notbeuller

8 ms·

61.
by notbeuller 3y ago
Not in nearly the same league, but Jim Al-Khalili is a physicist and science communicator for the bbc that I’ve really enjoyed. Far more on the “popular” end than Feynman, but his enthusiasm is infectious.
62.
by notbeuller 3y ago
Our unix (Gould GLX or something?) with dozens of terminals lacked appropriate permissions on /dev/ttyNN - so we just piped rain directly to the neighbors terminal.
63.
by notbeuller 3y ago
I don't think I've ever seen ungetc() used in production code. I appreciate the "do it yourself" thing - but in 2023 unless you're building a product for a known ascii system, you're setting yourself up for pai
64.
by notbeuller 3y ago
You joke, but this is almost reasonable. When refactoring a large codebase riddled with strncpy, strcpy and strcmp, understanding unambiguously what code does shouldn't come down to my middle aged eyes being able to parse better than
65.
by notbeuller 3y ago
I still see dot matrix printers around, usually in auto workshops where they’re printing through multi-ply copy paper and covered with decades of grease.
66.
by notbeuller 3y ago
Classic Mac was like this (as were other systems) - the toolbox started in rom, but the OS would patch out it's jump table (effectively) as needed to add new functionality or fix bugs - but since the interface and data structures were
67.
by notbeuller 3y ago
I’d been doing some retro-mac’ing the past couple days, and one thing I noticed is how impossibly “tight” the mouse cursor movement always seems to the physical input. It’s probably just a few dozen instructions from taking the interrupt to
68.
by notbeuller 3y ago
I saw a video of some sort of motocross meet (not familiar with it) and apparently the visors become completely covered with mud, so riders start the race with several clear plastic strips on the visor and they tear one layer off off as nee
69.
by notbeuller 3y ago
Todd Rundgren wrote (or produced) an Mac app in 1990 called “Flowfazer” that was intended for meditative visuals. I remember lots of “is this what computers are supposed to be for” articles at the time.
70.
by notbeuller 3y ago
I recalled that this made the rounds a while back - caused me to purchase the assets (again!) to play. Diablo 1 for Web Browsers( https://github.com/d07RiV/diabloweb ) 449 points|nsoonhui|10 months ago|109 comments
71.
by notbeuller 3y ago
Remapping the non-locking caps lock to control is a no brainer - and if you train yourself to use control-[ to get ESC, then you don’t have to leave the home row. (us keyboard - not sure how that works out in other locales, but caps lock s
72.
by notbeuller 3y ago
This comes up time to time, See discussion of Robin Sloan’s “Spring ‘83: < https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32233412 > And “Fraidycat”: < https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22545878 > I do th
73.
by notbeuller 3y ago
If I'm using curl, I'm probably also using git, ssh and wget. I think an active threat would be more likely to try to blend in (a giveaway would probably to use a user agent that declared I was using a different OS because it was
74.
by notbeuller 3y ago
During covid when WFH, I received a legitimate looking SMS message with a link, so rather than clicking it, I curl --verbose'd it (and one subsequent redirect) before seeing it was an obvious phishing / troll. The next day, my VP
75.
by notbeuller 3y ago
I really appreciate the single quote allowing for alignment: case 0b0001'0000: case 0b0101'1000: (edit, fixed formatting, but I also wanted to agree with a lower down comment asking for 0b001_0000 instead; a better choice.)
76.
by notbeuller 4y ago
I've enjoyed a few VRChat things of watching movies with a random group of mst3k like mindset - but I'm not social enough to have created any contacts, so it's hit or miss if you'll find one of those rooms with a compati
77.
by notbeuller 4y ago
I ran into this one the other day[1] - similarly amusing iOS / macOS debugging (by the guy that wrote much of the modern objc runtime) [1] http://www.sealiesoftware.com/blog/archive/2010/09/01/D
78.
by notbeuller 4y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/19970625091034/http://www.berksy...
79.
by notbeuller 4y ago
I'd like to +1 the advocates of -x c++ here. There's just no reason not to. It's like building scaffolding around a building so you can retrofit it. It doesn't need to end up like a tower of c++, but the scaffolding l
80.
by notbeuller 4y ago
There was a folklore.org[1] article about user testing and the original Mac - the OK button was originally "Do it" - but one user was particularly frustrated because he misread it as "Dolt" and thought the computer was i
81.
by notbeuller 4y ago
Randomized cutesy errors (or non errors) are even worse. I'm thinking of the Slack app here, where unhelpful errors are a constant frustration for me. I'm not your friend Slack. I click in the search bar and it says "Enter