Tag: hobbies

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Ancient Web: Homo Ludens Built a Homepage for Every Hobby One Man Could Collect

Some personal websites choose a subject. Manfred Mornhinweg’s Homo Ludens homepage chooses the person and lets every subject follow him home.

Visit Homo Ludens

The site’s premise is right in the name: homo ludens, the playing human. Mornhinweg introduces the pages as the toys, games and hobbies of one specimen, then splits himself into a collection of mock subspecies.

There is homo ludens radiactivus for amateur radio, radiohistoricus for antique radios, electronicus for electronics projects, volatrix for free flight, nauticus for a homemade folding kayak and sailing, musicus for music, aeromodellisticus for model aircraft, andinensis for climbing, photographicus for photography and mechanicus for tools and car repair. There are more.

The navigation sounds like a joke, but the material behind it is substantial. Mornhinweg has published electronics projects, restorations, technical explanations, photographs and long accounts of things he built or repaired. His pages have circulated for years among electronics hobbyists because they contain the sort of detail that tends to come only from somebody who actually constructed the circuit, opened the inverter or rebuilt the radio.

The site states its design philosophy plainly: content rather than special effects, bells and whistles. That sentence has aged extremely well. The pages remain quick to load and easy to read because most of the machinery is simply text, photographs and links.

There is also something distinctly pre-platform about organizing a website around a whole human being. Modern publishing tends to reward specialization. Pick a niche, stay in it, train the audience. Homo Ludens does the opposite. The unifying subject is curiosity itself.

For webmasters, that makes the structure worth studying. The homepage works as a map of interests, while individual sections can become as deep as they need to be. Nobody has to pretend antique radios and homemade kayaks belong in the same SEO category. They belong together because the same person cared about both.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list is full of websites built this way: a human being first, taxonomy second.

Homo Ludens is still online and still refreshingly unconcerned with personal-brand consistency.

Explore Manfred Mornhinweg’s Homo Ludens site

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Ancient Web: The Northwest Fighter Kite Association Has Been Plotting World Domination Since 1998

There are hobby websites, and then there are hobby websites that announce they are dedicated to “single line very active controlable kiteflying” and, parenthetically, “World Domination.”

The Northwest Fighter Kite Association is the second kind.

Visit the Northwest Fighter Kite Association

The copyright line starts in 1998. The homepage still points toward a 2006 schedule, past meet reports, flying locations, a Longbeach fighter-kite plan, material related to the Washington State International Kite Festival, a “Fat Kids’ Notebook,” and something called Fighterkite Poe-ums.

There is also a link to newer information elsewhere.

The old page remains.

Good.

A tiny sport gets its own corner of the web

Fighter kites are not the passive diamond-shaped objects people remember from schoolyards.

The NFKA describes its subject as active, controllable single-line flying. Fighter-kite traditions use deliberate manipulation of line tension and kite attitude to steer a lightweight kite through turns, dives, climbs, and competition.

That alone makes the site a useful artifact.

A niche physical skill that would otherwise be transmitted through local clubs, festivals, photocopied plans, and conversation acquired a permanent online home. Meet reports could outlive the meet. A kite plan could travel outside the region. Someone who had never seen the activity could discover that there were enough people doing it to form an association and write poetry about it.

The humor helps too.

Old hobby pages often had a recognizable human voice because there was no incentive to sand every sentence down into brand-safe copy. The NFKA could promote an obscure form of kite flying and joke about world domination on the same homepage.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes club and hobby pages because they preserve communities at their natural scale.

Not everything needs millions of users.

Sometimes you need a few people, some wind, a line, a kite that turns much harder than expected, and a webpage that refuses to die.

Return to the Northwest Fighter Kite Association

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Ancient Web: RockTumbler.com Teaches Patience One Barrel of Grit at a Time

Rock tumbling sounds like the sort of hobby that should require one machine, a bucket of ugly rocks, and very little thought. RockTumbler.com explains why that assumption produces scratched rocks and plumbing disasters.

Visit RockTumbler.com’s tumbling instructions

The page is a long, practical procedure for turning rough material into polished stones with a rotary tumbler. It covers material selection, Mohs hardness, particle size, barrel loading, coarse grit, medium grit, pre-polish, polish, burnishing, cleaning, and record keeping.

Its three rules are brutally simple: bad rough stays bad, contamination matters, and good results take time.

The useful part is all the boring detail

The site recommends rocks around Mohs 6 to 7 for the standard process and repeatedly warns against mixing unsuitable materials. Porous rocks trap grit. Fractured pieces break and scratch neighbors. Brittle material sheds grains. A few coarse particles carried into a later stage can wreck an otherwise good batch.

Barrel loading matters too. The instructions call for a mixture of sizes so smaller pieces fill the spaces between larger ones and create more contact points for grinding. Too little material lets stones crash around. Too much prevents proper tumbling.

Then comes the part beginners probably underestimate: time.

A normal run uses roughly a week for each stage, and RockTumbler.com notes that it often repeats the coarse-grind stage before moving forward. The hobby is less about pressing a button than inspecting, cleaning, sorting, and deciding whether the rocks are actually ready.

The site even warns not to dump the muddy grit slurry down a household drain because it can clog the plumbing. That is the kind of sentence that saves somebody an unpleasant Saturday.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes specialist sites like this because useful old-web culture was often built by people documenting a hobby until the documentation became a reference manual.

RockTumbler.com is not trying to make polishing stones mysterious.

It is trying to stop you from screwing up the fourth week.

Return to RockTumbler.com’s tumbling instructions