I'm the Weakest Link
OK... Basically everyone has a links page nowadays. Some are small, some are large (even excessively so). Generally, link pages just have a lot of links to web sites that the webmaster likes to go to. If you have too many links, you run a serious danger of having links to places that don't exist or that really aren't very good.
So I'm making a compromise. I'm not going to list all of the 600 or so favorites I have (what?) but I am going to have a serious number of links here, organized into categories. The idea is that if a link goes on this page that web site is better than mine in one of three ways: (1) it has a huge amount of data or stuff, of which I don't have the time to amass (this includes reference works); (2) it contains great things that I do not have and am not likely to have (possibly because of copyright); or (3) it is a useful/fun/cool/interesting page that you should know about. There are exceptions, but I don't really want to go over them. You know.
Puzzle Links | |
|---|---|
| Sudoku | |
| su|do|ku | This is the official Pappocom website for sudoku. There's a computer program, some contests, a whole lot of solutions, and some pretty cool forums. A pretty nice site overall. |
| Web Sudoku | Web Sudoku has an absolutely obscene number of sudoku puzzles on four different difficulties. I don't think you'll run out all that soon... I found one of the Evil puzzles a bit easy (solved in 6 minutes) but the rest were a lot harder. |
| Vegard Hanssen's Sudoku Puzzles | This site is just crazy good. There are puzzles of eight different types, many different sizes, and eight difficulty levels. If you're bored of one kind of puzzle, just try another! The selection's a little sparse in some areas, but all in all this is an amazing site that you should go to a lot. |
| Bob's Du-Sum-Oh Puzzle Page | Du-Sum-Oh is this guy's variant on Sudoku. You have irregular regions and a minimalist number of clues, which makes for some very difficult Sudoku-type puzzles. How big can you handle? (Try the rest of the site as well.) |
| Slither Link | |
| Hirofumi Fujiwara's Slither Link page | There are a bunch of these puzzles here, with a nice java applet. These aren't just easy puzzles, though - most of them are quite large and difficult. Also check out the rest of his site; he has some great stuff up there. |
| Griddlers/Nonograms/Picross | |
| Griddlers.Net | If you ever wanted half a million Griddlers to solve, here's the place. Register for free and start solving single-color, many-color, multi-grid, and even triangular griddlers! You can even compare your speed with other people who've solved a puzzle. |
| Griddler Deluxe Program | Although there aren't as many puzzles as on Griddlers.Net, there are still a quite substantial number, and the player/solver/creator program is no slouch. |
| General Pencil/Paper Puzzles | |
| web Nikoli | The official web site of an absolutely awesome Japanese puzzle creator. They publish a magazine and dozens of individual puzzle books that aficionados of these kind of puzzles will need to take a look at. This is the creator of a good number of the Japanese pencil-and-paper puzzles you see around, and there are a lot that you've never seen before. |
| Puzzle Japan | If you subscribe, you can get a pretty good selection of the seven different kinds of puzzles they have (Sudoku, Griddlers, Slither Link, and four others), but even if you don't the sample puzzles are quite good. This is a good place to go to learn about these puzzles and try them, as there are java applets for each one. |
| janko.at | This is a great German site with a multitude of logic puzzles in Java. A few of them (the Kreuzzahlen and the word puzzles) require a working knowledge of German, but a good many of them are accessible for others, since the rules are often easy to figure out. |
| Erich's Puzzle Palace | This site has some great, hard puzzles of a huge number of types. No java applets, but the puzzles are really diverse and can truly get you thinking. |
| Conceptis Puzzles | A lot of cool picture-forming puzzles of various types. I think you can buy them, but I haven't figured out how. |
| General 2-D Sliding Block Puzzles | |
| Hirofumi Fujiwara's Sliding Block Puzzle page | Having made a quite nice java applet, Fujiwara has created a sequentially more difficult set of sliding block puzzles. Go through them slowly if you have problems doing other sliding block puzzles. |
| Nick Baxter's Sliding Block Puzzle Page | This is a quite large collection of old and rare sliding block puzzles, many of which are ridiculously difficult but still fun. If you think you're good at sliding puzzles, try some of these! This happens to be my favorite sliding puzzle site. |
| Burrs | |
| IBM Research: The burr puzzles site | This is a great place to test out, solve, and create 6-bar burr puzzles. You can look at a few really hard ones or make your own! Cool! |
| General Solid Puzzles | |
| Puzzle will be played... | This amazing site has images of the pieces and solutions for probably about a thousand polycube put-together and burr puzzles. If you have the time and cubes, try building some of these. You won't be disappointed. |
| Rubik's-type Puzzles | |
| TwistyPuzzles.com | A great image and data gallery for a near-complete list of Rubik's-type puzzles, books, and games. It hasn't been very alive lately, but that doesn't mean its directory of puzzles and list of articles about puzzle modification aren't still great. |
