I’ve been re-ordering my stash of drafts and found some experiments I totally forgot about, like this netrunner straight outta Neuromancer.
Tag: machines
My brief experience with the ONYX BOOX Nova 3 Color eReader
I got myself a color ePaper reader and concluded after a month of usage that the tech ain’t ready. …
Still one of my fav quotes on naming expressions:
“One of the things that every sorcerer will tell you is that if you have the name of the spirit, you have power over it.”
by Gerald Jay Sussman
Sensawunda!
Two perpendicular thoughts: 1) I am amazed how easy it still is for a large program (like Blender or Firefox) to fail to compile on a modern, common distro. A large list of dependencies greatly increases the chances of compile-time mishaps and makes the whole process resemble surgery. 2) I am amazed at how easy …
The thin line between quaint-retro and plain-obsolete
In 2016 the news of an auto shop in Poland still using a Commodore 64 for balancing driveshafts became very popular. The idea of a 25 years old computer still performing its task seemed to both fuel the story of ancient technology being sturdier than the modern one, and instill respect towards a mechanic who refuses to bend …
Visualize your website access log like a boss. A pong boss.
Shallow RAM…
The first computer I played with, in the late 80s, was a Commodore 64 that came with 64 Kilobytes of RAM. Early in the 90s, I was lucky enough to upgrade to a Commodore Amiga, which was a bounce in capabilities the likely of which I rarely saw ever since. The Amiga came with half …
Working from a Nvidia Shield K1 Tablet
Even if the dream to have an Ubuntu phone fizzled out last April, my hopes to keep on miniaturizing my work machine are as lively as ever. After spending a decade working on Desktop computers and a decade spent on Laptops, I think the time is right for another paradigm shift. It is with these …
The most recurrent computer errors on the web
(Not a color blindness test) Error codes in computing are a curious heritage of a bygone era when paper was relevant and memory usage stripped to the bare minimum. In those days, it was normal for a programmer to stumble upon an error code, stand up, reach for a dusty manual on a shelf, look up the …
Keep up with the times
The mechanism of Antikythera is an ancient Greek “Analogue computer” used to calculate astronomical positions. It’s a fascinating piece of technology that represents the earliest known mechanical clockwork: it is believed to have functioned as a set of at least 30 different bronze gears which several studies tried to reconstruct as digital or physical models. Its …