Interesting Links

Some interesting links, either due to content, design, or both. Not an endorsement of the authors etc. etc. etc.

The order is semi-random and doesn't even correspond to when I first came across the site because I've cobbled this together from random notes here and there (and chat histories when sharing some of these with friends).

• Eltham South Electric Tramway: Model tramway!

  • "The Eltham South Electric tramway is a shoddily constructed, cheaply run tourist tramway set somewhere in the Victorian bush" (link to forum post with pictures)
  • Melbournesparks's YouTube channel with videos of the model tramway

• Banner Depot 2000: "an interactive archive containing 22,915 web ad banners that existed on Chinese- and English-language web pages in the late 1990s and early 2000s"

  • Heads up: the home page will load dozens of animated, colourful, auto-playing, GIF banner ads. Might be overwhelming for those with sensitivity to such things! The link above is to the about page which does not show any of the archived banners.
  • They've made the full dataset of the archive available too: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8408539
  • Learned about this while attending Born Digital Heritage Now 2023, which included a fascinating presentation by Richard Lewei Huang (link to Richard's website) titled "Comparing the Archival Rate, Frequency, and Quality of Chinese-language and English-language Web Pages from the late 1990s and early 2000s on the Wayback Machine".

• Bits Galore: Fantastic blog on digital preservation and file formats, lots of good information and tutorials about FOSS tools in this area.

  • Learned about this blog at the (above mentioned) Born Digital Heritage Now 2023 conference's Disk Imaging Workshop.

• code{4}lib Journal: A journal about "the intersection of libraries, technology, and the future"

  • The website seems to frequently crash, but usually works after reloading.
  • I learned about this journal when attending the same Disk Imaging Workshop as mentioned in the Bits Galore entry above. This "Introduction to Optical Media Preservation" by Alexander Duryee was very helpful background knowledge, even for someone like myself who thought she knew most of the basic info there was to know about this stuff 😊

• Power Moby-Dick: online annotated Moby-Dick

  • If you're like me and read Moby-Dick without an extensive art history background, enjoy this interactive annotated version of the book. It's excellent and honestly indispensable during my first read through especially.
  • Also, an interesting note about the text used on the site.
  • The site uses an adapted version of Unobtrusive Sidenotes (archived link), which is pretty rad! It isn't very accessible, though, and Molly White's sidenotes.js written to turn footnotes into sidenotes for the Ghost blogging platform serves as a much better modern example.

• Citation Needed: Cryptocurrency critic and technology researcher Molly White's newsletter

  • Molly White has a lot of cool stuff aside from the newsletter. The sidenotes.js script I linked in the previous entry, for example, but also this rad web page template for publishing an annotated version of a text.

• 404 Media: really great independent journalism, focused on US.

  • Speaking of newsletters, this is another one I read almost every time it lands in my email!

• Remap Radio: enjoyable podcast and newsletter about games

• Side Story: Austin Walker's newish podcast about games

• Shelved by Genre: podcast about genre literature

  • Like being in an actually good book club. Really fun to read along before each episode, but I've also enjoyed listening to episodes on books I read a long time ago and don't feel like re-reading.

• Small Bear Electronics's guide on Using a Solderless Breadboard

  • Archive link, the website is no longer up ☹️
  • Sadly the images on this one were not archived, but other pages in the series (each one linked at the end of each page) seem to have them archived.

• Doom Patrols: a theoretical fiction about postmodernism and popular culture

• Banjo head tuning explored

  • If you're going mad trying to understand how best to tune your banjo's drum head, check this out. Invaluable when I restored a banjo for my spouse, which required re-tuning the head from scratch after we took the whole thing apart to clean in!

• Ian's Book of Crosswords

  • Great crosswords, though lots of Aussie-specific and even Melbourne-specific clues that will probably be inaccessible for folks who don't live here in Naarm! Sometimes clues are about the shop at a particular address on some street.
  • My spouse and I love doing these crosswords over coffee. I've never found another crossword write quite like Ian. His clues and the subject-matter they covers are the most fun I've had solving crosswords.
  • Ian designed the website in Microsoft Word and I turned it into a website for him. It's also hosted on Neocities.