Features

www.theyworkforyou.com
MPs and Lords may be able to swerve a Paxman grilling on Newsnight, but they can't avoid being held accountable by the formidable TheyWorkForYou.com. Tap in your postcode, and you're presented with a detailed onscreen dossier of your MP's activities, including their voting record, recent speeches and expenses claims, all expertly mined from public records. The site provides some delicious insights: Boris Johnson collected between £5,000-10,000 for hosting Have I Got News For You, for example, while Clare Short has only participated in 13% of Commons' votes. You can even put your MP on the spot by sending them a fax from a sister site.

www.ononemap.com
Trawling round estate agents is laborious. While the responsive Findaproperty.com does a grand job of aggregating properties from multiple agents into a single, searchable database, often it's location that's the deciding factor. OnOneMap is more distinctive and visually effective, since it delivers the results as icons on a conveniently draggable Google Map. Clicking on the icons gives you all the essential property details, and searches can be saved to minimise time-wasting. Sadly, some of that saved time is wasted by the site's occasional sluggishness, and properties on the database aren't updated as often as they could be.

www.instruction-manuals.co.uk
Bottom kitchen drawers are designed to hold two things: that slice-and-dice gadget your mum bought you in 1993 and instruction manuals. Except, of course, the instruction manual you urgently need. Step forward the primitively designed but invaluable Instruction Manuals UK, a directory of missing manuals for almost everything from motherboards to lawnmowers. Manuals are either scanned in on-site or linked to manufacturers' websites, and if you can't find the one you're after you can leave a request on the wanted list.

www.askoxford.com
The next time a jumped-up pub quizmaster declares the longest word in the dictionary is antidisestablishmentari-anism, point him towards AskOxford and ask him to look up pneumonoultra- microscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis - a 45-letter monster that's sniffily described as a "supposed lung disease". AskOxford is much more than an online dictionary; it's a wordsmith's dream, delivering hundreds of facts about our peculiar language, (occasionally haughty) advice on correct usage, and further distraction with interactive crosswords and games. A vastly superior alternative to the widely used dictionary.com.

www.walkit.com
This award-winning site (see www.pcpro.co.uk/news/109253) was set up after its creator realised that people were constantly jumping into cabs to visit clients when they could have walked to the location. For the moment, it focuses on London: you enter the start and end postcodes, and seconds later your very own walking map is generated - then press print, grab your coat and go. It even calculates how many calories you'll burn and how much CO2 you won't produce in the process.

www.howstuffworks.com
One of the most popular articles on this website is "How Women Work" and, credit where credit's due, it takes a decent stab at answering this eternal conundrum. But it's the more prosaic areas where HowStuffWorks truly shines: if you want to know how cable modems work, why avalanches happen and why you shouldn't go swimming after you've just eaten, this is the site to visit. The writing is clear, concise and - so far as we can tell, at least - accurate too.

www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/
Lurking in the long shadow of the omnipotent Wikipedia is the BBC's h2g2 - a user-written guide to modern life, inspired by Douglas Adams' Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. While h2g2 doesn't have the depth and detail of its wiki rival, it boasts something Wikipedia is sorely lacking: character. This is because articles are written to guidelines and subject to both peer review and human editing that reward originality. Thus, in addition to more worthy entries, you'll find an article on Crazy Golf and Putting Greens on The Isle of Wight, and discover that cocktail sticks are used "predominantly to attach pieces of cheese to pieces of pineapple, for a tasty, yet strangely unsatisfying party snack."