Bookmark Dump

I think there was one period in my life when I had a properly organised set of bookmarks - I’m talking subfolders and everything - but it’s so long ago that it was probably closer to when I was born than to now. Certainly it’s been a while. Generally nowadays I just favourite things in the hope that they will show up in the search bar, and I bookmark things on mastodon… I don’t actually know. To come back to, in some nebulous sense. Presumably.

Anyway I want to come back to a few, just for my reference and because I think some of them are quite neat. Your kilometerage may vary. These ones are largely computer-themed, mostly because that’s what I’ve looked at recently, but I might do this again with a more general topic another day.¹

Archive This Site

This is a great little resource explaining how to use wget to archive small simple websites (just like this one!) and individual pages. The best bit is that the example invocation converts links in a way that means they will still work when opening the pages locally without launching your own web server - a great trick that I didn’t think was even possible.

Fortran Techniques with Special Reference to Non-Numerical Applications

I’ve written about learning Fortran before and will probably do so again (it’s fun! I’ve been doing a lot with it lately), but this is an interesting 1972 book by Colin Day that has been scanned and uploaded to the internet archive. The scanner also wrote a nice blog post about the book and the experience of uploading it.

Fortran, or FORTRAN as it was known at the time, is highly numerically focused, but it was also all people tended to have access to on the mainframes they were renting time from. An easy to follow book of other techniques - linked lists, trees, sorting, etc - from the time is an absolute gem. That said I’m generally using a much more recent Fortran version for my own stuff and I don’t have a line printer (or big iron, contemporary or otherwise) so this isn’t useful so much as just fascinating.

iHateRegex

I actually like regex, which is a good way to tell that I don’t have to use it very often. iHateRegex is probably not the only regex example list and diagrammer but it’s the one in my bookmarks.

internet-ti.me

This site is based around Swatch Internet Time, the UTC+1-based decimal time format that never really caught on 20 or so years ago. It’s a neat concept and one that I’ve included in my Useless Clock bot but the site also has a real practical use as a way to send someone a particular time as a short url and have it be converted to their local time automatically. Not that I actually coordinate stuff across timezones very much at the moment, but hey.

Damon Burke’s Safety Sign Generator

This doubtless has actual practical use to some people, but a standard sign generator with free text is just fun.

Python strftime cheatsheet

This one barely needs a bookmark as unless I’ve temporarily forgotten the name of the strftime() function I can probably remember strftime.org. While this is supposed to be for python it’s a pretty good reference for most language’s version of this invaluable date/time format function.

CSS Pride Flags

Cohost is a kind of Tumblr-with-CSS, or at least inline styles, which has lead to a goldmine of CSS widgets and tutorials and other ‘crimes’. This is one of the simpler ones: a way of making inline pride flags with a span tag and inline styles. Like this one , or this one . This falls into an interesting space of being lo-fi, or at least emoji and javascript-less, but also obviously not retro friendly. Still, it’s really neat!