Little Boxes

Little boxes for little ideas.

Bookmarks and Links

Up until recently I didn't use bookmarks, preferring to keep all links to useful sites and places as shortcuts. Shortcuts have the benefit of being normal filesystem objects, allowing me to shuffle them about at will, copy them to external media and keep those that are relevant to projects in the project folder. I still use shortcuts for most things, but have started putting my regular reading into Firefox's bookmarks system, since "Open in Tabs" is quite a useful feature.

Note: Some sites linked here may deal with overtly adult themes, contain extreme foul language, or may include graphic adult advertisement banners. Such content is noted in coloured italics after the link.

Bookmarks

All the things that got as far as my bookmarks list.

Webcomics

Goats: Long running comic with a mix of epic (and surreal) storylines, beer drinking, aliens and animals with attitude problems. Entertaining read.
Something Positive: Heavy, witty sarcasm and social commentary, with an underlying plot. Cast based (at least in part) on real people. Reading large quantities of the back archives in one sitting will leave you bitter and cynical.

Girly: Cute, oddball art style and a storyline to match. Features a lesbian couple, a marshmallow kitty and an incapable superhero. Light and fun. Ongoing story, divided into chapters.
Polymer City Chronicles: A decade old comic with extensive plotline with a myriad of characters and locations. Storylines have been cut short or dropped in the past for becoming too epic. Impressive artwork in recent comics. Moves slowly, due to small number of panels per comic.

Misfile: An accidental gender change, fast cars and angelic intervention. Ongoing plotline. Good general read. Nice pencil drawn artwork.
Building 12: Surreal plotline featuring atypical college students, alien and demonic invasions and an evil moneygrabbing principle. Short chapters with little plot continuation between them. Kept for the occasional entertaining bit.

Loserz: Teenagers bumming about, playing console games, discussing the state of the world and generally being teenagers. A good, lighthearted read with reasonably realistic characters. Nice clean art style and witty dialogue.
Krakow: A young guy, his friend and his succubus girlfriend. Features demonic family feuds and the obligatory gag about holy water. Clumsy artwork, but good for the odd gag or storyline.

MegaTokyo: Epic ongoing story involving two foreign guys in Tokyo, their lives, their loves and l33t sP34k. Beautiful artwork and gripping story. Working through the extensive back archives requires serious determination.
Questionable Content: Music lovers, a hopeless romantic and a girl with serious issues. Good general read. Nice underlying plot and witty (though often niche) punchlines.

The Wotch: Witchcraft, teenage redheads and gender swaps. Amusing visual gags and an entertaining ongoing storyline. Good clean entertainment.
Inverloch: Pre-planned storyline featuring characters based on typical RPG classes and races. Gorgeous artwork with painted backgrounds. Gripping storyline and characters with genuine personalities.

Abstract Gender: A typical overnight gender change plot and occasionally amusing characters. Has had a change of artists in the past, arguably not for the better. Kept mainly to see if the story will pick up as the writer gains experience.
Impy and Aevy: The college antics of a ditzy witch and artistic goth. A relatively new comic with plenty of promise from an experienced writer and artist.

Other sites

Perkin Warbeck: Occasional ramblings and musings from myself and assorted friends (mostly from college). Will likely make little sense to the casual observer.
Airwired Wiki: A wiki containing whatever the assorted mass of misfits masquerading as users decided to put there.
The Daily WTF: A showcase for all that is wrong with the programmers and IT industry of today. You may commence weeping now.
Cute Overload: For when I've had a particularly bad day. Oh so fluffy.

Handy shortcuts

Shortcuts I have on my desktop, or otherwise stashed away.

Reference manuals

The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 6: Unix standard C headers and other miscellaneous information.
OpenGL Reference Manual: The OpenGL Blue Book, in HTML format.
W3 Schools: A readable refernce for all those unfathomable W3C standards.
PHP manual: PHP function and language reference, complete with handy user comments.
Java API reference: The standard Java 1.5 API calls, according to Sun.

Useful information

Java applets using XHTML 'object' tag: Handy hacks for getting around the IE versus Mozilla classid problem.
Common Errors in English: Large portions aimed at American abuses, but nevertheless useful as a reference for all English speakers.
E Number Index: Incomplete, but useful nonetheless.
The Jargon File: The essential reference for hackers and techies.
Wikipedia: The free encyclopædia.

Misc links

Completed comics

Webcomics which have run to completion. Worth a read if you have a few spare days.

Kid Radd: Based inside an early video game, complete with pixelated graphics. Comics are partially animated. Good story and unique presentation style. 601 strips.
Fusion D (Nudity, swearing, violence, etc.): A webcomic about angsty and/or insane anthropomorphic characters. Takes a while for the plot to stabilize, but a good read once it does. Not to everyone's taste. 373 strips.

Other junk

All the shortcut effluvia that ended up in my "Tidy" directory.

Flame Warriors: Mike Reed's Flame Warriors roster.
Fark.com: “It's not news, it's Fark.com”.
Weebl's Stuff: Home to Weebl and Bob, The Toast King and a bunch of dancing badgers.
Calver's site (Some adult content): Incredible hordes of digital kipple.
Optical Illusions etc.: Hideous abuses of human vision, replete with hideous site design.
Science Toys: Amusing things to do with magnets, string and a little ingenuity.
u.k. surf: A friend's band, in tasteful shades of magenta and black, last I checked.
Lostvids (Adult banner-ads): One of the many “funny video” sites on the 'net. Contains a few gems.
This Is Broken: Pictorial guide to broken design and implementation, in the non-software sense.
Drobe launchpad: Up-to-date information for an out-of-date platform.
The Icon Bar: Where the rest of the RISC OS fanboys hang about.
Trinity Rescue Kit: Emergency repair kit for operating systems.
IHTFP Hacks: The very greatest in physical hacks, courtesy of MIT.
The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity: Cipolla's classic piece of humor which, nevertheless, tends to ring all too true.
VG Cats: Gaming humour from a pair of anthropomorphic felines. Notable for the “face full of alien wing-wong” quote.