Cool Links
Last modified: Fri Dec 29 00:12:45 EST 1995
Hey NetHeads!
Many people have visited my Cool Links page
since I began it in late 1993 (two years ago!). Well, it's now got
somewhere over 470 links and it doesn't serve the original purpose for
which I created it - helping me get to the pages I like because the
original Mosaic's idea of bookmarks was lame.
As such, this page is now dead. It's still here for the people who
find it off the net, but if you're looking for cool stuff instead
of links pointing to stuff which no longer exists, try one of the
links below, which hopefully isn't dead:
Quick ref:
Books,
Magazines,
Art,
Computers / Graphics Research,
U.S. Government,
Numerical Software,
Electronic shopping,
Check it out,
Miscellaney
For a good introduction to why WWW and Mosaic are cool, check out
this
article by the New York Times's John Markoff.
For extremely detailed information on WWW, look at the
WWW FAQ.
For answers to most any frequently asked question, check out the
Usenet FAQs.
On-line books:
- Outtakes from Stephen O. Muskie
- VoyagerCo - publishers of the recently censored-by-Apple Who Built America?
- Possibly the most creative and beautiful HTML pages I've ever
seen. They make heavy use of Netscape extensions, and the
results are worth a visit.
- Penguin On Demand - from Penguin Publishing
- A series of Forbes ASAP articles by George Gilder, derived from his forthcoming book Telecosm. Useful as an introduction to political issues of the Internet, the telcos, and all kinds of stuff. Highly recommended.
- Lamont Wood's Web Site
to promote his book
The Net
After Dark - what do those crazy netizens do at night,
anyway?
- Banned Books On-Line - an exhibit of books suppressed or censored by legal authorities
- The Doomsday Brunette by John M. Zakour
- Bruce Sterling's Hacker Crackdown, or
click here for hypertext.
- Project Gutenberg Home Page - These folks have hundreds of public domain texts, including
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
- Project Bartleby (``I prefer not to'') also digitizes works for the Internet, including W. Strunk's The Elements of Style
- The complete works of William Shakespeare
- Various science fiction resources
- The On-line Books Page - over 400 books, many in HTML
- The Encyclopedia Britannica
- Philip
Greenspun's
Travels With Samantha and
Berlin/Prague. For all the current stuff, check out
The Web Travel Review.
- The
Bastard Operator From Hell by Simon Travaglia
- Eyes Do More Than See - a short story by Isaac Asimov
On-line magazines:
- Bunnyhop Magazine, recently got sued by Matt Groening for, um, recontextualizing Binky (a Life In Hell character)
- word - Issues. Culture. Bzzzz!
- The Economist - good, non-fluffy, reporting
- Upside Magazine - high
technology business. The articles are much more detailed
and insightful than most junk you read about the
net.
- Adbusters' Culture Jammer's Headquarters - wonderful parodies of corporate ad campaigns
- Suck - they suck, and they're proud of it.
- Urban Desires - an interactive magazine of metropolitan passions, some parts not for kids
- Popular Mechanics is now available, including their ever popular progress dude.
- eye, from
Toronto, is having a contest to find the worst article in the popular press
about the Internet. Click here for details on the
Media
Moron of the Month Contest.
- Playboy Magazine - Hef. What a dude.
- Penthouse Magazine - uselessly slow net connection...
- Libido Magazine - not for kids (note: new address)
- Skeptic Magazine - "Skeptic kicks ass." - Penn Jillette
- VIBE magazine - general interest / rap music / etc.
- Time/Warner Pathfinder
- WIRED Magazine
(techno-hippie-net-heads-R-us)
- If you like Wired, you might be able to figure out The Spew
- Magical Blend - interviews with interesting authors, generally left-leaning (Magical Blend = herbal medicine) - a good read
- Axcess Magazine - "art, cyberculture, music, and style"
- interScape Magazine - Canadian general-interest
- Mother Jones ("progressive" politics)
- Whole Earth 'Lectronic Magazine,
part of the WELL - lots
of really interesting reading.
- Ziff-Davis Publishing - PCWeek, MacWeek, and
other technical rags.
- InterText - an electronically-distributed magazine of fiction.
- International Teletimes (Canadian general-interest electronic magazine)
- Postmodern Culture - a fairly academic journal of
interdisciplinary criticism.
- BLINK magazine - a less serious journal of
postmodern culture - reads much like WIRED.
- The Global Network Navigator
- a publication of O'Rielly And Associates - a collection of
information of interest to net people.
- EINet Galaxy
- a guide to network information services.
- The Electronic Newsstand
- a large collection of other magazines
- PRESENCE - Teleoperators and Virtual Environments
- Verbiage Magazine - short fiction
- The Heuristic Squelch - humor newspaper at U.C. Berkeley
- Your MoM - humor newspaper at Columbia
- The Harvard Advocate - quarterly fiction/poetry/art/essay magazine
- Zarking Fardwarks - a publication of The Oxford University Douglas Adams Society
You can even order standards documents from
The Document Center.
