Bookmarks by theme, 1995–2026

A life online · Alejandro Rivero

What I chose to keep while reading. Browser bookmarks recovered from every machine I could still open, from a Netscape file of January 1995 to the current profiles, merged, dated by their first appearance and sorted into the subjects they belong to. A bookmark is a weaker trace than a paper or a post: it records an intention to come back, and the folder it was filed in records what the intention was about. Read together across years, they show which questions kept returning.

Browse the archive by subject

Where the bookmarks come from

The raw material is 41 bookmark stores: three Netscape bookmark files saved in the document root of my university homepage between 1995 and 1997, Netscape and Mozilla-suite profiles from a 2001 workstation, Firefox profiles from a 2007 Ubuntu laptop and a 2010 netbook, and Chrome and Firefox profiles from every machine since 2012, including the copies kept inside older backups. Together they held more than 8,000 entries; after removing the copies that the same bookmark left in successive profiles, 2,363 distinct addresses remain. The date given to each one is the earliest timestamp any profile recorded for it, so it is a latest-possible date of discovery. A batch of about 120 bookmarks first seen in October 2012 is a profile import, and many of those links are from 2009 to 2011. The three 1990s files carry Netscape's own ADD_DATE stamps, from 12 January 1995 to November 1997.

Browser defaults and the Netscape 4 personal toolbar account for 153 entries and are set aside. The remaining 2,210 were classified into some seventy themes by folder name, domain and title, with a manual pass over everything. Themes about personal life, shopping, bookings, household paperwork, contacts and internal dashboards at work stay in the private notes; the page below covers the rest. About a quarter of all the addresses had stopped answering when the 2001–2026 set was checked in March 2026, and for links first saved between 2012 and 2016 the share is closer to a third; of the 1995–1997 addresses almost none answer today. Links here were re-checked when the page was written; where the original had gone, the nearest surviving page or a Wayback Machine capture is given instead.

Classified bookmarks by area and period of first appearance
Area1995–972001–102011–142015–172018–202021–232024–26Total
Physics and mathematics4907010717527275
Data, networks and text601801881666334592
Systems and devices47574785493270
Machines, sensors and learning to build0011114102142243
History, language and society19008310424258435
Reading, playing, travelling and daily life65146136100398395
All classified4117364727463155822,210

The shape of the table is itself a record. The 1990s column is a single Netscape profile, saved three times in 1995, 1996 and 1997; then nothing survives until 2001, because the machines of the Telefónica, Carlos III and Teruel years were wiped. Bookmarking peaked in 2017, with 351 new entries in a single year, and fell steadily afterwards as reading moved to feeds, search and, since 2023, conversations with language models. The physics column revives in 2024 because a research question needed a reading list again.

1995–1997: the Netscape bookmarks of the university homepage

Three files named bookm1.html, bookm2.htm and bookm3.html sat in the document root of dftuz.unizar.es/~rivero/, saved from Netscape in 1995, 1996 and 1997 and recovered in September 2026 with the rest of that tree. They are the only bookmarks that survive from before 2001, and they run alongside the wwwlab experiments and the Flexion archive of the same years.

The Web as a subject

1995 to 1997 · 60 bookmarks

The first folder, June 1995, is a survey of what it cost to put pages on the web: hosting prices at XS4ALL, Cistron and NetLand in the Netherlands, Hiway and onLine in Britain, UniNet in Italy, the WELL, and Netscape's guide to creating net sites. December 1996 is the reading around the backlinking paper: Tim Berners-Lee's design note on topology, the W3C note on describing and linking resources, the Dublin Core, the Distributed Indexing workshop report, RDM, transparent content negotiation, the WebDAV working group and a WWW5 paper on a distributed hyperlink database. February 1997 adds a folder called ISoc et related: the IETF, the Internet Society, the EFF, the Tao of the IETF and the POISED list; the January 1997 message to the HTTP working group was written in those weeks. The Internet Archive appears in January 1997, a few months after it started.

Related reading: the history of the Web at the W3C and the first website, restored at CERN; the Internet Society’s Brief History of the Internet; the Tao of the IETF as it was then, RFC 1718, and as it is now; the Netizens netbook, still at Columbia; and the documentation of CERN httpd, the server the backlink scripts were written for.

Anarchism and the left, online

1995 to 1997 · 40 bookmarks

The folder politica is the reading list behind Flexion: the IWW, Love and Rage, Infoshop, the Chomsky archives, the Research on Anarchism archive at nothingness.org, Social Anarchism Online, the Anarchist FAQ on GeoCities, Biblioteca Arús, La Baronata, the Siberian Confederation of Labor, and the Zapatista pages that also fed the 1995 consulta ballot. Marx's Civil War in France arrives by gopher. In 1996 the Mondragón cooperative appears, and in February 1997 the FEEL forum of Zaragoza, which the mail of those years shows me posting to.

