Here are four interesting recommendations for 2011, along with an admittedly pointless one. The first is for frequent flyers who believe everyone else on an airplane always gets a better deal than they do. SeatGuru (.com) makes things just a little easier for them to handle. It tracks the seating charts of every commercial plane in service, highlighting the best seats and the ones you ought to run away from. It also lists planes that offer better luggage storage, and manages a comparison of armrests! Now, if only someone were to take the process of immigration online in the coming year.


FitByFun (.com) offers a bunch of animated classes, with simple
on-screen instructions

Recommendation two is for wannabe fitness freaks -- the sort who spend more time shopping for sweatpants than actually wearing them. Working under the assumption that life becomes easier to manage when there's a cartoon involved, FitByFun (.com) offers users a bunch of animated classes! It's an aerobics game that promises to help you shape up while following simple on-screen instructions. Cough up a small fee, and it lets you personalise classes to your ability and time constraints.

Next, freebies for that increasingly rare beast: the voracious reader. ReadPrint (.com) lets you read titles that are now available online thanks to copyrights that have expired. It offers the works of 3,500 authors (and counting) from Dante to Hardy, Whitman, Yeats and Kipling. There are essays, fiction, non-fiction, plays, poetry and short stories. Not surprisingly, Agatha Christie is currently listed as the top author; Emma, the top title.

And, finally, a bit of levity devoted to the art of 'kludging' -- the putting together of a poor solution to a problem. ThereIfixedIt (.com) showcases hilarious, and real, examples of how some people come up with the truly bizarre to fix what ought to be managed by experts. Christmas decorations gone awry, trees made from beer cans, attempts at taxidermy, awful car repairs, staircases in lavatories -- you get the picture. It's solid proof of the capacity for stupidity present in all men.

-- Lindsay Pereira is Editor, MiD Day Online twitter.com/ lindsaypereira