Hordes of Nerdy Links

I maintain a set of links called Hordes of Useful Links which is based on the excellent New York Times CyberNavigator. I have preserved the overall nature of the CyberNavigator yet find that there are other links I'd like to include which start drifting a tad too far from that list. These relate to Nerdy Stuff, and so I've collected my Nerd Links on this page. I also have a Commerce section in here with links to places which sell all kinds of fun stuff. These aren't the soon-to-be-bust Amazons of the world, these are mostly smaller operations where e-commerce might actually take root and work.

Looking for something? Try These Sites

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Yahoo: Subject guide and free-text searching of the World Wide Web
Google gives decent results by analyzing a page's popularity. It also offers a government search.
Net Mechanic will check your html, load times and links. Use it. I do. Not enough, mind you, but sometimes.
PC Pitstop will check your computer's insides and give you some advice on system setup, security, et al.

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Weather Things

Twin Cities weather radar Weather's a big topic of conversation here. Be in the know. You can also check out the National Radar.
Three Hour Lightning Probability from the National Weather Service shows where you're likely to get hit.
National Dewpoint Contour Map shows just how intolerable it is here at the moment. Pass me a lemonade!
National Drought Monitor shows where it's too dry. It's updated weekly.
Minnesota Weekly Precipitation Maps show how much water we've had recently.
Current conditions You can confidently recite the dewpoint or windchill.

Photography

I don't list every single stinkin' photo site on the web. Instead, I include this selection, which I find useful and/or interesting for one reason or another:

Photo Net An extensive site with lots of information on various topics.
B&H Photo Links once had links to virtually all equipment manufacturers, so I chose not to duplicate them. Unfortunately, these seem to have disappeared and I've emailed inquiring what happened. I've left this link in for the moment hoping this list will magically reappear.
CameraQuest Classic Camera Profiles does a great job of explaining Nikon SPs, Canon 7s and the mysteries of Leicas. It's a good way to waste some time.
The History of Photography is really useless if you're interested in a real history and not my personal experience.
Camera Traders is where I got my Contax G2. If you begin lusting after one you should try these guys, they're cheap.
Paragon Press my buddy Dave Dahm's home site, with some of his great Rocky Mountain, wildlife and wildflower photos
Sky Photography with just a Camera is an interesting article from Sky & Telescope.
Third Party Lens Resource has a bunch of information on non-OEM lenses. I'm an OEM guy myself.
Flashbulbs are a fun diversion. There's a decent article here including an artistic nude in a cave. Brrrr!
Meggaflash Technologies still makes flashbulbs, including some that must be like small nukes going off.
You might need a special sync cord to fire off the bulb. Paramount Cords can make you all sorts of weird cords, including my personal favorite PC cord-end, the Rollei locking male plug!
Speaking of weird equipement, the Zörk Film & Phototechnic site has the deliciously bizarre adapters to allow you to shift and tilt certain medium format lenses on your 35mm body. Twenty mm shifts anyone? I haven't actually seen or used one of these things, but I have a Rolleicord, and the finicky, obscure, German mechanical fixtures ring familiar.
Chris Groenhout's Photography Home Page is a marvelous page by someone with the same instincts I have for gear, writing and photography, only he's way better at it than I am. The link I offer it to his GeoCities site; he also now has his own domain name and the site repeats at chrisgroenhout.com but unfortunately he's gone all artsy in the design and it is more striking but much harder to navigate in my humble but correct opinion.
Liza Heider Photography is a studio in Oakland, California. Lots of people do nice black & white photos of mossy rocks; she does them of people, and they look great. I really like her luminous lighting.
Kite Aerial Photography , from Berkeley, is a model of how a site should be done; it's an interesting sub-topic of photography, with great images, technical detail and gentle good humour throughout.
The Nocturnes site is all about night photography, long exposures, weird lighting and cool results. These folks are from the Bay Area too, it must be a lively community out there.
The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit is completely different from the three sites above. Lowell Boileau has documented the destruction of much of the old industrial fabric of Detroit. I once sold a factory there and have a certain fondness for grimy industrial areas, and found this site quite interesting.
Robert Luiz Chavez does great lightning (and other) photography down in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Joseph Matthews Lightning Photography is a great site with actual fine lightning photos.
Evolving Beauty is an excellent artistic photography site. Much of it is figure photography executed in black and white using large format equipment, and it is superbly done. Sorry, no porn here, just a good photographer doing really nice work.
Wim van Velzen is a Dutch guy who shoots weddings and landscapes. Yawn, you might think, but he does a terrific job, shooting mostly medium format, and has a lovely site. It's well worth a visit. You'll learn something.
Garry Black's Multiple Exposure Tips are pretty neat. This involves taking, oh, 20 images on the same frame. I tried it with my Contax and it is a nifty effect.
PanoGuide.com is a decent site all about panoramic photography including how to do it without buying a Fuji 617 or some other $5,000 trifle. It's nicely done.
Floral Radiographs is a very different take on flower pictures by a guy named Albert Richards. You know how you discovered, about a year into your photo career, that close-ups of flowers were vibrant with colour but eventually realized that people don't give a rat's ass about photos of petunias? If you take a novel approach, like this, even petunias are intriguing. It's worth a stop, as is Steven Meyers' Radiographs of Nature.
Gallery of Fluid Dynamics is photos of drops of water collapsing, condensation in jet intakes and shocks waves from fast cars. Yawn? If you have any scientific curiosity at all, take a look. Capturing photos of these fleeting physical phenomenon can be surprisingly beautiful. This site is really well done by M.S. Cramer at Virginia Tech.
Not all x-rays are good. I like aviation, but to prevent us from getting blown up they're using more powerful x-ray machines which can hurt your film. Kodak writes about it in their Baggage X-Ray Prescans article. You should read it if you're heading overseas.
Kodak's eMagazine is a fun read. Lots of nice galleries, too. Best looked at at work with the T1 connection.

