You may not know this, but the internet has advanced a lot from the days when I first stumbled onto it. Back then, the novelty factor was big websites –and websites with a coffee cam (or any kind of cam) were big crowd pullers.
The humble origins of the first coffee cam came from being set up by lazy staff at some building or other, to avoid trekking downstairs only to discover that the coffee pot was empty. It made a certain sense to point a cam at the coffee pot and have the live feed visible on their computers upstairs, so they’d never have to walk down flights of stairs in search of coffee that wasn’t there.
So let’s look at the modern ‘coffee-cams’ — the strange, interesting and oddball things set up by people and connected to the net for you to mess with or stare at.
To start with, from the glory days beginning in 1994, try possibly the original Coffee Cam.
Then for a pretender to the throne, try CoffeeCam2. Or if you’re a coffee snob, Cappucino.
When you think of the internet, what springs to mind? Men wearing dresses? Scenic mist-covered mountains? Monsters in lakes? If I’ve guessed right on at least a couple of those options, then take a look at a page that’s filled with links allowing you to see choose your favourite Scottish Webcams.
Or if you prefer a far more hands-on approach, consider the case of a man who’s wired up his office, so that you can turn his lights on and off, upload and play music while he’s trying to work, turn his houselights on and off, and even drive a little radio controlled car around. Go mess with someone’s mind at Drive Me Insane.
And if you’ve always had a secret urge to graffiti a train, but couldn’t run fast enough to keep up, then how about doing it online, from the comfort of your PC? You can choose to graffiti a series of trains online (in the Online Vandalism section) or download the necessary bits and practice in private at The Vandal Squad.
When art and earthquake monitoring collide: There’s an online java applet connected to a seismic monitor, which itself is monitoring the Hayward Fault (in California) – so you can snoop in real-time on the movements of this section of the Earth’s crust. The whole concept is also an “art installation”. Goes to show that art doesn’t always have to suck. Take a look at Mori – An Internet Based Earthwork.
For something admittedly boring, (and purely text based at the moment) go see the info on how long it’s been since anyone used the washing machines at Random Hall Laundry.
Slightly less boring but much weirder, stare at the diagram and read the statistics on how long its been since someone went into one of the many toilets at Random Hall Bathroom Server.
Feel the need to express yourself? Why not type a whole bunch of ranting deep thoughts and then have a machine speak the text, much to the fear, horror and amusement of people sitting in an office in San Francisco. Don’t forget to read the logs and browse through the sometimes X-rated things people have got the machine to say at The Automatic Talking Machine.
Or perhaps you’d like to control a tele-operated robot dog — no I’m not kidding, take a look at Max The Tele-Robot Dog.
There again, maybe just turning lights on and off alongside an escalator in Japan is more your thing. Try Light On the Net, but this site seems to be up and down irregularly, so be advised.
Coming up soon is this fairly useful page which will allow you to access a space telescope (or at least choose exactly what you’d like the telescope to image). So space fans, take a look and then store the URL for when the project becomes operational at Online Telescope.
One forgets that a large quantity of webpages and information aren’t easily available if you only read and speak English. A large portion of global net users hail from non-English speaking countries, and few search engines will go browsing Cyrillic or Cantonese pages for what you’re after.
One of the major “killer applications” online has to be the page run by Altavista, which allows you to cut and paste a web address from a foreign-language site, and have it translated and displayed so you can see what the hell you’re looking at. (Rather useful if you’re browsing Chinese or Russian sites looking for interesting software or information). Go experiment at turning foreign pages into fairly understandable English at Babelfish.
Another web-page-translator site, which also has a vast quantity of links to dictionaries in just about every language you can think of, is the aptly named Free Translator.
How about an online translator which takes webpages, and turns them into examples of 1984‘s Ministry of Truth press releases? In other words, all the references get changed into reflecting Orwell’s take on reality. It’s difficult to explain and the changes are often very subtle, so just take a look at this example of the Mail and Guardian‘s front page turned into “GoodSpeak” — notice the Oceania and Big Brother references.
Or for a more blatantly obvious example, try the same trick at CNN.
For more fun, just remove the website URL at the end and replace it with a website of your choosing — I’m still trying to get over the weirdness of seeing a headline on the M&G front page that reads: “Oceania arms firm greases SA palms”.
By the way, you’ve heard of The Fear Factor — well, picture an online version, where you challenge some weirdos to eat things. Doesnt sound too bad? See how low things get at The Stink Factor.
Until the next time, if the device squad don’t get me.
Ian Fraser is a playwright, author, comedian, conspiracy nut, old-time radio collector and self-confessed data-junkie. Winner of numerous Vita and Amstel Awards, he’s been an Internet addict and games-fanatic since around 1995, when the Internet began to make much more sense than theatre.