I tend to spend a fair amount of time online and therefore collect a whole load of links to useful, interesting or just plain strange things from around the web. The following is a brief and randomly chosen collection of unsorted links which seem to have accumulated in my browser’s bookmarks over the last year or so. I have however omitted Flash games I enjoyed and will be listing some of those in a following update.
Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast
(but is slow in Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, …)
Programming article explaining a faster-than-the-usually-used approach to matching regular expressions; any programmer implementing them should be aware of this, although it does of course come with associated costs and may not be suited to all uses.
Finite Simple Group (of Order Two)
YouTube video of a clever song. Most of it may go over your head unless you’ve studied math to a reasonably advanced level, but it can still be appreciated purely for musical value and should have at least some meaning to the more modestly educated.
Multicolr Search Lab
Clever little page which allows you to search a huge selection of images posted to Flickr based on the colours in them; thoughts on potential practical uses for this are left as an exercise for the reader.
LifeHacker
Tips on improving productivity, choices of software packages, etc.
Robot Donkey
Youtube of creepy/cool robo-donkey - it turns out the model shown is the Boston Dynamics “Bigdog”; they’re a company who produce robots based on observation of living creatures. The one shown is intended for carrying packages (as a packmule or donkey would) in difficult terrain.
NES Controller Coffee Table
This guy built a working giant NES Controller which doubles as a coffee table. Gotta get me one o’ these!
Face-stealing/copying robot
Why yes, I am apparently slightly preoccupied with robots, what of it? YouTube of a robot that can copy face types.
Last.fm
Website/service that tracks the music you listen to, generates a bunch of stats and recommends similar stuff. Pretty cool.
On The Original Of Circuits
Damn Interesting article about a cool experiment using FPGAs to “evolve” novel solutions to problems.
Lordi - Hard Rock Hallelujah
I was trying to resist posting music or music videos, but this one is just too awesome. On the day of rockening, it’s who dares wins…
XBox 360 Portable
This guy managed to turn an XBox 360 into a laptop, pretty cool. He’s done the same with a Wii as well.
Mnemosyne
A cool piece of freely available software designed to help you remember things. I’ve used it to remember a whole bunch of birthdays, but I’m sure there are many other uses (new languages?!?) it could be put to as well.
Giveaway Of The Day
Free downloads of licenced software, one new application every day available to install for free only within that 24 hours. Most of it is crap, but occasionally you see some good software in there.
I’ve collected a whole bunch more, but rather than ramble on forever I’ll just leave it at those. Feel free to comment with any favourite online discoveries from the past year!