Internet Archive creates a National Emergency Library with over 1.4 million books you can borrow immediately
If you’re stuck at home as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Internet Archive has some good news for you. It has taken the step of suspending waitlists for books in its lending library, so you can gain immediate access to them.
There are over 1.4 million titles available to read, with more being added regularly.
Whoa! Brave browser can now show you web pages that no longer exist
When browsing the web, it can be frustrating to encounter a 404 error. You know the page isn’t there, but you don’t always know why. Has it been removed on purpose, by accident, or was it never there in the first place?
Well, Brave -- the browser from Brendan Eich, a former CEO of Mozilla -- is about to make 404 frustration a thing of the past, by giving you the chance to view the actual web page after it’s been removed.
You can now read cited books directly through Wikipedia
Wikipedia is an incredibly useful resource, even if not every entry is as accurate as it could be. If you’re using it for research, it’s best to perhaps view what you read there as a jumping off point.
Today, diving deeper into a subject just got easier, as when you find a citation to a book in a Wikipedia entry, you might now be able to go straight to the page of that actual volume with a single mouse click thanks to the Internet Archive.
Internet Archive makes its content available offline
The Internet Archive is a massive and incredibly useful resource that offers access to millions of books, games, software, audio and video files, and cached versions of websites via the recently updated Wayback Machine.
To use it, you need an internet connection, but that’s changing thanks to the creation of the new Offline Archive project.
Internet Archive's Wayback Machine gains new ways to fight 'digital extinction'
According to the Internet Archive, the average webpage lasts just three months before being altered or deleted. To prevent this data being lost for good, the team’s Wayback Machine saves a copy of web pages across time, allowing visitors to see how a site has looked at various points in its history.
I’ve found the Wayback Machine to be an invaluable tool on numerous occasions, but it’s now getting even better.
Internet Archive lets you play 2,500 more classic DOS games in your browser, including The Secret of Monkey Island and Microsoft Flight Simulator
Five years ago, the Internet Archive added 2,400 playable DOS games to its site, including 90s classics like Duke Nukem 3D, Prince of Persia, Championship Manager, The Incredible Machine, Eye of the Beholder (and its sequels), Hexen, Sim City, and Wolfenstein 3D.
Over the years, a number of additional games have been added to the collection, but the Internet Archive has made what it says is its biggest update yet, introducing another 2,500 MS-DOS titles.
The Geocities Archive Project will make you want to gouge your eyes out [Update]
The internet has changed significantly over the years. These days if you want a public presence on the web you can create pages on various social networks, or build websites and host them on your own domain, or on a service like Weebly or Wix.
In the nineties though, many of the web’s home brew sites were to be found on GeoCities, and they were usually created with enthusiasm, rather than ability or design sense. The service hosted tens of millions of the ugliest pages ever created, often filled with garish colors, flashing images, tiled backgrounds, and guest books.
How to access the new decentralized version of Archive.org
Archive.org is one of my favorite websites. It’s home to millions of free books, magazines, movies, software, music, games and websites, and you can spend hours there, discovering new (well, old), and amazing things.
Archive.org has been around for many years, but there remains the danger that its content could get removed, or the site get taken down as a result of copyright claims, censorship, DDoS attacks, and the like. For that reason, Archive.org has created a decentralized -- or distributed -- version of its site.
How to install Microsoft Windows Essentials tools -- including Movie Maker -- on Windows 10
Windows Essentials (also called Windows Live Essentials) was a suite of desktop applications that included various Microsoft programs, like Messenger, Mail, Movie Maker, Photo Gallery, Writer, and OneDrive.
The last version of the suite was released in 2012, with the final update in 2014, and reached end of support on January 10, 2017. Microsoft removed the pack from its site last year, and while it is officially no longer available for download, you can still get it -- if you know how. And the good news is tools like Movie Maker work fine on Windows 10.
Play your favorite retro handheld games with the Internet Archive emulators
The Internet Archive is a staggering piece of work, saving for posterity books, movies, music, and entire websites. For a number of years, the site has also offered in-browser emulation, giving everyone the chance to get teary-eyed with nostalgia and play a range of console games online.
Now the emulation collection has been expanded to cover a wide range of handheld games including the likes of Mortal Kombat, Double Dragon and Q*Bert. The new Handheld History Collection builds on the work the Internet Archive has already done with the MAME development team.
The Internet Archive now lets you run classic Apple Mac games and programs in your browser
The Internet Archive is a fantastic resource for old software. It’s home to large collections of Windows 3.1 programs, classic DOS games, Amiga games, arcade games, vintage console games, and more.
Now the site is hosting a collection of old Apple Macintosh programs that you can run in your browser.
Read classic computer and video game magazines in your browser
The Internet Archive offers a wealth of fantastic ways to revisit the past, whether you’re trawling through classic animated GIFs from the nineties, running Windows 3.1 programs in your browser, or playing DOS, classic arcade, or vintage console games online.
The latest trip down memory lane comes in the form of classic computer and video gaming magazines, something that really resonates with me as there are titles there that I not only read in my youth, but that I wrote for, or which were put together in the same building I worked in.
The Internet Archive to set up Canadian mirror to stay out of Trump's reach
Many people are concerned about just what Donald Trump might do when he becomes president in 2017, and some of the biggest concerns lie in the fields of technology and the internet. Worried about what the arrival of President Trump could mean, the Internet Archive is collecting donations to fund a Canadian mirror of the site.
The Internet Archive of Canada will lie outside of the jurisdiction of the US government and is being built based on the idea that "lots of copies keep stuff safe". Currently based in San Francisco, a blog post by the Internet Archive makes reference to fears about greater online restrictions that could be put in place by the US.
Relive the 1990s in animated GIFs, at the Internet Archive
The 1990s were great -- multiplayer shooters like Doom and Quake were revolutionizing gaming, Friends and ER were on the TV, and we were all enjoying a new, fledgling technology called the World Wide Web.
Before Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter came along, there was GeoCities, a web hosting service eventually acquired by Yahoo, that allowed users to place their websites in virtual 'cities'. But if there was one thing that most people remember about GeoCities, it was the animated GIFs.
The Internet Archive now lets you run over 1,000 Windows 3.1 programs in your browser
Windows 3.1 was the first version of Windows I ever used. The Internet Archive, which has over the past couple of years made it possible to play classic DOS games and console games in your browser, has just added over 1,000 Windows 3.1 programs to its catalog.
These include games, utilities and business software, and each can be run in your browser just by clicking on them.
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