Useful Stuff!

Documented here are some of the various utilities and helpful items that I have found over the years. Granted, there are far more such things than I could possibly list on this page; but who knows when they might come in useful? (Yes, I knew that that sequence didn't make sense as I was writing it.)

Online resources

• Google. If you want to find something online, Google is your man... I mean, search engine... whatever. The only downside is that the corporation that runs it hasn't lived up to their motto of "Don't be evil" - not that you can expect any better from a corporation.
• On the other hand, if you want real information, the Wikipedia contains more information than you will ever need. If you need some erudite fact that Wikipedia does not know... well, you can add it to Wikipedia afterwards once you find out.
• An enlightening article on human perception. This means a useful kind of enlightenment about your perception, folks!
• An archive of the text of many web pages throughout their history. Useful if a page has gone missing, down temporarily, or information has been deleted from it. Also useful to keep in mind before putting information on your website that you might not want someone to find eventually!
• Bugmenot - Bypass Compulsory Registration! If you ever run into a site that requires you to register before viewing or downloading information, just hop over to BugMeNot and get a free login and password so you don't have to go through the egregious process.
• A way to directly download videos from YouTube and its ilk.

Offline resources

• The book "The Humane Interface", by Jef Raskin, is an excellent guideline for designing user interfaces for computer programs. It's harder than you'd think to design a humane interface.