Miscellaneous Links

This page contains amusing and/or informative links on a variety of subjects.

• Science Links
• Game Links
• Other Links

Science Links

• The Apollo Guidance Computer website provides an immense amount of technical detail on the electronic control systems of the historical Apollo and Gemini spacecraft, including software emulations.
• NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day features tons of photographies, illustrations, and animations related to astronomy, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
• Chromoscope offers a panoramic view of the universe, in all the wavelengths from gamma rays to radio waves that have been observed by telescopes. Photopic Sky Survey covers only visual light, but at a resolution of 5,000 megapixels.
• Curt Herzstark’s Curta was one of the last mechanical calculators and an amazing piece of engineering. The German website provides ample background information and a Flash simulator. You can find English information at Curta Handhelds and The CURTA Calculator Page.
• The sixteen multi-megabyte GLOBE Project Data Tiles contain geographical data for the entire land surface of the Earth, at a grid spacing of 1 km (planar) by 1 m (vertical). They were assembled from satellite photographs and put up for free download by America’s National Geophysical Data Center. You can also order the whole package on CD-ROM for US$25.
• The Latin Library is a magnificient collection of Latin texts from ancient Rome to modern Europe. Timothy R. Carnahan’s Academy for Ancient Texts attempts to establish a similar collection across all ancient eras and languages.
• Natural Earth is a collection of free vector and raster maps, showing cultural and physical data at scales of 1:10 million, 1:50 million, and 1:110 million.

Game Links

• Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is my favorite Roguelike game. Based on the abandoned Dungeon Crawl, Stone Soup adds an unusually good interface and help system, as well as integrated tile support.
• Game Rankings collects and averages reviews for video games. Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes perform the same service for games as well as other media, such as films.
• GameFAQs hosts thousands of fan-written walkthroughs, puzzle solutions, story outlines, guides to secrets, and whatever else you might want to know about a given video game.
• Chuck Pliske’s website, The Genie’s Lamp, provides oodles of information on the classic strategy game series Heroes of Might and Magic. Chuck graciously offered to host my Manual Addenda for the third and fourth game in the series, so you can find them there as well.
• Infocom created a number of classic text adventures in the early 1980s, then collapsed after pumping their resources into an ill-fated business product. The Story of Infocom (9.04 MB, PDF) analyzes the company’s rise and fall, and tells a fascinating story about the dawn of commercial computer games. – The Interactive Fiction Archive also offers many other resources related to text adventures, so browse around a bit.
• Mainframe Games for DOS provides executables and/or source code for really old computer games such as Adventure. Classic Empire specializes in one of the earliest computer-only strategy games, and Icemark attempts to recreate and enhance the famous Lords of Midnight series.
• MobyGames hosts titles, release dates, developers, publishers, short descriptions, and box shots for just about any video game every commercially released on any platform that has ever existed.
• Want to enjoy a typical computer role-playing game without the tedium of actually having to control your characters? Download Progress Quest and get all the gameplay of critically acclaimed CRPGs such as EverQuest or Dungeon Siege – for free!
• Sloperama Productions is the website of Tom Sloper, a game designer with over 20 years of experience. Tom provides lots of very valuable (if somewhat sobering) advice for wannabe game developers. Definitely check it out if you think about entering this industry.

Other Links

• Yossi Kreinin’s C++ FQA (Frequently Questioned Answers) is an extensive critique of Marshall Cline’s C++ FAQ by someone who doesn’t like C++ very much. Cathartic for everyone who can’t understand what’s supposed to be so great about this unwieldy Frankenstein monster of a language.
• Gibson Research Corporation is the slightly wacky website of Steve Gibson’s one-man operation. Don’t let the screaming font compositions scare you away, there’s some great stuff to be found, including an explanation and demonstration of the ClearType font rendering technology and the Shields Up! page featuring a test of how visible your machine is to hackers on the Internet.
• I Love Typography hosts a vast amount of incredibly detailed and comprehensive articles on typography. “More than you ever wanted to know” almost certainly applies here – you have been warned!
• Kids these days don’t know how good they have it! Try the text-only Lynx browser for the authentic 1992 experience. Amazingly, Lynx is still being actively maintained, and quite usable for web browsing if you’re paranoid about malware.
• Visit the Obsolete Computer Museum for information and pictures of the computing behemoths of yore, from archaic Altairs to “luggable” CP/M machines and the popular home computers of the 80s. Great fun if you remember fighting the flimsy ZX-81 keyboard.
• The community-edited list of Obsolete Skills contains hundreds of amusing entries, focused mostly on electric and mechanical devices that dropped out of use in the last couple of decades.
• Silent PC Review offers lots of product reviews and background information for anyone trying to build a fast PC that doesn’t sound like a vacuum cleaner. Of particular interest is the article Power Supply Fundamentals and Recommendations which sheds light on this notoriously misunderstood subject.
• Silent UK – Urban Exploration & Underground Photography hosts a multitude of breathtaking images of cities by night, along with documentations on how they were taken.
• Solo violin covers of popular soundtracks: Lindsey Stirling does Skyrim (with Peter Hollens), Zelda, and Lord of the Rings; and Jason Yang does Skyrim and Game of Thrones.
• The Unix-Haters Handbook (ed. Garfinkel, Weise & Strassmann) is an enormously entertaining collection of true stories about an “Un-Operating System: unreliable, unintuitive, unforgiving, unhelpful, and underpowered. Little is more frustrating than trying to force Unix to do something useful and nontrivial.” The book was originally published by IDG Books in 1994 but is now available as a free download. While outdated and intentionally exaggerated, it still contains many truths about the state of Unix (and C++) just before Windows took over.
• Visually makes data visualization software, but more importantly hosts tons of amusing and interesting user-created charts, such as the classic Metal Bands per population. You can get new daily infographics on all their social networking profiles.