bouvin

Gnus was a joy to use. Never has an application fitted me better.

Spam was the issue – there were extensions and initiatives to combat it, but it was a losing battle. It was a major cultural loss – Reddit can at its best approach it, but not replace what existed in the early nineties.

I have had the privilege of seeing Kraftwerk live three times - easily some of the best concerts, I have attended. Even if there is not much left of the original axe, I can still recommend the experience. They have a reputation for perfection, and that is most certainly reflected in their live performance.

I also had the good fortune of attending Balanescu Quartet in concert during their Kraftwerk era. The only time, I’ve ever attempted (and succeeded!) to get backstage to meet the band.

Oh, we did all that. I even wrote my PhD dissertation on it (2001). Back then, there were quite a few research projects working on what I then termed ‘Web Augmentation’. You could do it serverside, in special proxies, or in the browser through extensions or scripting. The earliest browser based system I know of that allowed users to insert links and annotations into existing Web pages was DHM/WWW, developed by yours truly in 1997 – we even won best paper for it at Hypertext 1997. This was a specialised case of what was then known as Open Hypermedia, i.e., a hypermedia system that could integrate (more or less) arbitrary documents and systems through links and other structures.

Using a more general architecture, it was possible to add many kinds of structures on top of existing Web pages collaboratively. Navigational or spatial hypermedia, guided tours, etc. Link bases were stored outside of the linked resources, so that you could have different sets of structures applied to a corpus of documents.

There were also quite a few commercial attempts in this space. However, all, commercial and research alike, ultimately failed, and I believe that there were several reasons behind this: Web site owners disliked that others could annotate their pages; shared link bases often became polluted; bookmarks were ‘good enough’ for most users; maintaining link anchor consistency in (increasingly dynamic) Web pages became more and more difficult (despite our best efforts); and while I remain enthused about the notion of the MEMEX scholar carefully annotating their corpus of literature, I don’t think the appeal is all that widespread.

Still, there are remnants in some systems – e.g., I enjoy to see that others have highlighted the same passage as I in a Kindle book.

Melvyn Bragg and his guests recently covered Linnaeus on In Our Time [1].

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001l291

Oh, wow. That takes me back to my first PC, an Amstrad PC1512 (dual 5¼"), which came with CGA and B/W monitor.

I tricked that baby out with additional RAM (640 kB really was enough for most people), a 32 MB HD on an ISA card, and, importantly in this context, a Hercules card. The latter was switchable, so you still could run CGA games, while enjoying the crisp text and line graphics of Hercules.

I divide my listening time between audiobooks and podcasts. One thing that audiobooks have enabled me to do, that I probably never would have gotten around to do on my own (even as I do own the books), is to read classics like Rabelais' Gargantua or Mallory's Le Morte d'Arthur.

His style is something else – there are not many SF authors (and fewer still of his generation) that I would describe as lyrical, but he in one of them.

I wrote 'smacks of piracy’ for a reason. But I do not doubt for a moment that the main motivation behind current generation emulation is piracy, and that finding a person with a one to one game library real and emulated is a remarkable feat indeed. These systems and their associated games are neither hard to find, nor difficult to run, unlike older consoles, so there is no excuse if you wish to experience the games as they were intended.

Do you expect me to believe that all the people, who, say, downloaded the leaked copy of Tears of the Kingdom, dutifully purchased a copy upon release date?

Pull the other one, it has got bells on it.

I'm all for emulation of older platforms for the valid wish to preserve history, but emulation of current hardware and games that can run on current console hardware smacks of piracy.

If fame is the objective, there is also arson to consider: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herostratus

I came here to post the same. These are the most adorable robots, I have ever seen. The progress made in motor skills compared to earlier is impressive.

Having read the _excellent_ series in English, it was amusing for me to see the movie in a Danish cinema, where the incomprehensible English maritime jargon was translated to incomprehensible Danish maritime jargon.

I came here to recommend the very same. The interactive code examples are also very good for students.

In my case, Kagi.

There were a lot of ads in Byte. But as noted above, many were interesting in their own right. I certainly read many with interest back in the early/mid-eighties.

