Sredzkistraße

New discoveries

This was posted on reddit today. I agree entirely with the poster’s sentiment: interesting links on reddit are, more often than not, not links to the gateway of a whole website of interesting stuff. When they are links to a website’s front page, it’s generally a very narrow, single-purpose website that is quickly forgotten about. Hopefully, the poster’s subreddit — apparently yet to be made — will be a success.

In any event, having gone through the blog-post he had linked I decided to share some of my new discoveries here myself:

• Building Maker: A Google app I was unaware of, which lets you add the 3D element to Google Maps. For all bored architects out there (since this is just what they want to be doing in their time off.)
• Ikea Hacker: Neat stuff done with bog-standard Ikea furniture.
• Strange Maps: A blog of, well, old and interesting maps. I don’t know if I’d go as far as to say strange…
• Newseum: The front pages of newspapers from 78 countries around the world.
• Cooking For Engineers: This one reminded me of my father, a pragmatist who insists on weighing pasta before cooking it, in order to make sure he’ll be doling out the correct amount. Nothing wrong with approaching cooking as a science, as opposed to an art!
• GetHuman.com: An excellent idea for a website. This one tells you which keys you need to press in order to get an actual human operator on the line when calling a large company, saving you the time of listening to and trying to interact with a computerised system.
• PDFGeni.com: Another great idea — a repository of PDF documents such as old technical manuals, academic texts, and so on.

I feel I must write a disclaimer, saying I haven’t used or read these sites extensively, having just discovered them a few hours ago, but from first impressions they do look like they deserve a bookmark.