Michel Vuijlsteke's weblog

Tales of Drudgery & Boredom.

  • Links van 14 tot 18 december 2025

    The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure – Creatures of Thought

    Author’s note: I originally intended for this post to cover adventure games, computer role-playing games, wargames and other simulations, a brief look at the home video game market, and finally the rise of hybrids that fused home video game systems with personal computers. In the grand scheme of the story about personal computers that I am trying to tell, it probably does not make sense to lavish nearly 7,000 words on early adventure games alone, but it’s a topic of personal interest to me and the tale grew in the telling.

    interactive fiction

    Typeframe

    The Typeframe PX-88 is an integrated system that has been perfectly arranged to guarantee a superior outcome for the operator. Leave it to Typeframe to integrate these critical elements into one commanding machine.

    diy, computer

    The Secret Life Of Moles: What They’re Really Up To Underground – The Nature Network

    While you’re walking above ground, completely unaware, an entire civilisation of furry engineers is constructing elaborate tunnel networks beneath your feet. Moles live in a hidden world that’s far more complex and fascinating than most people realise. Here’s what they’re up to while we’re not paying attention (or aren’t even aware they’re there!).

    animalds, moles

    Google Releases its New Google Sans Flex Font as Open Source – OMG! Ubuntu

    Google has made its ‘next generation brand typeface’, Google Sans Flex, available for download — under an open source license, which is welcome news. A modern sans serif font purpose-designed for use on screens and OSes, Google Sans Flex is a ground-up, multi-axis rebuild of the proprietary Google Sans font, by typographer David Berlow (of Font Bureau fame).

    google, free, font

    Unscii – a bitmapped Unicode font for blocky graphics

    Unscii is a set of bitmapped Unicode fonts based on classic system fonts. Unscii attempts to support character cell art well while also being suitable for terminal and programming use.

    unicode, font, bitmap

    AI agents are starting to eat SaaS – Martin Alderson

    The other, potentially more impactful, shift I'm starting to see is people really questioning renewal quotes from larger "enterprise" SaaS companies. While this is very early, I believe this is a really important emerging behaviour. I've seen a few examples now where SaaS vendor X sends through their usual annual double-digit % increase in price, and now teams are starting to ask "do we actually need to pay this, or could we just build what we need ourselves?". A year ago that would be a hypothetical question at best with a quick 'no' conclusion. Now it's a real option people are putting real effort into thinking through.

    AI, SaaS

    "I was forced to use AI until the day I was laid off." Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry

    “AI didn’t quite kill my current job, but it does mean that most of my job is now training AI to do a job I would have previously trained humans to do,” he told me. “It certainly killed the job I used to have, which I used to climb into my current role.” He was concerned for himself, as well as for his more junior peers. As he told me, “I have no idea how entry-level developers, support agents, or copywriters are supposed to become senior devs, support managers, or marketers when the experience required to ascend is no longer available.” When we checked back in with Jacques six months later, his company had laid him off. “I was actually let go the week before Thanksgiving now that the AI was good enough,” he wrote.

    copywriting, AI

    Chafa: Terminal Graphics for the 21st Century

    The premier UX of the 21st century just got a little better: With chafa, you can now view very, very reasonable approximations of pictures and animations in the comfort of your favorite terminal emulator. The power of ANSI X3.64 compels you!

    terminal

    The best science images of 2025 — Nature’s picks

    The Sun’s fiery surface, a tattooed tardigrade, rare red lightning and more — prachtige foto's, ook dit jaar weer.

    photography, science

    Coding Agents & Complexity Budgets | Lee Robinson

    I migrated cursor.com from a CMS to raw code and Markdown. I had estimated it would take a few weeks, but was able to finish the migration in three days with $260 in tokens and hundreds of agents.

    cms, AI, vibe coding

    “You should never build a CMS” | Sanity

    Lee Robinson migrated cursor.com off Sanity. He made good points. Here's what he missed.

    cms, headless

    A brief history of Times New Roman | Typography for Lawyers

    Fame has a dark side. When Times New Ro­man ap­pears in a book, doc­u­ment, or ad­ver­tise­ment, it con­notes ap­a­thy. It says, “I sub­mit­ted to the font of least re­sis­tance.” Times New Ro­man is not a font choice so much as the ab­sence of a font choice, like the black­ness of deep space is not a color. To look at Times New Ro­man is to gaze into the void.

    history, typography

    MODALZ MODALZ MODALZ

    It doesn’t have to be a modal! Have you considered using the following?

    ux, modal

    Ravaan – Art Reimagined

    Reimagine classical and contemporary masterpieces transformed through AI.

