Viewing profile — thristian

It's not exactly a better Topaz, but I made Topaz Unicode to be more Topaz: https://gitlab.com/Screwtapello/topaz-unicode

Ah, it might be nice to mention that before the first code example, then. Or just use consistent case in the first example, to avoid distracting people with details that aren't the…

In the first code example in the readme ("First program"), there's `sdlcls`, `SDLinit`, and `SDLShow`. Is there some significance to the capitalisation?

In 1983, AT&T released the fifth version of Unix, called "System V". Part of the release was an ABI specification for how the different parts of the system would talk to one anothe…

I think it's from people reporting sports statistics for a player or team as "W:5 L:7" meaning "five wins and seven losses". https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/l-and-w-slang

Steve Wozniak was incredibly foresighted when designing the Apple II, to make sure that expansion cards could disable the default ROMs and even disable the CPU, making this kind of…

Pretty much, yeah! The difference is that in Python the function that calculates a single value looks like: foo(x) ...while the function that calculates a batch of values looks lik…

APL and K are still pretty daunting, but I've recently been dabbling in Lil[1], which is something like a cross between K and Lua. I can fall back on regular procedural code when I…

It isn't really related to the Infocom that released the Zork games, except in a legal sense. Infocom was sold to Activision in 1986, and shut down as a studio in 1989. Circuit's E…

You might be interested in YTree ( https://www.han.de/~werner/ytree.html ), UnixTree ( https://www.unixtree.org/ ), or linuXtree ( https://stahlke.org/dan/lxt/ ).

Brøderbund was the publisher of "Stunts", but not the developer. The developer was Distinctive Software Inc. who had previously developed the hit games Test Drive and Test Drive II…

From the PuTTY FAQ: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/faq.html#... Would you like me to register you a nicer domain name? No, thank you. Even if you can find one (…

The old 68k Macs are emulated with Basilisk II, which shims the mouse driver so it can just take mouse events from the host OS and move the cursor to the corresponding pixel on scr…

It took me a while to figure out that the nice product shots of Mac computers were actually live, interactive copies of the relevant operating system, running under emulation. Even…

For some context about why a portable, user-friendly, hardware-level emulator for classic Mac systems is such a big deal, see this blog post from 2020: https://invisibleup.com/arti…

SimpleX is cool, but it has VC investors, so a lot of people won't trust it long-term (for exactly the same reasons we're talking about replacing WhatsApp now).

You can make a chat backup, but it's an encrypted binary blob, not a mailbox file or a JSON file or some other more accessible format. I think I understand why they do that (if you…

It replaces the "list of short shell-scripts" aspect of Make, but it doesn't replace the "only execute rules that need to be re-executed" part, which is the actually useful bit.

No, Python's current type annotation syntax was added in Python 3.0 as a generic annotation syntax, in the hope that somebody else might come along and build a type-checker or othe…

I can recommend The Further Adventures of Nick Danger as a decent introduction to Firesign Theater (It's on YouTube). A lot of the other stuff I've heard is chaotic to the point of…

If you're wondering what a 32-bit descendant of the 6502 might have looked like, especially one that incorporated the "radical simplicity" ideas of RISC alongside the radical simpl…

Icelandic names follow that pattern. Björk's full name is "Björk Guðmundsdóttir" because she is the daughter of Guðmundur Gunnarsson. English-speaking countries generally don't do …

VisiCalc, the first computerised spreadsheet, was released in 1979. Presumably there were non-computerised spreadsheets, actual large sheets of paper, used for calculations before …

The fact that U+D800-U+DFFF are reserved means that it's generally pretty easy to distinguish UTF-16 text from UCS-2 text - if you spot even one 16-bit value in that reserved range…

The robustness principle is really just another way of stating the Golden Rule.