Links

In the early days of the Internet, search engines were extremely limited and finding things often involved ‘surfing,’ which meant starting from one of one's favourite websites (often a ‘portal’) and following links in the hopes of ending up where you wanted to be. For this reason, in the very first iterations of my website, this links page used to be stuffed with about every website I knew about at that time. This practice became mostly pointless since the advent of efficient search engines. So instead, this page now contains a concise set of websites that I either (used to) visit frequently or deem important and could be of interest.

Ironically, I deem the ‘surfing’ paradigm to have become more relevant again due to increasing sloppiness of current search engines. It seems there is an overflow of information, some of which only shows up at the top of search results because the site authors have spent a lot of time on ‘SEO,’ not because the information is actually useful. To make things worse, major search engines like Google have obviously started to drop webpages from their index entirely, based on some weighting scheme that changes every few months. They also heavily favour recent pages which makes it profitable for parasites to make sloppy derivative copies of existing pages. The mere fact that the copy is newer will give it a good chance of being preferred by search engines, even if the content of the page is worse than the original. Bad times.

General • Music & Movies • Comics • Photography • YouTube channels

General

• Google
  If you have never heard of Google, you should really update your internet awareness. Google owns at the time of this writing the most popular search engine. A search engine makes an index of webpages and tries to return the most “relevant” ones when someone enters a search term. The success of Google is partially due to the fact that their engine is very efficient, contains a massive amount of pages, and used to rank the results in a way people find helpful. Over the years, Google evolved from merely a search engine to a player on multiple markets. They also have free e-mail, world maps, webmaster tools and much more.
  You can search Google directly from this search box:
  The major problem with Google is that the time when they were merely a search engine is long gone. Google is now a subsidiary of Alphabet, a conglomerate whose core business is advertising. The search engine has changed a lot and in my opinion, it is no longer objective by any stretch of the imagination. Results are now weighted in weird ways that heavily favour a limited set of webpages. I suspect that one of those weights (directly or indirectly) is potential ad revenue, but it is of course very difficult to prove this. Be very critical about the search results and if you want to be sure, cross-reference with other search engines like the following ones.
• Brave Search
  An alternative to Google. Pretty much its opposite: the goal here is to maximise privacy instead of trying to construct a user profile to maximise ad revenue. On top of that, my first impressions is that this search engine returns way more relevant results instead of heavily favouring sponsored junk, the experience is similar to how Google used to be before it went bad.
• DuckDuckGo
  Another alternative to Google. I don't use it very often, only when I get frustrated by the fact that Google keeps feeding me the same ‘trendy’ results even when I try to craft my search terms to find something else. As with Brave, this search engine is not part of a big conglomerate whose primary goal is to make money off a personal profile they construct from your search and browsing behaviour. Unfortunately I have the impression that they are trying too hard to provide similar results as Google with a similar kind of vagueness and fuzziness, often making it similarly frustrating to find specific things.
• Bing
  Microsoft's search engine, worth a try if none of the above seem to offer useful results.
• Wikipedia
  An online encyclopaedia that can be edited by anyone. The result is that you can find information about pretty much anything there. The only disadvantage is that the quality of the information may be lower for less popular topics, and for political and controversial topics it is not unusual for the text to be biased. It is an immensely useful site but you should always read it with a critical eye. There are translations in various languages but for non-region-specific information, the English pages are most often the most elaborate.
• Slashdot
  News for nerds, stuff that matters, and a gazillion idiots who are waiting like vultures to reply to your comments with some self-indulgent remark to show how much more intelligent they are than you, and how much better their way of life is. My strategy is to read the articles only, and the first comments that aren't stupid first post! attempts. If I really feel brave, I might attempt a comment on a fresh article. Don't waste your time posting on an article that has a large amount of comments already: chances are nobody will ever read your text.
  (The relevance of this site has probably dwindled in recent years, and so has its popularity. I mainly keep this link here out of nostalgia.)
• BBC News
  I live in Belgium but I rarely check the Belgian news sources, because experience tells me they give watered-down versions of the BBC's news with a delay added on top. Although I admit that these days I tend to ignore mainstream news outlets altogether because it is becoming too obvious that their main goal is not to provide actual news, but to make you buy a subscription or generate ad revenue by maximising controversy in the featured articles.
  I mostly used the RSS feed instead of browing through the site itself.
• Engrish.com
  This is another relic from the early Internet going back as far as 1996, collecting funny and weird examples of ‘Engrish,’ the kind of distorted English that can often be seen in countries where it is not the main language. Especially Japan is a great source of it, which is why the site was originally called ‘Japanese Engrish,’ but other countries like China are now also joining in the fun. This site has known some long periods of downtime but at the time of this writing, it is again alive and kicking.