    AI, slop

    The Weird Way The 404 Media Zine Was Built

    Lessons on laying out the 404 Media zine using a relatively weird setup—on Linux, using Affinity, with the help of the Windows translation layer WINE.

    layout, Affinity, DTP

    Why SETI Relies On Us Accepting Our Mediocrity

    Fermi’s paradox is not only downplayed and ignored by a large part of the scientific community, but also mocked and even censured. Distinguished SETI researchers, like Frank Drake or Seth Shostak, claim in their memoirs that they had not heard about Fermi’s paradox until very recently and that it should not be taken seriously. Astrobiology, one of the premier journals in the field, has recently instituted a policy of not considering manuscripts dealing with Fermi’s paradox, including even short communications and book reviews. There are many scientists who, like the British astronomer John Gribbin, are happy to proclaim that there is no paradox whatsoever, since “we are alone, and we had better get used to it.” In principle there may be several reasons for this attitude. But in my opinion one underlies all of them: We humans still think we’re special.

    aliens, seti

    Paraquat, a pesticide sprayed on U.S. farms, blamed for Parkinson’s in lawsuit – mlive.com

    Paraquat, a heavily regulated weed killer, is banned in more than 70 countries, but still legal in the United States. It's the subject of thousands of lawsuits claiming it’s linked to Parkinson’s disease.

    parkinson's, pesticides

    Were classical statues painted horribly? – Works in Progress Magazine

    It is often suggested that modern viewers dislike painted reconstructions of Greek and Roman statues because our taste differs from that of the ancients. This essay proposes an alternative explanation.

    history, art

    ⁂

  • Het is zover

    Ik weet niet meer welke dag van de week het is, en ik weet niet wat eerst gedaan en dus niet wat gedaan tout court.

    Boeken lezen, dingen kijken, dingen maken, opkuisen: keuzestres en dus geen keuzes maar gewoon in mijn bed blijven liggen heel de dag.

    Ook een optie, natuurlijk.

    ⁂

  • Bedrukt

    Het was vandaag teambuilding, hoezee!

    We zijn naar het Letterkabinet gegaan en we hebben er met hun blokkendoos allemaal affiches gemaakt. Kijk, ’t is een affiche van het Moose Dept. in allemaal blokjes:

    En met alleen maar blauwe en gele inkt voorhanden, zag het er zo uit:

    En aangezien ik al tekst had, dacht ik, ik maak er ook een Moosepatroontje bij:

    Ik heb geen foto genomen van het resultaat, maar ’t is iets in deze zin:

    Het drukwerk ligt nu nog te drogen; maandag mag ik er omgaan. Ik heb in totaal denk ik vier dingen gemaakt, waaronder ook ook, ge weet nooit dat we niet te leeg zijn om er dit jaar voor het eerst in gelijk ooit aan mee te doen, een nieuwjaarskaartje.

    En nu ga ik afswitchen en enorm hard proberen om niéts te doen, en mezelf ook niet op te leggen om dingen te doen. ’t Zal niet eenvoudig zijn.

    ⁂

  • Ongemakkelijk

    Ik heb vakantie, officieel, maar ik ben vandaag toch naar het werk getogen: er was iemand in België die voor ons werkt die normaal niet eens in de buurt van onze tijdzone zit, en het zou toch wat raar zijn als ik dan niet minstens eens goeiendag kwam zeggen.

    Vraag mij niet waarom, maar ik was wat ongemakkelijk in de aanloop ernaar en de afloop erna. Vorige week ook al, met het jaarlijkse Kerstfeest, dat ook tijdens een voor-mij-vakantiedag gebeurde: ongemakkelijk vóór en na.

    Zo’n gevoel van mijn keel is dichtgeknepen en mijn maag in een knoop, om eigenlijk geen aantoonbare reden.

    Morgen is écht de laatste dag dat ik tijdens mijn vakantie iets van werk doe: teambuilding. Met allemaal mensen die ik echt wel graag zie, maar ook daar lig ik nu al een tijd ambetant van te zijn.

    Het moet zijn dat ik de vakantie écht wel nodig heb. Eens een heel jaar, zou dat iets zijn? Of eens, kweetniet, een heel pensioen of zo?

