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South Kensington station's escalator replacement project
Deep underneath South Kensington tube station, a huge project is underway to replace all five of the station's escalators, and all of them at the same time.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
1562
What can be learned from studying long gone development practices?
Current ideas about the best way of building a software system are heavily influenced by the ideas that captured the attention of previous generations of developers. Can anything of practical use be learned from studying long gone techniques for building software systems?
1563
JAMMA Video Standard
Everyone had their weird pandemic hobby, right? Well, mine is that I bought an arcade video game. Not the whole cabinet - just a board, to hook up ...
1564
Life Improvements Since the 1990s
A list of unheralded improvements to ordinary quality-of-life since the 1990s going beyond computers.
1565
Copy-protection for vinyl in the 1970s (2008)
When I was thinking about an iconography for DRM, I began to think back to the old days of recording vinyl onto my portable tape deck using a 5-pin DIN plug to connect the two machines, the advent of tape-to-tape decks, and being poised over the pause button to record tracks from John Peel sessions. It was all so…
1566
The British Library puts 1M newspaper pages online for free
The British Library project to digitise copies of newspapers from its archive is to release one million pages as a free resource.
1567
“Raiders of the Lost Ark” Story Conference Transcript (1978)
G We’ll just talk general ideas, what the concept of it was. Then I’ll get down to going specifically through the story. Then we will actually get to where we can start talking down scenes, in the end I want to end up with a list of scenes. And the way I work generally is I figure a code, a general measuring stick…
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I'm reading the FT and WSJ from 100 years ago each week leading to 1929
This week, the Dow languishes near multi-decade lows and blue-chip stocks trade below book value.
1569
Why I Wrote PGP (1999)
"Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it." -Mahatma Gandhi
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Feelings at the Fall of the Republic, Ancient and Medieval Living Standards
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2021142 points83 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
Welcome! This is going to be the first of a new sort of post we’ll do from time to time where I answer a number of shorter questions posed by my patrons over at Patreon who are at the Patres …
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Lead Poisoning and Rome
"The bellows are burned, the lead is consumed of the fire; the founder melteth in vain: for the wicked are not plucked away. Reprobate silver shall men call them, because the Lord hath rejected them."
1575
Mario Paint Masterpiece
Mario Paint the 1992 masterpiece game, music-maker, and animation studio
1576
Knuth on Dijkstra (2014)
An excerpt from my book Coders at Work that I frequently find myself wanting to cite mostly because I get a kick out of someone having standing to call BS on Dijkstra:
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Apple iPhone charger teardown: quality in a tiny expensive package (2012)
This article is now available in Vietnamese Bộ sạc iPhone của Apple . Disassembling Apple's diminutive inch-cube iPhone charger reveals ...
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Who Were the Romans, Part V: Saving and Losing an Empire
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2021127 points32 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This is the fifth and final part (I, II, III, IV) of our series asking the question ‘Who were the Romans?’ How did they understand themselves as a people and the idea of ‘Roman’ as an i…
1579
Life before smartphones (2020)
An essay about life pre-iPhone addiction, why you're wrong about Salt Bae, an Indian butter chicken Instant Pot adventure, and a new Hell & Wellness pod discussing Marie Kondo.
1580
Restaurant prices in the 19th and 20th centuries (2009)
Restaurant prices in the 19th century (followed by 20th, below) Note: Until the mid-19th century prices were often quoted in shillings and pence, or in Spanish dollars. One Spanish bit = 12½¢; One …
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The Itanic Has Sunk
By today, July 29, 2021, Intel has shipped the last of its …
1582
Monkey Island PC-speaker music player
The Monkey Island (TM) PC-Speaker music player
1583
Columbo: an origin story (2018)
As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first airing of Prescription: Miurder, here’s a little bit about the origins of the Columbo character – and the actors who played him before …
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Japanese Typewriters
September 30, 2009 at 5:30 pm · Filed under Japanese History , Japanese Technology
1585
Why Japan Didn’t Create the iPod (2008)
At the end of last year, there were a couple of articles about Japan’s failure to be a giant in the new digital age (Newsweek on Why Apple Isn’t Japanese , and there were some interesting comments in a blog response Japan is no longer a leader in Electronics ). Unfortunately, the Newsweek article completely ignores…
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Steven Weinberg has died
I heard this morning the news that Steven Weinberg passed away yesterday at the age of 88. He was arguably the dominant figure in theoretical particle physics during its period of great success fr…
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The Dig
As you would imagine, a lot of the things you can do in a comedy game just don’t work when trying to remain serious. You can’t cover up a bad puzzle with a funny line of self-referential dialog. Er, not that I ever did that. But anyway, it was also a challenge to maintain the tone and some semblance of a dramatic arc…
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The History of the Dot Com Era
I graduated from college in 1997. While at college, the Netscape IPO, Yahoo IPO, eBay IPO, and Amazon IPO all happened. When I graduated, I…
1590
Full Throttle
The adventure makers at LucasArts had a banner 1993. One of the two games they released that year, Day of the Tentacle , was the veritable Platonic ideal of a cartoon-comedy graphic adventure; the other, Sam and Max Hit the Road , was merely very, very good.