The
E-Zine List provides a comprehensive list of Zines and other magazines
of less general interest.
You may also want to check out
Internet Talk Radio
(or, click here for an
alternate archive).
How about some on-line newspapers?
On-line "fine" art:
- HTML art compositions
- äda'web
- jodi.org - interesting, if you can figure it out
- ISDM.exit.ISDM - Interactive Study and Documentation on Multimedia - very slow, but looks nice
- the place - HTML art composition from the @art gallery.
- WaxWEB - a hypermedia,
narrative, electronic film: WAX or the discovery of television among
the bees
- J. K. Potter: Biomorphosis - neat Photoshop hacks
- Princeton's Art 210,
Art 211
(alternate version),
and Art 371 sometimes have interesting images of classic works available. May not work for folks outside Princeton.
- Also, check out Princeton's Mappamundi Project, which lets you query images from a large database. Again, may not work for folks outside Princeton.
- H.R. Giger pictures (he designed the alien in Alien)
- Who's Got the Body? - extremely cool student exhibits at New York's School of Visual Arts
- Art on the Net - numerous galleries and things
- The Andy Warhol Museum Home Page - really slow net connection
- Art Crimes - graffiti and such
- 911 Gallery - electronic media art, etc.
- Ansel Adams: Fiat Lux
- The New York Web's Expo, featuring work by Dave Bradford and Kim E. Hall
- Harlan Wallach's ARTHOLE - I tell 'ya, those Wallach's get around.
- International Interactive Genetic Art II
- The Art Gallery - an excellent server in Switzerland, containing gems like:
- Eye Candy - very nice, but requires HotWired registration. Boo, hiss.
- OTIS (Operative Term Is Stimulate) - synnergistic network art (old site)
- ANIMA (Arts Network for Integrated Media Applications)
- Australian National University, Art History (huge database of prints)
- Various on-line art experiments and projects - lots more pointers!
- Comics:
For an extensive list of other comics available on the net, check out
the Comics 'n stuff! page.
Click here for pointers other art museums and resources.
Here are some particular sites of computers and graphics research interest:
For an amusing diversion, read David Woolley's History of PLATO, one of the first multi-user on-line communities.
U.S. Government documents:
Sources of numerical software:
Electronic shopping crud:
- TAG Online Mall
- The Electric Sex Shop - sadly, the first Web site I've found that supports Netscape's secure transmission.
- Internet Media Services' Buy It! Online
- includes Safe Computing which sells some really neat ergonomic equipment
- Infohaus would love to sell you information.
- Shopping 2000 - lots of real companies, gaudiest shopping yet
- Netstuff Home Page - joke t-shirts about the net, including "The Net is full. GO AWAY."
- Also includes the export-restricted Perl/RSA shirt! Get yours now, but don't export it.
- CDnow! The Internet Music Store -
huge selection, plus the online database seems to have all the same
information as those kiosks in record stores. Query systems are
different for pop & classical music. Very slick! Generic domestic
CD's seem to cost $13.97, and shipping is pretty cheap.
- The NetMarket Company - supports PGP-encrypted transactions!
- The Avid Explorer
- The Computer Tailor
- Access Market Square
- eMall
- i-Mall - includes
the deal of the day
- The Internet Shopping Network - extensive catalog of computer products, brought to you by the Home Shopping Network (television sleaze)
- The Internet Book Shop
- Hot Hot Hot Sauce Shop
- The American Pacific Tea and Spice Company
- The Racquet Workshop - tennis gear
- Sell-it on the WWW - a variety of stuff for sale
- Multimedia Ink Designs - more stuff for sale
- The Webvertiser - you guessed it...
- Organic Online - more of the same, but fairly well done
- Condom Country - yee haw!
- CyberSight - cool, but tries too hard
- GNN Business Pages
- The Internet Store
- And, this section wouldn't be complete without the ultimate Green Card
net-sleazoids, Cybersell - laughable,
compared to their competition, above
Here are some other interesting things you may want to check out:
- Words that could be confusing and embarrassing in the UK & US
- The weather
- Awesome politics
- Weird Science - Kids, don't try this at home
- HTML Graphics!
- An interview with
William Gibson by a Swedish TV reporter.
- Sin City - The Web Home of Penn & Teller
- Don Hopkins Home Page has lots of cool stuff, especially if you appreciate good computer hacking
- Wondering how many different kinds of WWW browsers are out there? Check out BrowserWatch, which keeps statistics on this stuff, and can point you to other WWW statistics pages.
