Homo Ludens

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Now you thought that the Internet is here to enhance your productivity at work. This is a serious misconception. Sadly, productive work has to be done so the Internet gets paid for. But the real reason people use the Internet is that it is just plain fun (and addictive).

To give you an idea of what is out there waiting for you, here are a few interesting points on the Internet. You can also search for yourself ( more search). Of course, you can search this page itself by keywords

Feel free to use a copy of this page for your own server (see page recycling). But, please, remove the following lines (with the response forms, my name, and my address on it) when you change anything in your copy.
Note that the WWW is a dynamic environment with links and servers changing from day to day. Please inform us if you notice any incorrect or "dead" links in this file. Suggestions, complaints and remarks are welcome and can be mailed to: rob@fon.let.uva.nl.

This page is maintained by Rob van Son, see also our Legal Notice.

Do not forget to visit the World Fair!

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How to start on the World Wide Web

If you are new to the Internet or the World Wide Web, here is where you can find some guidance for your first steps.

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Gateways

The netports where you can fly or s(n)ail away on the wide, wide Internet.
Note that you can often save these pages for local use.

The ordering of the following links is purely accidental (i.e., I add new links at the top).

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Sensitive Maps

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Pictures

The Internet is loaded with pictures. Generally these are encoded and large (i.e.,.GIF), or compressed and small (i.e., .JPEG). You need special software to view them, software that can be downloaded from the net. Some image sources are (see also Virtual Tourism):

Local pictures

Art

Nature

Anime (Japanese Animation)

Fractals

People

Computer Graphics

SIRDS (Single Image Random Dot Stereograms)

Miscellaneous

We also store some pictures culled from the net.

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Movies

Digital movies on the Internet are generally encoded in MPEG format. The software necessary to run these movies can be downloaded from the net. There are a lot of sources of MPEG movies. Here are a few of them (see also Virtual Tourism): We also store some movies culled from the net.

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Sounds and Music

Read the Audio File Formats FAQ first! You might also find use for SOX, a sound file format converter for Unix and DOS PCs

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Games

Games are the raison d'être of the Internet, it's nothing but a giant playground. Who would use the Internet (or a computer, for that matter) if it wasn't for playing games?
Now, we cannot give you a comprehensive list of all available game-sites, so we just give you an impression where you can find the information you need.

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Virtual Tourism

In the days of old, as lore will have it, people would actually transport themselves to far away places. To do so they used to sit for days inside cramped cars, busses, trains, and planes.
It might be difficult to believe for the hardened web-surfer but a car- or plane-crash can actually be more of a nuissance than a hard-disk crash. Over the years people learned that romance and adventure are all in the mind, so they finally understood that there is no point in risking your patience and health in long trips and they stayed tuned to where the the real action is: The Internet.

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Space

That other Frontier.

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Human Interest

Humans are very interesting, as are their interests themselves.

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Religion

If you think religion would not qualify for this page, you should read the book.
For every (western) persuasion there is information available. The Holy Scriptures are on-line, of course (see Hyperbooks). If you are interested:

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Anarchy on the Web

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Information (sec.)

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Hyperbooks

 For those of you who are CRT-junks, but still want to read books (an unlikely combination) or just want to look bussy while reading at work, there are online books distributed through the Internet (with FAQ). Here is a small list of electronic-books:
Hypertext books
Books (sec.)
Holy Scriptures
Libraries and repositories
Resource Guides and Reviews

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Hypertext books

Books (ASCII, many of these will try to download the books to you)

TV & Film scripts:

Travel & Adventure:

Adult books:

  • Aristotle, biography and a list of his on-line works:
  • Plato, biography and a list of his on-line works
  • Crito, Plato (text at Wiretap)
  • The Republic, Plato (text at Wiretap)
  • Tao Te Ching, Lao-Tzu (text files at Rochester)
  • On the Nature of Things, Lucretius Carus, Titus (text at vt.edu)
  • Leviathan, Hobbes, Thomas (text at vt.edu)
  • An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume, David
  • An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke, John (text at vt.edu)
  • The Prince, Machiavelli, Niccolo
  • Second Treatise of Government, Locke, John (text at Wiretap)
  • Discourse on Method, Descartes, Renee (compressed)
  • A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Berkeley, George (text at vt.edu)
  • The Critique of Judgement, Kant, Immanuel (text at vt.edu)
  • The Critique of Practical Reason, Kant, Immanuel (text at vt.edu)
  • The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant, Immanuel (text at vt.edu)
  • The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (text at vt.edu)
  • The Monadology, Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (text at vt.edu)
  • Thomas Paine:
  • Pensées, Pascal, Blaise (text at vt.edu)
  • The Provincial Letters, Pascal, Blaise (text at vt.edu)
  • Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche, Friedrich (text at vt.edu)
  • Civil Disobedience, Thoreau, Henry David (HTML at Indiana)
  • Walden, Thoreau, Henry David (text at vt.edu)
  • See also: The Tech Classics Archive at MIT
    How-to books and sites
  • How to plan CONSPIRACIES AND POLITICAL OPERATIONS
  • How-to prevent problems the morning-after
  • Proper Care of Floppies
  • CP2020 Addictions List, what to get hooked on
  • City of San Carlos fire prevention tutorial
  • The Art of War, Sun Tzu, translated by Lionel Giles (footnoted text at Gutenberg)
  • Excerpts from The Love Teachings of Kama Sutra, by Vatasyayana (translated by Indra Sinha)
  • Basic courses in Paganism and Magick (a bookshelf, read the notice first)
  • Guide to Lock Picking
    Suspence
  • Jane Austen
  • Jane Eyre, Brontee, Charlotte (text at vt.edu)
  • Wuthering Heights, Brontee, Emily
    Crime
  • Dracula series, by Bram Stoker
  • The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (HTML at Rutgers)
  • Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (HTML at Rutgers)
  • The prisoner of Zenda (at the Gutenberg Project)
    Horror
  • The Civil War in France, Marx, Karl
  • The Communist Manifesto, Marx, Karl (compressed)
  • State and Revolution, Lenin, Vladimir Ilich
  • Bush Quote's
  • Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States (Washington through Bush) (HTML at Columbia)
    Miscellaneous
  • War of the Worlds
  • The Rubayyat of Omar Khayyam Translated by Edward FitzGerald
  • The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Yes, the complete works at the Gutenberg Project)
  • Flatland (at the Gutenberg Project)

    Holy Scriptures

    Libraries and repositories

    Resource Guides, Reviews, and other book-related sites

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    Online Magazines and Journals

     As with every other conceivable subject, there are special interest Internet Magazines. But there are also Online Magazines and Journals on every conceivable subject on the Internet itself. Look for yourself.

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    Newsgroups

     Fight it out with words in a Newsgroup.
    (if you cannot read newsgroups, you should do something)

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    Page recycling

     You might have thought about how to speed up your web-surfing while you where waiting again for the n-th time to read your favorite page from the net. Chances are that the only interesting things on this page were links to other pages. Now what do you do when you finally get the page? You throw it away. So next time, you have to wait again. Moreover, others have to wait for you while you are reading it. So everyone grows old while waiting for pages to get to still other pages, in the mean time clogging the Internet.
    Now wait, you say, I use my hotlist to store all my favorite pages. Then I read all ten-thousand URL's to get to my target page.
    We all know that the hotlist is not really the most convienient way to browse the net. There is a better way. Your browser can read local pages. So next time, don't throw away that nice page with all those smashing links, save it (in HTML format) and read this saved page when you need the links again. Don't forget to occasionally update your downloaded pages.

    A small hint: Inline pictures are not saved, neither are links to local pages. You should preverably download pages with outward links (relative to the host server).

    Here are some suggestions:

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    Web Top Publishing

     You thought that DTP was the end of publishing. Now publish on top of the World.

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    Software

     There is an awful lot of software available to help you use the Internet. Also there are tools available for data compression, displaying images and movies, using Hypertext on the WWW. We did store some of the software we used localy.

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    The Ultimate: Setting up your own WWW station

     Remember CB-radio. Boosting the power of your set to reach people all across the street. Now compare that to a WWW server, reaching people across the Pacific with your own workstation or PC. Here are links to the places that tell you how to do that.

    HTML

    General HTTP related info

    Perl related info

    Tcl/Tk

    Hardware and Systems

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    Contents