| Deep Cube | The site of a ten-second robotic cube solver, there's also a pretty good solving tutorial. I use a (modified) version of their Intermediate Solution to get under a minute each time, so that's nice. |
| speedcubing.com | Want records? Want news? Want algorithms? This is a great site for all of those, as well as having links to basically all of the major individual cube sites. Check it out for most of your cubing needs. |
| Dan's Cube Station | There are some really great tips for speedsolving on here, as well as a cool competition, speedcuber bios, and a whole heap o' other stuff. |
| Meffert's Puzzles | If you want to buy puzzles like Rubik's, this is the best online place to get them. Not only does Meffert's have a wide arrangement of cool and uncommon puzzles, but the prices aren't expensive either. Don't go to www.rubiks.com if you want puzzles, please. Just don't. |
| Jaap's Puzzle Page | A listing of Rubik's Cube links would simply not be complete without this page. There's just so much info here that you could spend days just reading it all. And it's good info, too! Jaap has put a lot of time into giving the world a great index of twisty puzzle types and specifications. |
| Puzzles in General | |
| clickmazes | The Java puzzles contained in this site are all challenging, interesting, thought-provoking, and well-done. Try them and see! |
Games | |
| Java/Flash Games Sites | |
| J*va on the Brain | Karl Hörnell has a good selection of his own Java games, with a bunch of documentation. No dumb sports games, either; his games require thought and patience to master. |
| AddictingGames.com | Standard stuff. A big listing of games. Try a few, you're bound to find a good number you really like. |
| Albino Blacksheep | Both games and flash movies. There are a lot of unique and genuinely great things on here. |
| Miniclip.com | There are a lot of really fun games on here, just try a lot of them. |
| XGenStudios.com | There are a few amazingly good games at this site. Fishy, Protect Your Castle, and Stick RPG are simply genius... |
| Shockwave.com | The games on here have always been diverse and pretty great, so pick your favorite type and play! Check out the Japanese site for a different variety... |
| Character-Specific Fan Sites | |
| The Mushroom Kingdom | The ultimate Mario fansite. There's a huge amount of Mario information here, plus a 'Mariopedia' which is a sort of dictionary version of the encyclopedia I was going to make. |
| www.sm64.com | Curtis Bright has really gone through this game and catalogued everything. He's also an expert who has some great times and has helped discover a lot of high-powered glitches. If you like Super Mario 64, you'll like www.sm64.com. |
| Donkey Kong Universe | This is a really great place to talk and learn about everything Donkey Kong-related. There's even a section for Stop 'N' Swop, which leads us to... |
| The Rare Witch Project | The people here are experts on Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie... They were the ones that hacked the game to find those crazy sandcastle codes. They now have a texture tool and some great videos, as well as a bunch of other stuff and a wonderful forum. It's like a video game hacker's convention... sort of. |
| Yoshi Lore | This Yoshi-based site has a LOT of stuff about Yoshi (and, of course, all the Mario games with Yoshi in them), as well as some rare clips of the old Mario TV shows. Definitely check it out! |
| Secrets of the Seven Stars | Although it doesn't have info about the newer Mario RPG games, it's a true treasure trove of info on the older ones. This is a great place to go to get info on them. |
| Mario Kart 64 Player's Page | This is a record site for Mario Kart 64. The ranking system there is a great way to keep track of how good you are. |
| the-elite.net | This is a site for the best Perfect Dark and GoldenEye 007 players in the world. Think you're that good? Think again. |
| Super Monkey Ball Elite | Similar to the-elite.net, just with the Super Monkey Ball games instead. The high scores on this are pretty crazy, and the videos of them look quite insane too. |
| Kirby's Rainbow Resort | Pretty much everything Kirby-related on here. |
| MIDIs | |
| VGMusic | A pretty well-known site, VGMusic is a wonderful place to get video game MIDIs and remixes people have made. If you like video game music, there's no excuse to not check this site out. |
| Speedruns | |
| Speed Demos Archive | SDA is the site for speedruns. There are speedruns for over 150 games there, many of which you've probably played. This is the first place to go for new speedruns. |
| Nesvideos | Just as SDA is the center for pure speedruns, Bisqwit's Nesvideos site is the center for tool-assisted speedruns. Hundreds of runs on the NES, SNES, GameBoy, and Genesis are yours to download and marvel at. |
| Smash Video Records | This is a central location for some of the best Super Smash Bros. Melee videos known. There's a lot of cool stuff here, so go download it if you want to be able to see. |
| General Video Game Sites | |
| David Wonn's Unique Video Game Glitches | This is a pretty good source for cool glitches and errors in games. There's just... a lot of stuff here. A lot of these are very, very interesting, cool, and surprising. |