    ⁂

  • Boids

    Dit is het klassieke beeld van boids in 3D:

    Ik dacht: hoe moeilijk zou het zijn om dat na te (laten) maken, met wat parameters om ermee te kunnen spelen?

    Niet zeer moeilijk, zo bleek.

    Het is dat ik er niet veel tijd aan wil spenderen, maar er zijn zoveel dingen die daarmee zouden kunnen gedaan worden. 🙂

    ⁂

  • Links van 7 tot 13 december 2025

    rePalm – Dmitry.GR

    Pixter was quite popular, as far as kids' toys go, in USA in the early 2000s. A friend brought it to my attention a year ago as a potential rePalm target. The screen resolution was right and looking inside a "Pixter Color" showed an ARM SoC – a Sharp LH75411. The device had sound (games made noises), and touch panel was resistive. In theory – a viable rePalm target indeed.

    emulation, Palm

    Colors of Growth by Lars Boerner, Tim Reinicke, Samad Sarferaz, Battista Severgnini :: SSRN

    We develop a novel approach to measuring long-run economic growth by exploiting systematic variation in the use of color in European paintings. Drawing inspiration from the literature on nighttime lights as a proxy for income, we extract hue, saturation, and brightness from millions of pixels to construct annual indices for Great Britain, Holland, France, Italy, and Germany between 1600 and 1820. These indices track broad trends in existing GDP reconstructions while revealing higherfrequency fluctuations-such as those associated with wars, political instability, and climatic shocks-that traditional series smooth over. Our findings demonstrate that light, decomposed into color and brightness components, provides a credible and independent source of information on early modern economic activity.

    art, colour, economy, painting, histoy

    Toasts | Primer

    GitHub no longer uses toasts because of their accessibility and usability issues. Toasts pose significant accessibility concerns and are not recommended for use.

    ui, ux, github, toasts

    Google Confirms Android Attacks—No Fix For Most Samsung Users

    Android is under attack. Google issued a warning on Dec.1 along with what is essentially an emergency update. This was rushed out to all Pixel users. But for most Samsung users, these fixes are not yet available, despite attacks now underway.

    android, samsung

    Is This The GREATEST In-Camera Effect of ALL TIME?

    Een bijzonder zeer fijne aflevering van Corridor Crew, over Foreced Perspective. Emotioneel ook, zowaar.

    sfx, specialeffects, Lord of the Rings, VFX, perspective

    December 2025 – News archive – Jorvik Systems

    It has now been 30 years since WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness was released. After the great response to Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, released in November 1994, Blizzard began working on Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness. Development stared in the first months of 1995, and the game was released in North America and Australia on December 9, 1995. While WarCraft: Orcs and Humans had laid the foundations of the series — arguably even for the RTS genre at a whole — it was really WarCraft II that took things to new heights. More units could be selected at once, the player could right-click to issue commands, naval and aerial combat was introduced, and buildings and units could be upgraded. The graphics were more vivid and visually appealing, and features like the Fog of War was introduced, where you could only see in the vicinity of your own units — unlike in the first game, where you could indefinitely see any area you had previously visited, you now had to continuously scout the map.

    history, games, warcraft

    Jack The Ripper: History's Darkest Mystery

    Tom en Dominic tonen nog maar eens waarom ze met recht en rede beste podcast van 2025 werden. "Was Jack the Ripper the first serial killer of all time? Who was his first victim, and why was the murder so shocking? And, what did the Ripper phenomenon reveal about the anxieties of Victorian London?"

    history, podcast, jack the ripper

    The Last Lecture: Bart Ehrman's Retirement Lecture from UNC

    In cauda venenum, wat deze lezing betreft. <em>After more than 40 years in the classroom, including 37 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Dr. Bart Ehrman is retiring from UNC. To mark this milestone, Bart delivered his final public lecture at UNC on December 7th, 2025, sharing his most cherished memories and profound lessons from his life as a scholar and teacher.</em>

    bible, Bart Ehrman, lecture

    Size of Life

    Explore the scale of living things, from an amoeba to a blue whale.

