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A Retrospective Look at Mac OS X Snow Leopard
Yes, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is as good as I remembered.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 337 posts.
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Teardown of a quartz crystal oscillator and the tiny IC inside
The quartz oscillator is an important electronic circuit, providing highly-accurate timing signals at a low cost. A quartz crystal has the...
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Ultima VIII – How to destroy a gaming franchise in one easy step
In 1994, Origin Systems’s Ultima series was the most universally lauded franchise in computer gaming. Over the course of seven mainline games and five spinoffs and side stories, the Ultima brand had consistently stood for elaborate but doggedly nonlinear plots which seriously engaged with questions of ethics; for the…
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Raiders of the Lost Ark as a Black-and-White Silent Film (2014)
(Note: This posting is for educational purposes only.)I’m assuming the phrase “staging” came out of the theatre world, but it’s equally at home (and useful) in the movie world, since the term (roughly defined) refers to how all the various elements of a given scene or piece are aligned, arranged, and coordinated. In mo
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1977: Zork
When four MIT hackers decide they can make a better Adventure, they start building a game that will still be topping bestseller charts eight years later.
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Functioning ‘mechanical gears’ seen in nature for the first time (2013)
Previously believed to be only man-made, a natural example of a functioning gear mechanism has been discovered in a common insect - showing that evolution developed interlocking cogs long before we did.
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What World War I Can Teach Us about Misjudging Tech and Social Change (2020)
Stay informed with the latest news articles, press releases, in-depth analysis, and top headlines from our grantees around the world.
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Windows Refund Day (1999)
Anyway, a few people from SVLUG , including Don Marti, Rick Moen (yes he was there ), Chris DiBona, the world famous Nick Moffitt, and Tabinda Khan, organized the Bay Area windows refund effort. Since at the Linux tea party , microsoft showed up at our meeting point to try to deter us from going to their offices in…
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Google could have killed Facebook with the flick of a switch
As we near the end of this decade, and more importantly the end of the hell that was 2020, I realised two things. First, I survived catching Covid-19, and secondly that I had a good story about the…
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Things JRR Tolkien has never said, done, written or had anything to do with
A list of things any decent Tolkien fan should avoid, ignore, despise and never ever share except for enlightening people they are getting it wrong. Thanks!
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A one-bit processor explained: reverse-engineering the vintage MC14500B
The Motorola MC14500B 1 is a 1-bit processor introduced in 1976. While a 1-bit processor might seem almost useless, 2 it was marketed as...
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IBM paperweight teardown: Reverse-engineering 1970s memory chips
I recently received a vintage IBM paperweight from the early 1970s that showcases some memory chips. 1 When IBM started using integrated ...
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Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice for Programming Under CP/M (2013)
CP/M was blessed with many programming languages, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. I think that Turbo Pascal stands out from these and I'm not alon
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What color was “Apple Beige”?
I went looking for a defining color of the personal computer era. I found it in an old jar of paint.
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The computer revolution hasn’t happened yet (1997)
In this video, Alan Kay talks about his vision of object oriented programming and how to design scalable systems.
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DrScheme in Space
Parenthetically Speaking: Articles by Shriram Krishnamurthi
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Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment
Windows 3.1 allowed you to change all system colors to your liking. Linux been fully themeable since the 90s. OSX came along with a draconian “all blue aqua, and maybe a hint of gray”.
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Sony News Portable Workstation NWS-1250 (2020)
We do not see many vintage Japanese workstations in the West. We also do not see many portable workstations (of any make). So, what we really rarely see, are Japanese portable workstations. I feel …
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Over 700k paintings from the Rijksmuseum online copyright free
Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum has put over 700,000 digitised copies of its huge art collection online, and is making them available to reuse as public domain
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USN AN-1 Submarine Aircraft Carrier (2018)
**US Navy SubmarineAircraft Carrier design** In the late 1950s the US Navy experimented with the concept of aircraft carrying submarines armed with jet fighters… Read More >….
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Soyuz spacecraft digital clock teardown
We recently obtained a clock that flew on a Soyuz space mission. 1 The clock, manufactured in 1984, is much more complex inside than you'd ...
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Tiny PDP11 on an ESP32
2020 has been a weird year, for everyone around the world. In my specific case, that meant being away from my home in Shanghai, as we were in Europe at the time Covid hit and China did not make it easy to return until somewhere towards the end of the year.
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Microsoft Space Simulator (Or, Charles Guy’s Galaxy in a Box)
It had been one hell of a year for the United States and most of the rest of the Western world — a year of rampant chaos and conflict at home and abroad, when the very foundations of democratic society seemed on the verge of crumbling to dust. In the course of twelve months, a brutal war with no prospect of ending had…
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51 Star Flag (2011)
Math, Science and Technology tidbits written for the average person.
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XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought
A couple months back I switched my terminal from xfce4-terminal to the venerable xterm. For some reason I always put xterm in the same bucket as xclock, xmessage, or any other prehistoric command starting with X that comes pre-installed on any graphical Linux distribution.