stevekemp

Robocop was another game with sampled speach, not yet mentioned:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dy8kZcGz98U

There were a few games (in later years) with speach/audio. But Robocop was one that stands in my memory for the good music.

For a while people were suggesting that adding "reddit" to queries for shopping advice was a real way to get uncensored/genuine commentary and reviews.

Even the first time I saw the advice I was skeptical, reddit is rife with bots, and fake comments/posts. It's been well-known for almost a decade at this point that there are multiple individuals moderating many communities there, and that kinda power is rife for abuse.

I've been a sporadic reddit reader/poster for a few years, but this past month I've had enough and deleted my account. The main draw was niche-topics, but they've been overrun with AI slop, and even the local communities have become echo-chambers rather than posts of new bands, events, etc. The local newspaper can tell me about those already.

One of the later pages mentions that the name came from "cirrocumulus floccus", the cloud formation.

It was only after reading that I learned that the "Ferris Wheel" was named after an individual (George Washington Gale Ferris Jr, which is a mouthful!)

Definitely a good read though, and a book I've recommended to a few friends.

"Oh no" is so memorable, but it's also goes hand in hand in my memory with the "Oh ho" from the Worms games.

Both games have a lot in common now I think about it, tiny characters and interactive environments.

Listening to a Finnish children learn English there are some cases where they struggle and perhaps some of it is vocabulary, "fall" vs "fell", "freeze" vs "froze" (i.e. past tenses).

But there are lot more gotchas and I think pronounciation is one of the biggest gotchas. Finnish is a bad starting point as the language has very regular pronounciation, but hearing a child read new text it's obvious how difficent pronounciation is to learn for even everyday, commonly-used words.

> I just can not really see myself using or needing "warez" on linux

I remember switching to Linux around 94 and at the time one of the things that annoyed me was that there was very little commercial software to patch registration checks out of!

There were a couple of image-viewers, and similar things, but I fell out of the habit of decompiling random binaries, and stopped keeping up with the newere techqniques for a good few years. My reversing skills came back, later, but swithching to Linux where everything was "free" and source was mostly available really did change a lot of my computer-related hobbies.

Interestingly if you get an allergic reaction to apples you get that same reaction to cherries, something I only learned recently.

Paying a few hundred dollars for a watch is cheap, compared to the prices for mid/high-end mechanical watches.

Watches are fashion, for most people, rather than a necessity.

That said there are definitely days when I wander out of the house with a watch and no phone. Fewer these days as I use an app on my phone to pay for bus/tram/train fares, but its still nice to be able to do things without the need for a phone.

The watches I wear are mechanical, and most of them are older than I am, made by companies that no longer exist!

I can see the appeal of smart-watches for some things, but I'm too attached to my (small) watch collection to ever consider buying one.

That's certainly how it is for me; mentally I think sauna is an hour, of 5-15 minute chunks inside the warm room, but sometimes it might be more.

There are days when I walk in and immediately nope-out after a couple of minutes, and that's usually a sign that I'm getting sick.

But when it stops feeling good that's the time to leave, or stop for the evening.

Generally I assume "sauna" will take an hour, or ninety minutes, but the process is pretty much:

1. Have a shower.

2. Sit in the sauna, and throw water on the stones. Stay there for 5-15 minutes, drinking a beer and sometimes listening to music. Depends on the mood what kind of duration I enjoy, and what kind of music I have. If alone music is nice, if with a friend or two then we have silence and conversation instead.

3. Come out and sit on the balcony, to have a little break.

4. If I still feel like it go back to step one, and have a quick shower before going back. Otherwise have a longer shower, and check that the heater is going to shut down soon.

I have a dodgy thermometer on the wall, and I tend to enter the sauna when it shows 80, by the time I leave it's usually been showing 90 for half the time. Celcius.

I made the mistake of looking at /r/sauna on Reddit once or twice recently, and there was a lot of people doing very similar things.

