Cool Links

A collection of fun optical illusions, with quick explanations of how they work.

I found out later that this is just one out of many other “toy” collections. I recommend checking those out as well!

This website allows you to find the latitude of your city (or whatever city you want) and shows all the cities in the same latitude all around the world (or in the mirrored latitute i.e. opposite hemisphere).

My home city is opposite to Cairo, which is neat. The one I’m currently living in is parallel to Vancouver, which is also neat.

A nicely put-together timeline with a lot (all?) of the photos from the Artemis II mission that orbited around the Moon. The sequence of the spacecraft approaching the Moon is breathtaking!

This is like a landing page + search engine for the old internet! It allows you to search for stuff on the Internet Archive without having to necessarily know the URL of every website you wanna visit.

I found some forum threads from 1998 of people discussing the imminent launch of Zelda Ocarina of Time. Fascinating stuff.

Ever wondered why, in software development, a group of characters is called a “string”? This won’t provide you the answer, but will make it easier to understand.

A world map where people can anonymously write about memories they’ve had in specific places. You can write your own or just roam around reading the memories of other people. It’s fun to look around places I know and see what kind of experiences people had there.

in a world looming with the threat of ai stealing your job, save humanity by stealing ai’s job.

Fun little website where you can play the part of an AI answering prompts made by humans. Remember to tell people they’re absolutely right!

Miss the feeling if watching TV as a kid? This site allows you to surf channels on a retro TV, and you can even choose the decade you want!

Unfortunately it seems it only has US TV, so I can’t really relate to anything there. Would love a Brazilian version of this!

This is amazing! This is a pixelated sandbox that allows you to experiment with all kinds of materials and elements, and see how they interact with each other. Each material interacts with others differently, as they would in real life. For example, oil won’t mix with water, but ink will.

A lot of time-consuming potential here, so don’t open it if you have something else to do 😅

This is both funny and incredibly infuriating. A PR was declined on GitHub for an open-source project because it was made by an AI agent and… the AI agent (or the anonymous person behind it) wrote up a defamatory blog post targeted specifically at the project’s maintainer.

If being an open-source maintainer was already a thankless job, now there’s one more hell to endure.

Excuse me, I’m in a Lies of P obsession right now. This video (which contains some light spoilers) talks about the Truth/Lie choices in the game, which are an incredible narrative device, and how that relates to what makes us human.

It’s not surprising that a game based on the story of Pinocchio would have Lies and “becoming human” as parts of its theme, but I really like how they made it all make sense organically and not just like something they tacked in there because they had to.

This is awesome: an entire site dedicated to shoelaces, how to lace, tie or simply learn about them. It even includes the “world’s fastest shoelace knot”, created by the website’s author himself! I gotta try it out.

You might have read before that I love the Catppuccin color theme. It’s the same one I use on this website! I also love using that theme on the apps that allow me to, like Obsidian, VS Code and Vivaldi.

To match all of that, I need some wallpapers that fit the palette too. And I just came across this tool that automatically adapts the color palette of any image you upload to a theme of your choice! I’ve had good results with it so far. Definitely makes my desktop look way nicer :)

Another great page by Neal Agarwal; this one lets you see life in all its different sizes.

This website is so cool! It’s the kind of thing that you’d imagine was a personal website, but it’s actually a marketing page! A marketing team actually sat down and planned this out! I thought no such thing as fun marketing existed. Glad to be proven wrong.

Neat little daily browser puzzle game where you use clues to find out who’s a criminal and who’s innocent.

Ok, this video is amazing. Corridor Crew recreates the amazing practical effects from the first Lord of the Rings movie (the forced perspective ones with Gandalf and the hobbits), but not only that, there’s amazing storytelling on how it was made, all the cinema history before it, and why it has never been done again since then.

This Mastodon thread is an amazing tale about game development, physics and time-traveling bugs.

Grab your headphones and get ready to lose some hours. This website compiles every subgenre of music and algorithmically sorts them out in relation to one another. It’s great to learn about new genres you might like or to find something similar to what you already know!

Adrift is a quiet space where doubts become paper boats and drift together across a shared sea.

What a neat lil’ website. You can write your own doubts or self-care notes and let them float out in a virtual sea, alongside the notes of many others. There’s some background music too.