie, before it’s out yet. Just give as a nice introduction to what the movie is about, which actors are in it, and one or two action sequences to give a feel what type pretty visual effects we’ll be getting. Nothing more.

So here’s the trailer:

[Watch the trailer on MissGeeky.com]

What did you think of the trailer? Any good?

Shopping nowadays is different than what it used to be. For me, an afternoon of leisurely shopping means looking around for clothes and shoes, and trying them on. Everything else though? Gadgets, books, games, holidays, everything else I do via the internet. This doesn’t necessarily mean I actually buy it online, but I’ll always know exactly what I want to get and where I have to get it.

The days of listening to a shop clerk and trusting his ‘expert’ advice are practically over. For almost everything I buy, I’ll always first do my own online research, reading reviews of other people, figuring out which product does exactly what I want, and where the cheapest place is to buy it. I’ve had a couple of times now that I’ve researched a product so much that I knew more than the shop clerk and had to correct him a couple of times.

But I realised not everyone is that web savvy, and most may not even have the faintest idea where to start finding these online reviews. So for that reason, I give you this blog post. Mind you, these aren’t all the resources that are out there, not by far; I’m only scratching the surface with websites that I like to visit myself when doing this type of “research”.

Amazon

Even though it’s not primarily a review site, Amazon is a useful tool to get general views about products. The main focus may seem books, games and DVDs, but you’ll find a lot of other items have pretty thorough reviews too. The reviews consist of 1 to 5 star ratings and a written review or a video of a user. I mainly like to use Amazon reviews to get that first impression of a product.

For simple items, like books or DVDs, I’ll keep it only to just Amazon, but If it’s something more gadgety (and more expensive) it’s only the first step. A problem in the past with the Amazon reviews though has been that anyone can leave a review, which led to authors giving themselves great reviews or fans giving competitors bad reviews. While it’s by far not the norm, keep that in mind when using these reviews. [Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Germany]

Reevoo

For those based in the UK, Reevoo is another interesting review website. Unlike Amazon (and most other review sites) Reevoo only allows people to publish a review, if they’ve gotten their product via one of their retail partners. The reviews itself though are quite limited, with users reviewing a product with only a couple of sentences of pros and cons, and a 1 to 10 score.

I mainly use Reevoo when I want a certain gadget, but have no idea what type, brand or even price range. Reevoo has a useful filter functionality for each category, so that you can refine your product search. For instance, in the Headphones category you can filter the price (£3-£10, £10-£20, etc), brand (Sennheiser, Philips, etc) and other applicable groups. It also has a nice price comparison of the different places where you can buy the product. What I’m not sure about though is whether the retailers mentioned in this list are only Reevoo’s retail partners; it doesn’t matter too much, cause a lot of the big brand cheaper retailers are listed. [Reevoo]

TestFreaks

I like to use TestFreaks to find more extensive reviews than Amazon or Reevoo. For starters, it splits the reviews into two groups: Expert Reviews and User Reviews. The Expert Reviews aggregates professional reviews from around the web, featuring reviews from blogs and online magazines. These reviews give much more technical analysis than your standard user reviews.

Besides the reviews, TestFreaks have some useful metrics, like the FreakScore: a weighted index of all aggregated expert and user reviews (expert reviews are given more value than user reviews, while older products and reviews are given less importance). It’s a great way to see what the hottest products are that people are actually talking about. Like Reevoo, TestFreaks also has a price comparison section, but is not limited to only the UK. [TestFreaks USA, TestFreaks UK]

Digital Photography Review

This website is specifically for photography, covering everything from the latest industry news to very detailed professional reviews on cameras and lenses. And with detailed, I mean: DETAILED. Some of them go so far as measuring the time it takes to switch on the camera and to take a photo. There are also sample photos, so that you can view the quality of the camera under different light circumstances. Finally, there’s an compare tool, where you can select various cameras and see the exact specifications of each of them side by side. [Digital Photography Review]

SkyScanner and Kayak

I don’t travel that much by plane, but when I do SkyScanner and Kayak are both useful sites to find the cheapest flights out there. SkyScanner offers a bit more flexibility in choosing the airports; for instance, I can get a list of all the different flights between UK and the Netherlands, without specifying which UK airport or which NL airport. Kayak on the other hand gives a more useful overview of which days are cheaper so that you can select the cheapest combo of depart/return flights. [SkyScanner, Kayak]

Bview

Bview doesn’t really offer reviews of products, but of businesses. It’s handy to find reviews of local businesses like plumbers or electricians. Besides that they also have vouchers for a huge bunch of different stores and restaurants. [Bview]

As I said before, this aren’t all the review sites out there; these are only the ones I use myself. Feel free to share any tips of sites that you use in the comments below.

Episode 117: *lick, lick, lick*

Almost every single day you can hear an ice cream truck pass our house, playing this weird little melody slightly offkey. So far I’ve heard it even on days nobody would fancy ice cream (like mid winter). Now this video about an “ice cream truck” just creeped me out:

[Watch on MissGeeky.com]

Via Candlelight Stories