etymonline.com 🔗 The Online Etymology Dictionary
I look stuff up here all the time because it is endlessly fascinating. Like just now I looked up “story” after reading @THEToughCookie’s list because I wondered why we call floors of a building a “story” and of course the answer was neat.
xkcd.com 🔗 xkcd
The only web comic I read (since Home Star Runner is no more). Definitely geeky, often geared toward programmers and engineers, occasionally over my head but almost always funny. And sometimes also deeply beautiful. Some favorites are the database-hilarious 327, the lovely 1489, and the touching 695 and the darkly funny 542. But really there are hundreds that are wonderful.
lettersofnote.com 🔗 Letters of Note
A deep stream of moving, funny, powerful, uplifting, depressing, and strange letters from powerful people, ordinary people, powerless people, and every other kind of person from the recent and distant past. They are intimate and always interesting. Site is run by Shaun Usher, aka @LISTSOFNOTE
planetary.org/blogs 🔗 The Planetary Society blog
This is the 💯 blog for astronomy news and analysis. It is approachable for non-scientists but not at all sensational (or political for that matter) and gives detailed interesting information that main stream news sites gloss over completely. Emily Lakdawalla is an American treasure. (She is American right?)
daringfireball.net 🔗 Daring Fireball
What can I say. The guy’s very smart about Apple news analysis.
regex101.com 🔗 Regex 101
Regular expression visualizer, debugger, tester, and reference all rolled into one excellently designed site. I am amazed at how much thought went in to this tool and I use it every time I need to work on an even slightly complex regular expression.
whatismyip.com 🔗 What is my IP?
Just what it says on the tin and handy for web programmer types like me.
downforeveryoneorjustme.com 🔗 Down for everyone or just me?
Another always useful tool. When you try to go to a web site and it isn’t responding and you wonder if it’s you or if Facebook is really down, this site at least gives you one more non-local point to check from. Give it a web site and it’ll see if it’s down.
lmgtfy.com 🔗 Let me google that for you
I love this snarky web site. When someone asks you a question they could obviously just look up themselves. Go to lmgtfy.com, enter a Google search term, then send your friend the generated link. When they click it it’ll show them how to find the answer on Google complete with passive aggressive “was that so hard?”
Archived Post
This post is archived from my account on li.st, a social media app that shut down in 2017. Some posts have been edited slightly to fix typographical errors and correctly represent the gender of some individuals. You can view the full archive here.