Commuting help here, homemade ditties there

The site: www.mta.net

Public transit is running again -- at least for now. If you need to get somewhere but don’t have a car and can’t afford a cab, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority website can help. Using the site’s metro trip planner, just plug in the address you’re going to, the address you’re traveling from and your departure or arrival time. In a split second, the site will spit out what buses and/or trains you need to take at what time, the trip’s cost and how much time it will take. Think of it as a sort of Mapquest for the region’s public transit system.

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The site: https://www.sr.se/cgi-bin/p1/src/sing/default.asp

“Let them sing it for you” is the motto of this clever site, which allows users to type in a line of lyrics and have it digitally sung back in one-word samples from a variety of well-known artists. Type in “take me out to the ball game,” for example, and it’ll spit back a sound collage with snippets from U2, the Who and UB40. Users don’t have to choose lyrics that already exist. It will work with any you’ve made up yourself, though the site is sometimes limited. Not every word and its corresponding sound bite has been loaded into the site’s database. If that’s the case, you can request that those words be added (which will take some time because they’re done by hand) or delete those words so the program will run (a far better option for the impatient).

-- Sue Carpenter