Music & Movies

• All Music Guide
  An extensive database of music releases and artists, with reviews by people who mostly know what they're talking about (be aware that some reviews are extremely subjective hence utterly worthless, though). The search function is useful, but unfortunately the site runs on Microsoft software and can't always handle the load. If you search something and there are more than ±200 results, don't bother opening them, the server will timeout. Also it is a bit biased towards releases/artists in the USA and UK. Anything else, especially when sung in a language different from English, is mostly labeled “World music” even when it's plain rock. Information about mainstream artists is generally correct but you may want to double-check anything about lesser known artists.
• Discogs
  Kind of a rougher version of AMG, built by anyone who wants to contribute, and it is also a marketplace where one can buy/sell music on physical media from/to other members. There are fewer reviews and their quality varies even more, but there's often much more detailed information about specific releases. If you can't find it on AMG, you may find it here.
• IMDb
  At some point I removed this link, but I restored it after some changes that truly annoyed me were reverted. I used to go to this website to look up ratings and reviews of films and TV series. Sometimes I wrote my own reviews. I even have a page explaining how I choose my rating score for a film.
  Even though they somewhat made it better again, the reviews page is still much less usable than it used to be. There is still a strong emphasis on sorting reviews in so-called ‘helpfulness’ order, and the lay-out went from paginated to pseudo-infinite scrolling, meaning you cannot even skim through reviews without clicking and scrolling like crazy and choking your browser by loading all the content into the same single page. (As I explain elsewhere, infinite scrolling is awful and should never have been introduced anywhere except maybe in very specific circumstances.)
  What pisses me off about the so-called ‘helpfulness’ ranking is that it is not helpful at all. It only calculates the ratio of upvotes versus downvotes for each review. This system is very easily abused by people who are paid to upvote reviews of a certain production house and downvote the rest. Heck, it is easy to do this through automated scripts. Generally, sorting reviews in this way will result in the first few positive reviews being forever stuck at the top of the list, unless the film was truly so abysmally bad that no drone or bot could prevent the truth from being upvoted. I used to describe here a way of getting a more balanced idea about films by sorting the list in various ways, but that has now been sabotaged. The result is that I now only rarely use this website anymore, although it remains useful to get listings and technical details about films and TV series. The ratings and reviews however have become pretty much useless and obviously I don't bother writing my own anymore.
  You may want to look at Rotten Tomatoes as an alternative, my general impression is that its votes are manipulated to a lesser degree.
• Radio Paradise
  If you hate advertisements and have a broad non-commercial musical taste, this may be the best internet radio station out there. If your idols are Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera and Lady GaGa, by all means stay away. If you become a regular listener, don't forget to donate to keep it running because donations are their only source of income.
  Keep in mind that the reason why Radio Paradise can run 24/7, is that it is semi-automated. You will hear recurring playlist fragments if you keep on listening for weeks. But it is nothing like the average U.S. radio station that endlessly loops its 30-song playlist with different commercials as only variations.
• Odysee
  This is an alternative to YouTube. I have only recently started to look at this, but despite some of the flak this site has been receiving and a slight feeling that a bit too many paranoid people have taken refuge here, my overall impression is good. The site has a bit of the feel of how YouTube used to be in its earlier days. Its popularity though is obviously nowhere near that of YouTube's. That is the main reason why I have added a link here, to spread some awareness. See the following for why I believe it is time for a contender for YT to emerge.
• YouTube
  In its earlier days this was a great platform where anyone could share any video. True, the result was that it soon filled up with unimaginable amounts of uninteresting garbage — the not-so-surprising result of giving the man-in-the-street access to video recording and publishing tools. However, if you looked well enough, you could find some true gems in there, as well as all the highlights of famous films. The comments were not moderated in any way and reading then usually lead to instant loss of faith in humanity. It was a nice illustration of why I believe the internet should be separated in a section for babies up to immature teenagers, and grown-up people. But even though I am not sure how, the quality of the comments has improved quite a bit in recent years. It may have something to do with changes to the rating and filtering system.
  What has not improved however, is the increasing censorship that seems to be the result of YouTube having been bought by Google. The main problem is that YouTube is no longer a video sharing website. It is now an advertisement platform, that uses user-contributed videos as a carrier wave for ads. Every decision is now being taken with advertising revenue as the primary goal. There used to be a visible ‘thumbs down’ counter, which they removed despite unanimous protest. Obviously a visible high number of dislikes could lead to people skipping a video and being served fewer ads. The whole platform also exudes hints of a leftist political agenda that relies on pretty much the same censhorship tactics as extreme right has been using in the past. Still, it is by far the most successful website of its kind, but that's probably only because no serious contender has managed to get a foothold yet.
  Below is a list of some of my favourite YT channels.

