2023-05-20 Links Changelog

I added a Many In One directory to Calculators. This now has things like Cyber Chef and Wolfram Alpha but also added Calculator.net which I previously had a link to but only to their Calorie Calculator. I've dropped that direct link and now it can be found through the Calculators.net index.

I also moved The True Size of… link to the To Scale section of Leisure links.

I dropped Excalidraw. I really liked the tool for a while owing to it's extremely minimal design that made it super fast to hack out a diagram on a video call as I tried to explain something. Of course they can't leave well enough alone and now it's full of all sorts of features like line colours, stroke width, edge types and layers that makes the tool slower to use in the hopes someone will pay for the thing.

I have no idea why I had Sweet Home 3D linked in the Stock Art Resources section. I moved it to the Editors section instead.

I rearranged the search engines section a bit. Sadly, Gigablast is no more. It was a slow and quirky engine, but could sometimes find some of the older, more useful web.

In other search moves, Yandex got moved to the bottom and I added Baidu. I dropped Petal since I've got Baidu now linked. These can sometimes help you find things not on the major engines. I moved Mojeek up just to help boost this underdog. I think everyone knows about DuckDuckGo at this point, but with Gigablast gone, I think Mojeek is one of the last small scale, full web indexers left as far as I know of. It's always hard to know for sure what data sharing agreements these companies have.

I dropped Yep.com. I haven't found it that useful when searching for things and can't tell if it's really running it's own unique index or what.

Seems Teclis got taken out by the bots and Million Short was only spitting errors when I checked it.

In language news, I found a site called Eunoia that has ~500 words in other languages the author found without direct translations to English. I love these sorts of words because they can sometimes give you insights into the sorts of things you don't think of regularly as an Anglophile. And gives you something fun to work into a conversation from time to time.

Import Yeti has become a quagmire.

The Daily Web Thing has unfortunately stopped publishing. I've linked to the i.webthings Directory instead which I believe has all the links from the daily post but in a standalone directory. That's kind of a bummer though. I found a number of great new additions thanks to that stream.

In other link directory additions, Vincent's Dungeon and the popular section of Pinboard.in have been added. Surf's up!

In programming practice, I've linked to the game TIS-100. It's a commercial product but as everything on this site, I'm not being sponsored or anything. It's been a great experience getting to do some assembly problem solving with a pseudo cold war era hacker vibe. I put it in the practice section because I think it's probably the best introduction to assembly programming I've seen. You only have 2 registers, 13 instructions, and 15 lines of code per core. This makes it really easy to understand and the interface shows all the data moving through the machine making it also easy to learn. I also found the problems have a great difficulty curve to them, forcing you to learn and then unlearn common assembly patterns to solve each new problem.

Given the end of The Daily Web Thing, I've created a section in the Resource section for Icons. I've linked a number of SVG sites I found I'd be most likely to use given the need. Feel free to check them out.

Sadly, This Person Does Not Exist, does not exist. Probably to be turned into some sort of commercial product at this point.

I found a site called Text Art that has a bunch of dither box drawing character art. Seems to be a place to copypasta those comments you've probably seen around the internet. I put it right next to Chris' ASCII Art collection.

I've linked to CivitAI. It seems to be an emerging hub to share generative art and the models used to produce those pieces.

I changed the Free Music Archive link to point to the main site instead of the creative commons community. Seems that community got wiped so that link went to an empty page. The archive still seems to be potentially useful though.

I found a page that collects all the government travel advisories and brings them together in a single place. The way they figure out the actual advisory level seems a bit broken for some countries. Probably just an update breaking things, but they do link directly to the information so it's easy to double check the information. Pretty handy to get a global view of travel outside of one's own government vantage.

I dropped the link to the COVID-19 dashboard. It's still killing about a thousand people a day and long COVID seems to pose a life altering disability risk but the data isn't as useful to me at this point. That dashboard's also begun to get flaky over the last little while, so I assume it'll stop being accurate at some point if it isn't already as the effort is directed elsewhere.