- Sick of hot and exciting WWW pages? Check out Stephen Turner's Coldlist
- Instead of using a dictionary or thesaurus, give WordNet a try.
- Something I'll consult before I drive cross-country: The Speed Trap Registry
- On-line Plugs for Traditional Media
- Toy Story - completely computer animated, awesome film from Pixar
- Space: Above and Beyond
- The Simpson's Springfield Page - currently featuring Who Shot Mr. Burns?
- The Discovery Channel and The Learning Channel have complete air schedules on-line
- MovieLink 777-Film has movie listings (what's playing and where) all across the country. Extremely cool!
- TV Net - find out what's on US television, get addresses of stations, etc.
- TV One - also has tonight's TV shows
- Johnny Mnemonic - a new movie based on the William Gibson short-story, unfortunately starring Keanu Reeves
- Tank Girl, that totally rockin' movie has like a totally rad page, dude.
- MTV Networks now has its own Web page, presumably after paying off Adam Curry
- MTV's page isn't nearly as cool as the older Adam Curry stuff, now vaguely available as The MetaVerse, unfortunately now polluted with advertising
- The 1995 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue
- with two backup servers: this one and that one.
- all three servers are pretty heavily loaded...
- Star Trek: Voyager, Official Web Page - wow! - includes audio and video clips
- MCA / Universal Cyberwalk - coming attractions, movie "premiers", and other stuff
- You Will, won't you? (AT&T marketing
thing crawls onto the net. Film at 11.)
- Card Games
- Computer Games / Multimedia Stuff
- If you're trying to install SLIP or something on a PC, there's
an astounding collection of well-written and useful documents
at PC
Lube & Tune
- Pissed at your cable company's lame converter box? Wish you could
make high-quality copies of digital recordings? Check out
The Home Recording
Rights Coalition
- Imminent death of the net? How about the VocalTec Internet Phone? For $49 plus whatever it takes to get your PC on the net, you can speak to anybody else who did the same thing.
- Feel the need for speed? Go fly a MiG 29. Have a party.
- John Conway's Game of Life - implemented with WWW forms.
- Prehistoric cave art in the recently discovered Combe d'Arc - pretty pictures, and now available in French and English!
- Federal Express - track your packages in real-time. Cool!
- Why are There So Few Female Computer Scientists? - an MIT tech-report by Ellen Spertus, 1991. Still quite relevant.
- The Gallup Organization - take a Gallup Poll. Be sure to lie. Mess 'em up!
- The Electric Postcard - send your friends a postcard via the Web.
- Life getting you down? Try DeathNet - An Information Service Specializing in End-of-Life Issues
- Is Schrödinger's Cat Object-Oriented? Enquiring minds want to know.
- How To Talk New Age - vocabulary lessons for your karma
- The Metaverse (no longer
MTV.COM) - shopping, music stuff, annoying advertisements, and more. (I'm still not sure where to put this - "stuff", "shopping", I dunno. You figure it out.)
- Booze
- Be afraid. Very afraid.
- News Of The Weird - another weird column every week
- WWWF Grudge Match - Flipper vs. Jaws? Barney vs. Wesley Crusher? Priceless fun.
- Durex - a major condom manufacturer penetrates the Web
- DigiCrime - ``make a crime out of bytes''
- Technology Company Engine - generate a fictitious corporate profile
- Peeping Tom Homepage - pointers to over 80 video cameras somehow linked to the Web
- InterMania - listings of the Internet's Millionaires
- Gothic Pick-Up Lines plus lots of other network tidbits and jokes
- Project Akimbo, containing weird audio clips
(not ready yet, but coming soon)
- The Yuckiest Site on the Internet, featuring Cockroach World!
- Miss Internet 1995 - ``visit each girl and vote'' - ugggh
- The Exploding Head Page. Boom!
- The text of the Unabomber's manifesto, Industrial Society and its Future There's also a nice HTML version available.
- Why do shining, happy, plastic people live in The Spot and why should I care?
- The Particles of Star Trek - attempts to catalog all those weird kinds of radiations and whatnot
- Join now! It's The Oval With Points Fan Club!
- The Schwa Corporation - the future of the planet is at stake!
- Charles Haynes's Radical Sex Page - something for everyone, I guess.
- Jammin' Johns - "It's More Than Just Bathroom Humor. It's Music to Your Rear!"
- How to make $95,093.35 by depositing a piece of junk mail in your bank account
- Free (?!??!) E-Mail accounts
- FreeMark
- Juno - you just have to give them some demographic information...
- The Camille Paglia checklist
- An interview with Dr. Frederick A. Murphy about the Ebola Virus
- The Swedish Chef (Bork! Bork! Bork!) now has his own Web page.
- 50 years of Band-Aid - What could I do, but share our found bit of history with you?
- McChurch is open to all sipritual customers, regardless of race, creed or temperament.
