Links

Web comic strips
Spaced out links
Computer links
Writing links
Stuff about the internet

Web comic strips

One advantage they have over comics in newspapers is that they can make longer and more complex storylines - after all, if you miss a day you can just go to the archives to catch up. And sometimes the authors trade characters for a while.

Naturally, all of these comics have their full archives available online. Beware.

User Friendly: Definitely computer geek humour. The comic takes place in a little ISP called Columbia Internet. In addition to the techs, the marketer, and the boss, there's the dust puppy (who was born in one of the servers) and Erwin (the AI that Dust Puppy made).
Sluggy Freelance: Time travel, interdimensional jumps, a homocidal lop rabbit named Bun-bun, a totally innocent, sweet, and easily distracted ferret, vampires, demons from the dimension of pain, an alien working as a secretary, and a few wierd things, too.
Freefall: A totally unprincipled alien hired a very honest bowman's wolf as an engineer to fix his spaceship. She's 'corrupting' his robot with her honesty!
Bruno the Bandit: Strange mixture of modern and medieval mindset and technology.
Kevin and Kell: Kevin is a burly rabbit who works from home on the internet. Kell is a petite wolf who works for 'herdthinners'. They're married. I'd imagine Kevin's a bit nervous about going to company parties...
After Y2K: The Y2K bug bit so hard no computers, telephones, or electricity was available. So the geeks switched to abacuses. Features guest appearances by most of the major people in the computer scene today, as well as some who are dead. And some aliens, too.
GPF: GPF is about a small computer company, GPF software (yes, GPF = General Protection Fault, the windows "blue screen of death" error)
Walkerton!: SEMME is the world's last line of defense against the aliens. Unfortunately, most of the SEMME agents are abductees...
Clan of the Cats: There is an ancient curse on Chelsea's family - in times of stress, she turns into a panther.
College Roomies from Hell: After the dorms burned down, people had to double up, or more. The title says the rest...
S.S.D.D.: A frequently rude, violent, and explicit comic strip. If you're easily offended, don't follow that link. There's a reason the domain is "poisonedminds.com".
Alice!: This is the story of Alice, a girl with a rich imaginative life... but some of it really happened.
Elf Life: Sort of an epic fantasy type thing, mostly set in an elf community.
Suburban Jungle: Animals take the place of humans. Starring Tiffany Tiger, a wannabe model, who works at a computer firm as a temp while waiting for her big break.
Ozy and Millie: Ozy is a young arctic fox, and Millie is his best friend, a young red fox. Their other friends are various other animals, and Ozy's dad is a dragon, which makes for interesting family reunions. Yes, Ozy is adopted.

Spaced out links

Anything to do with space...

Hubble Space Telescope Pictures: This is pretty self-explanatory. I use some of these for my desktop background
the Artemis Project: Dedicated to establishing a permanent base on the moon. My kind of people!
Seti@Home: Now your computer can search for aliens when you're not using it. The program downloads data from the seti@home server and processes it when you're not using your computer.
Heavens Above: Astronomy and satellite finding, customised for your location.
The best of NASA's spinoffs: Think NASA is a waste of money? Think again. This enormous page covers some of the best things that have come out of NASA research, from Laser Angioplasty for people with blocked arteries to the roof of BC Place Stadium (a 10-acre fabric roof, held up by air pressure).
It's the little robot that could!: I found this recently via the WayBack machine (more on that below) - it's all about the Mars Pathfinder mission, and little Sojurner, the little robot that could (I have a t-shirt that says that, with a picture of Sojurner and that big mars rock they named Yogi).

Computer links

Useful stuff I've found that has to do with computers.

Slackware

The official Slackware site. Slackware is the linux distribution I use, which is why I find this site useful.

GNU's Not Unix

GNU is as much a philosophy as it is a set of free programs and other tools for your computer.

Linux.com

A decent resource for lots of things linux. Has lots of sections, like 'jumpstart' for new users, 'tune-up' for more advanced, 'hardware', and so on, as well as news and articles related to Linux.

Kuro5hin

"Technology and culture, from the trenches" is its slogan, and it's a site for discussing anything related to technology and/or culture. (Oh, and kuro5hin is pronounced "corrosion")

The quine page

Quines are self-reproducing computer programs - programs that produce their entire code as output. All things wierd and wonderful...

