That crushing Apple iPad Pro ad really gives out some strong Fallout vibes...
It really captures the zeitgeist though.
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Interesting: Instagram tests a new design for carousels, making each slide slightly less wide than device width.
In Portugal there's a dearth of technical community gatherings. It's a serious problem, and one that seems to be getting worse (if that's at all possible).
I'm not talking about corporate events that people attend on behalf of their employers. We have our share of those. I'm talking about events that people attend, on their own time, because they want to meet people with similar personal interests.
These people exist, but they just don't come together!
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"If your computer is turned on, turn it off. Wait for at least thirty seconds before turning on your computer again. This will remove any virus which may be present and so minimise the risk of infecting and possibly destroying your Cannon Fodder disks."
We've been watching an explosion of interest in #retrocomputing, and people offer all kinds of plausible explanations for it, from the rejection of modern complexities to the mere fact that the kids of the 80's are now reaching their mid-life crisis.
Personally, I believe that it's mostly the result of computing having accrued enough history to reach critical mass.
Computing is now old enough that its history encompasses the ancient, the vintage, the classic, the plain old, and the forgotten.
If you're into retro because it makes you go back, or as a way to materialize your memories, that's #nostalgia.
If you're into retro because it gives you an understanding of how we got here, that's #history – or #archeology if original artifacts are what appeals to you.
If you're into retro because you feel the past contains forgotten bits of knowledge that you can use to improve yourself or the future – in either practical or creative ways – what's that?
When I was 9 or so, I watched Michael Jackson's "Moonwalker" (1988) in the local cinema. It was... weird.
https://www.imdb.com/video/vi4279174937/
This evening I tried the 1990 tie-in arcade game, whose intro credits MJ himself with the game's concept and design. 🤔
It's cheesy, but surprisingly fun. MJ shoots magic energy under chiptune versions of "Bad" and "Smooth Criminal". His special attack makes everybody dance and subsequently explode.
Lots of "ow!"s, but "hee hee"s are notably absent. 🤷♂️
BASIC turns 60 today. About it, Dijkstra once said:
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
Yet, BASIC was key to luring many young home microcomputer users into programming during the 80's.
To celebrate, open the C64 emulator at https://ty64.krissz.hu and type...
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1));
20 GOTO 10
Then RUN, and rejoice. 🍺
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS was released last thursday, and I was wondering why there weren't Vagrant images available yet.
Due to Vagrant no longer being open source, Canonical won't publish images for 24.04 and beyond.
What a sad state of affairs. How many true open source projects failed to take off because of these bait-and-switch schemes?
Communities were formed around these corporate open source projects which then invoked their CLAs to regress into source available licenses.
Microsoft open sourced MS-DOS 4.00 yesterday, under an MIT license. This joins v1.25 and v2.0 already released 6 years ago.
https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS
MS-DOS 4.x is... complicated. There was a 4.0 with multitasking ("MT-DOS") and a later one without. Both report themselves as "MS-DOS Version 4.00". The code on GiHub seems to be the non-multitasking version.
I highly recommend reading through the OS/2 Museum's posts on DOS history:
https://www.os2museum.com/wp/dos/dos-4-0/
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On April 25, 1974, a group of portuguese military toppled the dictatorial regime that had ruled for 48 years.
With only five deaths, it was relatively peaceful as revolutions go.
50 years later, the country's democracy faces similar threats as the rest of the world: a steep rise in populism (based on the absurd idea that things used to be better), the rotting of traditional media into sensationalism, and social media algorithms surfacing bigotry and ignorance for engagement.
#democracy 🇵🇹
Sinclair released the ZX Spectrum on April 23, 1982, so... Happy 42nd birthday! 🎂
To commemorate, why not play a nice game of "Galaxians" – a 1982 clone of Namco's "Galaxian" for the Spectrum – right in your browser?
https://archive.org/details/zx_Galaxians_1982_Artic_Computing_16K
Or by listening to the soothing tape loading screeches of Manic Miner? 🔊 😱
Voyager 1 is sending data again. Not quite there yet, but an impressive feat. 👏
"During the coming weeks, the team will relocate and adjust the other affected portions of the FDS software. These include the portions that will start returning science data."
Voyager 1 is 157x farther away from the Sun than we are, or 4.5x farther away than Pluto is. This is about how much more exciting this is when compared to anything coming out of the tech industry.
The arcade version of Zero Wing was released in 1989. Most people probably never heard of it, or don't remember it.
The Mega Drive version was released in 1991 in Japan and Europe. It isn't famous either.
The broken english in the european release is famous, though. Or was, for a while at the turn of the century some 8 years later, when the "all your base are belong to us" meme was everywhere.
Played it for the first time today, for great justice. It's nice, actually.
With AI able to play text adventures, we get closer and closer to a world where AI gets to do all the fun things, while humans get all the menial work.
Where's my self-drinking beer?
Carlos Rodrigues boosted
The typical VC podcast
Zilog Z80, 1976 – 2024.
https://www.mouser.com/PCN/Littelfuse_PCN_Z84C00.pdf
Over its 48 year life, the Z80 found its way into inumerable devices.
It's perhaps most famous for being the CPU used in the ZX Spectrum, but could also be found as a sound co-processor in the Sega Mega Drive and SNK's Neo Geo arcade boards, among others.
I remember finding one inside my first HP inkjet printer back in the late 90's, and my parent's Sony Trinitron CRT, handling the on-screen menus (and teletext).
R.I.P. 💀
Carlos Rodrigues boosted
The rollout of Google Chrome 124 started yesterday, April 17, and it includes post-quantum key exchange enabled by default on desktop platforms. With that rollout, post-quantum encrypted requests have grown to over 5% of Cloudflare global TLS 1.3 request traffic.
Didn't know that Kovich in Star Trek Discovery was played by David Cronenberg.
Waiting to see a "transporter accident" episode where a fly is accidentally combined with a crew member, or a "trapped in a simulation" episode where someone builds a phaser out of half-eaten alien bones and some prosthetic teeth.
@mosseri says Threads is testing a chronological sorted search: https://www.threads.net/@mosseri/post/C5yvw9LP4j8