Comics

• Calvin & Hobbes
  This is one of the most beautiful comics ever made, but it got stuck inside a paradox: its success on the one hand, and the very commercialization it tried to criticize on the other hand. I don't include a link because the ‘official’ site on which the comic resides is an insult to the spirit of the comic. I recommend buying the paper version or (only if you're really too poor to have any money to spare) downloading a complete archive somewhere.
• Concerned
  This is definitely not for everyone, because this comic is built around the storyline of the computer game “Half-Life 2”. You must have played that game (and preferably also Counter-Strike) to appreciate this comic, which mocks many elements of the game and computer games in general.
• Ctrl-Alt-Del
  This comic alternates between a storyline involving gamers, and loose comics about other games and computer-related stuff. If your experience with computers doesn't go beyond Facebook, web surfing and watching videos of kittens, you'll hardly find this one funny. I must admit I have stopped following this one, so I can't tell whether it has maintained the same quality as in its early years.
• Dilbert
  The neverending story of an employee in a corporation where nobody (including the CEO) knows what they're actually doing. It's amazing how recognisable the situations in these comics are, whatever your own job is. Despite the limited scope of the comic, Scott Adams seems to have an infinite amount of inspiration. Try this exercise: take a bunch of random Dilbert comics and try to replace their text balloons such that they match with your own company. The easier this is, the more worried you should be.
  Unfortunately the whole thing has turned sour in 2023, and the Dilbert comics are no longer being published through the regular channels, and perhaps you won't want to try to get inside the now gated community to read the newest ones anyway—your call. I recommend looking up the classic comics in for instance the Internet Archive, or buying printed editions.
• Dirkjan
  Aside from the occasional purely visual gag, Dirkjan is only really suitable for Dutch-speaking people. Don't try to auto-translate it, because many of the gags rely on puns that will never survive an attempt at translation. If you do understand Dutch though, this comic is thoroughly absurd at times and sometimes mildly offensive, which makes it all the more interesting.
• Garfield
  I can recommend the comics in the archive from the years 1990-2003. The quality has unfortunately been declining lately, probably because the comics are now produced by some kind of ‘collective’ and as David Bowie would word it, “Garfield has grown up a cow”. As a matter of fact, Garfield has been designed to be a cash cow from the start, but only in the recent decades this has become a bit too obvious for my taste. It looks like the whole franchise including the original website got swallowed by Nickelodeon now, which is why I now link to the comics archive on the GoComics site.
• General Protection Fault
  One of the lesser known webcomics from the earlier days, but of high quality, and still running at the time of this writing, although it is scheduled to be finalised in October 2024 around its 26th anniversary. The story line seems to start out very simple but becomes pretty complex. Despite the name there's something for everyone in here, although you will certainly appreciate it more if you're a bit ‘nerdy’.
• Hackles
  Since my whole site is slowly turning into a relic of the old Internet, I might as well go all the way and point you at this little gem of a typical early 21st century webcomic when the internet was still mostly ruled by nerds. This comic started in 2001 and ended only 3 years later. The mere fact that the site still exists in its final state 20 years later is pretty amazing, it is a real time capsule and an accurate depiction of what being a nerd around the start of the millennium was like. It has a naïvety and charm that is hard to find these days, when everything has to be cynical and bitter for some reason.
• Jesus Christ: In the Name of the Gun
  This comic is best described by summing up a few keywords: Jesus Christ, guns, Ernest Hemingway, nazis, gore, and fecal incontinence. Enough said. Not sure if there are still updates, but the first book was by far the best, the second one is OK, and I didn't bother checking for updates after the third one because it was rather uninteresting.
• Kevin & Kell
