flickr: Library of Congress

The Library of Congress has recently uploaded over three thousand photos to the online photo-sharing site, Flickr.com. These are amazing full color images from a time before I was around. In lieu of attempting to get all the facts right (and probably missing something), I'm just gonna link to The Library of Congress Blog post (did you know there was one?) and here's The Library of Congress's Flickr page.

WebUrbanist

WebUrbanist is a blog of "urban design, culture, travel, architecture and alternative art." It's a fascinating look at the cluttered world around us. Geek graffiti, surrealistic sculptures in public places, and other ironically intellectual "art underground" blog posts abound. It's definitely one to add to your RSS reader.

Bent Objects

Terry Border is an artist who creates tiny sculptures out of found objects - that, combined with a love for photography and a great deal of quirky humor thrown into the mix, make Bent Objects a must-see website! He's also working on a book of his little creations. Check it out; it's great! (discovered it via BoingBoing post)

GTD primer

This video primer on the GTD system was posted on Lifehacker.com - a great personal productivity website. From Lifehacker.com:

"Hyper but lovable author of Getting Things Done David Allen explains the meat of his GTD system in this five minute video, which covers dealing with the "stuff" in your life, reducing your to-do's to simple "widget-cranking," and clearing your mind. Allen comes across pretty frenetic in this quickly-cut together clip, but it's a good primer for folks new to GTD."

Here's the link.

Spare the Rock..

It's called "Spare the Rock, Spoil the Child." It's a local radio show (in Northampton, Mass.), that uploads all their shows to their website and offers them as podcasts. Anyway, looks like a pretty cool radio show for kids (and parents who dislike the standard children song fare). They play "kid friendly" songs . . . lots of Beatles, They Might Be Giants, obscure bands, and lots of up-tempo, happy songs. (I kind of like listening to it myself - very eclectic)

Here's the link: Sparetherock.com

canopy replaced, artist cheers

I've gotta put in a (free) plug for DickBlick Art Materials (for all your art-related needs). I just got an email back from customer service, and the company has agreed to replace a damaged canopy I had purchased from the company. Damaged through no fault of their own, by the way - I blame mother nature, if there's blame to be dished out. Anyway - that's the latest news from the home front. Keep up the good work DickBlick!

notebookism

Here is another website I frequent from time to time. It's centered on the interesting, creative world of [what else] writing in notebooks. Sure it's an odd subject for a blog, and no not every post is very interesting, but every so often I will find a gem, feeding some creative fire within me, urging me to drag out a long forgotten notepad and start doodling or taking notes or whatever.

Okay, so it's not for everyone. But for those of you interested: notebookism.com

xkcd.com

I know there are other web comics out there, but I wanted to mention this one because I usually really enjoy it. It's called xkcd, "A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language." - some of the cartoons are hokey, some of the cartoons contain semi-lewd material (whatever that means), and most of them would appeal only to the geek-minded among us. Here's a recent one that I snickered at.

my new favorite dictionary site

As you may know, Google has a built in dictionary search - type in "define:" followed by the word you need defined and Google returns with an array of dictionary options. This is very handy and it's all well and good, but this is not the site I was going to mention. My new favorite dictionary website is NinjaWords.com - check it out. It's simple and fast [much like Google] and although it doesn't have many extras . . . well, it's simple and fast!

Here's an even better thing: using Firefox [you are using Firefox, aren't you?] you can install the Dictionary Search extension and configure it to use NinjaWords.com instead of or in addition to the default dictionary site. Excellent, I say. Simple and fast.

30 Boxes

30boxes is a community-oriented online calendar. It's nice looking, easy to add events and apparently works well for groups to use [I haven't checked out this last feature yet]. Bottomline: it's slick, check it out!
link: 30 Boxes

How To Build A Computer - Wikibooks

This website is not a favorite website of mine, but a website I would highly recommend to the first-time computer builder [or even if you want to add additional hardware to your system]. It's a comprehensive [exhaustive] primer on building computers, start to finish.

Here's the link: How To Build A Computer - Wikibooks

Digg it

Digg.com is an ever-changing news headline site where regular websurfers submit and "vote" on various articles online (the news headlines are then automatically sorted according to the number of "diggs"). The result is an interesting collection of cutting edge headline news, geeky trends, novel websites, and weird science. It's great!

Here's the link: Digg.com

The Red Ferret Journal

Here's a website/blog I frequent [two or three times a month]. It features "tantalisingly tasteful, tacky and taut tech trivia." Actually, "trivia" is misleading: it features tech gadgets. And although I would never have enough money to support such a hobby, it sure is fun to window shop.

Here's the link: The Red Ferret Journal