Listed below are links to other pages on the internet which may be of interest. Each link has a brief description of the site, and so this page has grown quite large over the years. I have therefore preceded the main section with a compact table which lists all the linked pages, and links to the fuller description below - hopefully this should make browsing this page quicker and easier. On a separate page I have listed the source addresses for many of the Macintosh utilities and ShareWare programs I find invaluable, and another page has the home web page addresses for friends and colleagues.
But before that, here is a list of the links that have been added recently:
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| Astronomy | |||||
| http://www.aiub.unibe.ch/ | The Astronomical Institute at the University of Bern. Satellite Laser Ranging, calendar conversions, and many related items. | ||||
| http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html (UK mirror) |
Astronomy Picture of the Day. The web site where a different astronomical picture is provided every day with short description, and many links to associated web pages. Maintained by astronomers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center near Washington. Of particular interest to Londoners perhaps, the page for the 11th April 2003 has a night-time view of London taken from the International Space Station. The orbital M25 motorway, Heathrow and Gatwick airports, and the dark Hyde Park and Regents Park stand out. | ||||
| http://ciclops.lpl.arizona.edu/ | Stunning pictures of Saturn and it’s moons from the Cassini space probe are constantly being added to the CICLOPS (Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS) web site. | ||||
| http://www.analemma.com/ http://www.sundials.co.uk/equation.htm |
The exact length of a solar day varies throughout the year due to both the Earth’s elliptical orbit around the Sun, and the inclination of its polar axis with respect to the plane of our orbit. The time difference from the mean only amounts a few seconds at most, but accumulates to plus and minus about fifteen minutes, and this is known as the Equation of Time. These two sites both have excellent descriptions of the effect, and hence why a sundial can often apparently be “wrong”. | ||||
| http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/... .../scienceopticsu/powersof10/index |
The Florida State University in Tallahassee has put up a very interesting Java applet on their site. It begins as a view of the Milky Way Galaxy viewed from a distance of 10 million light years and then zooms in towards Earth in powers of ten of distance. 10 million, to one million, to 100,000 light years and so on until it finally reaches a large Oak tree leaf. But that is not all - it zooms into the leaf through cells and atoms until it reaches the level of the quarks viewed at 100 attometers. | ||||
http://www.maj.com/sun/index.html
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The Majestic Research web site has up to the minute data on solar activity, with images from the Soho spacecraft and several observatories in many different wavelengths. | ||||
| http://aa.usno.navy.mil/ .../faq/docs/moon_phases.html |
The United States’ Naval Observatory’s web site. A real “Aladdin’s cave” of information. The second link leads to information on the phases of the moon, and on that page are large (496K) and small (136K) animated GIFs by Antonio Cidadao showing views of the Moon over the period of a lunar cycle. They clearly show how the moon appears to wobble in orbit, and also becomes larger and smaller due to its elliptical orbit. | ||||
| http://www.solarviews.com/eng/homepage.htm | Calvin J. Hamilton’s Views of the Solar System. A fabulous site with loads of pictures of all parts of our Solar System, many of which have been processed by Calvin himself from raw NASA data. Sadly this site is so popular that access is rather slow - anyone out there able to offer him a fast server, cheap? | ||||
| Amateur radio | |||||
| http://www.batc.org.uk/index.htm http://www.cq-tv.com/ |
The B.A.T.C. (“British Amateur Television Club”) is the organisation that serves Radio Amateurs interested in amateur television. While based in Britain, it has members all over the world. The lower link is a separate site dedicated to their quarterly magazine - “CQ-TV”. Members can access the current edition of the magazine online, but a recent (changing) sample is available for everyone to examine. | ||||
| http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/... .../Bay/5899/ |
The Mac Shack has a collection of Macintosh software for Amateur Radio. | ||||
| http://www.rsgb.org.uk/ | The RSGB (Radio Society of Great Britain) is the institution that serves Radio Amateurs in the British Isles. | ||||
| Cult TV shows | |||||
| http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/index.shtml | The BBC’s cult web pages, with info on Buffy the Vampyr Slayer, Doctor Who, Red Dwarf, Roswell, The Simpsons, Star Trek, The X-Files, and many more. For the really sad amongst you, the I Love TV section has Flash animated versions of old Schools and BBC-2 logos! | ||||
