Since about 1998, whenever I need a rickroll-style URL placeholder for whatever reason, I use zombocom.
This is my favorite website ever, because, quite simply, you can do anything at Zombocom.
For those who don't get it, in the late 90's there was a distinct sense that internet websites might just solve all of the world's problems, and we just hadn't imagined yet how it was going to happen, and most people hadn't really been online yet.
Looking back I think the optimism for the internet in the 90s and early 2000s wasn't nearly as inaccurate as everyone says it was. There was certainly a lot of nonsense but I think most of what people thought would happen did end up happening, it just took decades instead of a few years.
It is true, if you know where to look. Twitter has many interesting creators I follow, both in tech and in other fields. Instagram similarly has many good photographers and artists I follow in many different styles as well.
>For those who don't get it, in the late 90's there was a distinct sense that internet websites might just solve all of the world's problems, and we just hadn't imagined yet how it was going to happen, and most people hadn't really been online yet.
wasn't it more of a parody of those long and elaborate flash intros that websites used to have?
Definitely, but it also addressed something I'm trying to tease-out here.
For people who had never really used computers, and had not been online, the buzz about how the Information Superhighway was going to change everyone's life was enigmatic at best.
This led to all manner of fantasy, and a yearning to make the connection and discover what was going to happen - to be a part of it, to converge - with, or without, a good technical understanding. There's something of this irony in Zombocom.
There's a great 80's Neue Deuetsche Welle song by Paso Doble with which I am practically obsessed, which captures some of the very weird fantastical dream-con-fusion of human and machine, love and logic, flesh and silicon. For the non-tech artists, it was (is?) a rich place to play:
Without a doubt, one of my favorite sites to go reading through. I find every article fascinating, and love that it's still got that retro look and hasn't changed in years.
I had a roommate who would binge watch that guy's videos in his room and when he came out I'd make jokes like hey how's Elmer Fudd doing? Roomate didn't like that (honestly I just thought they were more of his goofy ufo vids at the time) but he does have a pretty damn good channel regardless of rhotacism. I also like Anton Petrov on YouTube whose angle is more about recent developments in astrophysics: https://m.youtube.com/user/whatdamath
Arngren is amazing. When I was UX lead at a big e-commerce retailer I spent a lot of time looking at that site.
You might also enjoy Yvette’s Bridal Formal. It’s the good, old, weird, outsider art web that you just don’t get now. Didn’t really get it then either but this is something special.
Really not sure how to describe it but I love the layout of this. It fully reminds of me old print mail-order catalogues which always had all sorts of zany products. Although here, things for sale all seem quite practical to the right person :)
One of my engineering professors still has a Web 1.0 site, "best viewed in Netscape Communicator 4.0 or higher at 16 or 24-bit color". It's actively updated, but hasn't fundamentally changed since the late 90s - some pages still have the Netscape Composer generator tags in them. (For further frame of reference: I last had a reason to go to it over ten years ago now, but still bring it up as a talking piece.
https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/ The world's biggest collection of classic text mode fonts, system fonts and BIOS fonts from DOS-era IBM PCs and compatibles
> Mechanical watches are not as accurate as digital ones. They require maintenance and are more fragile. Despite all these drawbacks, these devices show a true mastery of engineering. With creative use of miniature gears, levers, and springs, a mechanical watch rises from its dormant components to become truly alive.
And to an extent, I can agree that figuring out and building such a tiny mechanic is truly genius. But so is figuring out the digital electronics devices, even if they seem much less sexy.
What we should really be thankful for are those geniuses who figured out all those technologies and put their powers in the hand of the mere mortals.
I don't need to be able to understand the inners of the computer, but can still make use of its power to the benefit of others.
So this is clearly amazing, but on the topic of page design for my future reference, can any frontend people tell me whether there is an effective way to avoid the 'i want to scroll but interacted with the graphic' effect?
I’ve mentioned a couple of times on here before: I downgraded my data plan during Covid, and haven’t bothered to increase it yet. Oh my plan, it goes to 100kbps once I run out of data. Once that happens I mostly just read hackernews comments. It works perfectly. Google search also works ok, google maps works with patience, and virtually nothing else will even load.
I spent a few months with extremely slow (single digit KB/s) internet. As you say HN is basically the only usable site. Even HN loaded very slowly though, so I would read it through w3m (text mode web browser) over Mosh (more efficient than SSH).
-- Worth mentioning that many sites will be difficult or unusable in a text mode browser, so I recommend Browsh which renders them (in Firefox?) and then converts the image to colorful, pixelated terminal art—it supports mouse and everything! (The word "recommend" is a bit strong here, but if your internet is bad enough and you need to get something done, it may be the only way to do it.)
I had to actually plan my media downloads ahead—I'd collect a list of podcasts / lectures to download and then fetch them all when I had access to decent wifi. Eventually I made an elaborate series of bash scripts with a php frontend to extract audio from youtube lectures and convert it to Opus, to save money on my fast but expensive mobile data.
I even set up my own internet radio station, an Opus proxy for Lofi Beats to Relax and Study... as they say, necessity is the mother of invention... or at least the mother of reading a bunch of icecast manpages... Wouldn't want to repeat the experience, but it was very educational!
Right now I'm on a metered connection (5GB/day), so I set my Steam download speed low enough to spread a 12GB download over 3 days... brings me back to the old days hahah.
