Ciro Santilli was contributing to this, when CommonMark left private mode and killed it, thus wasting many hours of Ciro's time.
You have to know the language to appreciate them.
The 60's and 70's were the days, those great proxy wars and CIA dictatorships allowed hippies to make awesome freedom music without too imminent a fear of death.
Songs making fun of things or that are pure Brazil nostalgia are also accepted. No love songs, ever. Except some by Caetano, but that's it!
English:
French:
Piano by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
The piano is the most elegant non-electronic instrument. But it requires way too many strings, so expensive and not portable.
Also it allows for no legato or vibrato.
The guitar is kind of the opposite.
After computer sound synthesis however, all of these distinctions become meaningless.
First They Ignore You by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
First They Ignore You, Then They Laugh at You, Then They Attack You, Then You Win
BitcoinStrings.com by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
bitcoinstrings.com has all strings -n20 strings, we can obtain the whole thing and clean it up a bit with:
wget -O all.html https://bitcoinstrings.com/all
cp all.html all-recode.html
recode html..ascii all-recode.html
awk '!seen[$0]++' all-recode.html > all-uniq.html
awk to skip the gazillion "mined by message" repeats.
A lot of in that website stuff appears to be cut up at the 20 mark. As shown in Force of Will, this is possibly because they didn't use -w in strings -n20, and the text after the newlines was less than 20 characters.
That website can be replicated by downloading the Bitcoin blockchain locally, then:
cd .bitcoin/blocks
for f in blk*.dat; do strings -n20 -w $f | awk '!seen[$0]++' > ${f%.dat}.txt; done
tail +n1 *.txt
Remove most of the binary crap:
head -n-1 *.txt | grep -e '[. ]' | grep -iv 'mined by' | less
Nature Scitable by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
As of 2022 visible at: www.nature.com/scitable
Apparently they had a separate URL as just scitable.com, so they were somewhat serious about it before shutting it down.
As of 2022 marked:
This page has been archived and is no longer updated
RIP.
www.nature.com/scitable/blog/student-voices/ has last entry 2015, so presumably that's the shutdown year.
Self description:
Using our platform, you can customize your own eBooks for your students. Create an online classroom. Contribute and share content and connect with networks of colleagues.
so quite related to OurBigBook.com.
Wikipedia dumps by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Per-table dumps created with mysqldump and listed at: dumps.wikimedia.org/. Most notably, for the English Wikipedia: dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/latest/
The tables are "documented" under: www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Database_layout, e.g. the central "page" table: www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Page_table. But in many cases it is impossible to deduce what fields are from those docs.
Wikimedia Commons by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
A really good option to store educational media such as images and video!
Shame that like the rest of Wikimedia, their interface is so clunky and lacking obvious features.

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
  1. topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
    Articles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
    • a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
    • a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
    This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
    Figure 1.
    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
    . View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative
  2. local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:
    This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
    Figure 2.
    You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either https://OurBigBook.com or as a static website
    .
    Figure 3.
    Visual Studio Code extension installation
    .
    Figure 4.
    Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation
    .
    Figure 5.
    Web editor
    . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
    Video 4.
    OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo
    . Source.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact