I salvaged a pen plotter from the early ’90s. The owner, a retired architect, was ready to free up some space in their home after decades of disuse. The unit was in fair condition and required hardly any maintenance: some cleaning, tightening of a belt, and a slide rail that needed lubrication; after that, it …
Tag: machines
What I love about this quote is that both the word “computer” and “accountable” share an etymology that traces back to the concept of adding up numbers.
We are about to share the creative space with non-human entities. Will people genuinely find the creative product of a non-human interesting?
I’ve been re-ordering my stash of drafts and found some experiments I totally forgot about, like this netrunner straight outta Neuromancer.
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 …