It's definitely that time of year - fresh fruit in season, gorgeous flowers, and original handmade crafts all can be found at your local farmers market. Did you know that you can find a local farmer market near you with the help of the Web?

Read more in my article titled Find A Farmers Market.

I don't mean to alarm you, but I think I've found my new obsession. They're cute, they're free, and there are a whole heck of a lot of them. What am I talking about? Why, nothing but Cubeecraft, free papercraft toys with all kinds of characters. So far, I've downloaded 3 of these little guys, and the directions are dead simple to follow. Once you start playing with paper, you kind of get carried away (at least I do), especially when you find sites like Cubeecraft and these ones:

• Yamaha Paper Crafts: Free downloadable paper crafts of motorcycles, animals, and more.
• Paper Toys: TONS of free paper craft patterns here.
• ReadyMech: Create your own ReadyMech army. I am.
• Paper Toys: These are perfect for the younger set.

More crafty goodness

Etsy: Etsy is one of my favorite Web sites; you can find lovely handmade crafts there, but one of the biggest perks is how wonderfully designed the site is. It's one of those sites that is a pleasure to browse through.

Whether you're a seasoned torrent user or just starting to learn about 'em, you know that sharing torrents with other people....well, it's frankly a pain in the patoot, especially if you're trying to send your computer-phobic Mom a copy of a really great eBook you just downloaded and she can't figure out how to open it (speaking purely hypothetically, of course).

However, that's where Torrent2exe comes in. Basically, this site will turn torrent files into .exe files, which means that your computer-phobic Mom can just double-click on the file and open it, rather than having to install a torrent client to process it. In addition, Torrent2exe also gives you the ability to publish your favorite files on your site or blog to share with everyone, simply and easily.

Wait - what's this torrent stuff?

• What are Torrents?: BitTorrent networking is the latest form of Internet P2P (peer-to-peer) file sharing. BitTorrent works by simultaneously downloading small bits of files from many web sources, is extremely easy to use, and is completely non-profit and free of user subscription fees.
• The Top Ten Sites for Movie Torrents: Looking for movie torrents? It's easy to be overwhelmed with the number of torrents found in an average search engine query. I've made finding the best movie torrents with my list of the Top Ten Sites to Find Movie Torrents.
• 50 Torrent Tools: BitTorrent technology, while somewhat controversial, is here to stay. You can use BitTorrent to download music, movies, software, and more - and since BitTorrent is so easy to use, the rise of useful BitTorrent tools seems to have no end in sight. Here are my picks for the top fifty most useful BitTorrent tools that will increase your BitTorrent productivity.

Need to find someone online?

Well, according to a few Web stats I've seen lately, finding someone online (also known as "spying") is one of the all-time most popular activities on the Web; well, that along with a few other Web habits). With all the new Web sites available to help you find someone online, people are finding surprising tidbits of information about their co-workers, loved ones, and friends that often don't turn up in a simple Web search. Plus, this stuff is all freely available on the Web - you've just got to know where to look.

Sounds intriguing, doesn't it? Go ahead and check it out - The Definitive Guide to Finding Someone Online.

This graph from CreateDebate gave me a little giggle this morning, mostly because I found myself identifying with nearly all of their classifications. So! Here's where I found myself:

• I'm always playing withTwitter
• I open Outlook about every five minutes two hours
• I am just a wee bit addicted to eBay
• Come on - who doesn't love some YouTube?
• Every morning I tune into Digg to see what's going on

Therefore, I fall under the following classifications:

• AB: Totally Bored, Yet Communicating
• AC: Totally Bored, Yet Being Productive
• AF: Totally Bored, And Shopping
• AG: Totally Bored and Mindlessly Consuming
• CG: Being Productive and Mindlessly Consuming

I definitely don't agree with the whole "Totally Bored" thing, but it's a fun way to classify your time online. How about you? Where do you fit?

More Habits

Seven Habits of Highly Effective Web Searchers: Every time I need to find something on the Web, I am successful. Right? Uh, not exactly. Eventually, I get to where I'm going, but it takes some work sometimes. Over the years I've developed a few search habits that have made me a more effective searcher, and with just a little practice, you can too.

When it comes to packing for other people, I do a pretty good job: I remember socks, pj's, all the really important stuff. However, when it comes to packing for myself, I seem to forget everything I'm going to need to get through a normal day. In fact, I usually end up making an emergency run to the nearest drugstore for stuff I've left at home.

That's where the Universal Packing List comes in. This is a fantastic site that helps you customize your packing list to the nth degree: by weather, destination, trip dates, what you want to see, your luggage size, and more. If you're a forgetful packer like me, this site is a lifesaver!