    visualisation, biology

    Decoding Armenia's 6,000-Year-Old Dragon Stones: An Ancient Water Cult

    Archeologists say they have finally cracked the 6,000-year-old mystery of Armenia’s “dragon stones" – massive carved monoliths scattered across high-altitude volcanic slopes and pastures where no ancient settlements ever existed. New research from Yerevan State University (YSU) and the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography is the first large-scale statistical and spatial analysis of 115 known dragon stones – or vishaps – to argue that these monuments were not markers of territory or myth, but deliberately placed totems of an early “water cult” whose rituals were tied to melting snow streams, springs and the seasonal movement of herding groups through the mountains.

    archeology, Armenia, cult

    Patterns.dev

    Patterns.dev is a free online resource on design, rendering, and performance patterns for building powerful web apps with vanilla JavaScript or modern frameworks.

    development, patterns

    Israeli Ban on Media Entering Gaza Remains, as Legal Challenge Is Delayed – The New York Times

    Nearly two months into the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, Israel continues to bar journalists from freely entering the Gaza Strip to report, despite a longstanding petition brought by journalists seeking access to the territory. On Sunday, the Israeli Supreme Court gave the government an extension in responding to the petition, the ninth such delay since the case was filed in September 2024.

    journalism, israel

    String Theory Inspires a Brilliant, Baffling New Math Proof | Quanta Magazine

    Years ago, an audacious Fields medalist outlined a sweeping program that, he claimed, could be used to resolve a major problem in algebraic geometry. Other mathematicians had their doubts. Now he says he has a proof.

    mathematics, string theory

    Revisiting the Ediacaran Enigma

    The radiation of animals across the Ediacaran-Cambrian transition is one of the most transformational events in Earth history, radically changing Earth’s surface environments. However, while fossils from the Cambrian are readily recognised as belonging to extant groups, those from the late Ediacaran Period show distinctive forms with no counterparts among living species. Although these Ediacaran fossils are often held to represent the antecedents to modern animal groups, their strange anatomies have meant that, for the most part, they have been eschewed from the debate and their unique insight left unrealised. My work combines novel morphogenetic data and phylogenetic systematic studies to show that these unique fossils are animals to the exclusion of alternatives and likely occupy a critical position in the tree of animal life. This conclusion enables me to integrate Ediacaran macrofossils into debates concerning the ancestors of major animal lineages and the mode of early animal evolution.

    paleontology, biology, fossils, cambrian

    Goodbye Microservices | Twilio

    Microservices is a service-oriented software architecture in which server-side applications are constructed by combining many single-purpose, low-footprint network services. The touted benefits are improved modularity, reduced testing burden, better functional composition, environmental isolation, and development team autonomy. The opposite is a Monolithic architecture, where a large amount of functionality lives in a single service which is tested, deployed, and scaled as a single unit. This post is the story of how we took a step back and embraced an approach that aligned well with our product requirements and needs of the team.

    architecture, ict

    Recovering Anthony Bourdain’s (really) lost Li.st’s

    Loved reading through GReg TeChnoLogY Anthony Bourdain’s Lost Li.st’s and seeing the list of lost Anthony Bourdain li.st’s made me think on whether at least some of them we can recover. Having worked in security and crawling space for majority of my career—I don’t have the access nor permission to use the proprietary storages—I thought we might be able to find something from publicly available crawl archives. All of the code and examples lead to the source git repository.

    linkrot, internet archive

    Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? | Ubuntu Summit 25.10

    This talk focuses on that evil little term “UX/UI,” which is responsible for so much confusion and tension in open-source projects. Not only does it unnecessarily pit programmers against designers, but it also limits our vision of what we could be doing. In this talk, Scott Jenson gives examples of how focusing on UX — instead of UI — frees us to think bigger. This is especially true for the desktop, where the user experience has so much potential to grow well beyond its current interaction models. The desktop UX is certainly not dead, and this talk suggests some future directions we could take.

    desktop, ux

    Dynamicland front shelf

    Incubating a humane dynamic medium.

    research, ux

    ⁂

  • Pluribus

    Wat een fantastisch concept, Pluribus. En wat een fantastische episode deze week — het was zowaar Fly van concept, achtig.

    De commenaren op aflevering 7 zijn ook helemaal wat de commentaren op Fly waren: traag, onbekijkbaar, saai.

    Ik ben ongelooflijk content dat dit soort series en dit soort afleveringen nog gemaakt worden.

    ⁂

  • Carcassonne

    Ben ik anderhalf uur of meer bezig geweest om de kaartjes van Carcassonne pixel voor pixel te tekenen in afbeeldingen van 15×15 pixels en peetjes in tegels van 8×8? Euh, misschien?

