Look deeply into the mango… Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey.

Somewhere in parallel universe the web consists entirely of totally useful, boring applications and websites. Fortunately we don’t live in that universe, which is why we have The Useless Web (potentially NSFW), a collection of the web’s most useless pages.

The Useless Web is the work of developer Tim Holman, who has curated a nice list of useless websites. Some of these sites will no doubt be familiar to veteran time wasters, but there were quite a few I’d never seen before, including my new favorite republiquedesmangues.fr — hypnotic those mangoes.

Holman’s list is hardly complete — is it even possible to have a complete list of useless websites? — if you’ve got a favorite useless site, be sure to submit it to The Useless Web. If you’d like to see the complete list of sites currently in The Useless Web’s repertoire, have a look at the JavaScript file.

The center of the Bacon Number universe. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey

Google has added a new Easter Egg to its web search — the Bacon Number.

Disappointingly not related to actual bacon, the Bacon Number in this case refers to the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, specifically the number of degrees of separation a person has from actor Kevin Bacon.

Google Search now understands the Bacon Number. Type, for example, “Bacon Number Obama” to learn that President Obama has a Bacon number of 2 (connected by Tom Hanks). Google can even handle the reflexive “Bacon Number Kevin Bacon.” Of course not every search returns a Bacon Number, not even some you would think should — try to find the Bacon Number of nerd favorite Joss Whedon and Google comes up empty — but for more generally popular celebrities Google now has yet another bit of trivia stored.

It’s not quite as nerdtastic as other Google Easter Eggs like “Do a Barrel Roll, but the Bacon Number search shows Google does still have a sense of humor at times.

Homepage photo: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff/Flickr

“I’m Feeling Puzzled” will take you to Google’s puzzle a day project. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey.

Google Instant Search eliminates not just the need for, but the opportunity to even press the venerable “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. With Instant Search, results appear the minute you start typing, without pressing any buttons. That might help explain why Google appears to be phasing out “I’m Feeling Lucky” with some whimsical Easter Eggs instead.

Head to the Google homepage and hover your mouse over “I’m Feeling Lucky” and you’ll see it spin like a slot machine, landing on things like “I’m Feeling Stellar,” which searches for various nebula and other stellar objects, or “I’m Feeling Wonderful,” which takes you to random pages on the World Wonders Project.

Alex Chitu over at Google Operating System points out that there are currently eight different options that the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button will morph into, which is at least somewhat in keeping with the random spirit of the original.

Decrypt is a silly little Python script that lets you act like a hacker on TV; you know the scenes — a terminal window full of garbage slowly coalesces into a decrypted, er, something, usually just in time to save someone from certain death/ruin.

Perhaps the best part of the Decrypt.py effort from developer Jouke Waleson, is the potential use case: “recover some friend’s hard drive (i.e., he destroyed his mbr). After the “hard” work has been done, act like you are having a hard time and run some of his personal files through this program and ask if he recognizes the content.”

If you’d like to prank a friend, grab the script from GitHub and throw it on a USB stick. Hit play on the video above to see it in action. For some animated GIF demos and more discussion, see the Hacker News page as well.

Papa don’t code. Image: Wikimedia.

It’s unlikely Ernest Hemingway would have thought much of programming. Staring at a screen all day hammering out Perl doesn’t seem like something Papa would have enjoyed. A typewriter in the Cuban sun was more Hemingway’s bag.

But what would it have looked like if Hemingway had cracked open Vim and written a few web apps? Angus Croll, an engineer at Twitter, has one answer in a great post that looks at how some famous writers might have written code. Here’s Croll’s take on how Hemingway might have written JavaScript:

Code reduced to its essentials with no word or variable wasted. It’s not fancy; maybe it’s even a little pedantic — but that’s the beauty of Hemingway’s writing. No need for elaborate logic or clever variable names. It’s plain and it’s clear and it does what it has to — and nothing more.