"I take my preworkout, do my exercise, then I sit for 12 minutes at 90 degrees in sauna, before three minutes in the cold plunge-pool at 8 degrees, before going to sauna again for 19 minutes and I finish with a seven minute warm shower".

Just the thought of looking at a watch in a sauna, and timing things minute by minute sounded exhausting.

I assume going to sauna takes an hour, it might be I leave it on for a couple of hours, but beyond that the minutes inside/outside are a mystery and I like it like that. Same story with being outdoors in a cabin/cottage. I might dig up some plants, or move the hammock around, but whether I get (literally) dirty is just down to whatever random things I've done that day!

Sure, but ten minutes was the benchmark of the original site!

Hey now! The C64 might have been technically better with sprites, etc, but the Spectrum was way more quirky and British.

Something about the scrappy underdog making awesome games despite the attribute clash, and having the terrible keyboard really set the vibe. Plus the Z80 processor was way more interesting than the 6502, and really set the speccy-folks up for the move to intel in later years.

Back in the day I don't think many would have switched from the Spectrum to the Commodore.

A doddle is the same as a piece of cake, or a walk in the park; something that is simple & easy.

Perhaps not, but I'm sure you'd never be more than 10 minutes walk from a sauna. Unless you're somewhere pretty remote.

A similar on this very site too, of course.

Take a look at the collections by the same author:

https://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/home.html

There are some more complete programs there.

I still run Borland's Turbo Pascal on CP/M systems, and many programs had setup/configuration programs which would rewrite binaries for specific input/output devices.

Choosing between ADM-3A or ANSI terminals by running "WINSTALL" would rewrite the main Wordstart executable WS.COM appropriately for example.

I think the only answer is that all dating sites are full of dark-patterns, and promise to promote your profile if you pay more money.

Linkedin isn't a dating site? Sure it is. I've seen the messages friends receive, and the way people try to sell themselves in the fakest possible ways - it's the only way to judge it these days.

Cool, and loved by some. Annoying and disliked by others.

I understand why people choose it, but if I see the catgirl I close the tab - same is I get the test from cloudflare.

And that episode was stretched out into a novel which I linked to above - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/99852816-mutant-59

Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters, a 1971 British sci-fi environmental disaster novel written by medical scientist Kit Pedler and television screenwriter Gerry Davis.

No wikipedia page, but goodreads has it here:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/99852816-mutant-59

This is obviously regional too; here in finland all stores that sell "drinks" have a machine for accepting returns.

It doesn't matter what kind of bottle it is, or which company made it, all returns are accepted at every point.

Children, unemployed, and elderly people are often seen hunting for stray cans/bottles, by bins, in parks, and similar places, to return them for the cash.

I cut my teeth writing assembly on a ZX Spectrum (mostly hacking games for infinite lives, etc).

Over the past couple of years I've gone back to the Z80, working on CP/M emulation, testing, and similar things. It's fun to play the old infocom games, and mess around with BIOSes when all you have is 64k.

There's a lot of good CP/M reference material out there, and numerous emulators to run it on modern systems

Honestly unless I'm planning on quitting my current job, or if I were unemployed, I just ignore the linkedin.

Sure they spam you with "XX wants to connect", or "I'm awaiting your reply" emails. But real contacts and friends can call/email you, and everybody else can wait six months.

Despite only connecting with actual people I've worked with, not recruiters, I still get "suggested" posts which are slop, and "that happened". The site is a cesspool.

It's nice to see that has a brainfuck interpreter. I wrote a lisp compiler recently, then used that to write a lisp interpreter, and in both cases have a version of brainfuck in it.

That said interpreting the brainfuck mandelbrot program takes several hours. On an old CP/M system I have a brainfuck compiler that converts a program to Z80 machine code, and that same mandelbrot example runs in less than two seconds.

So speed isn't great, but having brainfuck really proves a toy system is "real".