- Now you can gamble at the Internet On-Line Offshore Electronic Casino
- The Church of Scientology is trying to censor alt.religion.scientology, where people say how stupid it really is. Here are all the gory details.
- Really Stupid Ways to Injure Yourself
- The Silly Zone, brought to you from those kings of kitchenware, Spatula City
- The Enhanced for Netscape Hall of Shame
- For Your Eyes Only... - not for kids
- Real Astrology by Rob Brezsny
- Stark's Museum of Vacuum Cleaners
- stevec's Webhappy pages - includes enormous amounts of weird stuff, including
- Barbie, the Plastic Princess Page
- The Keirsey Temperment Sorter - measure your personality
- Hey, that's one BIGASS SPAM!
- Matthew and Jake's Adventures - cool!
- The Rome Lab Snowball Camera - throw real (?) snowballs at real (!) engineers.
- Evil Ralph's Safari Outfitting Company
- A Tribute to the Number 22
- bianca's SMUT Shack
- Brandy's Babes - "an adult oriented computer fantasy forum" - don't ask
- The Jihad to Destroy Barney
and The Barney Page
- The Church of the SubGenius
- F.N.O.R.D.
- The Capt. James T. Kirk Sing-a-long Page - unadulterated Kirk and Spock worship.
- Lots more useless WWW pages can be found here.
Warning: hours of time consumption within.
- Higher quality pointer pages - less pointers than this page but lots more details
- First All-Web Easter Egg Hunt: Results
- The Ada Project - Internet resources for women in computer science
- The National Address Server - type your U.S. address, it figures out the ZIP+4
- Top 20 Comet Shoemaker-Levy Images
- Hubble Space Telescope's Greatest Hits, 1990-1995 Gallery
- The Letter by Carl Steadman
- Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy stuff:
- Visible Human Project (gopher) - 15 Gbytes of one guy, digitized, disected, etc.
- A Day at Comdex - pictures from the fall '94 Comdex (consumer electronics) show in Las Vegas
- AT&T's 800 (toll-free) Directory
- Music stuff:
- The World's Flags
- WWW attempts to be more MUD-like (maintaining some level of interactive chatting)
- A list of Nonprofit
Organizations on the Internet - very long list,
click here for no
inline images.
- Sites relevant to sofware patenting and computer politics
- Drool - a weird WWW / Forms game
- Vannevar Bush's amazing 1945 essay,
As We May Think
- Doug Ingram's News & Politics Page
- WebWorld - a Web-based cyberworld constructed entirely by the Internet community
- The Lucasfilm Archives - includes movie stills from Star Wars and more! Wow.
- The Best of the Web Awards
- Netscape Communications Corp. - will they take over the Internet?
- The New York Web - club listings
and lots of other NYC info, all crammed into one site. Cool!
- The Terrorist's Handbook (intended for "reading enjoyment" only, of course)
- DoomGate - all about the DOOM real-time in-your-face multi-player shoot'em up
- SGI users will be interested in wadtoiv, which converts WAD files to Inventor format
- The Asylum - a fair amount of interesting, but odd stuff
- The British Broadcasing Corporation (BBC) Networking Club
- Stock Market Stuff
- On-line romance?
- The Digital Confession Booth (?)
- Online Sports
- Mystery Science Theatre 3000 (The Web Site of Love)
- They Might Be Giants home page (includes Dial-A-Song Online!) Also, check out The Kate and Kari Show
- A PGP public-key server
- All the Usenet
FAQ's and
RFC's!
- Also, check out the monstrous Publicly Accessible Mailing Lists archive.
- The Smithsonian photograph archive
- The Late Show with David Letterman
- Berkeley Software Design (BSD/386 Unix, among other things)
- Entering the World-Wide Web: A Guide to Cyberspace (takes a while to load)
- Cardiff's Movie Database Browser
- An amazing collection of recipes
from the
CMU English Server, which contains a huge amount of interesting stuff.
- The I-Ching and
Tarot on-line services.
- The Open Software Foundation
- The Web's Edge, UnderWorld Industries (weird stuff)
Miscellaney
To start navigating the Web, an excellent resource is
The Virtual Tourist.
For points to many other WWW things, try
Yahoo - A Guide to WWW.
Here's a site that attempts to track
the latest new servers announced to the net. Of course, you can always
check out the more-or-less official What's New listing.
Here's another site with a
comprehensive site list, and another site with an
index
to multimedia information sources.
If you are looking for software via anonymous ftp, you know the
name of what you want, but not where to find it, try
this archie form.
If you know vaguely what you're looking for, but you're not exactly sure,
try one
of the W3 search engines.
Of course, you could always go to the
Planet Earth Home Page, and work your way down from there.
Dan Wallach,
CS Department,
Princeton University