The whole post is funny and well worth a read, particularly if you happen to have come to programming from a background in liberal arts. Other authors Croll covers include Shakespeare, Dickens, Bolaño and my personal favorite, surrealist Andre Breton. Also be sure to check out Croll’s JavaScript blog.

Wired.com Font Bombed. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey.

We’ve already showed you how to turn any webpage into a game of Asteroids; now you can add Font Bomb to the list of ways to destroy text of the web.

Font Bomb is a fun little JavaScript bookmarklet you can use to plant bombs all around a webpage. Just drag the bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar and then head to a page you want to destroy. Click the bookmarklet and then start clicking anywhere on the page to plant bombs.

Then, thanks to a little magic from CSS 2D Transforms, the text starts flying — perfect for a little Friday afternoon amusement. (It’s also not a half-bad way to take out some frustration on trolls: Don’t feed them, just blow up what they wrote and move on.)

Font Bomb was created by Philippe-Antoine Lehoux. The code is available on GitHub (CoffeeScript) and there’s some discussion on Hacker News if you’d like to know more.

Image: Microsoft

Clippy, whose real name was actually Office Assistant, made his debut in Microsoft Office 97 and quickly became famous for such clever quips as, “It looks like you’re writing a letter, would you like help?”

Since Clippy is long gone — he was removed when Office 2007 shipped — it only makes sense to resurrect him on the web, which is exactly what Clippy.js does. Yes, Clippy.js is “a full JavaScript implementation of Microsoft Agent (aka Clippy and friends), ready to be embedded in any website.”

Technically Clippy was not the only help agent and Clippy.js also supports Merlin (a wizard), Rover (a dog) and Links (cat), though sadly not our favorite, Will (a caricature of William Shakespeare, because inane, intrusive help is so much better when it comes from a poorly drawn Shakespeare).

The Clippy.js script is a “weekend project” by the developers behind Smore. As the Clippy.js website puts it, “our research shows that people love two things: failed Microsoft technologies and obscure JavaScript libraries. Naturally, we decided to combine the two.”

If you want to subject your visitors to Clippy, grab the script from GitHub and scroll through the mock Word document that is the Clippy.js site for details on how to use it. Bonus points if you use some conditional loading to only serve Clippy.js to IE 6 users.

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To install HTML9 Responsive Boilerstrap JS just “attackclone the grit repo pushmerge, then rubygem the lymphnode js shawarma module — and presto!”

If you’re wondering what H9RBS.js actually is, well, you can abandon any hopes of one day being hip. But if you must know, H9RBS.js is a “flexible, dependency-free, lightweight, device-agnostic, modular, baked-in, component framework MVC library shoelacestrap to help you kickstart your responsive CSS-based app architecture backbone kitchensink tweetybirds.”

The hilarity continues on the official HTML9 Responsive Boilerstrap JS website, and there’s a GitHub repo of course. Check out the issues page (“Need unrealistic micro-benchmarks”).

You can read a bit about what inspired developer Louis Lazaris’ pitch-perfect web development parody over at his site, Impressive Webs.

Lake.js: It's lakes all the way down. Image: Lake.js

Sometimes it’s easy to forget how far the web has come in the last decade, which is why we like the otherwise somewhat useless Lake.js. Lake.js is a JQuery plugin that creates a shimmering reflection of an image, an effect that dates from the days of Geocities — back when the web was nothing but one pixel gifs and under construction banners.

The appeal of Lake.js isn’t just about nostalgia though, it’s also a nice reminder that the web no longer needs to rely on terrible Java applets (the main source of cheesy lake reflections in the early days), or any other proprietary technologies to build shimmering lake effects. Today web standards like HTML, CSS and JavaScript can pull off not just lakes made of <canvas>, but things that were, until very recently, almost inconceivable.

Sure some of the web’s most common tools might still be hacks (CSS floats anyone?), but at least when we want cheesy rippling water we don’t have to download a 120 MB “applet” anymore.

Also, the first person to port Lake.js to pure CSS… please e-mail us when you’re done.