Not long ago we all used an ordinary encyclopedia when we needed to find information about something. Today the Internet can give us the answer to (almost) anything.

When it comes to getting the facts on basically anything between heaven and earth, one particular site really stands out. Yes, Wikipedia, we are talking about you.

There is actually more information on that site than you ever thought you needed.

Here are some examples of what you can find on Wikipedia that you will never find in the likes of Encyclopedia Britannica.

IP over Avian Carriers

A joke about using homing pigeons to carry Internet traffic. It was initially described in RFC 1149 on April 1, 1990. It has been tested in Norway with a packet loss of 55%.

Bill Gates’ flower fly

A flower fly named after Bill Gates, found only in Costa Rican highland forests. Latin name, Eristalis gatesi. There is also a Paul Allen’s flower fly found in the same area.

ISO 3103

ISO 3103 is a specified standard method for brewing tea that was added in 1980.

AOL disk collecting

Read about America Online’s infamous marketing strategy to spread excessive amounts of CD-ROMs with the software for accessing the America Online service. It’s been estimated that they produced over a billion disks with over a thousand disk designs.

Atari video game burial

An event that took place in 1983. When the North American video game industry had crashed, Atari ended up dumping thousands of video game cartridges (many with the ill-fated E.T. video game) into a New Mexican landfill.

How does one patch KDE2 under FreeBSD?

Apparently a geeky Russian Internet joke. The question tends to pop up frequently in unexpected circumstances. It was for example given to the Russian president Vladimir Putin when people were able to propose questions for an online conference.

Dogcow

Clarus the Dogcow is a bitmapped image originally part of Apple’s Cairo font that was created in 1983. Since then it has reached cult status, and has appeared in several different applications and other places.

John Titor

Someone calling himself John Titor posted on several Internet bulletin boards during 2000 and 2001, claiming to be a time traveler from the year 2036. He made lots of predictions that never came true, but there are still believers.

Lenna

Lenna or Lena is the most widely used test image for image processing algorithms. The image was originally cropped from a centerfold picture of Lena Söderberg, a Swedish model posing in the November 1972 issue of Playboy magazine.

The Lenna image is so established in the image processing community that Söderberg was a guest at the 50th annual Conference of the Society for Imaging Science and Technology in 1997.

Last but not least: List of problems solved by MacGyver

The 80s TV series MacGyver made all kids want a Swiss Army knife. The extremely resourceful character created inventions from basically anything to get out of trouble (he didn’t carry a gun).

If you want to ensure your survival against all odds, armed only with a Swiss Army knife and sometimes not even that, you need to read this.

Perl has been around since 1987 and became an early darling of web developers. These days, however, you don’t hear much about Perl. Everyone seems to be talking about trendier languages like PHP, Python and Ruby, with Perl left in the back as a neglected, not-so-hip cousin.

That might lead you to think that Perl is dying, but as it turns out, it’s still used by plenty of websites out there, including some pretty big hitters.

Here are some of the more popular sites that use Perl extensively today.

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In this post Twitter enthusiast Garin Kilpatrick shares his tips on effective ways to get more followers.

It is hard to put a price on a Twitter follower but the host of The Price is Right, Drew Carey, is offering to donate $1 to cancer research for every new follower he receives this year. The following eight tips will enable you to make the most out of your tweets and help you connect with as many followers as possible.

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Web design carries with it certain challenges that don’t exist in print design. Perhaps the most obvious is that in print design, whether you print your own work or have it printed by a professional, you know what your work is going to look like before your customer sees it.

Web designers don’t have this luxury. There’s always the chance that something, or maybe many things, won’t look or behave the same from browser to browser and from operating system to operating system. It’s easy to make mistakes that can make your website appear strange or annoying to a lot of website visitors.

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This April 1st the guys at Wired Magazine put together a great April Fools’ joke: A dedicated mobile device for Twitter dubbed the Wingman.

Check out this video introduction to the (then) totally fake device.

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Looking back on Android’s first year on the market, there’s no denying that things have been rocky for Google’s ambitious mobile platform. There was little hardware diversity for the better part of the year, and with the hype surrounding the release of the Palm Pre, Android seemed almost instantly dated. For all of its initial hype, the platform never really seemed like much of a threat to the iPhone, and in many ways it was barely competing. It seemed as if Android was going to celebrate its first birthday merely running on the fumes of excitement from its launch.

The announcement of the Motorola Droid’s upcoming release on Verizon’s formidable 3G network changed all of that.

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