Links to things that I've found interesting.
This is currently a combination of some of my Pinboard bookmarks that I make public and my GitHub starred repositories. For now, I'm showing the latest 25 links.
I recently asked Steve Wozniak via email about why the original Apple II did not support lowercase letters. I could have guessed the answer, but it’s always good to hear the reason straight from the source. Woz’s response was so long and detailed that I asked him if I could publish the whole thing on VC&G. He said yes, so here we are.
And what was my plan for quarantine and self-isolation in Canada?
That last topic occupied probably six or seven minutes. She asked where I would stay, who else would be there, how I would get groceries and other necessities. She took my email address and phone number. The entire process—including the wait time for the one vehicle ahead of me when I halted—occupied approximately 15 minutes. Over the following two weeks, I would receive daily messages by text or robocall to confirm that I was complying with quarantine rules. Once, I received an in-person call. I don’t know that there was really any follow-up beyond these contacts, but they reminded me that I had given a promise and that somebody cared whether I honored that promise.
A SN76489 MIDI synth, controlled by a Teensy 2.0 microcontroller
Load and display GWBASIC/QUICKBASIC BSAVE graphics files
In order for bullshit not to distract me for the rest of the week, I try to minimize my number of “open loops”—projects or processes that I’ve started but not completed.
This is sound advice. Working on it.
In these videos, I talk about how VGA signals work and build a circuit that provides the correct timing of sync signals so that a monitor recognizes the signal and displays an image stored on an EEPROM.
In the episode, “Fry and the Slurm Factory,” a character named Professor Farnsworth points his F-ray at the head of the show’s famously ill-tempered robot, Bender. It reveals a little rectangle, apparently a chip, labeled “6502.”
The 6502 was a beloved—at least by geeks—8-bit microprocessor created by MOS Technology in 1975. It was the chip that the scruffy-bearded, sandal-wearing Steve Wozniak used to build the Apple II in 1977—“The Machine That Changed Everything,” as PC World once put it. It was also used in the Commodore PET, the BBC Micro, and a host of other systems that fomented the personal computer revolution.
Turn a $30 USB switch into a full-featured multi-monitor KVM switch
An open source crowdfunding tool built on Shopify
Arduino library for e-paper display Inkplate 6
SDFat library edited to work properly with Inkplate 6.
Open Source Hardware (OSH) files for e-paper display Inkplate 6
Vimium for macOS.
Below are some simple methods for exiting vim.
A terminal-based presentation tool with colors and effects.
✏️ Storyboarder makes it easy to visualize a story as fast you can draw stick figures.
This video shows the usage of the top internet browsers in the period 1994 to 2019. Worldwide timeline of desktop web browser popularity.
Gorgeous. This is totally my aesthetic.
People think about how race has affected the world. It’s not just in the States. Colonialism is the cousin of slavery. Colonialism in Africa would have it that, in order to be a ruler, his education comes from Europe. I wanted to be completely sure that we didn’t convey that idea because that would be counter to everything that Wakanda is about. It’s supposed to be the most technologically advanced nation on the planet. If it’s supposed to not have been conquered – which means that advancement has happened without colonialism tainting it, poisoning the well of it, without stopping it or disrupting it – then there’s no way he would speak with a European accent.
If I did that, I would be conveying a white supremacist idea of what being educated is and what being royal or presidential is. Because it’s not just about him running around fighting. He’s the ruler of a nation. And if he’s the ruler of a nation, he has to speak to his people. He has to galvanize his people. And there’s no way I could speak to my people, who have never been conquered by Europeans, with a European voice.
🖼️ A command-line system information tool written in bash 3.2+
Replace your notebooks and printed documents with the only tablet that feels like paper.
This looks incredible. It’s a bit much for me to buy sight unseen, but the Hacker News comments seem to indicate a good track record. While I love my iPad Pro, there are a lot of things about this that I wish it had.
I’ve always been fascinated by unusual clocks. This is one of my latest creations that uses refrigerator alphabet numbers to display the time.
Generations of readers would look for hidden meanings and metaphors in its text—but for Dr. Seuss, Green Eggs and Ham was only ever about one thing: “Cerf bet me fifty bucks I couldn’t write a book using only 50 words,” he said later. “I did it to show I could.”
As expected, the adults learned quickly which creature gave the most candies and selected that creature 86 percent of the time. But children selected the highest-reward creature only 43 percent of the time.
And it wasn’t because the children didn’t realize which choice would reap them the largest reward. In a memory test after the study, 20 of 22 children correctly identified which creature delivered the most candy.
“The children were not motivated by achieving the maximum reward to the extent that adults were,” Blanco said. “Instead, children seemed primarily motivated by the information gained through exploring.”
But the largest gap is that middle bunch of Tinkerers. Not only do they stand to gain the most from low-code tools. From my observations, that group is also the fastest-growing category. Every day as more tech-native people enter the workforce, or are compelled to dive into technical tools, people are graduating from Novice to Tinkerer status, realizing that many modern tools are resilient to experimentation and forgiving of user error.