tkb

7 ms·

1.
by tkb 8mo ago
The children's maths/puzzle book "Nut-Crackers" (John Jaworski and Ian Stewart, 1971) had a slide rule printed at the back of the book - two strips each numbered 1-50 - to cut out and try out. The authors commented &quot
2.
by tkb 3y ago
I too had a small web site with M4 around 1999/2000. Why M4? Because I'd learned enough of it to be useful/dangerous when wrestling with Sendmail, and it seemed to do the trick (at least when the trick was simply "be eas
3.
by tkb 3y ago
Sendmail - "The Bat Book"
4.
by tkb 3y ago
Jeff Atwood had a piece in his "Coding Horror" blog about this project: https://blog.codinghorror.com/updating-the-single-most-influ... (Personally I grew up on the British early 1980s Usborne BASIC programming bo
5.
by tkb 3y ago
I still have one IP address lodged in my memory from 25+ years ago - sable, the university's key Unix server for students, on which I learned so much about Unix and the 1990s Internet. (I'm not sure if I'd faced DNS issues th
6.
by tkb 3y ago
Interesting to see here how different people discover Bruegel... I did so through Michael Frayn's entertaining "Headlong", a caper about an academic unsuited to subterfuge who thinks he's discovered a masterpiece. (Some
7.
by tkb 4y ago
The BBC Microcomputer had an "Escape" key and a potentially misleadingly named "Break" key - but "Break" was actually more like a reset key (with CTRL-Break being a "harder" reset and SHIFT-Break prom
8.
by tkb 4y ago
(Prompted by a remark from one poster here that people don't comment much on blogs much nowadays...) What are people's views on how important having comment functionality on a blog is? I have a low-readership blog published with a
9.
by tkb 4y ago
For some data on the game size (based on my implementation and analysis of a BBC BASIC four-room game "MINI" which I referenced in another comment and won't self-promotionally spam again...) The source code for MINI weighs in
10.
by tkb 4y ago
I discovered Inform 7 last year and was impressed at the sophisticated platform it provides for writing interactive fiction in semi-natural English. In the 1980s there were plenty of books about writing text adventure games (as they were mo
11.
by tkb 5y ago
I believe many of his books (at least, those which I picked up, I know he wrote many more) were collections of his Scientific American "Mathematical Games" columns. And as a bit of trivia - when Douglas Hofstadter (of Gödel Escher