Surf log

“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro....”
Hunter S. Thompson

• Wink | For creating software product presentations in Flash.
• Dark Roasted Blend | Blog covering important stuff such as big machines and retro technology.
• OpenWebDesign | Free web design templates. Most of them under very liberal licenses. More here: OSWD, OpenSourceTemplates, Studio7Designs, Tristar, Andreas Viklund, Sixshootermedia
• Google Patents
• Synergy | For sharing keyboard and mouse between two PC’s.
• Mozart Musical Score Sheets | All of Mozarts compositions are now freely available. (2400+ pages of sheet music in PDF).
• Hamachi | Zero-configuration VPN between two computers on the internet.
• Snap.com | Search Engine with previews of search results. (This is also used for displaying the previews for links on this site.)
• AstroGrep | Nice Windows GUI for Grep. Allows you to perform regular expressions searches on multiple files. In contrast to WinGrep, AstroGrep is open source, free, and comes with a nice clean interface (and Windows Explorer integration).

• Uncyclopedia | A not-so-serious alternative to Wikipedia.
• Educational Color Apples
• Let Tekken decide

• Various flash games: Line Rider, Double Wires, N-Game, Tank Ball (Shockwave), and Sift Heads
• Video of MIT Interactive whiteboard demo.
• Assorted examples of impressive Flash-design: Pencils, The Oculus, and Carlos-Polo.
• Songbird 0.2 | A new MP3 player built on top of the Mozilla framework (think Firefox/Thunderbird). It is still early in development, but Songbird is already stable enough to be my media player of choice - especially since iTunes 7 seems slow and buggy (seamless playback scanning takes for ever, and although nice, the Coverflow browser just eats up memory), and WMP 11 just seemed confusing to me. When the extensions community get onto this, this will most likely be the Firefox for music.
• Video: Transforming 2D pictures into 3D | The source is downloadable and after having tried, I ended up with much worse results than those displayed...
• TiddlyWiki | A client-side Wiki written in JavaScript hosted in one HTML-file. Well, it is easier just to try it, than to explain it. Really impressive.
• Google Code Search | Well, despite the competition (Kruggle and Koders), once again Google delivers a great product.

• VirusTotal | Allows you to test single files against multiple virus scanners.
• AOL - Active Virus Scanner | Very impressive free virus scanner. Made it into a tied first place in this test
• Hough transforms | A nice algorithm for detecting lines in photographs.

• Google Code Hosting | Seems Google has taken up the competition with SourceForge. Nice and clean subversion repository hosting.
• Krugle | Open source search engine. Very nice interface (seems better than koders.com).
• Infinity | One programmers attempt to create a massive online multiplayer game in a procedural generated universe. Like ‘Pixel Image Editor’ listed below, I am impressed by the sheer ambition behind a project like this. Judging by the screenshots and videos (and the fact that a playable beta test has been going on) he has already come far.
• Free movies fallen out of copyright | A lot of good stuff here. Including cult and kitsch classics such as: ‘Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1941)’, ‘Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)’, ‘Night of the Living Dead (1968)’ and traditional classics such as Dreyer’s ‘Vampyr’ and Eisensteins ‘Battleship Potempkin’. Also lots of documentaries (’Fahrenheit 9/11’) and cartoons.

• Logarithmic Image Deformations | A description (and some examples) of how to generate the optical effects, Escher uses in some of his pictures.
• ShscWiki | Misc. technical articles. Includes a very good “PC Parts Picking Guide”.

• Bumptop3D Video Demo | Physics based 3D desktop.
• Zwok | Nice online game - similar to the old Scorched Earth.
• Gliffy | Visio-like web2.0 service.
• ComicBookDB | IMBD meets Comics.
• MyDrawings | Collaborative Pixel Drawing (a la Google Maps).
• Reactos | Reimplementing WinXP as open source from scratch. Well, it is certainly ambitious.
• Picasa Web Albums | Googles newest initiative: seamless upload and sharing of your Picasa photos to a Google server. To really appreciate it, you have to try for yourself how simple it is.
• Pixel Image Editor | One mans quest for creating a paint program ... with all the features of Adobe Photoshop CS2 and some extras (like animation). Runs on Windows, Linux, Linspire, MacOSX, BeOS, Zeta, QNX, MorphOS, FreeBSD, eComStation, OS/2, SkyOS and DOS. It may still be buggy, but I am impressed by the sheer amount of work hours and dedication he must have put into this project. It is written by Pavel Kanzelsberger, born 1977. It is written in Free Pascal.
• Google Spreadsheets | Ajax spreadsheet.
• Google Browser Sync | Firefox plugin for synchronizing bookmarks, cookies, passwords, tabs and history.