Related here: the electronic edition of La conquista del pan and the participation theme fifteen years later.

Related reading: the Anarchy Archives at Pitzer and the Spunk Library, two archives of the 1990s that are still online; The Anarchist Library and An Anarchist FAQ, where that material went on; the RA Forum, successor of the Research on Anarchism list; Marx’s Civil War in France at the Marxists Internet Archive; and Mondragón as the cooperative presents itself today.

Hardware, from a VGA-to-TV cable to the ATA-2 specification

1995 to 1997 · 47 bookmarks

Pen computing and the Newton in January 1995; the MBone, CU-SeeMe and a VIC-20 page in 1996; OCR software in September 1996. Then two dense weeks: converting VGA to television (SCART, the sci.electronics.repair FAQ) in December 1996, and in January 1997 the internals of a PC: the Enhanced IDE FAQ, Intel's PIIX chipset datasheets, the ATA-2 specification, Tom's Hardware, pinout collections, a databook shelf. Perl and the GNU C++ library close 1997. The same curiosity about what is inside a machine returns in the sensors and devices themes of the 2010s.

Related reading: the VGA-to-television converter came from Tomi Engdahl’s pages at the Helsinki University of Technology, and his ePanorama has kept growing from them ever since; pinout collections live on at pinouts.ru and the Hardware Book; Tom’s Hardware is still publishing.

Alexandria, Euclid and the desert fathers

May and June 1997 · 45 bookmarks

A folder named pilar e historia starts it in 1996 with Herodotus and the Seven Wonders; in May and June 1997 the reading widens without a folder: Alexandrian scholarship at Perseus, the legend of Alexandria, Euclid's Elements in Greek and in Joyce's Java edition, Ptolemy's Geography, the Perseus Atlas, the history of mathematics at Brown, the Catalan Atlas at the BnF, Oddens's cartographic bookmarks; then John Cassian, the Pachomius library, Augustine, Byzantine and medieval links, the Avesta, Indology and the Buddhist canon, Gibbon, the Gnosis pages and Asklepios at Epidauros. This is the material of the essays on Alexandria and the routes of lost texts (May 1997) and Democritus, and of the later conjecture on Ptolemy's coordinates.

Related reading: Perseus is still where the Alexandrians are read, and ToposText puts the ancient texts on a map; David Joyce’s Euclid moved from Java to JavaScript and his site is on the reading trail; Ptolemy’s Geography is at LacusCurtius and the Catalan Atlas on Gallica; MacTutor for the history of mathematics; the Avesta, SuttaCentral for the Buddhist canon, and the Christian Classics Ethereal Library for Cassian, Augustine and Gibbon.

Photosynthesis, cyanobacteria and the origin of life

July and August 1997 · 33 bookmarks in a folder named fotosintesis

The most focused folder of the decade. Light-scattering codes, the optical properties of cirrus, the colours of seaweeds, the Photosynthesis Center at Arizona State, CyanoNews and the cyanobacteriologists' directory, biochemistry courses on glycolysis and carbohydrates, the Glycoscience network, an interview with Stanley Miller on exobiology, the origins-of-life pages at Santa Cruz and Scripps, and an AltaVista query for “origin of life Szostak Miller”. It is the research behind the 1997 question on photosynthesis and polarised light that became the ice and chirality conjecture, and the reason the earth and climate reading of the 2010s keeps returning to ice.

Related here: Ice, polarised light and molecular handedness (2004).

Related reading: the Photosynthesis Center became Arizona State’s Center for Bioenergy and Photosynthesis; Cyanosite at Purdue keeps the cyanobacteria pages; the origins-of-life reading continues at NASA Astrobiology.

Science fiction and Mars

1997 · 18 bookmarks

A folder called SF, Espacio, Teoría de la Ciencia: David Brin, Greg Bear, Asimov's Foundation, alternate-history travel guides, Gibbon, the Federation of American Scientists, and the Mars Pathfinder news pages in the week of the landing, July 1997. The brin-l list of the same years appears in the mail archive.

Related here: the Science Fiction inventory and the Worldbuilding inventory.

Related reading: David Brin still keeps his own site; Pathfinder has its mission page at NASA Science; the Federation of American Scientists is still publishing.

