Three easy pieces

I’m back from vacation – World Boardgaming Championships, where this year I earned laurels in Ticket To Ride and Terra Mystica.. Catching up on some releases I needed to do: * Open Adventure 1.3: Only minor bugfixes in this one, it’s pretty stable now. We gave 100% coverage in the test suite now, an achievement… Continue reading Three easy pieces

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Managing modafinil

For the last year or so I have been deliberately experimenting with a psychoactive, nootropic drug. You have to know me personally (much better than most of my blog audience does) to realize what a surprising admission this is. I’ve been a non-smoking teetotaller since I was old enough to form the decision. I went… Continue reading Managing modafinil

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Open Adventure ships

Colossal Cave Adventure, that venerable classic, is back and better than ever! The page for downloads is here. The game is fully playable. It would be astonishing if it were otherwise, since it has been stable since 1995. One minor cosmetic change a lot of people used to the non-mainline variants will appreciate is that… Continue reading Open Adventure ships

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The wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald: the *science* version

My last G+ post reported this: Something out there kills about one oceangoing ship a week. It is probably freakishly large waves – well outside the ranges predicted by simple modeling of fluid dynamics and used to set required force-tolerance levels in ship design. Turns out these can be produced by nonlinear interactions in which… Continue reading The wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald: the *science* version

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From molly-guard to moggy-guard

In ancient lore, a molly-guard was a shield to prevent tripping of some Big Red Switch by clumsy or ignorant hands. Originally used of the plexiglass covers improvised for the BRS on an IBM 4341 after a programmer’s toddler daughter (named Molly) frobbed it twice in one day The Great Beast of Malvern, the computer… Continue reading From molly-guard to moggy-guard

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Four modes of creole formation

A ‘pidgin’ is a language formed by contact between speakers of different languages. A ‘creole’ is what happens when a pidgin becomes a birth language for children raised where a pidgin is spoken. Pidgins are simple languages, stripped to the running gears, Often creoles re-complexify in later generations, retaining grammar mostly from one parent language… Continue reading Four modes of creole formation

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Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.10

And the latest revision: Things Every Hacker Once Knew. This time: The Break key. uuencode/uudecode. Why older Internet protocols only assume a 7-bit link. The original meanings of SO/SI. WRU and station ID on teletypes. BITNET and other pre-Internets. There is one respect in which working on this is changing my historical perspective. The section… Continue reading Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.10

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Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.8

Heritage games. The legacy of all-uppercase terminals. Where README came from. What “core” is. The ARPANET. Monitoring your computer with a radio. And more… Things Every Hacker Once Knew The response to this document has been nothing short of astonishing. More than half of my non-spam mail over the last three weeks has been people… Continue reading Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.8

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Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.6

The newest version is here. I think it’s stabilizing. The rate of comments and submissions has been dropping. Changelog: How VDTs explain some heritage programs, and how bitmapped displays eventually obsolesced them. Explain why the ADM-3 was called “dumb” even though it was smart. There’s also a mention of RS-323 on network gear. Still nothing… Continue reading Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.6

Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.4

New version 1.4 at: http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/things-every-hacker-once-knew/ New content in this one is an expanded section about outboard modems, their descendants in today’s technology, and the curious survival of the Hayes AT command set. I had actually received a couple of previous requests to add material on the Hayes AT convention, but rejected them on the grounds… Continue reading Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.4

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