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She Blinded Me With Science

Bug Bios Shameless Promotion of Insect Appreciation is what clean, well organized Web sites should look like. This site was obviously put together by someone who's really into bugs. And why not? The planet is literally crawling with them. There's enough diversity in the bug world for the Smithsonian Institution to have 30 million of them in its collection. Each of the 14 insect orders is represented with a literal translation to English of its name and a rogues' gallery of photos (with links to larger photos if the first shot of a dung beetle, for instance, isn't enough to satisfy you.) And, if you want to get a little buggy with your photography too, there's a complete primer on what equipment to use and how to use it. (This writeup was plagiarized from Netsurfer Science)
Geology 101, more or less literally, is a set of lecture and course notes from the University of Washington for their beginning geology class. If you find geology interesing, this site is kind of fun.
What guy couldn't resist a Jet Powered Beer Cooler ? Some bloke in New Zealand did one to keep his Guinness cold and if he has to wear hearing protection while it runs, well, that's the price you pay for advancing the frontiers of human knowledge.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics says "Life is Hard. But it is harder if you don't know how the material world works." This site shows that what is astonishing is not that things go wrong, but that they don't go wrong more often. Entropy is also discussed. This is done by Frank L. Lambert, Professor Emeritus at Occidental College, Los Angeles
Physics Central has well written background helps you get the gist of current research in Physics. Its range of topics is wide enough to satisfy teachers, Popular Science devotees, and "Star Trek" fans alike. The articles are supplemented by illustrations and photographs, links to external sites, and, in some cases, movie files.

Computer Things

Excel Links is basically a gateway to lots of other Excel sites, a couple of which I list below.
The Daily Dose of Excel blog is well-done. Quite often the specific daily hint won't have immediate applicability but the archives are a treasure trove and you never know when you might need it.
I see the web as a supplemental Excel Help function. My google searches for specific questions and often as not hits the excellent J-Walk site. It's worth a look-through.
Dave Ritchie's My Excel Pages is pretty well-done.