| http://epguides.com/ http://www.tvtome.com/ |
Epguides and TV Tome are now working together and have episode lists for hundreds of TV shows, with programme synopses and credit lists for many of them. Unlike many of the “official” web sites, these have the information you want in an easily accessible fashion, without all the fancy animated graphics that professional sites love, but which take ages to download on a modem connection, and, I find, seriously hinder access to the information. That is not to say these sites are plain and boring - far from it - they are just doing what is necessary, simply and easily! Highly recommended. | ||||
| http://www.st-hypertext.com/ | Jamahl Epsicokhan’s “Star Trek Hypertext” site with extensive reviews of all episodes of Deep Space Nine and Voyager. | ||||
| http://www.geocities.com/garn13/ | Al Garn’s Canadian web site “Garn’s Guides” which has episode listings for over 250 current and past Sci-Fi shows. In similar vein to Epguides, this is also highly recommended. | ||||
| http://www.psiphi.org/ | David Henderson’s “Psi Phi” site also devoted to DS9 and Voyager. | ||||
| http://www.antarians.com/ http://www.crashdown.com/ |
A couple of the many Roswell sites. | ||||
| http://www.thewiccabox.co.uk/charmed/charmed... | The Wiccabox - definitive UK website with all the info on Charmed. | ||||
| http://www.noctua.demon.co.uk/links/culttv.html | Finally, my own page where I have tabulated links to both official and unofficial web sites for the shows I am currently enjoying. | ||||
| Encryption | |||||
| http://www.pgp.com/ http://www.pgpi.org/ |
Since Tuesday 24th October 2000, it has been legal in the UK for companies to monitor e-mail messages for content, and rumour has it that Governments have been doing this for ages. Time was when interfering with the Royal Mail was an offence punishable by imprisonment in the Bloody Tower (in London), but present governments don’t seem willing to apply the same standards to email today :-( Public Key Cryptography was invented in the 1970’s, but required a lot of computational power. Phil Zimmermann modified the RSA technique to be usable on personal computers in the early 1990’s, and came up with PGP (“Pretty Good Privacy”). The algorithms and program source code have always been available for inspection and peer-review, and have been shown over the years to be highly secure with no weaknesses. Phil made the program freely available in order for it to gain widespread acceptance and use before the US Government could clamp down and make it illegal. Development has continued over the years, with modern versions being very intuitive and incorporating a GUI interface - unlike the original command-line versions! Phil set up an organisation to develop and market PGP, and after a brief period when it was owned and funded by Network Associates, famous for their McAfee virus protection software, it is now independent again. Versions of PGP are available for most computer platforms, and the freeware versions can be downloaded from the web site at the first link. Before export restrictions were lifted, Oslo University in Norway acted as the international distribution centre, and they are still maintaining their site (second link) which doesn’t require any form filling! (My public key is available here). | ||||
| HTML | |||||
| http://developer.netscape.com/docs/manuals/ | Netscape’s web site with some useful reference manuals. An online HTML manual is available, and they also provide a zip file including all the relevant pages so that you can have this invaluable reference at your fingertips on your own computer. JavaScript and Dynamic HTML also have their own sections linked from the main index page. | ||||
| http://www.w3.org/ http://validator.w3.org/ |
The World Wide Web Consortium’s web site. The standards authority for the web. The second address has an HTML validation engine - just give it a URL, and it will produce a full (and pernickety!) report, with links to clear explanations of what is wrong, and how to fix it. | ||||
| http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy/ http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/1057/ |
Dave Raggett is a big noise at the W3C, and as well as books on HTML, has also recently produced an application called Tidy which will check through your HTML page and produce both a list of errors and a “pretty-printed” corrected output. He has links on his page for downloading the program for several platforms, but the second link on the left here is to Terry Teague’s site where he has a compiled version for the Macintosh. (This explains why my pages are much more legal than they used to be, but also means I have no excuse!) | ||||