Unlike the old days, though, you have to actively not download data, as opposed to not actively download data. For example, make sure synching to the cloud is off (moving a folder, especially if you’re not always connected can easily be an accidental replias of 10GB), making sure an OS update won’t be downloaded (easy on windows but not easy on MacOS except in the case of iPhone tethering), and be careful about browsing (Reddit or news sites can easily use hundreds of MB in a few minutes).
Little Snitch (Mac) can be very helpful in these situations. When I'm on the road and using my limited phone data for internet, I turn on the 'limited' profile where Little Snitch doesn't allow most internet traffic (with some exceptions).
Try browsh in mosh like others have mentioned, but also Opera Mini. Download Microemulator from https://storage.googleapis.com/google-code-archive-downloads..., and use curl or wget (not a browser) to download http://m.opera.com/mini.jad . Next run microemulator, set the device to "resizable", and open the mini.jad file (the menu item is "Load MIDlet from file" or something similar) you downloaded. Opera Mini works pretty well on bad connections, though every so often it shows an interstitial ad for an Opera site. Also, don't use it for logging in to things, it proxies all pages through its servers so it would be able to see your passwords. The Android version is bad, don't use it.
No, I'm not trolling. This is one of the coolest websites I've ever seen, despite it being a personal blog and having no fancy animations.
ps: the coolest "site", not the coolest content of the site. While it is very good too in this case.
387 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 426 ms ] threadWorks pretty well, can answer almost any question :-)
I also recommend checking out Dan Russell's (lead researcher on the Google Search team) blog. https://searchresearch1.blogspot.com/
This is my favorite website ever, because, quite simply, you can do anything at Zombocom.
For those who don't get it, in the late 90's there was a distinct sense that internet websites might just solve all of the world's problems, and we just hadn't imagined yet how it was going to happen, and most people hadn't really been online yet.
…
…
is yourself.
wasn't it more of a parody of those long and elaborate flash intros that websites used to have?
For people who had never really used computers, and had not been online, the buzz about how the Information Superhighway was going to change everyone's life was enigmatic at best.
This led to all manner of fantasy, and a yearning to make the connection and discover what was going to happen - to be a part of it, to converge - with, or without, a good technical understanding. There's something of this irony in Zombocom.
There's a great 80's Neue Deuetsche Welle song by Paso Doble with which I am practically obsessed, which captures some of the very weird fantastical dream-con-fusion of human and machine, love and logic, flesh and silicon. For the non-tech artists, it was (is?) a rich place to play:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-l5Pyg_pSYw&list=PLHgJlrCztl... "The modules are going crazy -- Man, I'm totally in love"
Without a doubt, one of my favorite sites to go reading through. I find every article fascinating, and love that it's still got that retro look and hasn't changed in years.
If you like a science-based approach to futurism this guy is the absolute best. His channel on YouTube is amazing.
A music network state (if you are into new forms of music).
I like how insane this Norwegian mail order website is.
You might also enjoy Yvette’s Bridal Formal. It’s the good, old, weird, outsider art web that you just don’t get now. Didn’t really get it then either but this is something special.
https://yvettesbridalformal.p1r8.net/links.html
https://people.rit.edu/meseec/
Lots of great sites among the RIT profs.
https://fabiensanglard.net/ a personal website with interesting side projects and lots of technical details
https://paulstamatiou.com/ photography, technology and design with in-depth articles and detailed travel photosets
https://www.arun.is/ a visually-rich blog that dives deep into how design and technology shape our lives
https://ciechanow.ski/ detailed explanations and illustrations of technology
https://simone.computer/ a personal website designed like an old computer
https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/ The world's biggest collection of classic text mode fonts, system fonts and BIOS fonts from DOS-era IBM PCs and compatibles
http://y9k.xyz/
https://ciechanow.ski/exposing-floating-point/
At the end, concludes with:
> Mechanical watches are not as accurate as digital ones. They require maintenance and are more fragile. Despite all these drawbacks, these devices show a true mastery of engineering. With creative use of miniature gears, levers, and springs, a mechanical watch rises from its dormant components to become truly alive.
And to an extent, I can agree that figuring out and building such a tiny mechanic is truly genius. But so is figuring out the digital electronics devices, even if they seem much less sexy.
What we should really be thankful for are those geniuses who figured out all those technologies and put their powers in the hand of the mere mortals.
I don't need to be able to understand the inners of the computer, but can still make use of its power to the benefit of others.
https://news.ycombinator.com/news
-- Worth mentioning that many sites will be difficult or unusable in a text mode browser, so I recommend Browsh which renders them (in Firefox?) and then converts the image to colorful, pixelated terminal art—it supports mouse and everything! (The word "recommend" is a bit strong here, but if your internet is bad enough and you need to get something done, it may be the only way to do it.)
I had to actually plan my media downloads ahead—I'd collect a list of podcasts / lectures to download and then fetch them all when I had access to decent wifi. Eventually I made an elaborate series of bash scripts with a php frontend to extract audio from youtube lectures and convert it to Opus, to save money on my fast but expensive mobile data.
I even set up my own internet radio station, an Opus proxy for Lofi Beats to Relax and Study... as they say, necessity is the mother of invention... or at least the mother of reading a bunch of icecast manpages... Wouldn't want to repeat the experience, but it was very educational!
Right now I'm on a metered connection (5GB/day), so I set my Steam download speed low enough to spread a 12GB download over 3 days... brings me back to the old days hahah.
No, I'm not trolling. This is one of the coolest websites I've ever seen, despite it being a personal blog and having no fancy animations. ps: the coolest "site", not the coolest content of the site. While it is very good too in this case.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gwern
Hasn’t changed in 26 years.
https://www.spacejam.com/2021/
This is just amazing.