Airfares are high. Gas prices even higher. And forget about paying for hotels.
Seriously, forget about it.
With CouchSurfing you have access to free accommodations from generous hosts in over 240 countries (including Antarctica). The only catch: You’re sleeping on their couch.
But what you lose in amenities you make up for in access to a local – one who is more than happy point you to the best restaurants, sights, and hangouts in town.
And since flying across the globe to sleep in a stranger’s house is a mind-boggling challenge, the site has drafted a seven-step plan to help you get involved in the community. Baby steps include forums, local activities, and coffee meetings, all before you even get to hosting or visiting.
So the big question: Is it safe? CouchSurfing takes rigorous steps to ensure the quality of its participants. But like most things in life, it takes a bit of research and a lot of guts to pull it off.
For example, we’re working up the courage to visit Antarctica – and to “forget about” that cute penguin stowed in our luggage on the way home.
Create Customized Envelopes Featuring Your Location
Email is great for convenient, speedy transmissions. But sometimes you want to evoke that tactile sense of place.
Enter Map Envelope, a free service that allows you to create an envelope whose inner lining is a custom Google Map featuring a satellite photo of whatever locale you choose.
The service couldn’t be easier to use. Just enter your location and an optional custom message and hit “preview.” If you’re happy with your creation, hit print.
A minute or so later you have the makings of a custom envelope (you do have to fold it, but they include convenient hash lines, so even we managed to do it).
The lining is a crisp satellite image of the location you select, with your address and a custom message you write attached to the location pin, just as it would appear on Google Maps.
Snail mail just got cool again.
Find a Date For A Meeting or Event that Works for Everyone
Browbeating people to meet is never fun. Assuming you can reach everyone, you then have to undertake the impossible task of polling everybody to find a time and place.
To make things easier, try Doodle, a free service that helps you schedule events and vote on the logistics.
Say a disparate group of college friends wants to meet up on alumni weekend. With Doodle, all you have to do to schedule a mini-reunion is pick the times and dates and add the relevant email addresses.
Doodle then sends an email to everyone in the group, who vote on times that work for them. The service then tallies the votes and notifies all of you when it determines the most convenient time.
Want to have your friends vote on the meeting place as well? Click on “Create a poll” and fill in every locale where you might want to gather. Your friends will vote and Doodle will send you the ranked results.
For $28 a year, you can upgrade to Premium Doodle, which includes an ad-free environment, a tracking tool and the ability to send personal messages with your invites.
It’s the next best thing to being a complete and utter hermit.
Read Any Web Page with a Cleaner View
Reading online is both essential and incredibly frustrating, especially for long-form pieces. It’s all clutter, tiny print and widely variant font choices.
Thankfully, there’s an elegant new browser app called Readability that makes the undertaking much, much easier.
To get started you select your settings, choosing a style (we like the “novel” setting), a type size (“medium” is nice) and the width of your margins. Then you drag the Readability badge into your toolbar.
When you come to an article that you want to make more “readable,” just click on the button to enable the tool.
Magically, the ads and associated clutter will disappear, leaving only text. The look and feel is akin to a magazine page (albeit one that’s easy to read). The links are preserved (and, in most cases, so is the artwork), but all the other clutter is gone.
It’s kind of like the Large Print edition for online reading. In other words, your eyes will thank you.