gfaure

7 ms·

61.
by gfaure 5y ago
The appearance of the pages -- filling all empty space -- reminds me of the style known as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horror_vacui .
62.
by gfaure 5y ago
eBay leaves the return policies to the individual sellers, so some sellers absorb the cost of returns, some require you to pay postage, and some don't accept returns at all. Naturally some of this probably gets absorbed into the listin
63.
by gfaure 5y ago
@kens: Thanks, long time follower of your work. Are you familiar with the inner workings of the HP Voyager (11-C, 12-C, ..., 16-C) series, and if so, is a teardown/analysis of these something that you'd be wanting to do?
64.
by gfaure 5y ago
The price of Curtas seems to have gone up over the past 18 months. eBay has plenty of listings for Curta I and IIs, but you'd have to shell out more than US$1000 for one, unless the unit was in bad condition.
65.
by gfaure 5y ago
I love the artist-provided annotations when they're available, but they really need to take a good look at the low quality of the vast majority of their user-generated content. It doesn't help that so much of it is pure speculatio
66.
by gfaure 5y ago
I was lucky enough to see this talk in person at the Vintage Computer Festival West this year. One of the absolute highlights (timestamp https://youtu.be/_1jXExwse08?t=1903 ) was the incredible work on a custom disk loader
67.
by gfaure 5y ago
I assume one reason Apple has made it more challenging to extract the dictionary resources is in order to satisfy licensing constraints with the dictionary authors. I wonder if they'd block an app like this through the App Store submis
68.
by gfaure 5y ago
In the Russia case, not their full name -- notice that the patronymic is different for each of the real candidate and the two fake candidates.
69.
by gfaure 5y ago
English does use clicks, as paralinguistic sounds. The first paragraph of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_consonant has a couple of examples.
70.
by gfaure 5y ago
Correct, but it was despite Kumon, not because of it.
71.
by gfaure 5y ago
If the article is accurate, one Japanese equivalent of this, known as Kumon, is almost its polar opposite -- remembering my own experiences with it as a kid, it was very much about rote memorisation and doing the same sheet of arithmetic as
72.
by gfaure 5y ago
The composer of the Mario Paint soundtrack, Kazumi Totaka, is still at Nintendo and most recently did the music for Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020).
73.
by gfaure 5y ago
Steve Mould did an explainer on the pollination cycle of figs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6jJzOc9gaE Despite all this, I have no plans to alter my fig consumption at this time.
74.
by gfaure 5y ago
There's a Tom Scott video about this with some further academic references: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TDIAObsqcs Bouba/kiki is most likely a specific instance of the more general notion of https:/&#x2
75.
by gfaure 5y ago
It was new to me too, but "BOLO" turns out to be US police jargon for "be on the lookout".
76.
by gfaure 5y ago
Many people I know have bought more games on Steam than they could ever play (a behaviour encouraged by seasonal Steam sales). This strikes me as a great chance for people to discover and play titles that have sat in their collections for y
77.
by gfaure 5y ago
I take a little pleasure in the idea that our kids might discover some program I wrote when I was younger, and in doing so, maybe better understand the mind that made it.
78.
by gfaure 5y ago
This combination is what Germans call a Radler, which translates to "cyclist": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shandy#Radler
79.
by gfaure 5y ago
Annoyingly, itertools is one of those packages in the Python standard library with wordsruntogether-named functions, so it's really known as itertools.groupby instead.
80.
by gfaure 5y ago
Whereabouts in RWC? I checked along the rail route and couldn't find any crossing that wasn't grade-separated.
81.
by gfaure 5y ago
There's a beautiful vector typeface produced from a calligrapher's hand in the SGI collection called Inja Ink: http://graficaobscura.com/sgitype/page014.html The calligrapher who drew the letterforms is still
82.
by gfaure 5y ago
Similarly, in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, a young squire is described as conducting himself "in hope to stonden in his lady grace" (in the hopes of standing in his lady's grace). Some take this to be a bawdy anatomi
83.
by gfaure 5y ago
Bravery doesn't enter into it -- I used the word because as linguists, we want to refer pragmatically to "whatever Chinese varieties actually are", rather than entering into endless debates about what is a language and what i
84.
by gfaure 5y ago
No: 尸, the radical of 尻 doesn't mean "flag" -- it means "corpse". Notice that many of the characters with the 尸 radical refer to defilement, excrement or death.
85.
by gfaure 5y ago
The last point, about Ancient Greek read in the "modern" pronunciation (with Φ, Χ, Θ read as fricatives rather than aspirated stops) reminds me of how Mandarin, which is how Chinese poetry is often read nowadays, is not great for
86.
by gfaure 5y ago
Wow, I'm honoured to hear from someone who loves these old calculating devices as much as I do! I have a Curta II and a number of the HP Voyager calculators from the 80s (11C, 15C, 16C), but the one that takes the pride of place in my
87.
by gfaure 5y ago
He's also a connoisseur and collector of slide rules and the Curta mechanical calculator! Here's a video of him describing how the Curta performs arithmetic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OynMJB-2J1o — as well a
88.
by gfaure 5y ago
near was the author of higan ( https://higan.dev ), a SNES emulator which is at the cutting edge of accuracy and emulation research. If you have even touched in passing the field of Nintendo console emulation, it's quite like
89.
by gfaure 5y ago
The reason why the Latin prefix for "twice" is "bi-", while the Latin word for two is "duo", is exactly the same sound change (dw -> b) that turned archaic Latin "duenos" into "bonus" in
90.
by gfaure 5y ago
Even if they didn't draw specifically for CRT output, I imagine the process to have been iterative -- if something ended up looking bad on end-user output devices, they would make tweaks until the product looked good enough on CRTs. Or

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