• C64 Emulator | And it is made in Flash!
• Soviet Propaganda posters | From 1917 to 1991
• Old Atari Ad | Those were the days.
• Flash Timeline | Timeline of Trends and Events (1750-2100)
• Google Notebook | Just after having discovered Google Bookmarks, Google Notebooks was released. It is a general information / links / texts / todos storage solution, complete with a firefox plugin.
• Google Bookmarks Store your computer on a Google server. Combined with this Firefox extension you can keep track of your bookmarks across different computers. Update: Try Google Notebook or Google Browser Sync (see above) instead.
• Google Desktop 4 | Indexing of your desktop computer. The new version allows for desktop widgets, including a Google Calendar widget. Also the new Quick Search (invoked by pressing Ctrl twice) is a superb tool for launching programs and searching local content. Combined with Larry's any file indexer you can also index all source code on your computer. A must have.
• Google Trends | Allows you to browse search volumes.
• Silk Icons | Free icons (700+)
• Full Screen QTVR | Panoramic photos.
• The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci

• Flickr Browser | Nice flash interface to Flickr.
• Handy Programs | Which doesn’t require any install.
• Last.fm | Music recommendations based on user similarity.
• Cinemaware | Retrogaming. Cinemaware, makers of such Amiga classics as Defender of the Crown, Rocket Ranger and It Came From The Desert, has released a lot of their old games (the ones mentioned included) as freeware. Some of them require an Amiga emulator (ie WinUAE) but others run directly from a Windows PC.
• Google Calendar | At last it arrived. But will it stand up to the competition from SpongeCell, Trumba, Kiki and 30 Boxes?
• Hivegroup World | ‘Tree’ representation of geographical data.
• "Ultimate" web design resources | At least it is quite comprehensive
• Yamipod | Alternative to iTunes (seemed somewhat buggy)
• Kapsules | Desktop widgets (like Yahoo Widgets)
• XVI32 | Hex editor
• Blender 3D | 3D modeling
• Wink | Creating Flash product presentations
• Inkscape | Open source vector graphics
• ArtWeaver | Natural drawing (untested)
• Celestia | Very nice space explorer
• Stellarium | Virtual planetarium
• Sketch i 4 secs | Java game. Try to reproduce a drawing i 4 secs.
• Cyber Extruder | Convert a 2D photo to 3D Update: I tried to upload a picture of myself - this movie (600KB MP4) is what their service generated...
• Orangoo | Online spell check in web2.0 colors.
• CodeFromThe70s | Mem peak / poke
• Small Flash games
• Open Source CMS | Very nice way to try several CMS systems.
• Firefox Tweaks

• SpeakEasy - Nice Speedtest
• Red rain - Article about the red rain phenomena in India, suggesting that the origin of the rain may be extra-terrestrial. (Accepted in a peer reviewed journal).
• OGLE: The OpenGLExtractor
• Rumblebox - Indie game
• Snowbeat - Indie game
• DHTMLGoodies - including some of that ol’ AJAX magic
• Particle Chart

• Listable - Community lists
• Firebug - FireFox extension for debugging scripts.
• Newton Dynamics - Interesting Physics SDK.
• 30 Boxes. It is stil in beta, but it seems like it was exactly what I’ve been waiting for: a online calendar, matching GMails superior user interface. //Update:// Google Calendar has appeared and seems to be superior to 30 Boxes.
• Pandora.com - It is certainly impressive. A online radio station, which based on a user provided seed (artist or number) creates a channel with similar music. Try it.

• Google IG. Seems like start pages are having a revival (promoted under the massively overused web2.0 and AJAX terms): Googles attempt to provide a start page. Standard features combined with community plugins.
• Live.com and Start.com.
  Microsofts bold scheme for conquering the browser start page. Live.com is part of a much larger package of Microsoft Live services. It offers http://microsoftgadgets.com/gallery user made plugins similar to Google.
• NetVibes - offers a nice clean implementation, similar to MS and Googles.
• Protopage - has a very fancy GUI - but seems to lack a lot of functionality in the current version. It seems, however, promising.
• Cover Pop

• Reverse Engineering - Open Source Book
• Digg - Community based news
• Raytraycing tutorial on devmaster.net.
• ArtRage. Excellent freeware painting program. Simulates real brush strokes better than anything I’ve seen.
• Google Pack - A installer / update system for the core Google desktop applications (and some other, incl. a Norton AntiVirus 6 month trial, Adobe Reader and Adware Personal.).
• Cidero - UPnP Control Point.
• Drupal - Very nice CMS incl. Wiki & Blogs.
• Scrapbook - FireFox extension which allows to save, annotate and edit web pages. Comprehensive.
• Colorization Using Optimization - Nice algorithm to colorize pictures

My 2005 archive of links