| http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/ | Eric A.Meyer’s web site. Eric is an Invited Expert on the Cascading Style Sheets and Formatting Properties Working Group at the World Wide Web Consortium. Again, lots of clear information on how it should be done. Eric is a strong proponent of standards - only when everyone writes code to the published standards, and browsers interpret code to that standard, will we know that our page will look the same on everyone’s screen. These pages were originally hosted on the website of Case Western Reserve University (Cleveland, Ohio), but as Eric has now left, he has them on his personal site. CWRU do still have some popular Introduction to HTML pages. | ||||
| Miscellaneous | |||||
| http://www.barnowl.co.uk/ | The Barn Owl Centre in Gloucestershire (West of England) has recently created an excellent web site with lots of information, and pictures of gorgeous owls! | ||||
| http://www.mgb-stuff.org.uk/owlstext.htm | Bee and Vee’s pages. Someone else as mad about owls as I am :-) (And also MG sports cars, it seems!) | ||||
| http://www.serviceview.bt.com/list/homepage.htm | British Telecom’s site with their charge rates. There are lots and lots of pages, and finding what you want is now a nightmare (it was FAR easier last year!) Anyway - here is a good starting point for you! | ||||
| http://www.thedaily.com/ | The Daily Autoload Start Pages - Photos &
Cool Links Updated Each Weekday. Bruce Murray has been running this site for over seven
years, putting up a new picture every week-day. Details are given on how to configure your
browser to load his page automatically every time you run it. Actually there are three
pages: The Daily Overlook (http://www.thedaily.com/overlook.html) A scenic view of town or countryside. The Daily Menagerie (http://www.thedaily.com/menagerie.html) Pictures of pets or other animals. The Daily Bikini (http://www.thedaily.com/bikini.html) An attractive (and tasteful!) picture of a bikini-clad girl. Each page has a smallish picture (usually about 180 x 300, and is a JPEG about 15-20KB in size), plus lots of links to places of varying interest. This site is completely free, paid for by the (minimal) banner advertising - please take the time to click on the banner, as he gets a few cents for every time you do! In the Spring of 2001, the Broadband Overlook page (http://www.dailyoverlook.com/) was added, designed for people with fast internet access. This base address links to a page where you can select another suitable for your monitor resolution, either 800 x 640, or 1024 x 768. On there is a much larger picture that will practically fill your screen, but which is necessarily about 100 kilobytes in size. This modern design page includes a Java controlled menu system for accessing loads of links! | ||||
| http://www.domai.com/ | The internet seems to be overloaded by sites offering pictures of naked women, most of which use loads of Javascript pop-ups that open a new window (or several!) when you try and back-out of or close the first! There is one site, however, that has tasteful, artistic, nude pictures, with none of these irritating pop-ups. DOMAI doesn’t support the amateur gynaecologist - instead they have pictures, mainly from European and Eastern Bloc countries, of amateur models displaying, if you will, God’s handiwork. Many women apparently look at this site, enjoying the beauty of those portrayed - what more recommendation can you want? Members get access to a new twenty-picture photo-set three times a week, but there is plenty of frequently updated free material too, including a weekly newsletter with letters and stories from other members, and samples from the photo-sets updated that week. | ||||
| http://www.sodacrystals.co.uk/ | Dri Pak are apparently now the only UK company manufacturing washing soda (Sodium Carbonate Decahydrate). A century ago, before the introduction of detergents and other proprietary cleaners, soap and washing soda were practically the only cleaning agents commonly found in the home. Now it has fallen out of fashion, which is a shame as it is extremely useful - and far less toxic than the modern alternatives. Dri Pak’s website has lots of suggested uses. | ||||
| http://www.exbury.co.uk/ | Exbury Gardens - A fantastic 200 acre site owned by the Rothschild family, and filled with magnificent examples of practically every species of Azalea, Camellia, and Rhododendron. Less than a hundred miles from London, near Beaulieu, Hythe, Fawley, and Southampton on the South Coast of England, these gardens are spectacular in May when all the blossom is out, but a peaceful haven the rest of year when rock- and rose-gardens provide an alternative attraction. The site includes a large car park, tea-rooms, and a shop for plants as well as the more usual souvenirs. Building work is nearly finished on a new attraction due to open later this year - a steam engine shed! GPS derived route coordinates are available on request. (The site was used by the Royal Navy during World War 2 as a land-based training centre (“concrete battleship”) under the name “HMS Mastoden” - what a place to spend the war!) | ||||
