CliffStoll

9 ms·

91.
by CliffStoll 3y ago
Wow - haven’t written Forth in almost 40 years. Worked great for real-time control at observatories;
92.
by CliffStoll 3y ago
A decade ago, I taught physics to some high school students; they were amazed by the old CRT Tektronix oscilloscope. "So many knobs and controls!" "Does it only show green?" "Can it show pictures from the web?&quo
93.
by CliffStoll 3y ago
I've not followed the German hackers who I tracked. A couple years ago, I heard that one or two of them were active in the Chaos Computer Club, at least they showed up to a meeting and described what had happened to them. Every now an
94.
by CliffStoll 3y ago
Hmmm: I know that phrase all too well! But where was I associated with it? Whoever you are, I suspect we met at one of these places: A whiteboard at Newfield Wireless around 2015 (amongst LTE geolocation wizards)? Space Telescope Science
95.
by CliffStoll 3y ago
My smiles back to you ... in 1964, I coded our high school's IBM-1620, to solve a pythagorean triangle. Yep: punch-cards, assembler, and a very finicky Selectric. The computer couldn't even add (you had to load arithmetic tables
96.
by CliffStoll 3y ago
Alas, but I too have forgotten ( though I do remember Kepler’s; I purchased the Oxford world atlas there, and all their employees signed it. )
97.
by CliffStoll 3y ago
Genus-1 earlobes !
98.
by CliffStoll 3y ago
Worth mentioning here: my website, kleinbottle.com is hosted on a raspberry pi at my home. Cloudflare does a great job of keeping its content available while reducing bandwidth to my place. FoxyCart handles all the secure e-commerce stuf
99.
by CliffStoll 3y ago
Where yesterday’s tomorrow is here today!
100.
by CliffStoll 3y ago
Hmmm: Thank you, Complex Lamda! Assuming they’re paperbacks, you’ve contributed the munificent sum of 24 cents to my kids’ tuition and/or bail fund. Yep, royalties generate about six cents a copy.
101.
by CliffStoll 3y ago
Oh Man of DOS, you don’t know the half of it: that Nova was filmed (yup, 16mm Kodachrome) maybe a year after I quit chasing those hackers. So it was not only fresh in my mind, but the technology was properly state of the 1988 art: 9 track
102.
by CliffStoll 3y ago
As you realize, I run this zero-volume business for fun: somehow it attracts crazies and quirkies whose sense of humor maps onto mine.
103.
by CliffStoll 3y ago
Gorkish, now imagine receiving furrowed brows and the hairy eyeball whenever you tell someone what you do. “What do you mean, it doesn’t have any use?” And then I try to say that lots of things don’t have any use: a sunset, for instance
104.
by CliffStoll 3y ago
Yes, oh wizard of gauntlets, I pretty much have an open door policy (well the lock doesn’t work very well). Visitors stop by and I’m delighted to learn about everything from homotopy theory (thanks Aaron) to lizards need for ultraviolet li
105.
by CliffStoll 3y ago
Still true. Someday I’ll modernize it, but right now there’s too many other cool things to do.
106.
by CliffStoll 3y ago
A legend in his own bathtime.
107.
by CliffStoll 3y ago
Keeping a logbook is a part of experimental physics. In grad school, I learned "If you don't write it down, it didn't happen." And a diary is easy and fun - just a sentence or two every day (even on a wall cale
108.
by CliffStoll 3y ago
3Blue1Brown makes terrific videos -- he's great at introducing a challenging subject and then making each step clear and accessible. Splendid work!
109.
by CliffStoll 3y ago
Somehow wound up installing from https://github.com/mozilla-Ocho/llamafile Don't ask me how I wound up there - I apparently followed links from this HN article.
110.
by CliffStoll 3y ago
OK - I followed instructions; installed on Mac Studio into /usr/local/bin I'm now looking at llama.cpp in Safari browser. Click on Reset all to default, choose Chat. Go down to Say Something. I enter "Berkeley we
111.
by CliffStoll 3y ago
I've made several pseudospheres from glass ... using a glass lathe and an appropriate jig and 2-D pattern. Much fun!
112.
by CliffStoll 3y ago
Fifty-five year old true story: I was dating a woman in Buffalo; we're both native speakers. She tells me to meet her at a place on "Gothee" Street, over in the Lovejoy district. I bike over to the east side of town, and se
113.
by CliffStoll 3y ago
Where's the Orange Glow?
114.
by CliffStoll 3y ago
Agreement. As a ham radio operator and sometimes programmer; I found the GitHub documentation utterly opaque.
115.
by CliffStoll 3y ago
Thanks to you for brightening my afternoon -- oh, you brought a smile to my face. My happy wishes to you and your family! =Cliff
116.
by CliffStoll 3y ago
Please purchase 30,000 copies of the paperback -- at a nickel royalty per book, it'll help with my kids' tuition this month.
117.
by CliffStoll 3y ago
My smiles to you Mercer: it's fun to look back over my shoulder to a slowly vanishing time, when the Arpanet backbone ran at 4800 baud and a 1 megabyte Unix workstation was hot stuff...
118.
by CliffStoll 3y ago
Uh, yes, h0p3 ... I didn't exactly start on that adventure thinking I'd write a book. Chasing after those hackers was orthogonal to my work in astronomy and the Keck telescope.
119.
by CliffStoll 3y ago
Oh, how I wish I had your scripts (and insights!) when I was analyzing Unix logs in 1986, looking for the footprints of an intruder...
120.
by CliffStoll 3y ago
Terrific book: The Man Who Stole Portugal by Murray Bloom. Tells the details and how he did it. Fun read!

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