Physics, briefly

1996 and 1997 · 16 bookmarks

Only a handful: SPIRES at SLAC, the department's bulletin board, CERN preprints, the APS e-print server, Baez's This Week's Finds in August 1996, his papers in March 1997, Sprott's Wonders of Physics, the Metaphysical Review, TIPTOP's physics jobs, a Mexican school on gravitation. Physics lived in the department's server and in the mail, not in the browser; the bookmarks belong to everything else.

Related reading: This Week’s Finds is complete on Baez’s site and The Wonders of Physics is still running; both authors are on the reading trail, as is Cosma Shalizi, whose notebooks were bookmarked in May 1997 while they still lived at Wisconsin. SPIRES became INSPIRE, and the e-prints are all at arXiv now.

Autumn 1997: cinema, Lisbon and a change of job

April to November 1997 · about 110 bookmarks

The undated remainder of 1997 tells its own story. Portuguese cinema listings and a Lisbon cultural agenda in April; the IBM–Kasparov match in May; the Fura dels Baus and Spanish film magazines through the year. From August to October, a long run of recruiters and careers pages in quantitative finance and IT, in London, Paris and New York, together with RiskMetrics, GARP and NumeriX, and, in September and October, rental listings in Madrid. The mail of those months records the same search and its outcome: by November 1997 I was working at Telefónica I+D in Madrid, and the Netscape profile there is where the next bookmarks would have been, had it survived.

Related reading: IBM’s own history of Deep Blue, and La Fura dels Baus, still touring.

Physics and mathematics

These themes run alongside the publications, the physical conjectures and the public discussions. The bookmarks show the reading behind them.

Hadronic supersymmetry and the superbootstrap

2013 to 2026 · 56 bookmarks, most of them in 2014 and 2017

The largest physics thread, and the one that turned into papers. It starts in January 2013 with the bosonic ancestor of open and closed fermionic strings, gathers momentum in September 2014 around composite models of quarks and leptons, and returns in force in June and July 2017 with a folder called leer, to read: Regge trajectories, diquarks, the old dual models with isospin, quarks at the ends of strings, supersymmetric quantum mechanics with singular potentials, and the superconformal meson–baryon symmetry of light-front holography. The 2017 reading also took in the non-supersymmetric heterotic strings and the E8 × SO(16) structure of eleven-dimensional supergravity. The last entries are from September 2024, group theory from quarks at the ends of strings, and March 2026, back to the 112 breakings of E8.

Related here: the particle-physics theme of the publications; the conjecture could familiar composite particles be the missing superpartners?; the string discussions; the Stack Exchange question on supersymmetry and dimensions.

Koide's formula and mass relations

2015 to 2024 · a small thread with a long reach

Few bookmarks, because most of this work happened in forums and on Wikipedia rather than in reading. A March 2015 entry keeps my own tweet with the basic mass of the last Koide triplet; February 2019 adds a geometrical interpretation of the quark and lepton mass matrices and a paper linking conformal symmetry to the Fermi and Planck scales; March 2024 is the Wikipedia edit page for the formula, and November 2024 the note on my blog announcing the published article that joins the superbootstrap with Koide's relation. The Physics Forums thread What is new with Koide sum rules was bookmarked at its tenth page in January 2026.

Related here: the Koide discussion on Usenet; the conjecture mass relations: from a numerical puzzle to a proposed mechanism; the Wikipedia entries in the chronology.

Exceptional groups, triality and octonions

2012 to 2024 · 25 bookmarks, concentrated in August 2014, October 2014 and July 2017

The representation-theory toolbox for the thread above. August 2014 opens a folder named M y compactificación with the triality of Spin(8), Dynkin diagrams, Coxeter elements and the projective planes over the division algebras. October 2014 collects the software: LieART, the Weyl character rings of Sage, Slansky's tables. July 2017 adds the Atlas of Lie Groups, Susyno, the branching rules of E8 through SO(16) and the decomposition of E8 tensor products. In 2021 the Perimeter Institute course on octonions and the Standard Model, and in 2024 a question on the existence of the exceptional groups.

Related here: the earliest bookmark in the group, from 2012, is Tony Smith's page on E6, strings and branes; his site appears in the reading trail of other personal pages. The preprints include the spectral-triple notes that first needed this material.

Compactification, M-theory and strings without supersymmetry

2012 to 2018 · 26 bookmarks

A D-brane primer and David Tong's string notes in the 2012 import; then, in August 2014, M-theory on manifolds of G2 holonomy and the flux-compactification reviews, filed next to a Physics Forums thread about whether eleven dimensions can make almost predictive statements. September 2017 is the densest month: the O(16) × O(16) heterotic string, the dualities of type 0 strings, a Durham thesis on non-supersymmetric string theories, Sagnotti's lectures and the heterotic strings in fewer than ten uncompactified dimensions. The last entry, in November 2018, counts Standard Model fermions against N = 8 supergravity.

