Mon, 07 Mar 2005
I was doing a bit of browsing today and ran across several websites that I figured I'd record for later reference.
- BookCrossing - pass books around to people, record your thoughts about received books on the website.
- The Online Books Page - listing of over twenty thousand books freely available on the web.
- Internet Book List - looks like an attempt to create an IMDB for books. Good idea, only ten thousand books so far. And no ISBN search. Compare to All Consuming and...
- Internet Speculative Fiction Database - more or less the same thing, but aimed specifically at SF. Includes information on what awards books have participated in. Didn't see any good way to search by ISBN.
- The Library of Babel: Links - one blogger's collection of other blogs that deal with books (though the collection is, of course, incomplete).
- BookSpot.com - didn't really look around this site all that much, and the appearance seems a little too corporate for my tastes. Still, might be useful.
Mailinator seems a nice service for disposable email addresses. Use an @mailinator.com email address, and view the received emails on the web. Note that there is no privacy for received email.
I've used a service like this in the past. It can be useful for situations where you need a single email from someone and don't want your real address being harvested.
Just as reference for later perusal:
- In Defense of Fahrner Image Replacement: nice description of a technique for adding images to a website without the <img> tag and with better underlying content for image-incapable browsers. Requires CSS.
- css Zen Garden: looks like this has some nice examples of CSS use. Linked from the above article.
- Web design postcards: Collection of little snippets of tips and such for web design. Need to go and read through them.
Andrew Lipson's LEGO Page has some pretty impressive constructions made from LEGO bricks. The mathamatical models are nice, but some of the reproductions of Escher drawings are just amazing. (Even if he did cheat a little on "Waterfall".)
newsmap is a visualization of Google News. It gives you headlines in color-coded bands by category, sized by how many places are reporting the same story, and shaded by age. This is information pornography of the highest order. It uses flash. It may accomplish what even Strongbad and weebl and bob have so far failed to do -- get me to install Flash on my home computer.
newsmap comes from the same person who wrote social circles, which also looks interesting. I may see if I can put together something similar with Perl and Graphviz.
What time is it? Well, no one knows for sure
Interesting discussion of different timescales (as produced by differing treatments of leap seconds) and possible consequences for the differences.
