Around the Web 3

Music of the Day: Monody – found this a couple weeks back and can’t stop listening to it. Haunting and catchy all at once.

Just a nice quick post today, sharing a random assortment of things from around the internet that are useful or interesting in some way. If anyone ever, ever tells you that they’re bored, it just means they don’t know what’s right at their fingertips online.

Useful:

• Goodreads: If you read as much as I do, Goodreads is going to be pretty useful for keeping track of which books and series you’ve read, and for suggesting new ones based on your ratings of them.
• Wolfram Alpha Calculator: This site is just incredible. Ask it things! It can answer anything from “How tall is the tallest tree?” to “How many eggs would fit in the sun?” to “How many calories are in a cubic light-year of butter?”… or compare/contract companies/stocks, tell you the odds of a given hand in poker, track the exact location the International Space Station is flying over right now, show you a starmap of what someone in New York would see if they could see the stars at a certain time, and a ton of other things. It’s just a really cool website.
• Color Blender: Ever try to figure out just the right shade between two other colors? This tool takes the guesswork out of it! Great for graphic and web design.
• Soundrown: One of many similar ‘white noise’ sites, Soundrown lets you listen to things like ocean waves, rainfall, fire crackling, or even a blend of multiple sounds at your preferred volume settings. Handy for when you need to drown out distractions or just relax inside your own head.
• The Wayback Machine (Archive.Org): As useful as the internet is, it’s not always as permanent as it might seem. Websites can disappear overnight, taking with them all of their content. The Wayback Machine provides a way to recover some of that content, or just to visit nostalgic sites from your childhood that may not be around anymore. It’s not perfect and has trouble with image files due to how they are usually stored on separate servers, but it’s still good to know this exists!
• Snopes.com: Snopes should be mandatory training for anyone who creates a social media account (or forwards emails a lot). They do a great deal of fact-checking to confirm or bust those posts you see constantly about how this politician is secretly in the KKK (usually traced to an internet image board as a joke) or that kid went missing and needs you to SHARE AND LIKE to spread the word (probably happened in the 90s if it happened at all). If there’s even the slightest chance that what you’re posting could in fact be a bunch of nonsense? Do a quick search for it on Snopes, for your dignity’s sake. As a bonus, your friends and family will appreciate the vastly-diminished flood of junk posts and emails coming their way. Also good for identifying email scams, so copy-paste a few lines of that email to see if it’s legit!

Fun:

• The Cutting Room Floor: You may have gathered that I enjoy video games, and have for a long time. Just as football has its statistics and rivalries and history, so too does gaming. For those interested in the minutiae and quirks of games past, sites like The Cutting Room Floor are a great way to kill a few hours. This one identifies and summarizes everything that was cut from a game before it was launched – usually content left on the cartridge or disc but unused in the game itself. Some really interesting stuff here, if you poke around!
• Ancient DOS Games: Speaking of games past, I’ve recently been playing ADG here in the background while I work, and it’s brought back a lot of memories of games from the early 90’s – some of which I’d forgotten entirely. It’s been a fun, nostalgic trip full of those “Oh hey, I’ve seen that before!” moments when my brain snaps to attention. I’m pretty sure every DOS game I played has shown up on this playlist at one point or another. If not, then the very similar Lazy Game Reviews certainly covered it.
• Silk: A simple but elegant art-making site. Combine this with the white-noise site above or your favorite music on Youtube for a relaxing afternoon!

That’s all for now. If I can’t keep this kind of post short, I can’t make -any- post short.

 

~ by jumiaurum on March 7, 2016.