Added a link to the fascinating Eye Candy - Visual Technique Library page in the Media References Library section. It's a taxonomy of visual editing techniques that link to dozens of each such technique from various videos. It's also probably the fastest way to get a photosensitive seizure, so please be careful.

In other AI ruining things news, the Mushroom Observer wiki now requires you to get an account, probably to prevent scraping. They now have only one public article on "MO Images for Machine Learning." All I can say is pass. Sad, because it was a pretty great resource.

I've found 3 new wikis though on typewriters, mechanical human interface devices like keyboards, and lighthouses. These are at the bottom of the Reference Library section.

I found a site called Prime Curios that seems to list as many facts as possible about every number. I see it as a sort of complement to the OEIS so I've placed it right below it in the Mathematics. That section has been split into one for Mathematics that has been moved to the Reference Library and another for Algorithms and Data Structures that stays where it was in Programming. I keep programming outside the References Library just because it's so big given it's my main hobby and day job and the web has so many works on and about it.

I've linked to the page that links to the 3 Illustrated/Animated protocol works by Michael Driscoll. The link is called Byte by Byte Protocols and it's in the Protocols section of Programming.

I've added a link to the OpenMP specification in the Languages section of Programming. I knew of it for a while but I'd never really found it that useful until I watched a video serious by Bisqwit that explained the real advantage of it is the ability to add annotations to a C/C++ program that should allow the program to compile even when there's no OpenMP support or parallel hardware. I get it now. I always saw it as more of a half measure below a full multiprocessor architecture in your program using something like threads or shaders. The ability to take some trivially parallelizable section and do just that in a way that the code reads the same sequentially or in parallel is actually pretty cool.

Linked to Zed Shaw's selection of resources for learning various programming tools. Sort of linked without reading. Maybe someone finds it useful.

I dropped my link to Dear ImGui. I like the simplicity of immediate mode GUI frameworks, but this one has poor X11 tiling window hinting which makes programs written using it kind of a no-go for these environments. It's great for compositing window managers but I prefer tiling and it's a pain in those environments. If you're writing for Windows only though, it's still pretty great.

Added a link to the OpenBLAS library in the C Libraries section of Programming. The BLAS specification is fairly standard and there are many implementations. Having a go to one is probably worth while. I'm not saying this one's optimal, but it seems commonly used.

In operating system news, I went through and cleaned out a bunch of them that haven't been updated in over a year. Seems 2021 many people gave up on their operating systems. Essence, Visopsys, Phantom OS, Barrelfish OS, Project Oberon, Snowdrop OS, Solar OS, and Collapse OS all didn't make the cut. On the bright side, Serenity OS is really getting me excited again for desktop operating systems.

I removed my link to FoundryVTT. My group and I made great use of it over the last few years. It was really innovative at the start of the pandemic. I might still recommend it, but less and less so with every update. Also, we can now game in person again. Happy I bought it when I did. Happy to move on now.

Dropped my link to D&D Beyond. Greed rots everything around me.

Found an amazing Cognitive Biases Map in the Wikimedia Commons. It's an SVG that links to all the cognitive bias articles on Wikipedia and does so clustering them into their general failure mode. Really stunning piece of work.

Thanks to that Lighthouse Directory in the reference library I found out about the Lighthouse Map. This is a map showing the characteristic of every lighthouse the author had in their dataset. It shows range, colour, and interval by animation. Really cool to zoom in and look around the coasts. It's not real time or anything connected to an updating source of truth, just a static animation.

In Radio Stream organization I removed a bunch of stations I'm no longer listening to. Nothing against them, I've just unfortunately fallen in love with Happy Hardcore. So much energy! I'm listening to it right now and it's been responsible for the last few hours of typing this out.

From Leisure I moved the Openings.moe, 0x40, and Listen to Wikipedia pages into Radio Streams. It's hard to know the right place for things like this. This seemed to make a bit more sense.