| http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/... .../scienceopticsu/powersof10/index |
The Florida State University in Tallahassee has put up a very interesting Java applet on their site. It begins as a view of the Milky Way Galaxy viewed from a distance of 10 million light years and then zooms in towards Earth in powers of ten of distance. 10 million, to one million, to 100,000 light years and so on until it finally reaches a large Oak tree leaf. But that is not all - it zooms into the leaf through cells and atoms until it reaches the level of the quarks viewed at 100 attometers. | ||||
| http://www.geocaching.com/ http://www.geocacheuk.com/ http://www.trigpointinguk.com/ |
Geocacheing - is really a GPS-enabled treasure hunt! People hide the cache (a small weather-proof container) in a publicly accessible, but non-obvious place, then publish the exact GPS co-ordinates on the website (first address on left). Bearing in mind that your average domestic GPS satnav is only accurate to about 10 metres, it can take a little searching to find a camouflaged sandwich-box in amongst a load of trees and bushes! The treasure is usually only the rubbish trinkets you can get for pennies at the faire or the seaside, but the fun is to find it. You then sign the log book, exchange a trinket with one you have brought, and also log your find on the website. I learnt about this in the winter, but having tramped through muddy woodland paths, quickly decided it was a summer sport (although leaves on the trees attenuate the satellite signals, so making navigation more difficult in heavily overgrown areas). It gives you a reason to get out of the house, and go for walks in places you otherwise might not have bothered. Some people leave special tokens called "Travel Bugs" in the caches. These have travel plans (described on the website), like visiting certain capitals or countries, and Geocachers pick them up from one cache, and deposit them at another in line with those plans. A related pastime is "Trigpointing" (see third link on left), where, particularly in the UK, people try to track down the marker points used by the mapping authorities before satellite navigation equipment became available to give them far more accurate and consistent results. UK readers will doubtless be familiar with the concrete pillars on top of hills used by the Ordnance Survey to accurately map the country, but there are also other, much more subtle markers, like the stud in the ground at Ham, on the bank of the River Thames (http://www.trigpointinguk.com/trigs/trig-details.php?t=420). | ||||
| http://www.herbsgardenshealth.com/ | Herbs, Gardens and Health is an excellent online shop - try them for the hard to find vitamin tablets, herbal remedies, and things like bicarbonate of soda. | ||||
| http://www.bbc.co.uk/london/... .../travel/downloads/tube_map.gif .../travel/downloads/walking.pdf .../congestion/images/congestion_map.pdf |
The BBC’s site has some useful downloadable files, including a large map of the London Underground railway system, known locally as “The Tube”. This is a 1700 x 1124, 230 kilobyte GIF file. There is also a nice map of central London for those visitors exploring on foot (this is a 172KB single A4 sized PDF file); and another map showing the limit of the Congestion Charging zone (190KB PDF file). | ||||
| http://www.petrolprices.com/ http://www.taxigas.co.uk/ |
With petrol prices changing all the time, it would be nice to be able to find the cheapest via the web. This used to be possible (in the UK) via the AA (Automobile Association) sponsored PetrolBusters.com, but sadly sponsorship for that site was withdrawn in 2005. However, there are now a couple of new sites to replace it. PetrolPrices.com will display the cheapest in your location, and also send a weekly email with the latest information. However, Taxigas.co.uk is an interactive site. Created by Richard Bagnall of Cambridge (England), it was primarily intended to help taxi drivers, hence the title, but it seems they carry the information around in their heads, and so it has been made available to everybody. Using the Google Earth mapping API, the exact position of the garages can be seen, both on a map, and/or an aerial photograph. Users can not only see the current prices (as on PetrolPrices.com), but can update the information themselves! | ||||
| http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/ http://www.mirror.ac.uk/sites/www.libpng... |
PNG - “Portable Network Graphics” - the modern graphics file format that is replacing GIF. The LZW compression used in GIF is subject to copyright, and a royalty payment has to be paid for each copy of an application that encodes or decodes it. PNG was therefore devised to be completely free of any such royalties, and to improve on the capabilities of GIF It can therefore provide loss-less compression on 24-bit images, as well as 256-colour paletted ones, and can even deal with 16 bits per colour, and an alpha channel! Both Internet Explorer and Netscape can display PNG images, but the current Netscape vs.4.7x doesn’t yet deal with transparency (the upcoming vs.6 should!). (PNG is also the format used for images embedded in MHEG - the format used for Digital Teletext on the British Digital Terrestrial Television channels.) The second link on the left is to the British mirror site, so should be a bit quicker from over here! | ||||