More travel help:

• Organize your travel plans with Tripit: In order to avoid various unpleasantries that were experienced in last year's excursions (getting lost, missed reservations, etc.) I decided to look around the Web for something that would help me organize things better. I found TripIt, your own personal travel assistant.
• Yapta: Find travel deals, and use Yapta's tag tool to keep track of the prices you've found. Yapta will then notify you if those prices go down, therefore potentially saving you a lot of money.
• Find Flight Information Online: Track your flight on the Web via a variety of methods.
• Take a Trip with Roadside America: If you're taking a road trip in the United States anytime soon, you're definitely going to want to check out RoadsideAmerica.com, your "online guide to offbeat tourist attractions."
• Find a Last Minute Vacation: If you have an itch to get out of town, but haven't booked way in advance at your favorite hotspot, have no fear - the early bird doesn't always get the worm. You can find lots of good deals on last minute vacations on the Web.

Traditionally, dictionaries are not known for being fun, entertaining, or even mildly interesting. However, that's where the Visual Dictionary Online comes in. Instead of a traditional words-only dictionary, the Visual Dictionary is based on images - more than 6,000 images, in fact, in 15 major themes that span from Astronomy to Sports.

For example: see that butterfly? I was able to click on any of those words surrounding it and learn more about the unique morphology of a butterfly: what makes the cells, the hind wing and its function, the antennae, etc. The Visual Dictionary is much more than "just" a dictionary, to be sure.

Feel like a little book larnin'? I do!

• Wikipedia: Wikipedia is one of the most useful sites on the Web today. Find out how to use Wikipedia more effectively.
• Explore the Smithsonian Online: One of my favorite things to do on the Web is explore museums that I would one day like to visit in person - and the Smithsonian is definitely on my top ten list.
• The Top Twenty Essential US Government Web Sites: Get the information you need with my picks for the Top Twenty Essential US Government Web Sites. There are literally hundreds of thousands of US government and government-related Web sites online today, however, I found that these sites consistently offer the best user experience, helping you to find what you need quickly, easily, and efficiently.

One of the coolest YouTube mashups I've come across lately has to be TimeTube, a site that takes your topic and finds videos for it, chronologically, starting with the first and ending with the most recent.

For example, I typed in "American Idol" and got a video walk down Memory Lane....the first season, the worst auditions (and there were many), the winners, the losers, etc. Plus, TimeTube gives you more than one way to look at all these videos: timeline, list view, flipbook, and geolocation. Pretty darn cool.

More great Web video doodads

• The Top Ten Sites for Movie Torrents: Looking for movie torrents? It's easy to be overwhelmed with the number of torrents found in an average search engine query. I've made finding the best movie torrents with my list of the Top Ten Sites to Find Movie Torrents.
• The Top Ten Most Popular Video Sites: Here are the top ten most popular video sites on the web - you'll be able to use these sites to find all sorts of free videos, movies, and documentaries, as well as short films, viral videos, and much more.

If you are one of the lucky folks who has an iPhone (pardon me whilst I drool a little bit....mmmmm.....iPhone....), then you might want to check out Natuba, an image sharing site specifically aimed at the iPhone crowd. As far as I can tell it's not any different from any other image sharing site on the Web; however, it is kind of neat to see the great pictures people are taking (I especially liked this one of an old Coke machine).

And speaking of images....

• Thirty Free Image Resources on the Web: Looking for free images? Here are thirty sites where you can find completely free images, available for use on your blog or web site. All of these sites offer royalty free images for your use (be sure to check each site for specific guidelines that they request you follow in order to use their images).

Tell me if you've ever done this: you're playing with a map, or you're tweaking your favorite online radio station, and you go to save it to your bookmarks or your favorite social bookmarking service. The next time you go back to this site, all the changes that you so carefully crafted? Well, they're gone. Why? Because that content you were playing with is dynamic, while the URL itself is static. One changes, the other does not.

That's what I love about Iterasi, a new service that not only saves the URL in your carefully crafted cache of content, but saves the Web page itself; a virtual snapshot of the last time you visited it, with all the tweaks, changes, or additions you made still there and ready to be accessed. Simple, elegant, and incredibly useful.

More about saving your stuff on the Web

• Save Videos for Later with the YouTube Quicklist: YouTube is addictive, but what if you don't have time to watch all the videos you want to watch? Save them to your YouTube Quicklist for easy viewing later when you're able to kick back and relax.
• Instapaper: Don't have time to really read what you're looking at? Save it for later with Instapaper, a simple bookmarking service.
• Bookmark and Share Sites with Furl: Basically, Furl gives you the ability to create your own searchable database of your favorite sites. Furl is similar to del.icio.us, in that the primary task that you can use Furl for is as an online, access from anywhere, list/article database.