Links
(last updated 2021-08-30)
Putting the “inter” into “the internet”! Categories and links are in no particular order.
Table of Contents
Blogs and Newsletters
- qntm
- Adam Cadre
- Computers Are Bad
- Bruce Schneier/CRYPTO-GRAM
- Hackaday
- Matthew Butterick
- 50 Years of Text Games
Newsletters:
- Tom Scott
- Ryan North
- Dracula Daily
- HEATED
- Welcome to Hell world
- They Might Be Giants
Design/Art
- The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack: Do you, like me, have a strange fascination with those pixel text mode fonts from the bowels of the ROMs of classic computers? Want to emulate the style of the IBM BIOS, or evoke the PC-98 aesthetic in your typography? My friend, you have arrived at text mode font Valhalla. Fun fact: I used this resource for the heading fonts on this very website!
- Practical Typography: Some good information and guides on how to keep your typography sharp.[hover for note]
- MDN Web Docs: This is an excellent resource for learning the full stack of web development and it’s my go-to resource for referencing anything that pops up in web design. Great for teaching accessibility support, great for beginners to experts.
- Piskel: A great web tool for putting together pixel art sprites and animations; I use it for way too much, including my custom 88x31s and the background tiling for this website. I’ve never needed one, but for a fully-featured desktop pixel art editor, I’m told Aseprite is the king of the space.
- lospec: In the vein of pixel art, this is a tool for finding and trading pixel art palettes, whether they’re for real or fantasy hardware or are just some colours that complement each other nicely.
- Metaflop Modulator: An interesting web tool to synthesise your own funky-looking fonts from four different foundations, based on Donald Knuth’s Metafont system (you know Donald Knuth, right? The Art of Programming?). A lot of fun! I used this to make the 1.0 dFRAG logo if anyone remembers that.
Music
- generative.fm: Ambient music that generates forever without loops.
- musicForProgramming: It’s music… wait for it… for programming. Nice and ambient.
- BeepBox: Tool for sketching chiptune melodies with a simple piano roll/pattern tracking web interface.
- OverClocked ReMix: High-quality genre-spanning covers of beloved video game tunes by many, many different artists.
- Battle of the Bits: A place for chiptune-oriented music competitions – major contests, one-hour battles and all the rest of it. Lots of great chiptune artists hang out and compete here! (I haven’t been on for ages myself, though.)
Tech
- Project Gemini: An interesting new protocol designed to deliver the most “bang for your buck” in terms of serving text-based content over the internet; described as slightly heavier than Gopher but much lighter than the web (HTTP/HTML). If you’re interested in Neocities for nerdy reasons, you may find this interesting. I’ll update you guys if/when I get a capsule set up on Geminispace myself.
- nmap: The classic robust port-scanning tool.
Educational
- Quantum Computing for the Very Curious: A very interesting text that teaches you quantum computing (given you know linear algebra and some other stuff beforehand). A key aspect of it is that it drills you on the key points throughout reading it and then drills you on them on follow-up emails (in a manageable, spaced-out way) that keeps the information in your long-term memory.
- Learn CW Online: Learn Morse code using the Koch method! You’re going to be listening to it, like a real ham radio operator, none of this namby-pamby written stuff.
- ChemGuide: I’ve been lucky to have a series of very good chemistry teachers at school, but this resource is stellar for high school chemistry, covering all the areas of the syllabus in detail and clearly marking common student pitfalls.
- Chemistry LibreTexts: Another great chemistry resource/reference, extending into university-level content.
- Project Euler: A “series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve”.
- Advent of Code: Another programming challenge, but seasonal (25 problems to solve, released each day of December). Keep your brain warm in winter (if you live in the Northern Hemisphere).
- Project Gutenberg: Free public domain ebooks! Read Shakespeare, read Moby Dick, read the ancient Greek philosophers, or don’t, I’m not your English teacher.
Games
- Nethack: The roguelike nearest and dearest to my ASCII heart.
<3 - Open Source Game Clones: Play open-source remakes/releases of great old games. (i.e. for free)
- Zachtronics: These guys make cool programming games, plus other stuff too, sometimes.
Webcomics
Yes, yes, everyone knows about xkcd and SMBC. This is a place to mention the slightly more obscure ones I like.
- E-merl.com: A collection of various runs of comic strips behind all of which Daniel Merlin Goodbrey is the architect. Entertaining, experimental, funny.
- Subnormality: Difficult to describe. Some of the conceits of the strips can be a little cliché or preachy, but then there are others that just won’t leave your head ever.
Utilities
- TRANSLATE: Quick tool for translating binary, hex, octal, base64, etc.
- Desmos: The graphing calculator the cool kids use.
- Guerilla Mail: Use a disposable temporary email address for whatever!
- Wildwalks: For people living in New South Wales, Australia – a great little online bushwalking guide to find trails and tracks from casual strolls to hardcore treks.
- Internet Archive: View old versions of dead or updated websites and find books, audio and software of every flavour archived in their libraries. Absolutely indispensible and an incredible public service.
- sfxia: Cool retro video game sound effect generator for Windows.
Misc.
- 88x31 button collection: Collection of those 88x31 buttons that have seen a revival on Neocities.
- Textfiles: Trove of text files archived from old (80s, 90s) BBS systems covering a very, very wide range of topics and written by people of wildly varying reliability. The guy who runs it, Jason Scott, works at the Internet Archive and actually did a documentary on the BBS phenomenon. If you’re on Neocities, you’re probably going to find BBSs interesting, seeing as though there’s the same retro-independent-exploring-the-internet vibe.
- webgbcam: A web re-creation of the Game Boy camera for your webcam. Use it to take lo-res selfies and pictures of other objects. Maybe even use it to make a cool album cover, I don’t know.