These are 3 visual resources for connectors. They are useful when you want to know the name of the kind of plug you are looking for or to confirm visually with a remote user that he actually have a USB port.
The HP Connector Chart [PDF] shows the most common connector types found on computers and A/V equipment. Very handy and can be emailed to someone who does not know USB from S-Video.
This page has actual pictures of the connectors and sockets for over 80 types of connectors, including coax and fiber optics.
This cablesdirect.com page has diagrams of over 50 connectors, mostly computer related.
Found this little gem from, of all places, Intuit.
Find-A-Human is a list of voice mail system shortcuts for major companies, basically a way of getting a real human to answer your call, not just an endless selection of numbers.
For example, to get faster service with Cingular, select the option that you are looking to cancel you account and you get put at the front of the queue. For American Express, hit zero, pound, three times over (ignore prompts that it's an invalid entry).
Could be a useful list to have around.
This site, CountryCodes.com lists the country and dialing codes for a given country to another.
This is way more useful than just a list of country codes because it also lists the dialing codes you need to dial before the country code and that change by phone system.
Afghanistan to the UK: 00 + 44 + Area Code+ Tel #
Canada to South Africa: 011 + 27 + Area Code+ Tel #
France to Canada: 00 + 1 + Area Code+ Tel #
Useful for telling contacts in other countries how to dial to reach you.
Here are 3 site that will identify the application that is associated with a certain file type and file extention.
The one I have use the longest is: Every file format in the world from WhatIs.com's Quick reference section.
FileEx.com is one I found recently. The interface is not that great but the info is pretty solid.
Glossary of Computer File Extensions from Saugus.net. Just found it today.
I usually check at least two of them so that I am sure I am hunting for the right software, especially when a file extention can be used by more than one software.
When you get to reap the rewards of someone else's obsession: Buffyology or as they describe it "Every Buffy character, episode, cast member, writer and director and every word of every show, in a searchable database."
Every actor, writer, director, role and episode script are clickable and searchable. They also throw in random cross-references. For example, "Once More With Feeling" has these: episodes featuring dairy products, episodes where the Mutant Enemy guy is different and episodes with one-off credit sequences.
They are still rare inaccuracies in the episode transcripts but this is a huge project and my hats off to them for the dedication they have put in.
The Atlas of Canada is an online resources where you can access all the public information and maps from the Natural Resources Ministry.
Alot of information is available here, a very data heavy site with rather easy navigation.
SecurityArms.com has a looooong index of small arms, each featuring a picture and, sometimes, a little bit of information.
etymonline.com is an online etymology dictionary. This will give you the origins and/or first recorded use of an English word or expression.
For those of you interested in getting more data on the various motherboard form factors check out this article. It gives general data and where available points you to the appropriate definition standard definition document.
Koders is a source code search engine. It indexes over 125 millions lines of code from open source projects in 16 different programming languages.
This is very useful when you have read about a function or operator and want to know how it is used in real life or simply to see if a more efficient way exists.
You can use the PDFs this site, vendian.org, to print out rulers in many different units and sizes, including the standard foot long imperial/metric combo.
Please make sure you follow the printing instructions (turn off "shrink to fit", pick the right paper size) and the note on accuracy (basically, they depend a bit on your printer but a still very good).
One reader has a good tip of printing them out on transparencies to make mesuring easier.
This site, incompetech.com, allows you to print up different graph paper form downloadable PDFs.
They have the standards quarter inch sheet and mili/centemeter grids as you would expect. But they also have Multiple width, Asymetric, Dots, Iso-Dots, Hexagonal, Hex Dots and even Celtic Knotwork. The only one that seems to be missing is logarithmic.
They also take requests.
This is it people. The one stop shop for everything and anything related to CD sized disks that hold video data: DVDs, VCDs, SVCDs. Included are discussions on trans-coding from different formats, players, burners, capture cards, software, media quality.
If you ever have to crimp your own ethernet cables, this site is a good reference to look up the color order (from left to right):
White-Orange
Orange
White-Green
Blue
White-Blue
Green
White-Brown
Brown
It also has a diagrams for crossover cables.
This is a tool which I rather like. Its a dictionary of both regular and computer words that is hyperlinked. Hyperlinking a dictionary seem like an obvious thing but this is the first I've really noticed doing it.
It seems that someone has indexed all words of eight characters or more and put the results here. Weird and perhaps useful. Not sure though.
Reed Design as a neat little colour reference: Conversion from Pantone to RGB and Hex HTML.
It allows you to convert a given Pantone (industry standard colour palette) to RGB and Hex values but most importantly, it displays a example/sample of the colour, a thing so few colour conversion sites do. This means you can also use the site just to browse for a colour you like and have it's equivalences listed.
This is also useful if you have to produce real world items that match an online colour.
The Index DOT HTML is a very complete HTML resource. It includes such information as an element reference (viewable either in an index or a tree structure), generic attributes and character entities.
There are also some interesting sections such as HTML Support History per browser (IE, Netscape and Opera) and per element, so you can know exactly which HTML element is supported by what version of what browser.
The site is also available for download.
The Index DOT CSS is a very complete CSS resource. It includes such information as a property index, selector descriptions and syntax rules.
There are also some interesting sections such as CSS Support History per browser (IE, Netscape and Opera) and per property, so you can know exactly which property is supported by what version of what browser.
The site is also available for download.
A handy reference for bash shell scripting can be found here. It covers the basics as well as the advanced topics and always includes some examples that are easy to follow. Well linked and cross-referenced. Worth a look.
If ever you've needed a handy dandy reference for timezones and such then take a look at timeanddate.com. An alternative is worldtimeserver.com. It has a graphical map of the world that shows you where you're looking at. Both do a good job.
What is grub? Grub is a bootloader which is becoming quite popular as an alternative to lilo. It's very sleek and offers a multitude of options which I'm coming to enjoy quite a bit. Here is some basic documentation about it.
For those looking to jump in quickly without wading through the entire document here is a quick link to the section on configuration.
From the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures contains descriptions and definitions for an incredible variety (over 1200) of algorithms. Some also include implementation examples, sometimes in pseudocode, sometimes in a real language like C, java, Perl, etc.