Space & Aviation Things

Nine Planets is a cool astronomy site
The Heavens Above can tell you what satellites are visible, when, at what time and print you a map. It labels Iridium flares but those will go away once that particular $5 Billion screwup is de-orbited. This is based on data from the German Space Operations Center (motto: "We aim for the stars, but sometimes we hit London"). It's pretty neat, unless you've...
...got a Palm. Or a Handspring. I do. One of the coolest applications for it is Pocket Sat, which calculates visible satellite passes for any point on Earth in a chosen time frame. You get to pick the satellites, look up data on them, set alarms to go off when they start their passes and show a plot of the pass including, during the time the satellite is visible, a flashing indicator of its position. If you aren't cheap like me, you buy a color Palm device and run this in red mode to preserve night vision whilst lying in the field watching meteor showers. It's a great application for the Palm, a Nerd Classic!
The GSOC will also print you a Sky Chart but you'll want to change the coordinates and time for your own location unless you live really close to me. Once you've got it loaded, try incrementing the hour one at a time and see how things rotate. Clever chaps, these Germans.
Spaceflight Now calls itself "the leading source for online space news". Who am I to dispute them?
Liftoff, from NASA, shows the positions and trajectories of thousands of objects in space, in 2D and 3D.
If you have ever seen an total eclipse of the sun live, you know it's very very cool (especially in February in Manitoba!). Espinak's Eclipse Home Page has loads of resources on eclipses. I highly recommend seeing one if you have the chance.
For real airplane nerds, Airliners.net has thousands of photos of airplanes. The link is to the favorites of all time so is heavy on engine strikes in Hong Kong and jumbos coming in over the nude beach at Princess Julianna airport in the Netherlands Antilles.
The Commercial Aircraft Census Page is an absorbing way to waste a few hours if you like airplanes, like I do. A guy named Bill Harms originally compiled this listing of most of the modern jets produced and their disposition, although it's now been handed off. You can see things like, oh, Northwest Airline's continued operation of DC-9 number 16, delivered on 1/17/66. Paul Allen's private 757s are in there. The Write-Offs and Out of Service ones are interesting and often cryptic; a Korean Airlines 747, number 186 off the line, delivered 3/31/72, is "W/O 01SEP83 RUSSIA", a cryptic obituary for the KAL jet the Russians shot down.
Once you've seen some of the W/Os (Write-Offs) above, take a look at the Aviation Safety Network page. It's all about airplane crashes, and if you count all the ones in Malaysia, Peru and Ghana, they happen a lot. Much of the site is very sobering; you can read Cockpit Voice Recorder transcripts and even see some very illuminating video, like a Ethiopian Airline 767 trying to ditch. It was hijacked, ran out of fuel and is coming in dead-stick but catches a wingtip on the water. There's a enormous splash as the plane skews and digs into the water, and you can think that you just saw 120 people die and realize how utterly useless the seat cushion is going to be as a flotation device. You feel for the pilots, whose last moments are starkly captured on tape, and the frightened passengers behind them.

Nuclear and Other Weapons

Bureau of Atomic Tourism Hey, it's a hobby of mine. The Trinity Atomic Web Site is also good and includes handy plans to make a fallout shelter, from 1980.
The Cold War Era Civil Defense Museum has shelter tours, supplies, MP3s of Civil Defense Sirens and more nostalgia for us grizzled veterans of the Cold War.
The Department of Energy's Photo Library has a nice selection of photos of various nuclear tests in case you'd like an 8x10 glossy of, oh, the XX-12 Grable shot on your wall.
Find the mass vaporization of thousands of humans a bit depressing? Go back to killing them the old fashioned way with weapons and armor from Historical Weapons where you can outfit yourself with swords, daggers, chain mail, shields and suits of armor.
Not really all about weapons, the Medeival Technology Pages discusses many of the advances in technology including rat traps, wheelbarrows and Arabic numerals.

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Bicycles

Bike Coffee is a classic nerd site, someone who has done an extensive and apparently authoratative site related to brewing, transporting and drinking coffee while riding bicycles.
Myra VanInwegen's Bike Articles is by a girl nerd! She has written about bike lights (how I found the site), cold weather riding, all sorts of things. She has some interesting things to say.
Peter White Cycles carries the extremely nerdy Schmidt hub generators for lighting your way. They also carry Finnish Nokian studded bicycle tires, just the ticket for riding around here.
Rohloff Hubs are very cool sounding, a German unit with 14 speeds in an internally-geared hub. No messy derailleurs, shorter chain, single chainring crankset and a 529% gear range. Sounds ideal for a commuter bike, especially with the Schmidt hub generator on front! Cannondale actually makes one, but it's only sold in Europe! D'Oh! This link is to the U.S. site.
One day I was over at The Bicycle Chain , where I bought my Marin Pine Mountain, and they had a bike called a Breezer Uptown. What a cool bike! It's aluminum-framed, 7- (and soon 8-) speed Shimano Nexus rear hub, Nexus generator front hub (not quite as cool as the Schmidt, but lots cheaper), fenders, lights, rack, kickstand, even a bell. It's all equipped for commuting and running local tasks. Turns out it's been developed by a guy called Joe Breeze, one of the founders of mountain biking. You can see his website with the whole product line at Breezer Bikes. I find this sort of bike deeply appealing and he's done a great job putting together this package.
I'm not alone at finding this sort of utility bike interesting; some guy out in California was thinking about buying a new commuter bike and put together an excellent page listing the bike models and gear he is looking at. Try Commuter Bikes in the U.S. to see the selection. Another guy, also out in the Bay Area, has links to many manufacturers of commuter bikes and gears. Check out Commuter Bicycles to see this site.
Harris Cyclery has a wide selection of odd gear and a bunch of useful and interesting articles by Sheldon Brown.
Ice Bike is a useful site for us Minnesotans. It has to do with cold weather riding and what gear and techniques to use.
Calhoun Cycles is a Minneapolis-based dealer specializing in recumbents and folding bikes.
Bikes At Work, from Ames, Iowa, is a group that does delivery on bicycles including things like lumber, couches, and refrigerators, and who sell their trailers. If this seems a tad hardcore for you, you can consult the Work Bike Makers List to find who makes trailers, trikes, quads and delivery bikes. Hey, who needs a darn car, anyway?
Even the Devil Rides is a blog about urban cycling in San Francisco. This guy is generally interesting to read. I ran into it when he linked to a photo of me from my Bike Touring Circa 1980 page.
Martino's Bike Lane Diary is a blog devoted to urban cycling and photography. This guy's from Toronto which is actually somewhat south of the Twin Cities, something most Minnesotans don't realize.

