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A hidden “book server” like this could be set up in just about any electronic device with a sufficiently powerful microcontroller. But I think there is something delightfully poeti…

A favorite film of mine. I was very happy when a decent quality bluray became available a few years back. I know someone who uses "Warn. There is another system." as an alternative…

One of Asimov's best. I've often thought of naming a computer "multivac", as I'm a fan of the first generation computer names like ENIAC, EDSAC, etc. Multivac was, of course, a pla…

Will this image also work on the 3B+? I have a spare one of those that I can try this out on.

My friend M. Goode’s father was a urologist named Dr. P. Goode. For real.

This sort of thing really bugs me! Marketing departments appropriate an existing term and use it in some new, often deceptive way. This goes all the way back to when IBM released “…

A counter argument is that Mauchly was actually interesting in using computers for weather modeling and I’m sure that influenced the design of ENIAC. He could only get ENIAC funded…

The Dead Past is one of my favorite Asimov stories. We don’t have the tech that’s in the story, but the idea of lost privacy is relevant today.

I am a boomer and I absolutely give a "flying fink". Stop stereotyping my generation. The group I worked in at NASA Goddard did visualizations of climate data. I heard directly fro…

It's fun to play around with, but unless I'm missing something, it's not possible to specify the size, in rows and columns, of the screen, such as 24x80. It's an odd omission.

Agreed! Bees are my favorite social insect (we share a love of hexagons, for one thing) and they seem to be especially intelligent.

I remember those monitors, but I forget what resolution they were. For what it's worth, Toy Story was rendered at 1536 x 922. I believe they re-rendered the whole thing from the RI…

Film weave is also the bane of the VFX world. If a shot is going to have, say, a matte painting added in post, then a pin registered camera must be used. These cameras have a preci…

Ah, yes, you are correct, I had forgotten it was Yahoo that took over Verizon mail.

Larry Niven called them slidewalks and I've always been sorry this terminology never caught on.

Verizon handed their email service over to AOL some years ago. I wonder if this will be the end for my unused @verizon.com account.

I always wanted to rig up a laptop that has an IMU to detect when it was in free fall and play the Wilhelm scream.

That was from Algol 68. Algol 60 used BEGIN/END blocks when the body of a do loop (or a then or else block, etc.) had more than one statement. Bash was influenced by Algol 68.

All I can think of is that it was a way to look at the end of a long program which wouldn't all fit on a display. Predating, I suppose, the 'tail' program, or whatever the DECSYSTE…

Vowel length is generally not semantically significant in English. Vowels are lengthened before voiced consonants, for example, and we don’t even think about it. Compare “cab” and …

My best friend George (Gyuri) from college is Hungarian and I've picked up a few words (mostly cuss words) from him. One of the hardest parts for an English speaker to learn about …

Vernor Vinge could absolutely have included that in some of his stories.

Okay, got it, thanks. I suppose it could also be the FIOS router itself making those connections, or any of the other systems on my local network.

Forgive my ignorance, but I'm not sure what this is showing me. I'm running it on my home linux system, which is connected to the Internet via Verizon FIOS. The map shows three red…

I’ve wondered if there should be two string types in C, analogous to different length numeric types. Short strings (“tokens”? “words”?) could be Pascal style strings and longer str…