#390 Web App -- Curious to know how much the homes in your neighborhood are worth? New real estate valuation Zillow has the answer. Billed as the “Kelly Blue Book” for homes, Zillow provides maps of real estate valuations based on address or locations. Definitely a must-consult for home-buyers. (HT: LifeHacker)
#391 Email Hack -- Web service Mailbigfile emails a link to a large file - up to one gigabyte - to any address you specify. Great for sharing PVR-recorded TV shows and other large files, upload your big file to MailBigFile in secure or normal transfer mode. MailBigFile keeps the file available for 7 days for up to 3 downloads. (HT: LifeHacker)
#392 Google School -- Filter out adult web sites from Google search results, use the safesearch operator. Example: safesearch: sexuality statistics
#393 Know Your Fallacies -- Reification -- treating a concept, an abstraction, as if it were a real, concrete thing. (Example: "Their ideology is going to ruin this country.")
#394 Spyware Hack -- Web service SiteAdvisor tells you if a web site has known spyware, pop-ups or if it spams users after you register with an email address. A browser plugin for Internet Explorer and Firefox is available for download which alerts you realtime to sites with the cooties. Otherwise you can just pop a URL into their search box and get information about a site that way. (HT: LifeHacker)
#396 iTunes Hack -- Sometime you need to create a playlist that is not based on artist, genre, or album. To make list using keywords (i.e., love songs, rainy-day, workout) use iTunes “Grouping” feature. To get to the Grouping field, right-click on a song and choose “Get Info” then go to the “Info” tab. If you use the “Grouping contains ”you can put multiple keywords, separated by commas in order for your songs to show up on multiple playlists. (HT: LifeHacker)
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Your Zillow link is very neat. I found my house in St. Paul and the valuation was very thorough with lots of comparison homes. The site says it is a beta - my guess is that they will be making $ hand over fist with this.
posted on 02.15.2006 8:17 AM2
I tried Zillow on several addresses I know well in New York: an old 4-unit tenement in a depressed neighborhood, a famous and highly exclusive 150-or-so unit co-op in one of the most desirable neighborhoods, and a 40-unit apartment house in a working-class neighborhood of Brooklyn. (Yeah, my fortunes have varied a bit.)
It correctly notes that Brooklyn is a lot cheaper than Manhattan, but otherwise seems totally confused. It ranks all the buildings on the same block within about 10% of the same price, though some are large apartment buildings and some are modest single-family homes.
It ranks the ghetto tenement at one-quarter the price of the entire 150+-unit luxury building facing Central Park. (Individual units in that building are known to have sold for almost the price it gives for the entire building. If you could actually buy that building for that price you'd have the steal of the century.)
It appears to just be consulting a property registry to get the square footage of each building, and multiplying by an average price-per-foot for that block or census tract. That may work for suburban homes that are all alike, but it's way off for urban blocks where building type and size vary hugely even within the same block.
posted on 02.15.2006 12:25 PM3
As for Zillow, if this gets popular - that'll be the price for a house...like it or not.
As for Google School, didn't you mention the "safesearch" operator in an earlier Yak Shaving Razor?
posted on 02.15.2006 12:37 PM