  Not the oldest webcomic, but the oldest one still updating at the time of this writing, with uninterrupted daily updates since September 1995. If you don't care about the fact that this is impressive, the comic itself is also plain good, introducing the reader to a universe both familiar and different in its own unique way. This comic reminds me of the strips I drew as a kid, with a similar alternate universe populated by animals with human-like traits, but is much better executed. Obviously this comic starts out with a geeky undertone like most of the others I link to here, but when progressing through the archive, it becomes clear that there's more than meets the eye.
• The Perry Bible Fellowship
  A true little gem with wildly varying drawing styles and unlike some other comics, a healthy dose of sarcasm. Warning: adults only. Unfortunately the update schedule is, well, … completely random. Definitely quality over quantity.
• Sequential Art
  This comic, part of Collected Curios, is also updated randomly with sporadic long delays, but it is worth the wait. It usually draws inspiration from popular culture, especially the more ‘nerdy’ movies and video games, giving them its own weird twist with a unique style of humour that I really like.
• Sluggy Freelance
  I must admit I do not actively follow this one and only really know it from hearsay, but as one of the very oldest web comics that is still updated at the time of this writing, it cannot be missing from this list of links.
• S.O.N.A.I.S.
  Yes, I am shamelessly putting my own obscure web comic amidst all these classics, after all I'm the webmaster here, so I can do this. 😁
  This comic is my attempt at rekindling some of the spirit of the now gone User Friendly (see below), in a somewhat similar style, but with a more modern setting. The starting point is a small start-up company specialised in A.I. solutions, run by a group of nerds and a marketeer with a love-hate relationship towards nerds. There will be the occasional technical joke, there will be adventures, and there will be general weirdness. Please give it a try!
• User Friendly
  One of the oldest web comics, only slightly younger than Sluggy Freelance. When going through the archive you can actually re-experience the early internet, and the Dot Com Bubble bursting. It is not for everyone, but for people involved with ICT in some way, there are some true gems in here. The comments section under each comic used to act as a kind of message board for insiders aka UFies, often discussing anything but the comic itself. Rumours are that some relationships have sprouted in those boards.
  Unfortunately this comic has stopped publishing new cartoons since November 2010, then it went on repeat mode, and the site went down in March 2022. Unless someone revives the site or a cartoon archive, your best option to read the comics is the Internet Archive. Or, if you are looking for another comic that has a few similarities with UF, you might like SONAIS, my own webcomic.
• XKCD
  A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language. That pretty much sums it up. It is quite possible that you'll find this comic weird, nerdy and incomprehensible. If the previous sentence made you curious, you'll probably like it.

Photography

Sometimes I have nightmares about being already halfway a vacation in a far away country and suddenly realising I haven't yet taken any photos. I guess I must be one of those strange people some call photographers or photogs.

• Digital Photography Review
  This used to be pretty much the site for all things about digital photography. Unfortunately Amazon, who bought the site back in 2007, decided at the start of 2023 to shut it down as part of their big downsizing effort. After a huge protest, a buyer was sought and eventually Gear Patrol bought the site. It is unclear what impact this will have in the long term, but things are back to normal now.
• DPR Forum
  This is one of the independent forums that were launched in the wake of Amazon's DPReview closure announcement. There have been several others, but this is the one I stuck with and I'm mostly only active here, even now that the DPReview forums themselves no longer seem doomed—at least not in the short term. I find this one to have a very friendly atmosphere and an easy to use interface.
• Digicam Finder
  This site was also created during the time when it seemed DPR was doomed, to both preserve the database of digital camera information as accessible on DPReview, as well as improving upon it. Even though DPR has survived into its post-Amazon era, this is still a useful resource.

