September 15, 2002

5:51 AM

Matthias Wandel's Home pageis reminiscent of an earlier time in the online world. It's a homepage in the pre-weblog sense, and it's full of the sort of interesting things that made me excited about the Internet in the first place. From marble machines that can divide by six to homemade pipe organs and the story of his dad's old sawmill, there is almost nothing on the site that fails to be interesting.
posted by Nothing (15 comments total)

I couldn't help but notice that the company he works for, Research In Motion have very poor judgement when it comes to domain name selection.

Their website must have an awful lot of disappointed visitors.
posted by nthdegx at 6:27 AM on September 15, 2002

yah this is more like it... a homepage that's nothing more than a personal weblog never gets a return visit from me. give me things to do, stuff to learn, and possibly some downloads; do not make your daily angst the entire focus of the site. blogging has all but killed the personal homepage, making the 'net extremely bland and predictable.
posted by t r a c y at 6:58 AM on September 15, 2002

Thanks for the link, as you said almost everything there is interesting. Not many people have the energy and skills to save money by making their own computer equipment etc. I know a man who now works as a lock-smith, who makes his own trailers for his motorbikes and can repair just about anything mechanical from tractors to nuclear power plants. Some people just have a knack for it
posted by lazy-ville at 7:08 AM on September 15, 2002

The Scanner Camera is cool and look at the picture of the garage door closeing. Weird effect.
posted by stbalbach at 8:05 AM on September 15, 2002

thanks (for :) Nothing!

here're some homepages i like a lot:

• mathew white's homepage
• cosma's home page
• mark rosenfelder's metaverse
• danny yee's home page (who just started a weblog :)
• greg egan's homepage
• brad delong's website
• the robot wisdom pages (ironically :)
• and many more!

long live the homepage!
posted by kliuless at 8:09 AM on September 15, 2002

I'm slightly surprised that he doesn't have any links about Rube Goldberg machines in his links section.

Thanks, Nothing! A wonderful link for a Sunday afternoon!
posted by anastasiav at 9:30 AM on September 15, 2002

Great stuff :)
posted by zeoslap at 9:39 AM on September 15, 2002

Wow, kliuless. I'd say those links are worth a fpp of their own. I had no idea Greg Egan had a website, much less such an interesting one. Thanks.
posted by pheideaux at 9:48 AM on September 15, 2002

the story of the organ was worth it enough for me. this really takes me back to how it felt, surfing at school on the old ibm, chatting in geocities, discovering yahoo, and all that wonderful nostalgia.
posted by trioperative at 10:25 AM on September 15, 2002

Matthew Smith's homepage. He created Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy, and supposedly disappeared from the face of the Earth for quite some time.

Matt's Garden is particularly nuts. "Tended by Matt from Earth".
posted by nthdegx at 10:31 AM on September 15, 2002

Funny, but I have Mr. Wandel's site bookmarked and have always contemplated posting it to MetaFilter. I came across it while searching for pipe organ building equipment. Good stuff! I love net tinkerers!
posted by evanizer at 11:24 AM on September 15, 2002

Wait a minute. The static HTML, no-frames, old-school homepage is "in" again?

Thank God. I no longer need to be ashamed of my bloglessness.
posted by Galvatron at 11:35 AM on September 15, 2002

Amazing link... I remember when pages like these (content and style) were much more common.
posted by cadastral at 3:20 PM on September 15, 2002

I get the same humbling sense of awe when reading this guy's projects that I do when watching Junkyard Wars. It makes me feel both technically ignorant and mechanically inept. Both are true. Sigh.
posted by Hildago at 4:47 PM on September 15, 2002

Bogs are not my thing. They contribute little of value, IMO. 9 out of 10 times, all you see are poorly written rants about obscure little things that no one but the writer cares about.

Most of the blog crowd spends their days trying to come up with a pretty new design, instead of writing something interesting to say. Or doing something interesting.

There's some exceptions, but not many.

Personally, I'm a fan of Sam Sloan (www.samsloan.com). He may be... uhh... "a little off", but he is a very captivating writer. He always has something to say or to share, and he does it very well.
posted by Witold at 5:08 PM on September 15, 2002