I’m going wide-topic this week.
- The Toy That Talked Back. The Speak and Spell.
- About Star Wars in ASCII, which I’ve linked directly to before.
- Edible Games Cookbook: Play With Your Food. A Kickstarter.
- Command-line file-based dedup. (via)
- Genealogy of Elizas. Actual site here. (via)
- Stamping copyright information onto academic papers. The pdftk usage is what I find interesting here. There’s a LOT of tools out there for automatic PDF manipulation.
- Command line audio players.
- Bread is lighter than whipped cream.
- Break down of a C64 demo effect. (via)
- One Island Grows 80% of the World’s Vanilla. I’ve seen people keeping vanilla beans in safes. (via)
- A WinRAR joke.
- Doing Windows, Part 1: MS-DOS and Its Discontents. The very first sentence is fun.
I’d forgotten about E.T., but the Speak and Spell also features (rather less famously) in an issue of The New Teen Titans, where mute superhero Jericho uses it to relay important information over the phone. Spirit of the times!
Speaking of WinRAR. RAR has some kind of parity algorithm.
And the strange thing now is that apart from par2 utility (which is obsolete and I did not see anyone developing it any more (looks like a dead project), I did not find anything for doing parity on files.
It would be nice to have a simple unix tool to create some kind of compatible par files so that one can fill up the space of let’s say a blu-ray with parity. So that in case of scratches on the medium, the data could be restored with high probability when only few blocks are damaged, you understand what I mean?
Interesting that the Speak and Spell was based on a Texan’s voice. I remember having trouble with “pen” or “pin”, because the pronunciation was so much different to what I was used to.