Viewing profile — tkb

The children's maths/puzzle book "Nut-Crackers" (John Jaworski and Ian Stewart, 1971) had a slide rule printed at the back of the book - two strips each numbered 1-50 - to cut out …

I too had a small web site with M4 around 1999/2000. Why M4? Because I'd learned enough of it to be useful/dangerous when wrestling with Sendmail, and it seemed to do the trick (at…

Sendmail - "The Bat Book"

Jeff Atwood had a piece in his "Coding Horror" blog about this project: https://blog.codinghorror.com/updating-the-single-most-influ... (Personally I grew up on the British early 1…

I still have one IP address lodged in my memory from 25+ years ago - sable, the university's key Unix server for students, on which I learned so much about Unix and the 1990s Inter…

Interesting to see here how different people discover Bruegel... I did so through Michael Frayn's entertaining "Headlong", a caper about an academic unsuited to subterfuge who thin…

The BBC Microcomputer had an "Escape" key and a potentially misleadingly named "Break" key - but "Break" was actually more like a reset key (with CTRL-Break being a "harder" reset …

(Prompted by a remark from one poster here that people don't comment much on blogs much nowadays...) What are people's views on how important having comment functionality on a blog…

For some data on the game size (based on my implementation and analysis of a BBC BASIC four-room game "MINI" which I referenced in another comment and won't self-promotionally spam…

I discovered Inform 7 last year and was impressed at the sophisticated platform it provides for writing interactive fiction in semi-natural English. In the 1980s there were plenty …

I believe many of his books (at least, those which I picked up, I know he wrote many more) were collections of his Scientific American "Mathematical Games" columns. And as a bit of…