Food & Drink

Bike Coffee Yeah, I know, it's right above this in the Bikes section too, but I thought I'd stick it in here with the food items as well.
British Express is an on-line shop that carries lots of British (and colonial) items, particularly tea. If you want real British Tetley's bags, for instance, and not the grass clippings they flog here in the States, you can order 'em up here.
Sweet Maria's Coffee Supplies sells lots of coffee things including green coffee beans and home roasters. There's also instructions on how to roast your own coffee using air popcorn poppers, and a good set of coffee links.

Commerce

Small Parts, Inc. is the place to go if you need, oh, a 1/4" long 4/40 stainless steel socket head shoulder screw, or maybe a #6 nylon screw insulator. Their catalogue is a fount of ideas (Gosh, some titanium threaded rod!) if you ever make small mechanical devices (I got into it looking for parts for a camera rig for doing Kite Photography)
American Science & Surplus is another place to fish for ideas, but this time it's surplus and salvage items. Some of it is weird (13 1/2" long rubber salmon), some of it is military (surplus Swedish Army waterbottles, 1/2 the price they are locally)(Yes, I know it's sick that I'd know this), some of it is educational, and all of it has alluring descriptions (regarding a tape gun: "This is a brand new commercial product offered as an accommodation to introduce you to the thrill of packaging."). It would be a fun store to visit.
Into the Wind is a kite store in Boulder, Colorado, where I got my Sutton Flowform 16 and associated supplies. I like their catalogue and the on-line shopping experience is good.
Peet's Coffee is a good coffee vendor. They are real big on freshly-roasted coffee, so it get's roasted the day they ship it to you, and it's really good. Get one of their samplers to try it out. I wouldn't trust the coffee scoop they send, though, it seems kind of big to me.
Forestry Suppliers, Inc. is another great catalogue. I badly want to buy one of the Skyblazer® magnesium star shell flares (Shoots hundreds of feet in the air! Visible for 20 miles!), a couple of Three Minute Smoke Generators (40,000 cubic feet of smoke!), a box of Shot Tell shotgun noisemaker shells, a big cigar and a bottle of Jack Daniels and have myself a party! They don't sell the cigars or Jack Daniels, though.
I get bored mowing my grass so decided to buy some AM/FM hearing protectors. I ordered them from Omark Safety and they had a good price and quick delivery. You gotta like that!

Demonstrations and Miscellany

Cool Site of the Day
Useless Pages Useless, maybe, but fun. Try Derek's Big Website of Wal-Mart Receipts for a superb example of the genre; some guy from Fargo has posted scans of receipts from his every visit to Wal-Mart since 1996, with room for viewer comments. Work the Web!
The Darwin Awards have to do with, um, thinning the herd. I don't know if they're all true, but they're fun to read.
Learn2.com teaches you how to do useful everyday things
How Stuff Works explains, well, how stuff works. It's a wonderful site with clear explanations and great links.
Internet virus myths and Virus hoax information from the U.S. Energy Department
Money What it is, How it Works is all about money. It's all a huge confidence game, really, and this site goes into how this con works.
Lark in the Morning has all kinds of very cool musical instruments which I can't afford. Like this site? Send me a hurdy gurdy kit!
Our priest at church showed an R rated movie to the Youth Group (down to 12-year-olds) after telling the parents it was rated PG. This caused a bit of a flap. You can read the emails at my Jesus of Montreal and the Youth Group page.
Paper Airplanes Theme Page is a Community Learning Network page with links to all sorts of paper airplane sites and instructions. Put the stuff in that recyling bin to use!
Jasbits Netcams and Digital Camera Network have links to live cameras all over the Net

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About This Page

This is the repository for links related to Matt's nerdier interests.

Last updated May 1, 2005

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