Portent

I’ve never been fond of Flash but there’s no denying that it lets designers do some amazing effects. Where theres a lot of Flash code to load, the better designers usually provide a pre-loader; an animation usually showing a %loaded.

That’s all this site does though they do let you filter by year and provide information about the site that each pre-loader was used in. There are some brilliant animations there…

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This has over 6,100 photographic images from the slide collections of the American Geographic Society Library. The images selected for this project focus on architecture, city life, people, transportation and other aspects of urban development, such as neighborhoods, commercial streets, and business districts.

The pictures were taken by two photographers, Harrison Forman and Harold Mayer between 1942 and 1994. Pictured is Piccadilly Circus sometime in the 60s, towards the latter end I’d guess.

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I started off doing table wargames with my father in the early 1970s. This was in Belfast, so an interesting time but I made many friends and became the N. Ireland wargames champion in 1979 (Really!). Back then there were far fewer sets of rules, but now with the internet you can find many.

This website provides hundreds across every genre there is, including fantasy. Some are links but many are hosted on the site itself. I could waste serious numbers of hours here!

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A fabulous resource. Over 11,000 radio recordings from over 70 years ago with over 100 added new each week. These are US shows so you’ll get Dick Tracy not Dick Barton Some of these are incredible, for instance 973 episodes of the Lone Ranger starting in the Mid 1930s and running until 1956. Shows are typically 20-25 minutes long.

I would love to have these in MP3 format so I could listen to them on the way to work. They are though only available in Real Player files RAM. It is possible to convert these to MP3 with a little effort. Swens Blog provides details on how to do this.

Link to Old Time Radio downloads website

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Just like the Library of Congress Exhibition, the British Library has it’s own mini exhibition website which is about Britain. The main British Library covers most of the world. This isn’t on the main British Library website which is at www.bl.uk (one of the rare .uk Top Level domains!) but at www.collectbritain.co.uk and consists of over 90,000 images and sounds.

The picture shown is part of the a map. The Library has a pretty restrictive copyright policy so I’ve just shown a small taster of a map rather than a complete image.

The site itself comprises three sections- Collections, Exhibitions and Themed Tours. All are very well done and clearly laid out. The 19 Collections covering regional dialects, 1500 very old photographs of Victorian Britain, 1000 maps of London streets etc. The Five virtual exhibitions range from Mike Philips views on the British Caribbean collection, sacred manuscripts to Samuel Grimm’s sketchbooks about Northumberland. The themed tours use Flash to explain the story of the Trigonometrical Survey of England and Wales that became Ordnance Survey, 17th century gardening in Sayes Court at Deptford and the old East End.

Link to Collect Britain Website

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This site has more than just a massive collection of information about great buildings. It includes lists of places, architects.

It is though, more about the buildings than anything else. As well as the search and a very long alphabetically sorted list you can also browse by building type, architectural style, time period when constructed, construction types, climates, contexts, construction elements and you can even see by popularity which buildings or architects details people are looking at.

And there’s more. You can view and download free (or get the lot on CD-ROM) 3d models of many of the buildings. There’s free software (or pay a small sum for a more professional version) which lets you view the 3d models.

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This beautiful looking King Cobra is made out of cans all stacked high and is one of a number of photos from some exhibition somewhere.

Of course Andy Warhol made cans of Campbells soup famous in his paintings but I doubt he ever envisaged this use of cans!

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Reopening in November 2007, London Transport museum have revamped their website and added 5,000 of their classic posters and 700 original art works online in various collections.

The posters are nicely organised in various themes- eg Sport, Beyond the City, Events, Entertainments, Open Air London, London’s Transport System etc or you can browse the artist by A-Z. It’s well organised and there is some fascinating stuff. Very well worth a visit (both the website and the museum) and you can buy copies of posters from the website as well.

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Between 1920 and 1990 the Los Angeles Times and Los Angeles Daily News took over three million photos. The UCLA Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections has selected and digitized 5,746 of these and put them online.

They provide a fascinating insight into change and how different things were twenty, fifty, or nearly 100 years ago. You can browse by subject or by keyword. For example the keyword speed produced 17 photos ranging from race cars in 1927, policewoman training in 1946, a hand-held radar demo in 1976 and so on.

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I haven’t tried all 31 yet but the one shown is a clever game where you slide blocks of symbols up, left, right and down. If you get 3 of the same next to each other they vanish and you get points. Very simple but ingenious.

Also of note, if you want to learn how to write flash tiled games like this, there are a considerable number of tutorials on his site.

Link

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In the USA you’ll often see telephone numbers in TV and films with the area code 555. This is a made up area code, specifically for entertainment purposes. This site has an incredibly exhaustive list. Simpson’s fans will know that the numbers occur very frequently, whether it’s the Sleep-Eazy Motel(555-1000) which is the same number as the Yellow Cab Company in the film the Fast and the Furious! Or Moe’s tavern (555-1239) or the Marital Stress Hotline (555-1680).

One thing’s for sure. Whenever you see a 555 number in a film etc. in future, it will remind you of this website!

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This takes a few seconds so have patience! Spore is a newly launched game by veteran game designer Will Wright- famous for Sim City and of course the Sims.

Spore is his latest and possibly greatest game in which you sort of play God! Starting with a tiny single cell critter, you evolve it to a bigger critter then move into land, form a tribe conquer the world and then go into space. What makes it so compelling is that you get to select the path of evolution by choosing all sorts of legs, fins, flippers, tentacles; a massive collection of parts which the game is able to animate. that’s the really clever part. And it gets better- you can share your critter or use others and the Sporepedia (pictured) now have over 8.2 million.

Earlier today it had 8.1 million so that’s over 100,000 added today. As the game is being launched thats probably to be expected but still quite remarkable! I have ordered a copy of Spore so the Portentaurus when I have created it might yet grace these pages…

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