It seems Keygen FM finally kicked the bucket. The stream's been dead for a while. I used to routinely listen to it, so it's a bit sad. The bright side is all it's music is still available on the Mod Archive and KeygenMusic.tk. Sadly, neither of those are audio streams though. I might put together something for myself if the copyright's tenable.

Radio Record's stream still technically works, but they keep trying to break it (probably to get you to the website instead). They've got some good electronic music stations. Sadly they insist on interjecting now and then to remind you who you're listening to. A couple of the more popular stations seem to have news read on them. Still ad free, but annoying. I don't have a stream directly linked anymore because there are about a hundred different subgenre streams and picking just ones' hard. I wouldn't be surprised if I stop recommending them at some point. Up side is they have a really broad set of subgenre specialization.

I recently went through all my RSS feeds to clear out people who's art I find less appealing these days for one reason or another.

In additions, I've added Extra Punctuation by Yahtzee. I find his essays pretty on point given his experience with reviewing and critiquing the games industry for the last decade or more.

Andreas Kling's Car Talks are a treasure-trove of passion for software development. The more I watch the Serenity project, the more drive I'm recovering. I have no idea how to describe succinctly what it is, I just think they've not given up despite how it seems society has. They're not afraid of hard work and don't care that you think it's impossible to do what they're doing before your eyes. It's the anti-learned helplessness intervention I think many people (including myself) need.

A friend of mine introduced me to Wes Cecil who in turn introduced me to Jacques Barzun. I'm still going through the over 150 hours of lectures he's uploaded. I have yet to be disappointed.

Added links to Shaun and Ordinary Things who've peaked my interest for some of their essays.

Lastly in the YouTube section is The Honest Pre-flight Safety Video, which I wish I'd seen sooner. Great information and I love how it satirizes the traditional pre-flight safety information.

I renamed Feeds to Blogs. I'd call it writings, but there's people who create web demos and others who create web comics in there. I'd call it art, but that's not a really helpful category. Either way I've removed a bunch of links to sources I'm not finding as much value from or who've stopped publishing.

One new addition to industry research is Hindenburg Research who seems to have made a real professional living out of exposing business frauds. It's great to have someone who's figured out how to make a lot of money making society a slightly better place. We'll have to see how it plays out, but if we can get less grifting, I'm all for it.

The Security Now Curricula's gone. Seems Twit shut down the wiki. That show's gearing up for an end at episode 999 anyway, so it's probably fine to have been the boon it was for many years. There are other resources that can teach you all it taught me in significantly less time than the roughly 90,000 hours of runtime it's had. Steve's just always had a great way of explaining something in a way that's really easy to understand so it was great to be able to point people to the Cliffs Notes. It'd be great to go mine those out into a standalone resource at the end.

The SIGBOVIK (Special Interest Group on Harry Qatar Bovik) website seems to have disappeared. I can't really remember why I linked that.

I've added Speedrun.com because, wow, that's so much fun to watch someone just exploit the heck out of every bug in a game you enjoyed.

In Leisure, I've added a section for PICO-8 games of interest. There were so many pseudo retro emulators, but it seems the PICO-8 won. There are now a really great variety of free titles for it. Some like Celeste even went on to full commercial titles. That's so exciting. I really hope kids and novice game developers are able to find a fun time in learning to use the platform.

I dropped A Dark Room. It's alright, but I'd rather people try out anything other than an idler or clicker.

In Leisure, I created a section in Demos for Webpage Demos. There were a bunch of these sort of self contained web art projects sitting there that should have been collected sooner to reduce the size of the top level section.

In the Scale Of section I've added the Emoji and Pokémon scale site. Kind of fun to look through.

In sad news, it looks like ASCIIcker has begun to glitch out. Such a mysterious project. Still happy I got to experience it.

Finally I've linked Inspiral Web because spirographs rock.

Yeah, this is a huge update, but there was a bunch of house cleaning in this that lead one thing to another.