YouTube channels

These are by far not all the channels I follow and not even all my favourites are in here, these are just the ones I think deserve a bit more publicity.

• Acorn to Arabella
  Two guys woke up one morning and decided to build a wooden boat entirely from scratch (only some parts are salvaged from old wrecks). The crew working on this boat has changed over the years, but the goal hasn't. Watching this boat slowly take shape is always a relaxing moment at the end of each week. Now the boat has actually been launched, the channel will probably remain active and shift towards travel reports.
• Captain Disillusion
  This was, as far as I remember, the first channel I ever subscribed to, back in the days when YouTube movies were the size of postage stamps and ads were nowhere to be seen. Originally the videos were all about our Captain debunking visual tricks in (online) videos, but the topic has widened to special effects in general. Uploads are not frequent because obviously quality goes above quantity here.
• Cody's Lab (or Cody'sLab)
  This channel has stayed true to the earlier era of YouTube, when the goal was not to make fancy videos with high production values in the hopes of luring a big audience to watch videos crafted to be at least 10 minutes long to get optimal ad revenue. Cody's videos are basic and honest, and cover a wide range of subjects, trying to explain science in ways everyone can understand. Unfortunately many of the videos have been banned because some people confuse the concepts of education and danger.
• Garage 54
  Remember the golden days of Top Gear when they often did crazy experiments on cars? These Russians are continuing this tradition and take it to the next level. If only the people in charge of their country were as creative and positive-minded as these guys. In true Russian style, for translation the videos rely on a voice-over that is very well done by BMIRussian.
• The History Guy
  History that deserves to be remembered is the tagline of this channel. The videos describe interesting parts of history you have often probably never heard of before, and even if you think that the subject of a particular video does not seem interesting, the enthusiasm of the narrator will help convince you of the opposite.
• Mustard
  Another one in the “quality over quantity” camp: only sporadic uploads, but of very high quality. The general theme is failed or underrated attempts at bringing innovation in aerospace or other means of transportation. As was completely predictable given the quality level, after a while the author moved his main productions to a paid service, but he still uploads a free video to this channel now and then.
• NightHawkInLight
  Another channel that started out in the good old Wild West era of YouTube with fireworks experiments, but has evolved into specific scientific experiments (sometimes still involving exotic fireworks). Again quality over quantity. Some recent videos are about researching a high-performance radiative cooling paint with items one can buy at a grocery store.
• Project Farm
  Unbiased reviews of various tools and products, with quite a bit of care to stay true to the scientific method. Of course there are limitations to the test set-ups and methods due to the small scale, but still the results do give an indication of exaggerated manufacturer claims or surprising cases of good value-for-money. The funny thing is that this being an American channel, I cannot even buy some of the products being reviewed, but still the videos are very useful to know what to pay attention to and sometimes even to merely learn that a certain product exists at all.
• Taofledermaus
  Another remnant of the earlier days of YouTube. The subject of the videos has gradually evolved towards testing of strange or experimental shotgun slugs, with some attention to aerodynamics and supersonic flight behaviour. I admit this channel may appear a bit redneck at times, but that is part of the fun.
• World of Armor - ArmorSmith
  In the (admittedly unlikely) event that you need an accurate reproduction of a medieval bascinet for a re-enactment, or a more practical helmet for medieval fighting sport, or just a real metal copy of a cool helmet from a video game or movie, this is where I would go. The videos are of the same high quality as the armour itself. They are in Russian, but with pretty good English subtitles. (Overdubs in English and Ukranian are being added since recently.)
  I have no need for any armour, I just watch this for the display of skill and passion for the work. The videos are also often accompanied by medieval music played by the author himself and the newest videos also feature some well-done editing tricks and funny moments. Also check out the cool website at http://www.armorysmith.com.