The Essentials

This small desktop accessory staples a short stack of paper together by essentially making a stitch in the stack. (I’d call it a “paper stitcher”, but apparently that refers to something else.) For more than a few pages, you’ll be better off using staples, but if you only have a few pages to put together, using this will save money and materials.

The same company makes a number of other products, including the same product in other colors.

“the show with zefrank” was a video-diary (some people called it a “vlog”) series started on March 17, 2006 and ended exactly one year later by its host, Ze Frank.

Episodes ran on a mostly daily schedule (Monday–Friday), with only a few weekend episodes. They tended to be only a few minutes in length, which helped keep bandwidth costs down (the episodes were hosted on Frank’s site for most of the initial run).

The show was pervasively random, and contributed a lot of random awesomeness to the world, including making a sandwich around it.

The first few episodes are a little dry, as Frank hadn’t figured out what the show would be. It gels within a month or two. Nonetheless, it’s still worth watching from the very beginning.

I should note that some episodes of the show may not be suitable for younger viewers.

Feedbooks is an online bookstore with an unusually large selection of free books, some public domain, some not. Many classic titles are available for free for your ebook reader (including apps for iOS and Android devices such as Amazon’s Kindle apps, Lexcycle’s Stanza, and Apple’s iBooks) from their virtual stacks.

It has become an axiom worth remembering that, whatever you want to know more about, you can probably find a page about it on the Internet.

So it is with shoelace knots. Ian Fieggen has built a tremendous repository of information about shoelaces, especially the tying thereof.

If you take any single thing away from this site, it should be the Ian Knot, a faster way to do the usual shoelace knot. The animated GIF in the top-left of that page shows how quickly the knot ties. Fieggen has a video that shows the process in detail, and another user uploaded to YouTube another, shorter video that Fieggen made several years ago that shows the knot from the wearer’s angle.

Also worth checking out is his article on the granny knot, which is when you tie your shoes incorrectly and they won’t stay tied. He explains the problem and offers a very simple way to correct it.

Google Maps is a web-based map, point-of-interest search, and navigational tool. You can drag the map with your mouse, zoom in all the way to street level, and search for just about any place in the world—in the world!—to view the map around it. You can also ask it for directions between any two places.

Originally just a map, Google Maps has gained many new features, including these:

• Directions was one of the earliest, and it’s evolved over the years to support bicycling, transit, and pedestrian directions as well as directions for cars. You can even alter the route by dragging it with your mouse.
• When viewing California and possibly some other regions, a Traffic overlay shows the current traffic conditions on the freeway (green for free-flowing, orange for slow, red for parking-lot).
• A satellite view shows satellite and low-altitude aerial photographs in place of the regular solid-color backgrounds.
• Microsoft added angled photographs in each compass direction to their Bing Maps, making it easier to identify individual stores in strip malls, and Google added the feature to Google Maps a few months later.
• Possibly Google’s most controversial feature, Street View shows a panoramic view taken from the street (by a roving car with several cameras on top of it). Incredibly handy for finding how to get from the street into, say, a parking lot, but they’ve had to clear a few privacy hurdles along the way (among other things, they blur out people’s faces and cars’ license plates), and entire sites exist devoted to spotting embarrassing behavior and incidents captured by the Google cars’ cameras.

There are a bunch of other features. It’s worth playing around in it for an hour or so, both to get to know the application better and to get to know your area better.

With tools like this, it’s now almost impossible to be unable to find a place.

The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has been archiving the static content of the world-wide web since 1996. With it, it’s possible to see what a web page contained in the past, or view a page that no longer exists.

Website operators can exclude their site from archival or request removal of already-archived pages, so this doesn’t always work (particularly when the author of the page took it down because, for any reason, they no longer wanted people to see it). Also, there’s a delay of “a few months”, so you can’t view a web page from last week.

Even so, the Wayback Machine is an invaluable resource for research and resurrection. You can see it demonstrated in a previous Essentials post that links to something originally published in late 2001.

Project Gutenberg is an electronic library dating back to the earliest days of the Internet. I remember it from when I first got on the Internet, back in the mid-1990s, but reading Wikipedia, it turns out it’s much older than that.

For decades, all of their books were available as plain text or one or two other formats (such as RTF), but now, a growing section of them are available in ebook formats such as ePub. That’s a point worth emphasizing: This library of books predates electronic books!

Almost all of the books on Project Gutenberg are in the public domain (at least in the United States), most because their copyright has lapsed. This makes them free to download, to translate, to convert into other formats, and indeed to do anything with. A few are under copyright, but entered under a free license such as one of the Creative Commons licenses.

This post is dedicated to Michael S. Hart, the late founder of Project Gutenberg.