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Xbox Hacks: The A20 (2021)
In the early 2000s the Xbox was released. We are nearing the 20 year anniversary so its time to dive into the A20 "hack".
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 359 posts.
152
Six Years of Gemini
It's been a quiet year at geminiprotocol.net thus far. I've let two "Apollo days" slip by without a word. I'm about as disappointed in myself for this as I expect many folks are unsurprised by it. I do still have plans and clear ideas for finalising the minor oustanding spec issues. I'd tell people to look forward to…
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What were the earliest laws like?
Hammurabi’s code doesn’t tell the whole story
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Happy 20th Birthday, Django
Posted by Thibaud Colas & Benjamin Balder Bach on July 13, 2025
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The Story of Mel, A Real Programmer, Annotated (1996)
A recent article devoted to the macho side of programming made the bald and unvarnished statement:
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MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today
40 years later and the art people painstaking made in MacPaint on their little Macs still amazes me.
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Bill Atkinson's psychedelic user interface
How an Apple legend approached the world’s most powerful psychedelic as a user-experience problem to be solved.
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A Century of Quantum Mechanics
On 9 July 1925, in a letter to Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg revealed his new ideas, which were to revolutionise physics
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Phrase origin: Why do we "call" functions?
On StackExchange, someone asks why programmers talk about “calling” a function. Several possible allusions spring to mind: Calling a function is like calling on a friend — we go, we stay a while, we come back. Calling a function is like calling for a servant — a summoning to perform a task. Calling a function is like…
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Frame of preference A history of Mac settings, 1984–2004
A story of early Mac settings told by 10 emulators.
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Swedish Campground (2004)
We thought it was important for the user to be able to invoke every menu command directly from the keyboard, so we added a special key to the keyboard to invoke menu commands, just like our predecessor, Lisa. We called it the "Apple key"; when pressed in combination with another key, it selected the corresponding menu…
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Why English doesn't use accents
And why French is full of them
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July 5, 1687: When Newton explained why you don't float away
On this day in 1687, Isaac Newton published the Principia—a book that explained why apples fall, why planets don’t wander off, and why NASA is still lighting enormous tubes on fire to fling humans into orbit 337 years later.
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macOS Icon History
Documenting the evolution of macOS system icons over the past several decades.
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EverQuest
It isn’t always or even usually the pioneers who reap the rewards of the trails they blaze. As often as not, some pragmatic Johnny-come-lately pops in to make off with the booty.
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The War on the Walkman
The Sony Walkman is now iconic of the 1980s, eliciting nostalgia for the ‘good old days’ of owning music, rather than renting it.
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Using Sun Ray thin clients in 2025
setting up 20 year old hardware is bound to work first try, right? ... right?
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The original LZEXE (A.K.A. Kosinski) compressor source code has been released
Last year, I discovered that the Kosinski compression format is actually LZEXE, which was used for compressing DOS executables back in the 90s and the late 80s. Its developer catalogues three versi…
171
Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder
What offers the convenience of a cassette tape, and the sound quality of a CD? Digital Audio Tape (DAT) does. So why wasn’t it more successful?
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Revisiting Knuth's “Premature Optimization” Paper
The most famous quote from Knuth’s paper “Structured Programming with go to Statements” is this: There is no doubt that the grail of efficiency leads to abuse. Programmers waste e…
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-2000 Lines of code (2004)
In early 1982, the Lisa software team was trying to buckle down for the big push to ship the software within the next six months. Some of the managers decided that it would be a good idea to track the progress of each individual engineer in terms of the amount of code that they wrote from week to week. They devised a…
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Finding a 27-year-old easter egg in the Power Mac G3 ROM
I was recently poking around inside the original Power Macintosh G3’s ROM and accidentally discovered an easter egg that nobody has documented until now.
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The X Window System didn't immediately have X terminals
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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The FPGA turns 40
This year marks the 40th anniversary of one of the most exciting and interesting aspects of electronic engineering: the FPGA. The first commercially viable FPGA introduced in 1985 was the Xilinx XC2064, which provided developers with 64 configurable logic blocks, each with a three-input look-up tables. From tiny…
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The JAWS shark is public domain
A story with legal drama, a mystery, snow leopards, and, uh, naughty bits.
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Alpha Centauri
In the spring of 1996, Brian Reynolds and Jeff Briggs took a long, hard look around them and decided that they’d rather be somewhere else.
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Infinite Mac OS X
tl;dr: Infinite Mac can now run early Mac OS X , with 10.1 and 10.3 being the best supported versions. It’s not particularly snappy, but as someone who lived through that period, I can tell you that it wasn’t much better on real hardware. Infinite HD has also been rebuilt to have some notable indie software from that…