NASA DIGITAL IMAGE TREASURE TROVE
Photos from the manned space program, from Project Mercury to the present, and Earth images from the latest missions are available by FTP, Gopher or World Wide Web from Johnson Space Center's Image Science Division. Several thousand photos and text files describing them can be downloaded, but watch the size of the JPEG files. Some are as large as 2 MB. Average image is 40K. We've been waiting years for this. "ftp://images.jsc.nasa.gov" "gopher://images.jsc.nasa.gov:70/" "http://images.jsc.nasa.gov/html/home.htm"
MAKE A VIRTUAL VISIT TO THE MT. WILSON OBSERVATORY
This world-famous observatory near Pasadena, California has a new WWW site well worth visiting. In addition to the expected educational and historical information, it features a 'Virtual Tour' designed to emulate Mt. Wilson's real-life walking tour -- with the extra advantage that you can go places not usually open to the public. New exhibits are added frequently. Images of Jupiter's recent comet collision will be available soon. "http://www.mtwilson.edu"
Right off the bat a great opening quote: "The eye that directs a needle in the delicate meshes of embroidery will equally well bisect a star with the spider web of the micrometer". The rest is knitaholics nirvana. A short sample of links: The "KnitNet", Tvaandstickning, Knitting Events, Dealing With Ends, You Know You're A Knitaholic When..., Klein Bottle, Stitch Library, Floss Conversion Chart, Historical Costuming FAQ, and inevitably more. "http://palver.foundation.tricon.com/crafts/index.html"
SOCIAL SCIENCE GOPHER SITE SERVES A VARIED FEAST OF INFO BYTES
A good variety of social topics are available for exploration with Gopher or WWW client software from the University of Michigan. A sampling includes directories for employment, hunger, literacy, sexuality, U.S. Social Security, consumer product and insurance information, along with eight other topic areas. Interesting info. "gopher://vienna.hh.lob.umich.edu:70/11/social"
WEATHER WEATHER EVERYWHERE, LITERALLY
One of the oldest and most popular destinations on the net, the University of Illinois' Weather Machine gopher site has been implemented as a full-scale Environmental Information WWW server with many new options. Called the Daily Planet, it not only links to Weather World, a collection of over 170 continually updated images and over 600 archived surface maps, satellite images and animations, but also to a page of multimedia instructional modules that teach the basics of meteorology. For all you closet weather buffs as well as folks just wondering what to wear tomorrow. "http://atmos.uiuc.edu/"
FLORIDA WEATHER-WATCHING SITE: NOT A MICKEY-MOUSE OPERATION
If you're worried about a hurricane destroying your Magic Kingdom vacation, you might want to check out the new Web home page of the National Weather Service in Tallahassee, Florida. From there, you can tap into local meteorological and climatological data, as well as explore links to other weather resources. The URL is: "http://thunder.met.fsu.edu/~nws"
An MIT graduate student has developed the closest thing so far to Yellow Pages on the World-Wide Web. Commercial Services on the Net currently consists of an alphabetical list featuring 60-80% of the existing commercial Web sites. You'll find everything ranging from biggies like IBM and AT&T, to smaller businesses like The Sandal Dude. A search capability and category breakdown are planned. (Internet Business Report, July '94, p. 3). "http://tns-www.lcs.mit.edu/commerce.html"
PBS GOPHER STILL UNDER CONSTRUCTION
The Public Broadcasting Service has launched a gopher server that will primarily focus on online education in association with educational programming. The Gopher itself is rather dull at the moment, despite a planned link to Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, and we think PBS should upload juicy video clips from Trials of Life, Blackadder, and Nova to liven up the site. Lack of manpower and resources is cited for the dearth of material. Volunteer anyone? What there is to be seen can now be reached at: "gopher://gopher.pbs.org"
So here you are bound for Dublin Ireland and already starting to get thirsty. You could walk straight off the plane and into the first pub you see, but hey, it might be the kind of place where the keeper tends to change TV programs without prior notice. Well, worry no more because czimmerm@dsg.cs.tcd.ie has put together almost 17K worth of pub reviews (that's over 40 pubs and clubs) which he himself has personally visited. It's candid, it's thorough, and it's an entertaining read for real and virtual pub crawlers. "http://www.dsg.cs.tcd.ie:/dsg_people/czimmerm/pubs.html"
According to its home page, "the main goal of this initiative is to increase general awareness about Lithuania in the global networking community." Goodness knows, they need it. A brief perusal turned up the following: although the only natural resource found in Lithuania is peat, they still have 100% literacy. Who'da thunk? Actually, as these things go, the Lithuania WWW Info Service is fairly comprehensive. You can even get a MIDI file of the national anthem. "http://www.luc.edu/~tbaltru/lt/"
