Viewing profile — SulphurCrested

The Burroughs large system architecture of the 1960s and 1970s (B6500, B6700 etc.) did it. Objects were called “arrays” and there was hardware support for allocating and deallocati…

The Photo (v2) app gives you a choice of using Apple’s converters or “Serif” converters. But, when last I looked, lens corrections were not available with the Apple converters.

Yes, ideally the tool should edit its own preferences. A quick and dirty tool might leave the user to run the macOS "defaults" command line utility themselves. It’s certainly no wo…

Towards the end TFA claims that Apple’s bundled command line utilities, including zsh and vim, put their dotfiles in ~/.config. They don’t. They put them in the traditional BSD pla…

I highly recommend his book with Jeffrey Kluger, “Apollo 13”, originally published as “Lost Moon” in 1994.

I live in a country where the socket on the wall the fan is plugged into also has a switch, which could be on or off. So to make the fan go around, both switches must be on; the us…

The article suggests a “simple, well-labeled rotary control ... would accomplish the same function” as a power button and “prevent the user from accidentally activating the control…

There’s a little-used alternative to through-running as described in TFA, which is to turn trains around in an underground loop in the city centre and send them out again, usually …

It could also be invoked on VAX/VMS under the name “MUNG”, which was said to stand for “Modify Until No Good”. I think that style of invocation did something slightly different tha…

We had TECO on our DEC VAXes running VMS in the early-mid 1980s. It had a ”VT52” mode (as you say, a macro), and at least one of the terminals on my desk supported those escape seq…

The tunnel is signalled only for CBTC. The outer ends of the line have only the old fixed-block signalling. The section from Westall in the south east to (eventually) Sunshine in t…

I worked on this system during its development in the 1980s. There were actually two PDP-11s, the one to run the platform displays running locally-written software. The “weird cont…

The console processor was an LSI-11, a PDP-11 on a chip. It hung off the inside of one of the cabinet doors. It was responsible for booting the 780 and also gave VMS access to its …

Phil Harvey’s exiftool [0]. Despite being a command-line tool, it is widely known and used by professional and advanced amateur photographers to extract or repair metadata in image…

The article, especially in its second half, confuses the City of Melbourne municipality with the city of Melbourne. The former is the central business district and surrounding area…

The Multics terminals during its initial development at MIT were also mostly variants of the IBM Selectric typewriter, which rendered lower case text with descenders just fine. [0]…

In late 1977/early 1978 I used a Honeywell Level 66 mainframe whose timesharing interface was lower-case. My memory is hazy, but I’m pretty sure I typed in the FORTRAN in lower cas…

More capable mechanical focal plane shutters with a flash sync speed of 1/200s or faster do not show objectionable rolling shutter effects for most practical stills photography, in…

October used to be the 8th month (and September, November and December the 7th, 9th and 10th) because March was the first month of the year.

You could call this lots of things, but you shouldn’t call it “metric” because its second is not a metric second. In the SI (metric) system, the second is one of the fundamental un…

Filco Majestouch 2 TKL with Cherry MX Brown switches. I configured macOS to swap the OPTION and COMMAND keys and physically swapped the keycaps using the supplied puller. This is a…

Ask yourself why it frustrates you. Perhaps you can’t see exactly where the click will be – a high res screen makes a difference. Perhaps you haven’t learned all the mouse shortcut…

This is going to be controversial, but what saved me was abandoning a keyboard-intense environment (emacs + command line) for Apple’s Xcode. I do still build much of the time at th…

Preview has already been sandboxed for years.