david-given

63 ms·

1. 541.▲
   by david-given 10y ago

   Awesome --- thanks!
2. 542.▲
   by david-given 10y ago

   At some point I'd be really interested to read a writeup on Scrivener and your writing workflow.
3. 543.▲
   by david-given 10y ago

   I haven't played the game, but there's a novelisation, which is basically all the text from the game printed out. It's... very odd, but I enjoyed it. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1315984.Porta
4. 544.▲
   by david-given 10y ago

   When I was 15 I wrote a game on the BBC Micro and sent it in to one of the computer magazines of the day (this was back in 1991, and while the internet may have existed in the UK, nobody had heard of it). They rejected it (rightfully). Rece
5. 545.▲
   by david-given 10y ago

   You mean... you wrote Java 1.4 by hand ? I'm so, so sorry.
6. 546.▲
   by david-given 10y ago

   Just to clarify: this is referring to the e-ink Kindles, not the Kindle Fire Android tablets. The post could definitely be clearer. All the e-ink Kindles have basically the same architecture and run basically the same firmware, so the explo
7. 547.▲
   by david-given 10y ago

   I did some playing with a Kindle 3 a few years back --- I was writing programs that integrated into the native UI. I built an app which was a Javascript interpreter bolted onto a VT52 terminal emulator. You could type in programs and run th
8. 548.▲
   by david-given 10y ago

   Could it have been an Iridium flare? The timing sort of matches up. http://www.heavens-above.com/IridiumFlares.aspx?lat=53.1204&...
9. 549.▲
   by david-given 10y ago

   Was disappointed to find that this is not about Captain Zep, Space Detective: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFkaigGXtis
10. 550.▲
    by david-given 10y ago

    Magnetic Rag, his last piece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BweSQtoc8D0
11. 551.▲
    by david-given 10y ago

    Yes. Yes it should. ...I'd complain but I'm too busy micromanaging space potatoes.
12. 552.▲
    by david-given 10y ago

    Actually, I meant to say that it wasn't focus grouped, but tyoped. Original post edited --- ta.
13. 553.▲
    by david-given 10y ago

    Well, you can't go wrong with Oliver Postgate, who I now notice made nearly half of the programs in my (completely randomly selected) list... Also I appear to have remembered a fairly small selection of the 'children's televi
14. 554.▲
    by david-given 10y ago

    In Britain, the nihilistic Looney Tunes cartoons like Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry and (above all else) Roadrunner were vastly more popular than anything by Disney. In fact, I don't think I've even seen a single Mickey Mouse cartoo
15. 555.▲
    by david-given 10y ago

    Go look up some old British children's television. It was made in an era when... um... let's just say that it wasn't focus grouped. Chorlton and the Wheelies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6Ng7VMqet0 Noggi
16. 556.▲
    by david-given 10y ago

    Update: here's a 32" epaper monitor! https://www.visionect.com/development_kits Greyscale: $3600. Colour: $4700. There's a 13" model at a mere $999, but who wants that? Slightly more realistically, there
17. 557.▲
    by david-given 10y ago

    You can get refresh on a Kindle screen down to under 100ms if you want plain black and white. You only get the ludicrous refresh times if you want greyscale --- I believe they do some kind of dithering over time to achieve that. Back in the
18. 558.▲
    by david-given 10y ago

    I'm a big fan of the MSP430, which is the only ultra-low-end microcontroller that's not Harvard architecture. That is, code and RAM live in the same address space, which lets you load code at runtime without needing to fiddle abou
19. 559.▲
    by david-given 10y ago

    Sure. Also, K&R C tended to target platforms with really simple ABIs, where parameters were always passed on the stack and everything was a machine word; so you could get away with this kind of thing. K&R C actually has a minimalist
20. 560.▲
    by david-given 10y ago

    I live in Zürich. The joke here is that if you left a pile of money on the pavement in the city centre, it would stay there for a week and then you'd be fined for littering. People here are basically honest. There aren't any turns
21. 561.▲
    by david-given 10y ago

    Incidentally, the codebase I'm looking at right now contains gems like this: /*VARARGS2*/ int margin_printf (fp, a, b, c, d, e, f, g) FILE *fp; char *a; long b, c, d, e, f, g; { ind_printf (0
22. 562.▲
    by david-given 10y ago

    ...I once wrote a program to summon demons. It didn't work, mind. But I was really proud of my doubly-linked-list pentacle, each node of which contained a pointer to the summoning point in the centre. I thought that was really elegant.
23. 563.▲
    by david-given 10y ago

    Whole thing's on Youtube. Currently three tracks in and it's great so far.
24. 564.▲
    by david-given 10y ago

    The BBC Micro, one of the most popular 8-bit micros in the UK, contained a teletext decoder chip, the Mullard SAA5050. (There was an addon available that would let you display Ceefax pages displayed over the air with it; for a while they ev
25. 565.▲
    by david-given 10y ago

    If you want to see the true horror of MHEG programming, here's the source for a simple space invaders game in it: http://digvid.info/mheg5/invade.php
26. 566.▲
    by david-given 10y ago

    Wow, thanks! I've been using the SwissMobility maps, which is mostly using the same data, but this is way more slick (and faster). Check out the embedding options! That's really cool. Now, if only they had a mobile app...
27. 567.▲
    by david-given 10y ago

    Bing's geoblocked! You don't get the OS goodness unless you're inside the UK... streetmap.co.uk works everywhere, though, if you can stand the old-school interface: http://streetmap.co.uk/map.srf?x=171500&
28. 568.▲
    by david-given 10y ago

    Town is always London in this context.
29. 569.▲
    by david-given 10y ago

    Search this for 'Town': http://www.gutenberg.ca/ebooks/sayers-busman/sayers-busman-0...
30. 570.▲
    by david-given 10y ago

    Go read any of Dorothy Sayer's Peter Wimsey novels --- not only are they excellent, but they're an interesting insight into upper-class cultureof the 1920s. The main character says this a lot.