| http://www.wotsit.org/ | The Programmer’s File Format Collection - This site has, or has links to, format information on loads of different file types, and also other useful programming information. | ||||
| http://www.powerjets.co.uk/index.htm | PowerJets - Three amateur nutters who love nothing more than playing with small jet engines. “Please stand well clear!” :-) | ||||
| http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ Down the Plughole Stain Removal, Part 1 Stain Removal, Part 2 Stain Removal, Part 3 Stain Removal, Part 4 Stain Removal, Part 5 Stain Removal, Part 6 |
Rachel Simhon writes a column in the Weekend
Telegraph newspaper in England, giving tips on how to run a 21st-century home. In the
Spring of 2004 she devoted several of her weekly columns to the subject of cleaning stains - the
sort of folklore remedies that used to be passed down the generations by our grandmothers, but
which information seems to get lost in this technological age! The links to the left point
to the specific articles, but the website’s search facility will throw up lots more of her
articles. (See also the Herbs, Gardens and
Health website recommended by Rachel.) The Telegraph tries to insist that you register before reading their articles online, and said registration requires a fair amount of detailed information about you. I object to this intrusion of privacy - I can buy and read their newspaper anonymously - why should they know all about me so that I can use their online archive? OK - rant over! As it happens, this registration seems to be forced by javascript in their web pages, but you can still (May 2004) download the pages to read off line (with javascript disabled), even without registering, or else just enter some totally fictional information in their registrion form! | ||||
| http://www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/... .../snowcrystals/photos/photos.htm |
One of nature’s wonders is the beauty of snowflakes, and every one is unique! A number of sites on the web have pictures, and a very good starting point is Cal.Tech’s Snow Crystal Photo Collections. They have some beautiful pictures, and links to many other sites exploring the same topic. (There is even a site where Dave Stredulinsky has made origami-style paper snowflakes available as PDF files!) | ||||
| http://www.ukscales.com/shop/ | It’s amazing what you can find on eBay, and one firm I found that sell on there, and directly from their own website, is UK Scales from Glenrothes in Scotland. You can guess what they sell from their name, and this includes pocket scales that measure down to milligram resolution! And they also have a fancy gizmo that can tell if a diamond is real, or cubic zirconium! | ||||
| Satellites | |||||
| http://www.eutelsat.com/ | Eutelsat’s web site. | ||||
| http://www.lyngsat.com/ http://www.lyngsat.com/europe.shtml |
Lyngemark’s site with a wealth of information about satellites, and links to other sites with more info specific to each satellite. The second address is a page listing all the satellites visible from Europe, but they have other pages linked from their root with details about satellites visible from America and the Far East. | ||||
| http://www.panamsat.com/ | Panamsat’s web site. | ||||
| http://www.satcodx.com/ | SatcoDX is another independent sites similar to Lyngemark. | ||||
| http://www.tbs-satellite.com/tse/ | The Satellite Encyclopedia lives up to its name. The fullest information is only available by subscription, but there is none-the-less an enormous amount freely available online. | ||||
| http://www.ses-astra.com/ | I found it rather hard to find my way around the SES-Astra site, as they use clever pull-down menus with non-obvious names :-( However, persevere and you’ll find that footprints for the Astra fleet are available at http://www.ses-astra.com/corporate/satellites/footprints.shtml. (Oh look, I’ve gone and given you a direct link, saving you all the trouble! Aren’t I good to you?) | ||||
The following sites have information relating to the “Sky” satellite TV channels in the UK: | |||||
| http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/ .../terrestrial/epg/ |
Digital Spy is an independent site with loads of information and news. The second link points to an excellent table listing all the channels on the Digital Terrestrial service, with the channel logos, broadcasting hours, and links to the channel websites. | ||||
| http://skydigital.mediabullet.co.uk/ | Media Bullet, on behalf of BSkyB, have lists of the current Sky channel constituents, and on their front page, news items relating to forthcoming and recent channel comings and goings. | ||||