Related here: the 2001 string-theory exchanges and the later string discussions.

Quantum gravity, minimal length and noncommutative geometry

2012 to 2024 · 21 bookmarks, sixteen of them in September 2024

The noncommutative-geometry strand is old here: the participant list of the 2006 Newton Institute programme survives in the 2012 import, the NCG blog and the Dutch NCG site were saved in 2014 and 2015, and a 2019 entry keeps a set of notes on supersymmetry in noncommutative geometry. Seiberg's Emergent spacetime was bookmarked in September 2019. Then, in September 2024, a folder named gravity appeared in a few days: the Living Reviews article on minimal length scales, eight arXiv papers on the same question, and the pages of the journals that publish such work. It was the reading list for a question and a draft.

Related here: the 2024 Planck-area question, the spectral-triple preprints and the noncommutative-geometry reading discussion.

Nuclear data and fission

September 2015, with two later additions · 15 bookmarks

A single month's folder, fisión: the JEFF evaluated nuclear data report, the IAEA nuclear data for safeguards, the JANIS browser, the GEF fission model from Bordeaux, a Tokyo lecture on nuclear physics and Preskill's course chapters. Two IAEA INIS documents followed in 2017. The point was to test a numerical observation about nuclear patterns against the tables.

Related here: the conjecture do nuclear patterns know about heavy particles?

Lecture notes and the history of the subject

2012 to 2023 · 13 bookmarks

Tong's Cambridge notes on string theory and on quantum field theory, Susskind's Theoretical Minimum, Kleinert's chapters on path integrals and the Scholarpedia article on their mathematical side. Beside them, the historians' material: Sommerfeld's letters in the Pauli correspondence, the AIP exhibit on Heisenberg's doctorate, Einstein's Zurich notebook, Newton's De motu and the annotated Principia in Cambridge. The last entry is Kenneth Wilson's Nobel lecture, saved in August 2023.

Related here: history, culture and society, especially the entries on Democritus and the origins of calculus.

Blogs, forums and This Week's Finds

2012 to 2026 · 34 bookmarks

In June 2013 a folder called baez gathered eight issues of John Baez's This Week's Finds: weeks 59, 61, 90, 91, 104, 105, 106 and 253, the last one reached through the n-Category Café. Week 64 followed in 2014, filed with the compactification reading. The rest of the group is the physics web I kept returning to: Jacques Distler's Musings (a 2012 comment on shrinking SU(2)), the Reference Frame, Dispatches from Turtle Island, the n-Category Café's M5-brane model, Scott Aaronson, the CERN morning meetings and the LHC announcer, the 2013 workshop Why mH = 126 GeV?, and the particle-physics rumour mill in 2024.

Related here: the same people and places appear in the public discussions and in the reading trail of other personal pages.

Mathematics on its own

2012 to 2020 · 12 bookmarks

A folder named primos from the 2012 import: the prime-counting function, prime gaps, Artin's conjecture on primitive roots and the AKS primality test, together with the Inverse Symbolic Calculator for recognising numbers. Later, the Perron–Frobenius theorem (2016), the Cayley projective plane (2017), extremal graph theory (2017) and, in December 2020, Alcuin's Propositiones ad acuendos juvenes, the Carolingian puzzle collection.

Related here: my MathOverflow questions and the conjectures on reading ancient mathematics through modern calculus.

Data, networks and text

The working half of the collection. It follows the move from grid computing and citizen science at BIFI to social-network data, collective-intelligence platforms and language models at Kampal, and it maps onto the network, collective-intelligence and scientometric themes of the publications.

Social-network data and its APIs

2001 to 2026 · 56 bookmarks

The oldest surviving bookmark of my own is the Yahoo Groups list of August 2001. From 2012 the folder basicFacebook keeps the FQL and REST references of the time (friend, mutual friends, page fans, likes) and Facebook's Python SDK; Topsy and Google Correlate are saved in the same months. 2013 adds twtrland's map of who talks to whom in Zaragoza; 2016 the Instagram location pages of the city, Telegram and WhatsApp bot frameworks and the Twitter keyword analytics of Followthehashtag; 2017 the developer-forum threads about what automation Twitter still allowed. Botometer arrives in 2020 and a map of Mastodon instances in November 2022, the month of the migration.

Related here: the papers on online social networks; the recovered Facebook event graphs and Twitter stickers.

