Bookmarks
Below you can find links to websites and individual webpages that I find useful, fun, or interesting in some way. This is not a finalized list and will be expanded and refined over time. Links are presented in no particular order. Broken links will be replaced with archive links.
SAM is one of the oldest text-to-speech programs, originally written for the Commodore 64 in 1982. Sebastian Macke wrote an implementation of it in C, and has made it available to use on the web.
Displays a map with locations tagged with their respective wikipedia articles. See what famous places are around you.
DECtalk is a text to speech synthesizer and software that was widely used in the 1980s. You may have heard it before as the voice of stephen hawking, and the tts used in moonbase alpha. This webpage has instructions for how to make the voices sing. The software itself can be found on the internet archive.
Nicky Case's essay on spaced repetition for memorization. It's a great introduction to the spaced repetition method. The gist of it is that you can space out flashcard practice along increasing intervals to remember the information more efficiently. If that piques your interest you should click the link.
A debate on the ArsTechnica forum from January 2000. The concept of DVD ever replacing VHS in the near future was very controversial. There's a stark mix of predictions that are wildly off the mark, and shockingly prescient. Some highlights include: one user doesn't believe affordable HDTVs will come out this century, and another user predicts streaming services.
An essential read if you're learning a 2nd+ language. A few hundred words in any language make up the bulk of what you'll hear and say. This provides a burst of motivation early in your journey. However, the 90% most common words very often let you understand less than 10% of the sentence's meaning. For that, you will need to know the tens of thousands of less common words, requiring exponentially more words for each additional percentage of language understanding.
Amazon price tracker. You can enter the url of any product on amazon, and use the historical price info to learn if you're getting a good deal or not.
It's served over raw HTTP and last updated in 2006, so you know it's good. This page shows you the scale of the universe, starting a few light years from the sun, and zooming out until you get to the observable universe. It's available in multiple languages and includes negative images for printing.
A tool that lets you perform calculations with uncertainties built in, which constructs a probabilitiy distribution for the result.
PC video game sale tracker. Most of the stores they check provide steam keys, with a few exceptions such as the epic games store. All of the stores are legit -- no grey market sellers like cdkeys.
The personal website of Amit Patel. Contains extremely high quality interactive explainers on various computer algorithms. Mainly relevant to game development.