| System Crash | This here is a bunch of amazingly crazy glitches. The ones here are really weird, and some of them even have videos. Check it out a lot! |
| RPGClassics.com | Basically, this is a set of great websites for various RPGs. For example, check out the Paper Mario one. There's a lot of info, screenshots, etc. for so many different games that if you try to imagine it all your head will a splode. Pick your favorite RPGs and check them out! |
| GameFAQs | I'm sure you've heard of this one... GameFAQs hosts walkthroughs, cheats, saves, reviews, and message board for virtually all published games. GameFAQs is the site that other FAQ sites check for new FAQs, so it's a very good place to contribute to. |
Juggling | |
| Juggling Equipment | |
| Renegade Juggling | There's a whole bunch of great stuff in the online catalog here. A great place to buy quality equipment, if you ask me. |
| Dubé Juggling | The equipment here is very high-quality and quite expensive. Only the best brands are featured here. |
| Serious Juggling | I don't think there is a larger selection of juggling equipment anywhere. Call the number or send an e-mail and get basically whatever you need. |
| Patterns and Tutorials | |
| Jugglewiki | JuggleWiki is a set of juggling articles whose format should be somewhat familiar to anyone who knows about Wikipedia: all of them are editable. Although most of the tricks are without tutorials, there are a very large number of tricks with animations here and the articles on theory, routines, and the like are very interesting and innovative. |
| TWJC Tutorials | This is simply the best juggling trick tutorials site that I've found. It's very informative and its tutorials are interesting and useful. Check it out! |
| Wildcat Jugglers - Tutorial | There are a good amount of tricks here, with some useful tutorials, but the real high point is the looping videos of the tricks - they can be watched again and again, and even in slow-motion! |
| Videos and Personal Websites | |
| the juggling video page | This site has a huge number of videos of juggling trips and the steps toward learning them. Unfortunately, if you want them all, you will have to pay. |
| Luke Burrage's Thing on the Net | Luke is a funny and original juggler who's been around for a while. This is his new site; his old site, with cool articles and videos, is linked to on the navigation menu. Can you find it? |
| Anthony Gatto The World's Greatest Juggler |
Gatto, well-known in the juggling community for having mastered the juggling of obscenely large numbers of objects, has a site where you can talk to other jugglers, check out some tutorials, and look at cool juggling stuff. See what you can find! |
| Juggling Animations | |
| Juggling Lab | This is the official Juggling Lab website. This animator is really great; I use it on my juggling pages, and it just happens to come with a lot of useful features that are detailed on this web site. Get it for your site today! |
| JONGL | Oooh! This is a beautiful 3D juggling simulator that lets you play around with a lot of tricks, passing patterns, and a very nice rendered output. Just get it. It's more 3-D than anything else. |
| Juggle Master Java | Eh... It's OK. The advantage here is that there's a lot of weird/cool tricks that aren't anywhere else, so you might as well check it out. |
| JuggleKrazy | It's inhibitively expensive, but there are some interesting ways to change around the pattern. |
Programming | |
| Basic and Visual Basic | |
| C++ and Visual C++ | |
| HTML, XHTML, CSS | |
| htmldog.com | This is a pretty good - and good-looking - HTML and CSS tutorial site. Although it doesn't have the information about every possible value of every element that is a staple at many other tutorial sites, the guides here are very good and they explain everything you might have trouble with. I recommend this site. |
| W3 Schools | This site can teach you basically everything you need to know about web design. The tutorials are nice but, in my opinion, not quite as good as those on htmldog, although this site has the benefit of giving you some cool examples to play with. Use those frequently - it's a lot quicker and easier than making your own test page. |
| JavaScript | |
| Java | |
| Flash ActionScript | |
| Actionscript.org | While it can sometimes be difficult to find what you're looking for in the long list of tutorials on this site, they tend to be high-quality, and so reading through all of them is a great way to learn tons of new actionscript concepts. |
| Other Languages | |
Mathematics | |
| Formulas and Other Reference Guides | |
| MathWorld | MathWorld is a gigantic encyclopedia spanning every branch of mathematics and is a great way to get in touch with the latest and oddest mathematical developments. Although it's quite complicated, those in higher math courses may find its detailed discussions very useful. |
| Units of Measurement | |
| Fractals and Cool Graphs | |
| Math Programs | |
| the Art of Problem Solving | This website is about problem solving, and contains a great math forum and a bunch of interesting and useful math books. Check it out if you're preparing for a competition or if you just want to have fun! |
