thristian

7 ms·

1.
by thristian 4mo ago
It's not exactly a better Topaz, but I made Topaz Unicode to be more Topaz: https://gitlab.com/Screwtapello/topaz-unicode
2.
by thristian 7mo ago
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 thing you're trying to demonstrate.
3.
by thristian 7mo ago
In the first code example in the readme ("First program"), there's `sdlcls`, `SDLinit`, and `SDLShow`. Is there some significance to the capitalisation?
4.
by thristian 9mo ago
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 another. Notably, the main portion of the spec descr
5.
by thristian 10mo ago
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
6.
by thristian 11mo ago
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 thing possible. The article mentions a chunk of memory &quo
7.
by thristian 11mo ago
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 like: [foo(x) for x in somelist] Meanwhile in
8.
by thristian 11mo ago
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 need to, but I appreciate being able to do things like
9.
by thristian 1y ago
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 Edge was published in 1990, labelled "Infocom&
10.
by thristian 1y ago
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/ ).
11.
by thristian 1y ago
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: The Duel for Accolade. For whatever reason,
12.
by thristian 1y ago
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 (most of them seem to have been
13.
by thristian 1y ago
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 screen. The PowerPC Macs and NeXT boxes are emulated with a low
14.
by thristian 1y ago
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 the laptops with the screen at a weird angle from the camer
15.
by thristian 1y ago
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/articles/30/ For game consoles, we&#x
16.
by thristian 1y ago
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).
17.
by thristian 1y ago
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 send someone a message on Signal, they try very hard t
18.
by thristian 1y ago
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.
19.
by thristian 1y ago
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 other tooling on top: https://peps.python.org&#x
20.
by thristian 1y ago
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 confusion, but Nick Danger does have an actual
21.
by thristian 1y ago
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 simplicity of the original 6502, there's alre
22.
by thristian 2y ago
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 that. For a long time people had only fi
23.
by thristian 2y ago
VisiCalc, the first computerised spreadsheet, was released in 1979. Presumably there were non-computerised spreadsheets, actual large sheets of paper, used for calculations before that.
24.
by thristian 2y ago
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, it should be UTF-16. This property is not true of UTF
25.
by thristian 2y ago
The robustness principle is really just another way of stating the Golden Rule.
26.
by thristian 2y ago
Today I learned that, like Windows NT, the first version of Apple DOS was numbered 3.1.
27.
by thristian 2y ago
Since POSIX 2024, `set -o pipefail` is no longer a bashism!
28.
by thristian 2y ago
Pretty sure it just means "touching grass", as in "step away from the computer, walk outside, put your hand on a patch of grass". Previous generations might say "stop and smell the roses", although that idiom i
29.
by thristian 2y ago
As long as humans are writing things, they will try to come up with new things to differentiate themselves from the humans who'd gone before, those things will be written down, and we'll probably need new code points to express th
30.
by thristian 2y ago
See https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/RustPackaging/Policy

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