| http://www.wildsat.com/ | Pete Wild keeps a close eye on the Astra and Eurobird digital broadcast satellites covering the UK, and maintains up-to-date lists of the channels available on and off the EPG. | ||||
| http://www.wotsat.com/ | What Satellite magazine’s web site which also has news about forthcoming and recent channel additions and deletions on its front page. | ||||
| Television | |||||
| http://www.bvws.org.uk/405alive/ | 405 Alive is a site dedicated to old television. Mainly, but not exclusively, dealing with equipment and programmes from the early days of British television which used the 405 line standard. This site was started by Andy Emmerson, who is well known in British amateur television circles, but it is now incorporated into the British Vintage Wireless Society’s site. | ||||
| http://www.sptv.demon.co.uk/405colour/ | Lots of experimentation took place in the ’50s and ’60s to determine the best way to transmit colour television to the British public. Until practically the last minute it was assumed that an NTSC subcarrier would be added to the 405-line monochrome system then in use. This web site has some information on 405 Line Colour TV as it might have been. | ||||
| http://www.batc.org.uk/index.htm | The British Amateur Television Club is for Radio Amateurs who transmit pictures as well as speech. | ||||
| http://www.bbc.co.uk/commissioning/... .../tvbranding/picturesize.shtml |
On the Commissioning section of their site, the BBC has a section explaining how to prepare graphics on a computer for use in both 4:3 and 16:9 TV programmes. Included are a couple of downloadable Zipped Photoshop files with various markers relating to safe title areas etc | ||||
| http://www.bbc.co.uk/reception/ | The BBC’s Reception Advice section has a (large!) table listing all the DTT transmitters, with channels, powers, and heights. | ||||
| http://www.bbctraining.co.uk/ | The BBC’s Training Centre near Evesham, Worcestershire, provides training in all broadcasting disciplines, and is not limited to BBC staff. Anyone can book onto the courses, which often have several delegates from both British and Foreign organisations. Excellent on-site accommodation and catering in lovely countryside makes for a very pleasant break from the normal workplace. (No, I didn’t copy that from their brochure - I speak from experience!) | ||||
| http://www.andydickinson.com/editors.htm | Andy Dickinson, a video editor working with Avids, and a Lecturer in Online Journalism at the University of Central Lancashire’s Department Journalism (England), has put together an extensive list of other sites with delivery and technical standards for various TV stations around the World. | ||||
| http://www.dtg.org.uk/ | The Digital Television Group has lots of information about Digital Television, both satellite and terrestrial, including lists of DTT transmitter channels and frequencies. | ||||
| http://www.domino405.co.uk/ | Malcolm Everiss produces a digital 625 to 405 standards converter called the Domino. | ||||
| http://home.pacbell.net/ray2288/ | Ray Herring, a former Transmitter Supervisor for KGO-TV in San Francisco, has a site explaining High Definition Television. HDTV has been a long time coming, but it is creeping up on us fast! Herein are the answers to many of the fundamental questions you have about HDTV. | ||||
| http://www.choisser.com/broadcst.html | Larry Kenney has information about Digital and High Definition television in the USA, explained in terms clear even to those not in the industry. | ||||
| http://www.ofcom.org.uk/static/... ...reception_advice/dtt_pocket_guide_2-8.pdf |
OFCOM (the UK TV and Radio regulatory body) has a pamphlet listing all of the UK’s Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) transmitters, with their locations, channel numbers AND frequency offsets where used. This is available as a 300 Kbyte PDF file from the link at the left. | ||||
| http://www.philrees.co.uk/articles/timecode.htm | Phil Rees has some detailed pages clearly explaining Timecode - the system for stamping each frame with an exact time to simplify editing sound/picture synchronisation. | ||||
| http://www.pbs.org/opb/crashcourse/ | Robert X.Cringely, host of PBS’s introduction to the future of television, “Digital TV: A Cringely Crash Course”, leads you through the evolution of television from the early days, to modern Digital Television. All this from an American perspective of course, but still relevant to us in the UK. | ||||
| http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Contrib/WorldTV/ .../broadcast.html |
Surrey University in England has a very useful set of pages describing the various TV standards used throughout the World, with a list of the standard for each country on the second link at the left. | ||||
| http://www.ntsc-tv.com/ | Williamson Labs’ site clearly explaining many of the fundamentals of television. This site is in the USA, and the details apply to the 525 NTSC standard, but the principles are the same world-wide, just with a slight tweak of the numbers here and there. | ||||
