Reference stuff
- National Criminal Justice Reference Service – good collection of papers and resources from the DOJ
- Secrecy News – “Secrecy News from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy”, FAS=Federation of American Scientists
- Stanford Engineering Everywhere – free online courses from Stanford in CS, AI, and Linear Systems & Optimization; includes transcripts and video lectures
- “Life Incorporated” by Doug Rushkoff, or “How We Traded Meaning for Markets, Society for Self Interest, and Citizenship for Customer Service.”
- “Fooled by Randomness” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, or “The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets”
Technical stuff
- Creating DjVu documents in Linux howto
- Kicad libraries converted from EAGLE
- pfSense – “free, open source customized distribution of FreeBSD tailored for use as a firewall and router.”
- How to apply color curves in ImageMagick – came in handy for optimizing files from massive numbers of scans before DjVu conversion
- Internetworking Technology Handbook from Cisco – lots of freely available guides
- FreeMind – a free mind-mapping program written in Java. I haven’t used it much yet, but it looks really useful.
- Mathesaurus – quick reference for switching to open-source mathematical computation environments for computer algebra, numeric processing and data visualisation (e.g. MATLAB to Octave/SciLab/Python+Numpy)
- Advice in Mini-ITX – mailing list conversation
- KolibriOS – OS for x86 written in assembly; runs on one floppy; a fork of MenuetOS. This runs well in VirtualBox.
Music, demoscene, and other shiny stuff
- Future Crew – Second Reality – very impressive demo from 1993 (actual program for DOS here)
- ChibiTracker – portable Impulse Tracker clone (i.e. “a small, compact music composing application that is easy to learn and powerful enough to sound good”); GPLed and runs on Windows, Linux, MacOS, BSD, and BeOS
- Map of Science – trying to visualize connections between various sciences… Flash-based and interactive and kinda neat
Miscellaneous
- 10 Steps to Becoming Enlightened (yeah, slightly lofty title)
- List of Fallacious Arguments
- 38 Ways to Win an Argument – from Schopenhauer’s “The Art of Controversy” (which can be found here)
- The Happiness Project – read about this in Citybeat; “I recount some of my adventures and insights as I grapple with the challenge of being happier,” from an author before the release of her book by the same name in late 2009.
- Intelius – People search, free and apparently pretty good
Religious
