Today I learned: in 1919, the Treaty of Versailles formally ended World War I, establishing the A note above middle C as a frequency of 435 Hz. In 1939, an international conference recommended that the note's frequency be changed to 440Hz, and World War II broke out […]

Mathematicians occasionally uses "tack" symbols, ⊥ and ⊤, for various purposes. They're called that because they look like thumb-tacks from the side. But if you need a particular tack, what do you call it? Is "⊥" the "up" tack, because the pointy bit is up? Or is "⊤" the "up" tack, because it's […]

I love that Free Software means people can make the things they want to make in the fashion they want to make them without having to get permission from other people. And yet, it's stressful when I want to contribute to some project and I can't figure out whether my contribution would be […]

Something that's impressed me about Lil, #decker's scripting language, is that it's whitespace sensitive. Not like Python is, but... well, if you want to provide multiple arguments to a function, you separate them with whitespace: draw[canvas pos size] It doesn't have to be single-token […]

Every day this person posts beautiful photos of flowers in Japan, and it brightens my day every time. https://mstdn.jp/@noco3n_com/115145408003693093

I'm more than the sum of my experiences, I'm the *product* of my experiences.

Today I learned that Magic: The Gathering had a miniseries of cards with pixel art. https://scryfall.com/search?order=set&q=e%3Asld+cn%E2%89%A5325+cn%E2%89%A4329&unique=prints

Could the 2006 Pixar movie "Cars" be set in the far future of the 1965 NBC TV series "My Mother the Car"? In this essay, I will...

GAR. ``` $ /bin/bash -c 'x="2 + 2"; echo $((x * 2))' 8 $ /bin/bash -c 'x="2 + 2"; echo $(($x * 2))' 6 ``` bash(1) says "All tokens in the expression undergo parameter and variable expansion, command substitution, and quote removal" which I *think* is meant to imply that you can use a variable […]

From a 1982 text adventure, "Marooned" (h/t @jdyer)

I spent some time messing around with Snow, a new low-level emulator for classic 68k Macintoshes. It doesn't support hard-drive images from Basilisk II (the most widely-used 68k Macintosh emulator), so I had to make a fresh, blank hard-drive image, grab some […] [Original post on teh.entar.net]

Today I learned why magnets were horseshoe-shaped, and why we don't do that anymore: https://www.kjmagnetics.com/blog/why-horseshoe-shaped-magnets

From the Olean Herald, New York, on the 13th of September, 1884 (page 7, column 4), presumably quoted from a newspaper called the London Graphic.

A lovely review of desktop icons from the 1990s and before: https://www.datagubbe.se/icons/ #PixelArt #retrocomputing

Today I learned that one Michael Sharpe made an OpenType version of Algol, the font commissioned from Adrian Frutiger for the ALGOL 68 report, and never seen again. Homepage: https://ctan.org/pkg/algolrevived OTF downloads: https://ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/algolrevived/opentype #typography

Seems like things have been getting a bit quiet on Mastodon of late, I guess some of the people I followed when I joined have moved on to other things. I guess it's time to start following more hashtags, and following interesting people who get boosted onto my timeline.

Wizards of the Coast did as they promised, and released a System Reference Document (that is, the basic rules and game mechanics) for the 2024 edition of Dungeons & Dragons under an extremely open Creative Commons (CC-BY-4.0) licence. https://www.dndbeyond.com/srd D&D isn't necessarily the […]

Free42, the Free Software re-implementation of the classic HP 42s RPN calculator, supports using custom skins, a bit like WinAmp skins but more complex - instead of just a bunch of bitmaps, you get to define the size and location of each button and graphical […] [Original post on teh.entar.net]

#discord stopped working for me in @firefoxnightly, the devtools complained about NS_ERROR_HTTP2_FALLBACK_TO_HTTP1 while making a websocket connection. I thought the websocket protocol didn't support HTTP2, and apparently that *used* to be the case but Firefox Nightly now supports it, and […]

As a professional programmer, I don't have much cause to use a desktop calculator when I'm sitting in front of a computer with a squillion times more processing power and a richer, more versatile interface. But I came across this video of somebody running the firmware of the HP 50g graphing […]

'The cover of MAD magazine No. 258 from October 1985 announces a “special computer section featuring the MAD Computer Program”.' Somebody typed in all the source-code to draw your own vectorised Alfred E. Neuman on your 8-bit microcomputer of choice, so you can render it yourself. They also […]

OK, yeah, it comes with all the trappings of commercialised high art, but that is the most gorgeous 32×32 1-bit Great Wave pixel art I've ever seen. https://aspreystudio.com/collections/esc-keys-by-susan-kare-computer-keys/products/susan-kare-wave-icon-computer-key #PixelArt #susankare

Today I released a new version of bdflib, my Python library for working with bitmap fonts in the BDF format (commonly used on Unix systems). New in this version is the `bdflib.effects.expand()` function and the `bdflib-expand` command-line tool, which can be used to aspect-correct a BDF font […]

I've done a few retro-font projects over the years, and even wrote my own Python library to handle BDF files, thinking that I might someday make a tool for converting between different font formats, and maybe even editing them. It turns out that in the years since, modern OSs have stopped […]

Today I learned: the "E-Reader" hardware for Nintendo's Game Boy Advance let you load data (levels, artwork, etc.) into games that supported it, but also allowed you to load completely original programs. The GBA's ARM7TDMI CPU was powerful, but code size is a problem when your program has to be […]

If you've ever wondered what it would be like to be inside a bag of cornflakes, Wikipedia provides a 360° panoramic photograph to inspire you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Inside_a_cornflakes_bag_%E2%80%93_360%C2%B0_photo.jpg

Are you nostalgic for using a CRT terminal in the 90s? Or maybe curious about what things looked like before high-DPI displays and true-colour graphics? I've extracted the fonts from the firmware of the DEC VT320, a CRT terminal first produced in 1987, and […] [Original post on teh.entar.net]

To help out @vga256 I'm writing a program to extract the font from the DEC VT320 firmware. It's going pretty well, I've got all the glyphs for the 80-column mode, and I figured out how to correct for the VT320's extremely non-square pixels, so it looks quite readable.

This looks like the original source of that "If OpenSSL were a GUI" image going around: https://smallstep.com/blog/if-openssl-were-a-gui/

From the perspective of 2025, it's wild that the Unix `diff` utility (which takes an old and a new file, and prints the differences) and the Unix `patch` utility (which takes an old file and the output of `diff`, and prints the new file) were not only written by different people, but *a decade […]

Just got my first glyph contribution for my Unicode version of the Amiga Topaz font: U+1E9E ẞ Latin Capital Letter Sharp S. https://heckmeck.de/blog/a-capital-sharp-s-for-topaz/ #typography #retrocomputing

Typewriter Mystery Games (1951) gives you a sequence of keys to press on your typewriter (7 spaces, 7 Xs, new line, 5 spaces, 11 Xs, new line...) so you can make ASCII-art style images on your very own typewriter. They just provide the instructions, no pictures of the result, so the "mystery […]

Not gonna lie, I'm fond of the way #inform7 lets me write like Arlo Guthrie: ``` The twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy photographs are a plural-named thing. The twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy photographs are carried by Officer Obie. ``` (Inform 7 doesn't like names that include […]

Today I learned that the current owners of the dBASE trademark have an ENTERPRISE READY version of DOSBox you can buy for only $150 and keep running your existing dBASE III and dBASE IV applications on the latest versions of Windows. https://dbdos.com/ #retrocomputing