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What are some interesting websites (tech related or not) that I can add to my endless rotation of Reddit, Tildes and Hacker News?
My online habits are too limited by these three websites. What other aggregators, blogs or websites you suggest for me to open my horizons?
Some of my interests:
- Long-form film criticism (not movie news)
- History of American cinema
- Urban exploration (sewers, abandoned places, spooky stories)
- Python
- Learning techniques
- Transportation (subways and trains, mostly)
- True crime
- Science fiction literature (both new and old)
- Stand up comedy
- War history
I'm particularly uninterested by American or World News.
I currently am not listening to podcasts because my headphones break every week and I don’t have enough money to buy headphones that will last more than that.
Lobste.rs is a great supplement/alternate to Hacker News, with a focus on software tech. Like tildes, they are small and growing slowly. It is currently excellent.
one has yet to get an invitation.
Architectural Afterlife is a blog where photographer Johnny Joo posts photos and histories of abandoned structures/places in the American midwest.
shiey posts videos of his urban explorations across Europe.
MathUrls, SciUrls, TechUrls, and DevUrls are agregators that cover 20 sites/blogs from each of their respective subjects.
Didn't know about *Urls, thanks for suggesting.
EDIT: They also have FinURLs.
I highly recommend you to sign up for an rss reader and build your own feed that interest you. This way you can centralize content from multiple sources.
There are free and paid services available, my personal favorite is BazQux reader. Give it a try.
I stopped using RSS readers when they started sharing only the headlines, forcing me to go to the website to read the entire article.
That's also what Tildes and Hacker News do, though.
I use Newsblur to keep up with blogs and webcomics I like. I can't be bothered to remember their schedules, or if they even have a regular schedule.
I recommend bazqux.com. it has a shortcut which fetches the Page's real full content. Its UI is like Google reader
BazQux can fetch the full articles for you.
I use QuiteRSS on Linux. For selected feeds, I have it open the article link (inside the reader itself) instead of the RSS text content. Luckily, it also comes with a built-in ad-blocker.
Citylab is a favorite of mine that does general content on cities, but often includes transit topics if that is what you are interested in there.
I am also a big fan of the Low Tech Magazine Solar Website and the sister publication No Tech Magazine. They combine a little history of how things have been done in the past with a little futurism of how they could be done better in the future. Updates are rare as it's mostly a one man show, and the solar website is down sometimes when it's not sunny, but still full of great reads.
It's not what you asked, but for history I recommend reading actual books about whatever area you're interested in. Lots of good stuff out there.
Oh I do read books ;)
I'd say most of the point of reading history as an amateur (and pro) is getting into arguments/discussions about history online.
Hmm, where's a good place to do that?
longform.org is a fantastic aggregator of long-form journalism (and occasional fiction). If nothing else it's worth skimming through to find sites to subscribe to!
What sort of headphones are you buying?
How are you breaking them every week?
Cheap. Known brands. Like 20 BRL / 5 USD. But I broke an expensive one too. But please consider that expensive for me is 60 BRL, with converts to 15 USD.
I usually put them in my backpack.
Have you considered picking up a hard/semi-rigid headphone case? They usually aren't too expensive, aren't much more bulky than the headphones themselves, and will clearly save you some money over time since you keep breaking headphones, which they should prevent from happening again.
That's a very good idea, thanks ;)
What is your ideal set of headphones?
Thanks!
I don't have any other requisites.
I'm currently using a $5 pair of earphones. They're made to look like Apple's, but they're cheap plastic if you look closely, with relatively-bad quality of sound. Using them damn near all day every day, for... three months? Slept on 'em once by accident, dropped 'em a couple of times... Good as they ever were.
Could the poor choice within your market be the problem?
Do you need to be able to hear your surroundings?
Check out the Koss Portapro. It may look old and cheap, but that's because they've been making them for 35 years, completely unchanged. There's a reason for that. Great sound that pleases even audiophiles and pretty tough (and with a lifetime warranty in case they're not tough enough). In fact, in your case, looking old and cheap is probably a bonus based on your first bullet.