That's funny. This is much of what I teach my own IT Product Development students in the first year course The Web of Things at my CS Department, Aarhus University. My goal for the course was precisely to introduce tooling and techniques, and to habituate the students to their use through the construction of systems integrating Web and IoT. It's a busy seven weeks, but students further along often tell me that they learned a lot and are still using the same tools.

I have the honour of having met Douglas Engelbart, as well as attending a keynote he gave at a Hypertext conference. He struck me as such a gentle and wise man, and the disappointment palpable in his keynote that we, as a species, had not progressed further in augmenting the human intellect haunts me still.

Many years later, I noted in a hypertext conference presentation of my own that I thought the future would be cooler. But here we are.

I got my HP-15C in high school around 1987. Two weeks ago, I changed batteries on it, and I'm really not sure I have done that more than once before.

The device is a delight to hold and use (the buttons are unmatched in their feel), and it's fun to program with instructions listed as coordinates to the buttons on the device. RPN is such an elegant and compact notation in use.

I also have a HP-48SX, but it sees much less use – the buttons are not nearly as pleasant and the screen is harder to read. For a CS crowd, the HP-16C is the one to get (I found an emulated version very handy, when I taught Computer Architecture, and while I don't really need it, I certainly would like the Microswiss version).

Something that fascinated me back in the day (and something that I have not seen mentioned, whenever BYTE comes up here), when I as a teenager read BYTE (initially borrowed from the local Danish municipal library) was the transcripts from BIX [1]. It offered a tantalising view into the world of BBS (and what would come later through Usenet etc), before such things were widely accessible.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_Information_Exchange

LosslessCut is a magnificent tool. I use it as the final step for my lecture recordings, which have been disassembled with ffmpeg, edited with Audacity, encoded with Handbrake, and finally reassembled using ffmpeg. LosslessCut combines the speed of ffmpeg with a quick and pleasingly minimal UI.

mkvtoolnix to add the subtitles you want as well as remove the tracks that you don't need.

I adore Philip Glass, and it was through Koyaanisqatsi that I discovered him back when the movie was released.

I have been fortunate enough to see PG & the PG ensemble perform Music in 12 Parts (I heard the piece twice that day: once traveling to the concert hall, and once live) as well as attend an evening of piano works by him performed by him and a series of other pianists. On my bucket list is seeing Einstein on the Beach live – easily my favourite opera.

I have been collecting his music since the early nineties, and much prefer his earlier works – his later symphonies, etc, while fine, do not, to my ear, retain the stark beauty of his younger days.

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton [1]. A haunting and disturbing account powerfully told and rendered. Beaton is well known for Hark! A Vagrant, but this is her best work to date.

The Kalevala [2]. I am familiar with the Eddas, the Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, and the Epic of Gilgamesh, but the Finnish national epos was beautiful and refreshingly different. While I'm sure the English translation pales next to the original, it was nevertheless quite lyrical.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59069071-ducks

[2] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/elias-lonnrot/the-kalevala...

At least at the Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University, it was/is colloquially known as 'moesgaard' [1]

[1] https://www.moesgaardmuseum.dk/en/

Ditto. Looking through my files, I started doing lectures using Keynote in 2007. It is a robust piece of kit, and it makes it easy to record and export lectures afterward. Compared to Powerpoint, I find that Keynote's UI gets less in your way.

Prior, I used the markup/SVG based Slidy, which was pretty neat for its time, but made sharing and combining presentations with other people much harder.

It did. I have fond memories (no doubt in part shaped by Stockholm syndrome) of writing a Pascal(ish) compiler targeting the SPARC ISA as an undergrad back in 1993 based on four? pages of ISA documentation. As I recall, handling procedure calls and returns was quite elegant.

For me, the most startling one was seeing (a) Frida Kahlo smile.

If you ever wanted to use the sound of the Apollo transmissions creatively, the Lunar Module [1] is possibly the most niche of Eurorack modules.

[1] https://ajhsynth.com/Lunar.html

According to other posters, liquid CO₂ can be stored at 5 atm pressure which is trivial from an engineering POW.