Network science tooling

2012 to 2025 · 21 bookmarks

NetworkX, graph-tool and CFinder in the 2012 import; igraph from 2013, including a 2016 commit and the 2017 pull request that added fluid communities. May 2017 is a folder on community detection: degree-corrected block models, robust detection, the KONECT collection, graph-tool's inference tutorial. Then the Laboratory for Web Algorithmics (2018), Snap.py (2020) and, in 2025, a simulation of the Deffuant consensus model on a Barabási–Albert network.

Related here: collective intelligence and opinion dynamics.

The data stack, from Hadoop to Celery

2012 to 2023 · 65 bookmarks

HDFS architecture, Cassandra and the sort benchmark in 2012; a Spark and Scala winter in 2014–15, with a folder json scala full of JSON parsing questions; Cython, OpenMP, OpenACC and AVX at the end of 2016; Apache Beam and a folder on parallelising tasks with Celery and multiprocessing in late 2018; GraphX in 2019, Dask in 2021, Gremlin in 2023. Each cluster is a project's infrastructure question, solved and left behind.

Text: from word2vec to language models

2016 to 2026 · 60 bookmarks

Word2vec tutorials in July 2016. In January 2020 a folder named ideas keywords collected the Universal Sentence Encoder, its multilingual version, FAISS similarity search, keyword extraction and Chrome's reader mode as a text extractor; spaCy and textacy follow in 2020 and 2021. The Hugging Face hub appears in October 2021. In April 2024 a folder called llm gathered llama.cpp, Ollama, function calling (Functionary, the local-llm-function-calling package, the LangChain and Ollama threads) and Dify, alongside TRL and the implementation details of RLHF. December 2024 adds RAFT and a survey of knowledge editing; 2025 a critique of MCP, the Agents4Science venue and NeurIPS; 2026 a guide to which model to use, a comparison of open models, and Claude itself.

Related here: the repositories menard, selfupdate, agentbook and panelCopilot; the questions on attention and layers; the Hugging Face profile.

Neural networks, in three waves

2015 to 2024 · 44 bookmarks

December 2015, a folder named neuron: LSTM tutorials, backpropagation through time, learning to execute, character-level convolution, Torch benchmarks; March 2016 adds DeepWalk and Swivel. Early 2018, the second wave: the information-bottleneck story in Wired, the Quanta article on deep learning and renormalisation, permutation-invariant networks, Sinkhorn optimal transport, momentum and adaptive learning rates, reinforcement learning on CartPole. 2022 to 2024, the third: deep Q-networks in PyTorch, seq2seq and attention, Keras masking and padding, the VGG paper, and policy optimisation.

Repositories, identifiers and rankings

2012 to 2024 · 61 bookmarks, fifty of them in 2017

Sideral, the university's research catalogue, is in the 2012 import; Teseo, TDX and the Dialnet OAI-PMH instructions arrive in February 2016. March 2017 is a folder named catálogos y repositorios: OpenAIRE and its CRIS guidelines, Crossref's funder metadata and DOI content negotiation, DataCite, CORE, BASE, OpenDOAR, re3data, Recolecta, Digital.CSIC, REBIUN, Scopus, Microsoft Academic, AMiner, DBpedia, the Webometrics ranking of repositories. September 2017 adds the Shanghai subject rankings and the ministry's university statistics, and July 2017 three arXiv papers on mining GitHub and a PLOS ONE paper on the popularity law shared by science and Facebook. Later: Handle, Wikidata's item for the university (2018), Dimensions (2019), a paper on identifying academic rising stars (2020), NASA ADS and VOSviewer (2024).

Related here: the scientometrics theme of the publications, the CERIF-XML service and the CV.

Collective intelligence platforms

2014 to 2025 · 29 bookmarks

The Kampal Research code repository in 2014, Kampal Social and the Comtrade visualisation in 2015 and 2016, Thinkhub from 2019, and the 2025 manual of collective learning. Between them, a 2017 post on online tools for collective decision-making, the 2018 final-year project that built an API of open social data for Aragón, and the monitoring dashboards of the servers that ran it all. Most of these addresses are internal; the public ones are below.

Related here: the collective-intelligence papers; the recovered collective-intelligence interfaces and the Ibercivis launch page.

Open data, statistics and the 2020 epidemic

2013 to 2021 · 32 bookmarks

The national statistics institute and the LiDAR flight of Spain in 2013, the world top incomes database in 2015 and its successor WID.world in 2016 and 2017, UN Comtrade, GDELT, the Wikipedia clickstream dataset (2018), the public-procurement platform, the electoral results service, the atlas of income by district (2019), mortality by any cause during the epidemic (2020) and Gapminder's worldview upgrader (2021). The spring of 2020 has its own cluster: an SEIR model against healthcare capacity, Nicky Case's playable simulations, provincial case data, the genomic epidemiology viewer Microreact, and a paper on how generation intervals relate growth rates to reproduction numbers.