Forgot to say: cannot be too expensive. 15 USD would be ideal, 20 USD is my limit. I know it doesn't look much, but it's a lot when you convert to Brazilian Real. And also something that is probably available worldwide (I'm in Brazil). Import taxes + shipping from overseas make the cheapest things expensive for me.
Mildly off-topic but please listen to this man when he says 20 Dollars is super expensive in Real with a typical Brazilian salary.
I wouldn't say it's super expensive, but it's definitely something that makes a difference and the majority of the population would not be able to buy. We're a poor country.
If IEMs are acceptable, you can get some crazy high quality ones for cheap right now. I think my Fiio F1s were about $20. They come with their own hard case and they are small enough that you would not break them easily.
If you have or know someone with a soldering iron, you could try doing some DIY repair with the ones you have as a last ditch effort, or keep them in something a little more rigid, like a case or an empty water bottle.
Order some Xiaomi Mi Piston 3 from Aliexpress. R$30 and they arrive via Sedex without issue. Low key and sound good, should get good usage out of them before they break. Hybrid Pro HD is much better but at R$100 they are not cheap. The struggle is REAL... kkkkkk
I love the 'Morning Coffee' extension for Firefox.
Effectively you can add bookmarks to 'Monday', 'Tuesday', 'Wednesday', etc (by right clicking on the tab -> morning coffee -> [day of week].
Then, when you click the 'coffee cup' icon on the addon bar, it will open up all the bookmarks you have saved for that particular day. I find it's a great way to remember checking different websites, as opposed to relying on sites like this and Reddit for everything.
For example, I've added most links here to my morning coffee and added them all to different days. So when I do my morning browsing or have some spare time, I might stumble across something cool, as opposed to just leaving it buried in a todo list.
Now and again I'll go to the settings and delete link which piss me off / I remember being routinely dry.
For long form film writing, I highly recommend Bright Wall/Dark Room. It’s got the best writing out there. It costs $25 per year but it is 100% worth it.
That's 120 BRL. It's real money around here. I'll keep that in mind for when thing get better.
I wish more websites accepted monthly payments...
You’re right. I just remembered wrong.
Now that I browsed a little, this website is clearly devoted to independent cinema. That's cool, but I'd be more interested in the same approach for mainstream films.
Do you have Twitter? I’ve found the best way to find film articles is to follow my favorite writers there. I’ve noticed a lot of them tend to retweet articles from other writers too. It’s a good way to expand your film writer exposure.
What kind of sites/writers do you like? I’m happy to make recommendations for other sites.
(I love film so I’m always looking for a chance to spread knowledge about good film sites!)
Looks like I can also pay $3 a month. Much more manageable!
For art, https://www.artstation.com/ has some good posts.
Digg is my go-to site for interesting reads. They curate interesting articles and videos from around the (English-speaking) Internet. Those articles are sometimes about film, urban exploration, transportation, true crime, and war history, but also many other subjects. Might be worth a try.
How about something a little different: searches as RSS feeds.
Reddit search supports this. For example:
https://www.reddit.com/search.rss?q=python&sort=new
Every tag at Lobste.rs becomes an RSS feed by adding .rss to the URL. And, multiple tags can be combined to narrow. Eg:
https://lobste.rs/t/python,programming.rss
Pinboard also supports RSS. Eg, if someone posts about ZeroMQ
https://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/t:zeromq
And, I know one can turn a Google Search into an RSS feed also but I don't have a ready example.
UrbanRail.Net is a site dedicated to subways as well as trams and urban/suburban trains
I've just started reading The Baffler and found it to be pretty highly quality. They have quite a lot of content available so it's a good place to return to over and over again.
For transportation, SkyScraperCity is my go to.
I am a big fan of São Paulo's metropolitan transport network (aka train and subway), and I usually keep an eye there for news, there's also some meaningful discussions and possibility strategies, with a bit of insider info every now and then.
Every now and then I also read about São Paulo's local bus system there too.
Skimfeed is a nice and simple 'one-page' link aggregator. You can add / remove sites, it has darkmode, and even a little hourly-news player on the same page.