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11 posts total
 Does anyone here remember Norton Utilities? I realized recently how much of an influence those had on me back in the day. This suite of little useful nerdy DOS tools that eventually got packaged together and had their own little shared UI universe… In hindsight, together with Norton Commander, this was the first GUI I used in my life! But also there was something amazing about having this kind of a Swiss Army knife. A little toolbox of getting under the hood of your computer.    This font (and site) are so, so good! You don’t often see a pixel font with old-style numerals. https://departuremono.com/
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 @mwichary The site is not very good on the phone though. It not just doesn’t fit the screen. It clips content to avoid horizontal scroll. So I can’t even read all text.  Has anyone written about how textual generative AI feels strangely close to toxic masculinity in some respects? The absolute confidence in everything stated, the lack of understanding of the consequences of getting that confidence wrong for important questions, the semi-gaslighty feeling when it “corrects” itself when you call it out on something. It so often feels like talking to someone one would despise and avoid in “real life.” I’m curious if anyone did some writing on this.
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 @mwichary when the a large set of the conversational corpus of LLM's is taken from places like Twitter and a reddit, then their ... Flavour of discourse is the output “Of course I like to read nontechnical books, although I read very slowly. Here are some that I heartily recommend.”—Don Knuth 😳
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@mwichary I followed the progress of writing the book for many years but I didnt get chance to get my hands on the printed copy. Any chances to get it in an ebook format? 🙏  @mwichary So now I own two of the books on that list: Shift Happens and The Abominable Man.  I love watching his appearances in Numberphile videos on YouTube. He is a bit more recognizable in his portrait in the Wikipedia article for ‘The Art of Computer Programming’ that the photo used for his biographical entry in Wikipedia. This aesthetic – huge, proportional fonts, rendered via thick pixels without antialiasing, and using green on black – is very interesting to me and kind of beautiful? (The font on the second photo is also pretty unique.) A book idea: “Life before software.” All of the amazing mechanical and electromechanical solutions to what today would be software: Old pinball machines, Backspace on a Selectric, tons of a/v stuff, Linotype, Comptometer, phone relays, probably a million other things. Beautiful drawings and great stories.
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 All kinds of analog calculators from the humble slide rule to the Bendix Central Air Data Computer, stopping in the way to admire tide-predicting machines and gun directors. Sound synthesizers made out of oscillators and filters. The camera lucida and the blink comparator. Holmberg's lamp-based integrator for gravitational force between many galaxies. By which I mean, yes, do it and I'll buy it and recommend it. Last week, I had a chance to visit @hypertalking’s (James’s) excellent collection of Mac-related stuff. He’s particularly interested in collecting 1990s Macs, which is the era of Apple history I don’t have a lot of personal experience with, so it was doubly exciting. Here are some 100 photos from that visit: James’s work has recently gone viral! He meticulously recreated a few of Hokusai's views of Mount Fuji in the original Mac’s resolution and 1-bit colour. I got to see them all in person! https://kottke.org/23/05/great-wave-off-kanagawa-in-all-its-1-bit-pixelized-glory I did something fun this week: I made a typewriter simulator! It ended up being more complex than it seemed. You can overtype, rotate paper, set margins, use Wite-Out, change ribbons… Let me know what you make! (Desktop only so far.) https://shifthappens.site/typewriter/
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  To celebrate the Kickstarter for Shift Happens going well, I thought I would show you 50 keyboards from my collection of really strange/esoteric/meaningful keyboards that I gathered over the years. (It might be the world’s strangest keyboard collection!) This is technically a bit of a spoiler for the book, but a) a lot of them are not in the book, and b) the book comes out in half a year, and we’ll all forget by then! Let’s start! My book about keyboards, Shift Happens, is now on Kickstarter! There is all sorts of new information about it, and a video, and what I think are very cool tiers and rewards on top of a very cool book. Please back and spread the word! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mwichary/shift-happens?ref=cr61wq The launch livestream will start in an hour! I will be joined a conversation with @fonts. Hope you can drop by! |
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@mwichary "own little shared UI universe" surprises me. I am not a DOS guy, but I always assumed Norton Utilities adhered to IBM's CUA. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access) Is it very different from CUA or are the differences minor?
@mwichary 🖐️ Yo, I do. Seeing the pics made an immediate refresher to my memory of fixing some fiddly stuff on my first PC.
@mwichary We wrote almost all assembler code for our demos (1992-1996) in Norton Commander. As long as you didn’t write code that crashed your machine (which admittedly happened all the time) it was the closest we had to an IDE.
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