A new HTML Language Manual, designed to be easy to understand by "moderately beginning beginners", covers all aspects of HTML, including those semi-arcane features ISINDEX, FORMS, ISMAP (Image maps) and cgi-bin scripts/programs. Many examples. "http://www.utirc.utoronto.ca:3232/HTMLdocs/NewHTML/intro.html"
WRITTEN AN ONLINE ARTICLE? REGISTER IN THE ARTICLE DATABASE
Authors of publically available or published articles in the field of information systems are invited to register their articles. Links to your online version can be set up. "http://www.zib-berlin.de/People/mueller/GNA/ISG/Services/ArD/"
No luck finding career resources in cyberspace? Try the following WWW document, which offers links to a good assortment of online job lists. "http://ageninfo.tamu.edu/jobs.html"
QUOTECOM PROVIDES STOCK QUOTES ONLINE
This new service is dedicated to bringing quality financial market data to the Internet community. For more information, send a blank message to info@quote.com. Or on the Web, go to "http://www.quote.com"
SILICON GRAPHICS-AFFILIATED TRAINING CENTER
The Center for Visual Creation at Mississippi State University offers advanced degrees, plus short courses on a variety of software systems, including Photoshop, SoftImage and Renderman. E-mail CVC@erc.msstate.edu or "http://www.erc.msstate.edu/CVC"
It searches an index and builds a list of URL's to all matches, at the designated archive site (changeable), including links to postscript versions if they exist. RFC's are Internet standards technical documents. "http://www.usu.edu/~brandon/RFC/"
PC-MAC TCP/IP FAQ NOW ON THE WEB
What the heck is a SLIP account anyway? This helpful FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) site answers just about all of those Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol questions you've been dying to ask. "http://www.rtd.com/pcnfsfaq/faq.html"
KENYA AND EAST AFRICA GROUP HAS QUARTERLY ELECTRONIC NEWSLETTER
The newsletter called COMPUTEK, deals with info technology issues related to East Africa. Of interest to students of, and those from the area. "ftp://solar.rtd.utk.edu/pub/computek/"
AOL FILLS IN COMET ACCESS VOID AS INTERNET GRIDLOCKS
Pictures and information about Comet Shoemaker-Levy/9's crashes into Jupiter were more accessible on AOL than on many Internet sites due to the massive overloads of the WWW and FTP sites carrying this material. AOL has a good selection accesible through their special 'COMET' keyword including OMNI and SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN software libraries.
COMPUSERVE'S VERSIONS OF THE COMET FILES
Videos, GIF and Hubble Space Telescope images, and information files related to the collision of Comet Shoemaker-Levy/9 with Jupiter can be found in a special GO COMET download area online. Related discussion can be found in the Astronomy Forum (GO ASTROFORUM). Both are part of CompuServe's extended services.
COMPUSERVE OPENS CONSUMER ADVICE FORUM
Learn how to avoid the latest rip-offs and scams, get information about your consumer rights, and gather money-saving ideas in the CompuServe's new Consumer Forum. One of the forum's sections, 'Ask David/FightBack' lets the public ask questions of David Horowitz, who has produced his syndicated U.S. television show and newspaper column 'Fight Back!' for 25 years. The extended service is reached at GO CONFORUM.
GOPHERSURFER 1.0B8: NEW BETA OF MACINTOSH GOPHER SERVER
Those busy folks at the University of Minnesota are hard at work creating a gopher server which runs on the Macintosh. GopherSurfer 1.0b8 is available in both Power Mac and 68K Mac versions. There is the usual plethora of bug fixes as well as some enhancements to access security. All the caveats of Beta software apply as usual. Rummage around in the following directory: "ftp://boombox.micro.umn.edu/gopher/Mac_server/"
EFFORT TO SUPPORT WWW UNDER PERL SEEKS COLLABORATORS
Roy Fielding is directing an effort to develop a library of Perl4 packages which provides a simple and consistent programming interface to the World-Wide Web. This library is being developed as a collaborative effort to assist the further development of useful WWW clients and tools. To this end he has just released libwww-perl 0.12 and is seeking others to support the many protocols and also to provide better HTML libraries. Subscribe to the mailing list libwww-perl-request@ics.uci.edu, or look at "http://www.ics.uci.edu/WebSoft/libwww-perl/" for more info.
YET ANOTHER WWW INTERFACE FOR UNIX HACKERS: tkWWW 0.12 BETA
Tk is an interpreted toolkit which allows one to build X11 applications quickly and easily. tkWWW is a Tk interface to the World Wide Web. tkWWW 0.12 beta is the current release. To run tkWWW you need the tk and tcl packages, and the xli package for displaying images. If you want to fool around with it ask joe@mit.edu how to get it.
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