Reference stuff
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National Criminal Justice Reference Service - good collection of papers and resources from the DOJ
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Secrecy News - “Secrecy News from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy”, FAS=Federation of American Scientists
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Stanford Engineering Everywhere - free online courses from Stanford in CS, AI, and Linear Systems & Optimization; includes transcripts and video lectures
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“Life Incorporated” by Doug Rushkoff, or “How We Traded Meaning for Markets, Society for Self Interest, and Citizenship for Customer Service.”
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“Fooled by Randomness” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, or “The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets”
Technical stuff
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pfSense - “free, open source customized distribution of FreeBSD tailored for use as a firewall and router.”
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How to apply color curves in ImageMagick - came in handy for optimizing files from massive numbers of scans before DjVu conversion
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Internetworking Technology Handbook from Cisco - lots of freely available guides
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FreeMind - a free mind-mapping program written in Java. I haven’t used it much yet, but it looks really useful.
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Mathesaurus - quick reference for switching to open-source mathematical computation environments for computer algebra, numeric processing and data visualisation (e.g. MATLAB to Octave/SciLab/Python+Numpy)
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Advice in Mini-ITX - mailing list conversation
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KolibriOS - OS for x86 written in assembly; runs on one floppy; a fork of MenuetOS. This runs well in VirtualBox.
Music, demoscene, and other shiny stuff
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Future Crew - Second Reality - very impressive demo from 1993 (actual program for DOS here)
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ChibiTracker - portable Impulse Tracker clone (i.e. “a small, compact music composing application that is easy to learn and powerful enough to sound good”); GPLed and runs on Windows, Linux, MacOS, BSD, and BeOS
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Map of Science - trying to visualize connections between various sciences… Flash-based and interactive and kinda neat
Miscellaneous
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10 Steps to Becoming Enlightened (yeah, slightly lofty title)
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38 Ways to Win an Argument - from Schopenhauer’s “The Art of Controversy” (which can be found here)
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The Happiness Project - read about this in Citybeat; “I recount some of my adventures and insights as I grapple with the challenge of being happier,” from an author before the release of her book by the same name in late 2009.
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Intelius - People search, free and apparently pretty good
Religious