| See also the Satellite section above. | |||||
| Television Test Cards | |||||
| http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/ilove/tv/... ...testcards/index.shtml |
The BBC has a large collection of old Presentation symbols, lovingly re-created with Flash by Dave Jeffery, and incorporating both animation and sound! | ||||
| ftp://ftp.bbc.co.uk/pub/video/stills/tcf.gif | A 640 x 480 copy of Test Card F is available from the BBC, albeit only as a 256-colour GIF. | ||||
| http://acat.se/gallery2/v/tv/ | Thomas Bergstam works for the Swedish television organisation SVT, and has a collection of good quality test cards, mostly grabbed off-line with an Avid. | ||||
| http://www.test-cards.fsnet.co.uk/index.html | Keith Hamer’s site with lots of old BBC test cards and other tuning captions etc. Keith also has a DVD for sale with test cards and other archive recordings. | ||||
| http://www.oodletuz.fsnet.co.uk/... ...soft/tcmaker.htm |
Steve Heap has written a Windows’ program that can create test patterns from their building blocks - colour bars, frequency gratings, etc. Lots of sample files are included that closely reproduce common patterns and test cards. | ||||
| http://www.testcardcircle.org.uk/ | Gerard Fletcher’s Test Card Circle is one of the major web sites with a huge collection of test cards and other captions. Inevitably the quality varies, with many being photographed off-screen. But these are for historical curiosity, rather than testing your own television! | ||||
| http://www.meldrum.co.uk/mhp/ | The Test Card Gallery maintained by Darren Meldrum is the other major British web site, also with a vast collection of images. | ||||
| http://625.uk.com/ | Andrew Wiseman’s Television Room has lots of interesting tit-bits about the bits between the programmes on UK television, including Dave Jeffery’s Flash files of UK TV logos and test cards. | ||||
| http://www.noctua.demon.co.uk/video/ | My own pages describing the current BBC test cards J & W, as well as some info on the famous Test Card F. | ||||
| Time | |||||
| http://www.dti.gov.uk/employment/... .../bank-public-holidays/bst/page12528.html .../bank-public-holidays/index.html |
The British Parliament’s Department of Trade and Industry (“DTI”) have some pages with the official line on the start and end dates for British Summer Time, and public holidays in Great Britain. | ||||
| http://www.bipm.org/en/home/ | The task of the BIPM (Bureau International des Poids et Mesures) is to ensure world-wide uniformity of measurements and their traceability to the International System of Units (SI). | ||||
| http://www.analemma.com/ http://www.sundials.co.uk/equation.htm |
The exact length of a solar day varies throughout the year due to both the Earth’s elliptical orbit around the Sun, and the inclination of its polar axis with respect to the plane of our orbit. The time difference from the mean only amounts a few seconds at most, but accumulates to plus and minus about fifteen minutes, and this is known as the Equation of Time. These two sites both have excellent descriptions of the effect, and hence why a sundial can often apparently be “wrong”. The Analemma site also has a huge (2810 x 1526, 700 kilobyte) JPEG image showing timezones overlaid on a World Map. | ||||
| http://greenwich2000.com/ http://greenwichmeantime.com/ |
The Greenwich 2000 web site, for the old Royal Greenwich Observatory from where Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) got its name. | ||||
| http://hpiers.obspm.fr/ | The International Earth Rotation Service web site, with accurate details of current and predicted differences between Universal Time (= GMT, UT1), Atomic Time (TAI), and GPS time. | ||||
| http://www.npl.co.uk/time/ | The (Teddington, Middlesex, UK) National Physical Laboratory’s web site. | ||||
| http://www.ptb.de/index_en.html .../en/org/4/44/441/info2_e.htm |
The German standards laboratory Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt’s web site, with an excellent page about atomic clocks. | ||||
| http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/ | Dr. John Stockton has a personal home site with vast amounts of information on the subject. | ||||
| http://physics.nist.gov/GenInt/Time/time.html | The US National Institute of Standards and Technology web site. | ||||
| http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/ .../leapsec.html .../cgi-bin/daterdnm.sh |
The US Naval Observatory’s web site talking about all matters time, including their description of the how and why of leap-seconds on the second lnk, and a page that gives the current exact MJD (Modified Julian Day number) on the third link. | ||||
| And rather less seriously: http://xone.net/tti/ |
The Time Travel Institute. | ||||
| http://www.mystical-www.co.uk/time/ | The Mystical-WWW web site! Information on all sorts of unexplained phenomena, and also a large section on time and calendars. | ||||
This page last updated 24th April 2008 |
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