    Heb ik dan een versie van Carcassonne gemaakt die zichzelf speelt en desgewenst gewoon een kaart maakt? Met eventueel meer dan één set kaartjes? Ghoja, een mens moet iéts doen met zijn vrije dagen hé.

    ⁂

  • Kerstfeest

    Het was kerstfeest van het werk — begonnen om 13u, dan allemaal spelletjes te spelen, en dan bar open en hapjes vanaf enige tijd later. Ik kan mij de exacte tijdstippen niet zo enorm goed meer herinneren, maar er waren onder meer uitstekende Thai-achtige mossels, en dat ik me de bedenking maakte dat de volgorde van drank en hapjes mogelijk ook anders had gekund wegens wel rédelijk veel cava voorhanden.

    En dan was er uitstekend eten, en dan was er muziek en babbelen, en a splendid time was had by all. 23u40 of zo weer thuis, een volslagen redelijk uur.

    Ik ben ook dingen te weten gekomen die ik eigenlijk liever niet was te weten gekomen, maar hey, zo gebeurt dat nu eenmaal soms. Starring role ook voor het polyester schapenvelleken dat ik op mijn knieën heb gelegd om niet op te branden vóór de vuurkorf.

    ⁂

  • Duizend dingen

    Vakantie is het moment om die honderd dingen te doen die in de lijst van “dan eens” stonden.

    Natuurlijk leg ik mezelf vanaf vag één van de vakantie nog eens honderd andere dingen op, en komt er dus gewoon helemaal niets van niets.

    Cue schuldgevoeld dat eigenlijk nergens voor nodig is, maar het is er wel.

    Ik zou boeken moeten uitlezen! Ik zou dingen moeten maken! Ik zou moeten dingen herorganiseren! Ik zou moeten vanalles doen!

    Ik wil ook gewoon niets doen. Ik wil eigenlijk twintig uur per dag in mijn bed liggen.

    ⁂

  • Loading…

    Ik zat nog een beetje met Elite en dus met ZX Spectrum in het achterhoofd, en ik dacht: hoe moeilijk kan het zijn om te doen alsof ik een afbeelding laad op een ZX Spectrum?

    Niet zo moeilijk dus:

    • afbeelding inladen, verkleinen naar 256×192 met eventueel zwarte banden om de juiste aspect ratio te krijgen
    • omzetten naar ZX Spectrumkleuren met een degelijke manier van ditheren (zie één van mijn vorige worpen) en dat omzetten naar .scr-formaat
    • die 6912 bytes omzetten naar een audioformaat
    • dat afspelen terwijl de gegevens uit de .scr op de geëigende manier op het scherm getoond wordt (per lijn van elke 8×8, in drie stukken, en dan de kleur erbovenop) — met de rand die bij het laden getoond werd

    Oh, en wat prutsen met WebGL om een beeldscherm na te doen.

    ⁂

  • C64 Portable

    Zot. Met 3D printers en Raspberry Pi en bijzonder veel kennis van zaken:

    Ger vraagt u af wat iemand in 1986 zou gezegd hebben als dit ineens zou verschenen zijn.

    ⁂

  • Elite: op verkenning

    Er zit een ingenieus algoritme achter de generatie van de wereld in Elite — moest ook wel, om meer dan tweeduizend planeten met naam, locatie, omschrijving, producten en prijzen te genereren op computers die bijna géén geheugen hadden.

    Het is een compleet deterministisch systeem, dat met een vast set startgetallen altijd hetzelfde genereert. Namen, bijvoorbeeld: eerst op basis van de startcode kijken of het een lange of een korte naam wordt, dan sets van twee letters kiezen uit een lijst met letterparen, en dan de startcode een beetje aanpassen voor de volgende naam. En min of meer hetzelfde voor alle andere gegevens.

    Ik ben een grote fan van Elite, al jaren.

    Ik dacht: ik maak dat eens in javascript, om het hele universum van Elite te kunnen verkennen. De relevante code van Elite is beschikbaar op ’t internet, dus zo gezegd, zo gedaan.

