BOOKMARK: Canaryhop.comfor alternative city tours
For those who like their holidays to veer off the beaten track while enjoying authentic local expertise, this online site aims to take you offline by linking “canaries” or local tour guides to “hoppers”, or travellers. This means you’ll find stuff as diverse as a make-up and accessories tour of New York city or get a spytastic James Bond tour of London. You can also set yourself up as a tour guide and offer, say, an alternative Dublin literary pub-crawl. Hop to it!
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WATCH
The Hobbit Song by Allie Goertz
The Hobbit trailer has been knocking around since last December, but we still have another while to go before we see Peter Jackson’s latest masterpiece in all of its 48 frames-per-second, high-definition glory. In the meantime, Ian McKellen (who plays Gandalf) has tweeted this delightful tribute song from fan Allie Goertz. It’s an “adorkable” synopsis of JRR Tolkien’s tale told from the point of view of both Bilbo Baggins and his wizard friend Gandalf.
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INSTALL
Lego Super Hero Movie Maker on your iPhones
Everyone is going nuts for The Dark Knight Rises trailer right now, but you can make your own viral Batman video with this app – as long as you have some Lego handy. Borrow your kids’ Lego action figures, set up the scenes and take pics with the Movie Maker app, choose from the soundtracks, colour filters and title cards, and you’ve got yourself a stop-motion movie! Technically, you could do all this only using your phone camera, but this makes it a little easier and more presentable.
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TRANSLATE
Email messages with Gmail
Automatic message translation has graduated from Google Labs into a fully fledged feature within Gmail. You’ll soon notice that when you receive an email in a different language the option to “translate message” automatically appears above. This is handy if you receive regular newsletters or similar in a different language because it can be set to “always translate” so you don’t have to do anything the next time it appears in your inbox. Wunderbar!