Related here: the recovered seasonal search maps and the early Physics of Ownership.

Search engines and the size of the web

2013 to 2020 · 33 bookmarks

BuiltWith and W3Techs in 2013, when a transcript-search site needed to know what the web was made of; Baidu's crawl-pressure page for that same site. In 2018 and 2019 the question became how to run one's own search: public searx instances, Common Search's attempt at an open PageRank, the Open PageRank of the top ten million domains from Common Crawl, Startpage, SerpApi, the Bing API pricing, the top websites in Spain, and a fork of pytrends published on GitHub Pages in 2019.

Related here: Transcript Search, the crawler question and the 1990s backlink experiments.

Grid, cloud and citizen science

2012 to 2020 · 14 bookmarks

BOINC project options and the Ibercivis server monitor, the GStat view of the grid, the national grid resources wiki and RedIRIS traffic graphs, all from the 2012 import; the OpenStack dashboard at BIFI in 2013; the SCI-BUS gateway publications in 2014; the CESAR cloud at the university from 2016 to 2020; the EGI applications database in 2019.

Related here: the recovered Ibercivis launch page and the projects in the CV.

Everyday tooling

2012 to 2025 · 117 bookmarks on web development and Python

The least thematic and most revealing group. Rails and Vue questions cluster in 2019 to 2021, when Thinkhub was being built; PostgreSQL arrays and pivot tables, peewee and Django migrations, Celery again. On the Python side, gnuplot demos in 2012, TiddlyWiki as a personal notebook in 2013, Jupyter viewers, pandoc, ctypes and mixed Python–C++ debugging, Dask, Scikit-HEP in 2021, and the standard-library documentation for regular expressions as late as 2023.

Related here: the Python course for physicists, the notebooks and the calculators.

Machines, sensors and learning to build

A quarter of the classified bookmarks are about making physical things move or sense. They continue the open-hardware strand: the webcam mouse, the bicycle on rails, the electronic-paper readers.

Lego mechanisms and Mindstorms

2012 to 2025 · 92 bookmarks, seventy of them in March and April 2017

March 2017 is the month of linkages: the Tinkering Studio's Lego linkage experiments, four-bar, Chebyshev, Klann and Hoeken mechanisms, a jig for drawing ellipses, hypotrochoids, SolveSpace as a linkage solver. Around them, the mechanical literature of the Lego world: Sariel's worm-gear casings, Isogawa Yoshihito's creation book, TechnicBRICKs on the Torsen differential, Philo's measurements of motors and the internals of the NXT motor, JK Brickworks' drawing machine, the LEGO Education machines-and-mechanisms instructions, ev3dev. September 2018 adds a chain precession drive and a marble counter; January 2019 a pinwheel escapement built in Lego and brickr, which turns 3D models into brick instructions; 2022 the Mindstorms hub API and Pybricks; 2024 a fischertechnik optics kit.

Related here: Ciclorail, the note on Leonardo's supposed bicycle, and the wish-list entries for Florence and Paris, museums of instruments and ingenious machines.

Sensors, switchable hubs and home automation

2013 to 2021 · 84 bookmarks, sixty in August and September 2020

A DIY cellphone from the MIT Media Lab in 2013; the nine-dollar CHIP computer, the Raspberry Pi Zero and its display in December 2015; a January 2016 folder on hacking a Roomba through its serial port. The big cluster is a folder called usb hub from the summer of 2020: how to switch USB ports off programmatically (uhubctl, YKUSH, a hub modified for per-port power), AC power control through a hub, then a drift towards vibration sensors (the SW-420, the MPU-6050 and its motion processor without an interrupt pin, the Aqara Zigbee sensor read through zigbee2mqtt), NodeMCU and ESP32 boards, Tasmota, Sonoff and Shelly switches, the Arduino Nano 33 IoT, and speech synthesis from a web page. A small solar panel in 2021 closes it.

Related here: the webcam mouse, the iLiad USB hacking and the essay on free hardware.

Small drones, one summer

June and July 2018 · 20 bookmarks

The Ryze Tello programmed from Scratch, the Eachine E011 and its open Silverware firmware, the BoldClash whoop, the RT-Thread operating system behind a Chinese Wi-Fi shield, a drone-hacking reading list and a note on logging into an Eachine E50S. The same summer produced a repository for controlling a JJRC toy drone from a PC.

Related here: JJRC-Blue-Crab-Remote-Control.