    ⁂

  • Links van 7 december 2025

    What is Generative UI? | tambo blog

    Generative UI is an interface that adapts in real-time to the user’s context. Their natural language input, their past interactions, system data. Instead of a fixed experience everyone must learn, the software learns to fit what each user needs in the moment.

    ui, ux, generative UI

    (4218) Ivan Sutherland Sketchpad Demo 1963 – YouTube

    This video is a TV show made about the software Ivan Sutherland developed in his 1963 thesis at MIT's Lincoln Labs, "Sketchpad, A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System", described as one of the most influential computer programs ever written. This work was seminal in Human-Computer Interaction, Graphics and Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), Computer Aided Design (CAD), and contraint/object-oriented programming. While watching this video, remember that the TX-2 computer (built circa 1958) on which the software ran was built from discrete transistors (not integrated circuits -it was room-sized) and contained just 64K of 36-bit words (~272k bytes).

    history, computers, ux, CAD

    'Nothing else looks like them': Saving Japan's exceptionally rare 'snow monsters'

    Each winter, the upper slopes of Mount Zao in northern Japan – one of the country's best-known ski areas – are transformed. Fir trees coated in thick frost and snow swell into ghostly figures known as "juhyo" or "snow monsters".

    weather, japan

    Grumpy Website

    The original Windows 95 interface is _functional_. It has a function and it executes it very well. It works for you, without trying to be clever or sophisticated. Also, it follows system conventions, which also helps you, the user.

    ui, windows, affordance

    Perl's decline was cultural

    There's been a flurry of discussion on Hacker News and other tech forums about what killed Perl. I wrote a lot of Perl in the mid 90s and subsequently worked on some of the most trafficked sites on the web in mod_perl in the early 2000s, so I have some thoughts. My take: it was mostly baked into the culture.

    history, perl

    PocketMage Is an E Ink PDA for the Modern Era – Hackster.io

    Gather ‘round kids, while Uncle Cameron tells you a story. Back in the far away times before smartphones, people had these things called PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants). They were kind of like smartphones, except they weren’t very smart and they lacked most connectivity options. But they were very popular among Business™ types. Now Ashtf is bringing the PDA back for the modern era in the form of the E Ink display-equipped PocketMage.

    PDA, e-ink

    The past was not that cute • Otherwise

    Laura Ingalls Wilder‘s Little House on the Prairie books are problematic, and also I will always love them. She wrote about the beauty of family and hard work, but she wrote them because she spent her whole life supporting disabled family members. She and her daughter beautified her “pioneer girl” history to make good books. Her daughter describes the reality:  “It took seven successive years of complete crop failure, with work, weather and sickness that wrecked [my father’s] health permanently, and interest rates of 36 percent on money borrowed to buy food, to dislodge us from that land.”

    history

    Inside the Bizarre 1978 'Star Wars Holiday Special' George Lucas Hated (Exclusive) | Woman's World

    Hamill admitted that when he first read the script, “I thought it was awful. You know, ‘Why are we doing this?’ Then I said, ‘I’m not doing this.’” It was Lucas’ phone call that convinced him otherwise—with one condition: “All right, but I’m not singing.”

    Star Wars

    NPR : Books We Love

    Mix and match the filters below and the years above to explore more than 4,000 recommendations from NPR staffers and trusted critics.

    books, toread

    UX for reversible actions: A decision framework for designing with recovery in mind – LogRocket Blog

    Reversibility is one of the strongest trust signals in UX. When users can reverse an action, they feel safe. That sense of safety changes how they interact with your product. It boosts confidence, keeps them in flow, and reduces hesitation when performing actions. When people know they can recover from mistakes, they explore more, click faster, and stay focused on their goals instead of being worried about clicking the wrong thing.

    ux, undo

    ~nkali/vision-sdk (main): note/index.md – sourcehut git

    Back in 1983, an office software giant VisiCorp released a graphical multitasking operating system for the IBM PC called VisiOn (or Visi On, or Visi-On, it was before the Internet, so anything goes). It was an "open system", so anyone could make programs for it. Well, if they owned an expensive VAX computer and were prepared to shell out $7,000 on the Software Development Kit. VisiOn was released earlier than Microsoft Windows, Digital Research GEM, or Apple Macintosh. Its COMDEX demo even predates the annoucement of Apple Lisa. But being first doesn't mean getting things right, so this VisiOn of the future did not win the market. Not a single third-party program was released for the system. No one preserved the SDK for the system. The technical documentation roughly amounts to three terse magazine articles and a single Usenet post. Heck, even the copies of the operating system itself are hard to come by. Despite its low popularity, VisiOn is historically important. It influenced Microsoft's decisions about Windows, and it is a lesson about failing. So, I thought it would be nice to recreate the SDK for it, Homebrew-style. How difficult could it be, right?!