HTML with style

An ongoing series of articles about HTML and style sheets. An excellent reference.

css/edge

This site pushes the boundaries of CSS2; if you're using anything other than Mozilla 0.8 (or Netscape 6.0, or anything based on the gecko engine) and later, or IE 5 for the mac or later, it won't work properly because the browser doesn't fully support CSS2. Everything on the site is explained thoroughly and complies with the HTML and CSS specifications fully; any errors in rendering are because the browser doesn't follow the specification properly. If you have a standards-compliant browser, the site looks *extremely* cool.

Amateur fortress building, part 1 and part 2

Securing linux from attack for those who aren't computer security experts.

Sunsite archives

Sunsite, then Metalab, now known as "iBiblio", is about the biggest collection of free software around, all categorised for easy browsing.

Graphical User Interface Gallery

This page has screenshots of so many GUIs that most people have never even heard of. Ever wondered why MS Windows appeared to start at version 3? Take a look at versions 1 and 2, and you'll understand.

Lilypond

This is a music typesetting program, that produces very nice-looking printed music.

TeX resources

TeX is only about the best typesetting program there is, and that goes triple (or more) if you need to do math of any kind in your written material.

POVRay

POVRay is a raytracing program, comparable to the super expensive ones that cost upwards of $1,000. Ray tracers can make some spectacular images, with every shadow and highlight in exactly the right place. Check out "First Strike", a truly amazing picture and the well-deserved winner of the international ray-tracing competition.

The Story of Mel

The story of Mel, a Real Programmer:

in this decadent era of
Lite beer, hand calculators, and ``user-friendly'' software
but back in the Good Old Days,
when the term ``software'' sounded funny
and Real Computers were made out of drums and vacuum tubes,
Real Programmers wrote in machine code.
Not FORTRAN.  Not RATFOR.  Not, even, assembly language.
Machine Code.
Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers.
Directly.

(As circulated around usenet. Even if the original wasn't in free verse, I think it's better this way.)

Writing links

Stuff that I find interesting or useful for my writing.

Critters Workshop: An online critique group that focuses on SF/F/H stories. Very well run, very good critiques.
Write On!: A writers' community site. Promotes discussion of writing, but doesn't do critiques. (So I run it... I'm allowed to promote my own stuff aren't I?)
Language construction kit: A must see if you want to include an imaginary language in your story.
World Builders class: This is an actual class at a university, with all notes and assignments up on the web. It takes you through designing your alien, what they eat, what their population density must therefore be, and onwards.
Builder home page: "Programs that build things." The programs available include tectonic plate simulators to build a world, population growth and spread simulators to distribute nations on that world... some very neat things there.
Medieval demographics made easy: Not everybody in a medieval society lives in castles... here is the distribution of people in cities, towns, and isolated farms, how many of a given trade or business can a town of a given size support, and other such demographic information.
Hatch's Plot Bank: Over 2000 'ideas' are listed here, hinting at situations, conflicts, characters... scan through parts of it, something is sure to tickle that bit of your brain that thinks up stories. Please note that these are not complete plots, despite the title of the page. These are seeds.

Stuff about the internet

The Inboxer Rebellion: Take back your email inbox! This is a great resource for stopping chain mail and scams in its tracks. Next time you get a letter pleading you to help (and, incidentally, forward the letter to all your friends) look it up on this page. There are chain letters and scams many years old that are still passed around by people who believe them to be true.
Anatomy of an email chain letter: How to recognise a chain letter, without having to go look it up every time. (Hint: if it says "please email this to everybody" it's probably a chain letter.)
Censorware: Intro: What is censorware, why it doesn't work, and why the censorware companies are trying to hide this fact from you. These people have done numerous studies of actual in-use censorware systems, checking the number of sites blocked wrongly and rightly, and the number of sites passed through wrongly and rightly. Because they offer hard numbers to back up their claims that censorware doesn't work, censorware makers reply by adding this site to the blocklist under every category. If you're using censorware on your computer, there's every possibility that you won't be able to view this link.
The Way Back Machine: The Way Back Machine is an archive of sites as they existed in the past. Take a look at what your favourite website looked like when it was new! They also have some special collections, such as the 'web pioneers' collection, which covers websites that have been up and successful from the early days of the web, like Yahoo (which leads nicely into my next entry...)
Random Yahoo link: Yahoo used to have a 'random page' link on their front page, but it went missing a long time ago. Via the Way Back Machine and Yahoo's old front page, I discovered that the random link program actually still worked! So go for it, you never know where you'll end up. It could be an error, it could be a page not found ... and it could be something you'd have never found in a lifetime of searching. It could also be something you don't want to see (which as I understand it is why Yahoo took the link down) so use at your own discretion. I don't know where you'll end up, and can therefore take no responsibility for it.