Learning to code, and to count

2014 to 2018 · 27 bookmarks

A folder called codinggames, October and November 2017: CodeCombat, CodinGame, Codewars, HackerRank's checkers leaderboard, Bebras, Programamos and its Scratch tutorials, code.org, and the tools that port Scratch projects to the open web. Educational robotics in early 2018 (Makeblock, Estalmat, the mathematics-talent programme), Cuisenaire-rod worksheets in August 2018, GeoGebra and Twine along the way.

Related here: the calculators for children, the questions on sets and addition and the Mathematics Educators inventory.

Experiments at home

2013 to 2024 · 24 bookmarks

A Geiger counter board for Arduino (2014), a chemical garden and the nutmeg chemistry of Erowid's archive (2014), an ionocraft (2015), a turn-key cloud chamber (2017), the chemical chameleon demonstration (2018), Fusor.net and the Spanish amateur-scientists forum with its scanned TBO comics (2019), a printable planisphere, a double-pendulum simulator, the Roche biochemical pathways map, bean-to-bar chocolate (2021) and a fischertechnik optics kit (2024).

Systems and devices

Owning a device means being able to look inside it. This group is the practical side of the free-hardware essay.

Linux, small machines and other people's operating systems

2007 to 2023 · 85 bookmarks

The oldest are the Ubuntu links of a 2007 laptop and, undated, the manual of the Links browser in English and Czech. openSUSE is the constant from 2012 to 2017, with its default folders reappearing in every profile. In April and May 2013 a folder named interesantes tracks the effort to put Arch Linux, Debian or Fedora on the cheap WM8650 ARM netbooks of the time; the Zipit Z2 messenger had received the same treatment in 2012. Later come RAID rebuilds, rsnapshot, mosh, and a long tail of one-off fixes. The Apple side runs from a 68k Macintosh emulator and a hackintosh in a virtual machine (2016) to Catalina on unsupported hardware (2020).

Related here: the Librie and iLiad work and the Ask Ubuntu inventory.

Phones, televisions, routers and how they are locked

2011 to 2025 · 103 bookmarks

Rooting a Galaxy Note in 2013 and repairing it in 2014; a Nokia 770 and Bluetooth keyboards on Maemo; a smartphone as a dial-up modem, in 2017, for a place with no other line. The summer of 2016 belongs to Pokémon Go: a map server on my own domain, then the question of how the game pinned its certificates, which led through Frida, Substrate, radare and the pgoapi project; Frida returns in 2019. Samsung and LG televisions were opened up the same autumn with SamyGO and OpenLGTV. On the network side: a BT Openreach modem in 2013, dynamic DNS on Route 53 in 2017, the admin password of a Vodafone router and an IPv6 tunnel broker in 2018, VPN routing in 2020. The security reading is of the same kind, from a 2012 Linux rootkit analysis and Shodan in 2014 to zip bombs as a defence in 2025.

Related here: the Security inventory and the iLiad firmware discussion.

History, language and society

The reading behind history, culture and society and the hidden histories.

Archives, newspapers and the documents themselves

2012 to 2025 · 56 bookmarks, in two waves

April 2013, a folder named tesoros: the Aragón archives portal DARA and the Virtual Library of Bibliographic Heritage searched for treasure, next to the 1848 penal code; the Old Bailey proceedings of 1695 and 1876 and the Anglo-American legal tradition site had been saved the previous autumn, with the Newton Project's diplomatic edition of De motu. The second wave is August to October 2022: the Zaragoza newspaper library (issues of 1869, 1890 and 1910), the national newspaper library, the Gazeta of 1839 and the BOE of November 1938, the search engine of the Civil War repressed, the history of Torrero cemetery, the university's historical archive, a family name in the Prensa Histórica catalogue. In between: Migne's Patrologia Latina (2015), a photograph of the Moncloa palace in the Royal Library (2015), the Census-Guide of Spanish archives (2017), the Oracc cuneiform projects (2018), digitised Swiss journals, the CNIG photo library.

Related here: the conjecture on the Moncloa contamination hypothesis, Alexandria and the routes of lost texts, and the Alexandria entry in the travel wish list.

Languages, scripts and antiquity

2013 to 2025 · 27 bookmarks

Ladino through the Jerusalem magazine Aki Yerushalayim and an Aljamiado library in 2013; Arabic self-study pages in January 2015; the Etruscan word for water on the WordReference forums, saved twice, in 2014 and 2017; Philogelos, the ancient joke book, in 2016; the months of the Voynich manuscript in 2019; the genetic map of Europe; the arabisms in Spanish playground rhymes, from Federico Corriente's academy speech (2024); and in 2025 the Upper Palaeolithic proto-writing paper, the Old European Culture blog, Yomi, and the ScanPyramids report. Beside them, the places: Pluto's gate at Pamukkale, Naqsh-e Rostam, the underground cities of Cappadocia.