    reverse-engineering

    Vanilla CSS is all you need

    Back in April 2024, Jason Zimdars from 37signals published a post about modern CSS patterns in Campfire. He explained how their team builds sophisticated web applications using nothing but vanilla CSS. No Sass. No PostCSS. No build tools. The post stuck with me. Over the past year and a half, 37signals has released two more products (Writebook and Fizzy) built on the same nobuild philosophy. I wanted to know if these patterns held up. Had they evolved?

    css

    PC-Man and The Spark Of Childhood Wonder

    Teenager Greg Kuperberg wrote three fast-action arcade games for the IBM-PC in 1982 and 1983 (an almost impossible of feat at the time) and then took another path. In this rare examination of his work, we look at the legacy and inspiration of this “would-be” game programming auteur, who “moved-on” while at the top of his game.

    interview, games

    'Vampire Squid From Hell' Reveals The Ancient Origins of Octopuses : ScienceAlert

    The vampire squid is a fascinating twig tenaciously hanging onto the cephalopod family tree. It's neither a squid nor an octopus (nor a vampire), but rather the last, lone remnant of an ancient lineage whose other members have long since vanished.

    evolution, squid

    Desperately seeking squircles | Figma Blog

    In a famous 1972 interview, Charles Eames answered a short sequence of fundamental questions about the nature of design. This is a story about one Figma engineer’s hunt for the perfect answer to a programming challenge.

    design, Figma

    About

    Previous is a Next computer hardware emulator. It aims to emulate a Next Cube or a Next Station with all its peripheral.

    emulation, NeXT

    Frinkiac

    Frinkiac has nearly 3 million Simpsons screencaps so get to searching for crying out glayvin!

    reference, meme, simpsons

    Hating Stranger Things During the Death Rattle of Criticism

    Een hele reeks redenen waarom ik zelfs niet ga kijken naar dit seizoen.

    tv, criticism, Stranger Things, netflix

    Physicists prove the Universe isn’t a simulation after all | ScienceDaily

    New research from UBC Okanagan mathematically demonstrates that the universe cannot be simulated. Using Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, scientists found that reality requires “non-algorithmic understanding,” something no computation can replicate. This discovery challenges the simulation hypothesis and reveals that the universe’s foundations exist beyond any algorithmic system.

    space, cosmology

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  • Verbouwingen: de laatste loodjes

    Nee, niet onze verbouwingen natuurlijk, daar blijven de laatste loodjes al jaren dezelfde lmaatste loodjes. Zelfs nu we al de binnendeuren gekocht hebben, geraken ze nog niet geïnstalleer: voor één van de deuren moet er nog een deuropening rechtgetrokken worden, en de aannemer zegt nu al een tijd dat hij zeer binnenkort langskomt.

    ’t Zijn de laatste loodjes in het huis waar Zelie en Anna gaan wonen: de vloeren liggen er , de electriciteit en het water is gedaan, de plafonds, de muren, de trap in het achterhuis, de badkamers, allerlei. Alleen de buitenisolatie van het achterhuis moet nog gebeuren (maar daar moet er op beter weer gewacht worden, blijkbaar), en er moet ook nog geschilderd worden.

    Ik heb vandaar primer gezet in het bureau beneden, maar dan was de emmer primer op. ’t Was ook alleen maar twee en een halve muur en een plafond, want de andere anderhalve muur moet het pleisterwerk nog uitdrogen:

    En voor een aantal andere kamers moet er blijkbaar primer in kleur gezet worden omdat de muren ook in kleur komen en dat spaart werk uit. Hier, bijvoorbeeld, op het gelijkvloers van het achterhuis:

    En dan kunnen, hopelijk, de dochters nog deze maand verhuizen. Het was even de hoop dat ze vóór september gingen kunnen verhuizen, het zal drie-vier maand worden. (Hoop ik.)

    Ik kijk ernaar uit om ergens in de loop van december een inhaalbeweging opkuis van ons huis te doen. Te beginnen met de keuken, waar nu een Mewaf-dossierkast en een frigo in de weg staat, en waar we hopelijk een schrijfbord weg kunnen krijgen.

    En dan eens iets doen aan de boeken. En aan ons achterhuis.

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