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nikconwell

41 karma · joined August 16, 2019

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nikconwell··on Show HN: Space Invaders in C
Great write up, thanks. I was intrigued by the "tilt" keymapping on the last line of your posting. https://computerarcheology.com/Arcade/SpaceInvaders/ notes:

> In the early eighties you would have found the Space Invaders cabinet in an arcade right next to the pinball machines. So a "tilt" switch, like you would find in a pinball machine, would not have seemed as strange as it does today. If you shake, slap, or otherwise physically abuse an SI cabinet you will get a TILT message and your game will end.

nikconwell··on Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer
A guy in the office always remembers it as remembering that wedding saying - something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. Whenever he did a symlink he would always say out loud something old, something new, ... That has stuck with me as well for all these years so I've never needed to figure out which was which, I always just knew it.
nikconwell··on The electric car as a talisman of false hope
Has anyone ever seen calculations of whether leveling out the roads would save significantly in energy? We are slowly getting regenerative technology into cars so we can at least recapture some energy on the way down, but avoiding the use of energy for going up would seem like an even better win. The bonus is the level roads would also benefit older vehicles not equipped to recapture energy.