Related here: the conjectures on myths and the transmission of knowledge, the Pirahã folklore and bedtime prayers entries, and the Judaism inventory.

Participation, 15M and the tools for deciding together

2012 to 2022 · 61 bookmarks

The first anniversary of 15M in May 2012, the trend graphs of its hashtags and the guide for the indignant; the Partido de Internet's Ágora on Rails. In 2013, Agora Voting, David Ruescas on liquid democracy, Metagovernment's list of active projects, a sociological analysis of a unitary citizen candidacy, and the Medialab-Prado pads. ListAbierta in 2014; the collaborative programme of Ahora Madrid in 2015 and, in June 2015, a hand-collected set of thirty tweets from a single controversy about a new councillor, kept as raw material for a conversation graph. In 2016 apps4citizens and a study of participation through Twitter; in 2017 a post on online tools for collective decisions and the account of the cyberattacks during the Catalan referendum. The tail runs into 2022.

Related here: Prehistoria del 15M, the papers on collective action online and the political conjectures.

Economics, inequality and money

2013 to 2021 · 16 bookmarks

The bitcoin block explorer and the network graphs of 2013, the mining claims of the American West, the world top incomes database (2015), Nada es Gratis on complexity and financial regulation (2016), Bronte Capital and Mish's global trend analysis, graphs of the Spanish property sector, the Ethereum Foundation (2017), the IPO calendar (2021).

Related here: Physics of Ownership and the conjecture on construction and corruption.

Minds, measurement and the planet

2012 to 2024 · 24 bookmarks

Two small groups. On minds: the Small World of Words association study (2012), the Global Consciousness Project (2013), online IQ tests and the Psychometrics Centre's profiling demonstration in 2016 and 2017, the article on how a campaign might know a voter better than the voter does, the Open-Source Psychometrics Project (2019), LessWrong and Kialo. On the planet: the thirty years of the iron hypothesis of ice ages, how maximum rates of climate change are underestimated in the geological record, Skeptical Science, the crystals that record Earth's first magnetic field, the rocks of Mars, the Quaternary glaciation, and wind maps at 300 hPa.

Related here: the conjecture on atmospheric light, ice and chirality and the Space and Astronomy inventories.

Reading, playing and travelling

The remaining third of the collection is daily life, and most of it stays private. What can be said in public is short. The webcomics were Gunnerkrigg Court, Schlock Mercenary, Girl Genius and Vexxarr; the manga Dimension W; the series Doctor Who in its 2015 season and Girls und Panzer in 2022, with a Finnish news item about its pilgrims. The games were Minecraft on a home server in 2015, Pokémon Go and Overwatch in 2016, 0 A.D., the graphic adventures from Monkey Island to Thimbleweed Park, and chess watched rather than played: AlphaZero against Stockfish in December 2017, lichess and the live ratings in 2019. A recovered copy of Maxis's SimRefinery was bookmarked in 2020.

The travel bookmarks document a stay in Dubai in early 2015, with the ferries to Iran studied and never taken; a week of Ordesa and Monte Perdido in August 2019; London and Oxford in October 2019, punting included. The recurring daydreams are older: round-the-world tickets (2013), freighter travel (2012 and 2019), the underground cities of Cappadocia and Edinburgh (2014), the water towns of China and Zhangjiajie (2019), Tokyo (2021). Several of these feed the travel wish list, and the documented stays belong with the places I have been.

Notes on method and limits

Classification was done by rules on folder names, domains and titles, then corrected by hand; the private working files keep the full table with one theme per bookmark. Themes overlap: a paper on E8 branching rules sits with the superbootstrap reading because that is the folder it was saved in, and the same paper appears under exceptional groups when it was saved again years later. Counts are of distinct addresses; a page bookmarked twice from different profiles counts once, at its earliest date.

Two known gaps. Bookmarks from 1998 to 2010 barely survive, because the browsers of those years lived on machines that were wiped: the Telefónica workstation, the Carlos III and Teruel computers, two laptops. The chronology in Messages covers that period from other sources. And bookmarking itself thinned out after 2020, so the absence of a theme in recent years says little about whether the interest is alive: the 2024 gravity folder shows how quickly a reading list can reappear.

This page was built on from an export made on 4 March 2026, extended the same day with the three 1995–1997 files. New bookmarks will be folded in at the next export.