| HCSSiM | This six-week intensive summer program is devoted to all kinds of math. It's also a really great place to meet people who are very interested and talented in mathematics. Although generally limited to students entering the later grades in high school, the program will welcome older and younger students if the teachers feel they will truly add something to the program. I went there, and I must say that it was amazing and very fun. |
| Math Competitions | |
| The AMC Home Page | The AMC, AIME, and USAMO are a series of fun and progressively more difficult math competitions which are designed to find out who are the best math students in the country. Although the questions are tough, the tests are fun, and even if you won't do well I'd still recommend taking them. |
| The USAMTS | Now in the 17th year, the USAMTS is a way to prove your math talent, even if you don't have good test-taking speed. You get a month to solve five problems, so go ahead! If you're into math, you should definitely try it. |
Origami | |
| Representational Origami | |
| Geometrical Origami | |
| Origami Cloud | This site has diagrams for a number of simple and yet interesting/cool origami patterns. Those of you who like geometrical patterns will not find this site wanting! |
| Mathematical Origami | |
| Origami & Math | Although mostly an overview of origami math sites around the web, it's a very good one, and it links to a number of other good origrami math sites. |
| Origami Mathematics Page | Tom Hull is a mathematician who loves origami and applies mathematical theorems to it whenever possible. I had the opportunity to take an origami class with him, and it was extremely informative and fun. Take a look at the math here - it's only part of what Tom knows, but it's a rather good part. |
| Origami Tesselations | |
| Andy's Tesselation Page | Andy has created a large number of cool and unique origami tesselations. Although there are no diagrams, they're still cool to look at, and if you do ever learn to make tesselations you can come back here and try to make some of them. |
Linguistics | |
| Alphabets | |
| Omniglot | Omniglot is a comprehensive guide to the alphabets, abjads, and syllabries of the world's languages. Some of them are really amazing and definitely deserve to be checked out! |
| Specific-Language Resources | |
| Dictionnaire des synonymes | This is basically a perfect French thesaurus. Although it's in French (which shouldn't be a problem if you're learning French already), it does a great job by not just giving you synonymes but also their various relevance. You may have to copy-and-paste in special characters, like è, though. |
| Multi-Language Resources | |
| Verbix | Verbix has a quite good conjugator in 85 different languages, including some weird and rare ones. It's a great conjugator resource when you can't remember a certain conjugation for your language class! |
| Alcor Software Rhyming Dictionary | Ever had to write a poem in your modern language class? Use this site for help. It's only got a rudimentary rhyming dictionary (it doesn't save the words phonemically, just checks the end of the word for having the exact same letters), but it can be pretty useful if you can't think of any rhymes yourself. |
| Bilingual Translators | |
| J-Talk | This is a Japanese parser that is a great resource for decoding Japanese writing, including kanji. Use the fourth option for a word-by-word English translation! |
| Animelab.com: Japanese -> English Dictionary | A great dictionary for Japanese stuff. Very useful if you want to find some kanji phrases! This is also a great resource for decoding text in an image - make a guess, see if any of the kanji match, and check for phrases with them in it. |
| Universal Translators | |
| Langtolang | This isn't really a translator, but more of a dictionary. There are 18 languages that you can search between, so it has a pretty wide scope. |
| InterTran | The site wants you to buy things, but this is a way to get your translations for free. You can use any of a whopping 29 languages! The only problem is that this site is so good that sometimes it's so busy you can't even see the page. |
| WorldLingo | This is a stellar free machine translator. There are only 13 common languages here, but it will do websites as well, and the translations are quite decent when going from Asian languages. |
| Systran 5.0 | This is a pretty good translator for most purposes. You can go to and from 13 languages, and do web sites. Check it out if the others aren't working, or simply use it for comparative translatory analysis. |
| Poetry | |
| Artificial Languages | |
Reference Works | |
| Dictionaries and Encyclopedias | |
| Wikipedia | If you haven't heard of this, you've been living under a rock. Wikipedia has over 1,000,000 articles that are user-edited to guarantee constantly-updated, reliable articles. This is a great place to get information on literally all kinds of things. |
| Merriam Webster Online | Although teachers will often caution you against using online dictionaries, this one is not a let-down in any way. The online dictionary and thesaurus here are high-quality and very accurate; indeed, unless you are looking for exceedingly rare words, you should not need to use any other English-language online dictionary. |
| Trivia | |
| World Records | |
| Guinness World Records | You all know the book... now check out the site! They have a number of records on display, but the real selling point is the Video Vault, where you can see some actual records being set. Very cool. |