Most of my screen time is spent on apps (YouTube, Reddit, streaming platforms, Instagram, Pinterest…) but there is sooo much fun stuff on the Internet beyond that! Here are a few of my favorite finds:
- Neal.fun
- Are We Trek Yet?
- Binge.clock
- Project 2025
- Public work
- Wikimedia Commons
- My First Million Vault
Neal.fun
Random fun Internet games and interesting info presented in the most entertaining way! I haven’t gone through all of them but I’ll highlight just a few:
- Draw A Perfect Circle
- Can you draw a perfect circle? You’ll get a percentage score on all your tries.
- Universal Forecast
- What will happen in 30 years? 100 years? 10,000 years? 600 million years? And so on! (I scrolled to the bottom – it ends at 10^30 years from now 🤓)
- Wonders of Street View
- This is the kind of shit the Internet was made for!!! See different Street Views from around the world. Use the Random button to switch to new scenes. My first scene was of street posters on a city street in Germany. Next, a hill in France with scenes of different people’s jumps – skiing, paragliding, just jumping in the air with the good old legs, etc. Next, I’m aboard the HMS Ocelot in England. Sometimes I just go on Google Maps and street view my way around somewhere random for fun so having it all presented right here with a Randomizer is some good stuff.
Are We Trek Yet?
This site tracks which of the technologies shown on Star Trek have been been created in the real world. Per their website, “This guide is intended to be a comprehensive look at the tech that Star Trek suggested to drive humanity foward ad astra per aspera” (to the stars through hardships). They track developments in the areas of Bio/Med, Computing, Defense, Energy, Holo/VR, Materials, Robo/Cyber, and Transport. Each item is presented with the subject (“De-extinction”), description (“Revive a species through a record of its genetic code”), Dev status (“In progress”), and who’s working on it (Colossal Biosciences). I didn’t even watch Star Trek and I love this.
Some examples:
- Matter synthesizer: Convert energy into arbitrary forms of matter (not started)
- Transparent aluminum: Provide glass-like visibility and very high durability in a single metal (available)
Anyway this is a fun reminder that we are currently in the future 😵💫
Binge.clock
From Are We Trek Yet? I wound up on Bingeclock, a site/community all about binging tv shows. You can track your binges, follow friends, and create marathons (even with friends).
I do binge a few shows a year but that wasn’t the best part of this find – the best part was actually THIS feature:
The Antenna is formatted like an old-school TV with a dial that you can use to turn to different, pre-set channels. Click the TV book in the corner to see your channel guide (if you’re my age or older, you’ll remember TV guides). Find stuff like university courses from MIT, Harvard, University of Edinburgh and more; retro cartoons; robotics demos; old newscasts; creepypasta; movie trailers; and soo much more. It’s like watching an old hotel TV where you have a remote and a guide where you can only guess half of the programming based on the titles.
Project 2025
https://www.project2025.observer/en
Ok so this one may not be “fun” like the rest, but it is really interesting. Two Redditors started tracking the current administration’s progress on Project 2025 on a spreadsheet which evolved into this website tracker. A little bit scary, a lot of bit helpful.
As of writing this, the tracker shows 51% of the Project 2025 goals have been met 1110 days left of this term.
Public.work
https://www.cosmos.so/public-work
Public.work is a visual search engine for public domain content. It looks like Pinterest but cooler. It’s populated with over 100,000 copyright-free images from The MET, New York Public Library, and other services. This is a fun way to discover new art, especially historical photos. Only a minute in and I’ve come across these (click for more info on each):
Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
Home of over 130 million freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute. I found historical photographs here, but you can find plenty more than that! It’s like the next level of the Public.work project that goes beyond art. If you start at the main page it shares media of the day that’s pretty fun to check out! I feel like this is the kind of site that the historycoolkids Instagram account must use… 🤔
Fun finds:
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My First Million Vault
Getting niche here. My favorite podcast is My First Million. Two guys, Shaan Puri and Sam Parr, hop on the pod and talk about business – topics range from crazy business ideas they’ve learned about, founder interviews, and business tips. Really fun and casual banter between guys who actually built their own successful million-dollar businesses, sold, and gone on to create new successful businesses after that. I’ve referenced the podcast sooo many times in this blog and am constantly Googling little things I remember them mentioning. Now I don’t have to turn to Google because some genius decided to create the MFM Vault where you can mine the archives and get answers to just about whatever you can ask: “ChatGPT listened to 600+ episodes of Sam & Shaan so you don’t have to.” MFM Vault even provides frameworks presented in the episodes – some of the most helpful stuff, in my opinion. If you don’t know the podcast, start there: https://www.youtube.com/@MyFirstMillionPod But if you do know the podcast, check out the MFM Vault: https://www.mfmvault.com
That’s it for now. I’ll do another round up after I’ve collected enough other sites to share 🙂
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