apricot

I had one of the original Fisher-Price records player as a kid, and I remember trying to understand how it made sound, by running my fingers under the tonearm and figuring out that the bumps on the plastic records were an encoding of the song. It's actually one of my earliest memories.

The new version completely misses the point, and I think it's perfectly rational to be pissed off by it.

When my own kid got old enough, I got him a music box that plays music from a paper tape. It came with blank tapes and a manual punching tool.

That's a proprietary thin client, not a PC.

Today is the same but with AI-powered privacy destruction

Does Linux really need another media player?

IMO, just because a microprocessor has a quirky instruction set that doesn't include some standard instructions, or was made for a specific purpose in mind, doesn't make it not a microprocessor.

Maybe those few schools haven't done it because they don't want to have a racist admission policy.

> When I get asked if the person in a video is real, I still feel pretty confident to answer

I don't. I mean, I can identify the bad ones, sure, but how do I know I'm not getting fooled by the good ones?

The commercial microwaves we have at work have both a large dial to set the time, and four large buttons under it for 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% power. No other controls. They are great.

I remember one action game on the Apple II that played music during gameplay: Microwave. But the sound was made on purpose to sound kind of choppy (a bit like voice fry), so that there was some leeway to fit graphics updates and calculations. I never disassembled it but I can imagine the pain it must have been to keep the game loop close to constant time.

I'm not gonna lie. Opening a massive Toughbook in a classroom full of puny Macbook Air and other ultrabooks felt GREAT, and worth lugging the 8-pound behemoth in my book bag. Plus, free rucking workout.

> The keyboard feels awful

So sad. I had a Toughbook CF-30 and its keyboard was one of the best I ever used on a laptop. Not mechanical, but it had a bounce to it that made it easy to type for a long time without getting tired.

In the next iteration (CF-31), they changed it to a chicklet style keyboard like those common on laptops nowadays, and there was no magic anymore.

Another think I loved about my CF-30 was how bright the screen could get.

Agree on the trackpad, that thing was small and never worked right.

My son's first computer, back when he was 5 years old, was an old Panasonic CF-18 Toughbook that I bought from eBay for that purpose. The smaller keyboard was perfect for his little hands, and the computer survived countless drops, spills, and other incidents.

That was more than 10 years ago. He still has the laptop, the battery is long dead but it runs fine on AC power. Most of the time, it's used as a doorstop.

I remember fondly "Roland was here but he left". I learned so much from studying your programs!

I don't know about you, but I write my 1 in just one stroke of the pen. Also I use a space as a thousands separator, and you need to write 一万 in Japanese for 10 000, not just 万 by itself. That makes for a closer game:

一 / 1 (one stroke vs one)

十 / 10 (two strokes vs two)

一万 / 10 000 (or 10K) (four strokes vs five)

When you get to numbers like 5462, there's no contest versus 五千四百六十二.

In the 1990s, I worked on a Canon typewriter (AP800) that had a similar-looking keyboard. That keyboard is the best I've ever had the pleasure to type on and I've tried quite a lot, including IBM Models M and F, all Cherry colors, Topre, etc. I could type for hours on that thing and not get tired. I would love to get my hands on a Cat to see if the keyboard is as good as that one was.

In the beginning, self-reference was created. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

Nice. I learned programming reading similar books with Basic programs to type in, with a glossary at the end for commands that differed between Basic dialects — if you have a Commodore 64 type this, if you have an Apple II type this instead.

Also, leafing through this magazine, I was surprised to learn that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were called Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles in the UK.

Well can you blame him?

I mean, pigeons

I just wrote a simple CPU emulator last week for the computer architecture class I'm teaching, and used PySimpleGUI for the interface. When students tried to install it on the lab computers yesterday and asked me about that "30 day free trial" business, that really took me by surprise.

Guess I'm going to bite the bullet and rewrite the GUI in tkinter, which is what I wanted to avoid in the first place.

In my opinion, a keyboard like the Canon Cat, with modifiers centered under the spacebar [1], would be a joy to use: familiar yet more ergonomic. Sadly, very few keyboards use this layout.

[1] https://vintagecomputer.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Canon-...

The Nand2Tetris computer is a bad fit for 74xx chips and breadboards. It's 16 bit, for one thing, which implies a lot of chips and a lot of wires on a lot of breadboards, and the usual current problems that come with that. Better have a good source and an oscilloscope nearby. Also, the virtual design sweeps a lot of important timing issues under the rug, so you need some EE chops to translate it correctly to real hardware.

I know of a few people who managed to get a working Nand2Tetris computer on breadboards, but it took a lot more time and money than they thought it would.

On FPGA, though, it works nicely.

Yeah, the title is misleading here. What happened is that the Turing test judges, who had to decide whether they were talking to a human or an AI, judged ELIZA's output as much too poor for current AI, and therefore probably generated by a human intentionally being uncooperative.

Best movie I never want to see again.

You can still do that. Many do. But the next generation of TVs probably won't even deign to turn on without you giving them Internet access.

In China, similar tricks are used to work around automatic censorship. For instance, in the early days of the covid pandemic:

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/03/china-social-...

Today, one often hears "He is special needs" said by people who think they are being politically correct. But that's awfully wrong. He might have special needs, but he is not needs. He is a person. To me, that's a lot more dehumanizing than saying "retarded".

Then they'll say "but you know what I mean". That's the point, exactly.

My parents had the same octagonal glasses used in TNG. I still have a couple, and often think of the Enterprise when I use them.

https://star-trek.design/glassware/octime-double-old-fashion...

Yes, WPL was the most amazing feature of Apple Writer. It reminded me of programming a scientific calculator, but with text rather than numbers. When AppleWorks came out, I was really disappointed that it didn't include anything like it (this was alleviated a few years later with 3rd party macro packages).

The first program I sold for actual money, back when I was in high school, was a set of WPL programs that allowed teachers to generate exams by picking multiple-choice questions at random from a master file. The answers were also randomly permuted. It also produced the answer key for each. The idea was that teachers would use it to generate exams where each student's version would be different.

I sold a grand total of two copies. A marketing genius, I was not.

Wait, a 6502 version of WordStar? I was a serious hobbyist in my Apple II days, and I never heard of that.

I bought a Z80 expansion card so that I could run CP/M and WordStar on my Apple II (also Turbo Pascal, which was the main reason for getting the Z80 card).

English is my second language. I agree with your definitions except that I've always thought "several" is more than "a few". Say 3-5 is a few and 5-7 is several. 5 works for both, but 4 is too few for "several" and 6 is too many for "a few".