I am all over the map this week.
- How The Ballpoint Pen Killed Cursive. I learned D’Nealian; my mother wrote Spencerian. Technical lettering in college and signing labs as a grad student destroyed my style. Anyone know a good source of fountain pens that are cheap/usable? I don’t want to go down the crazy route. (via)
- Triple redundancy in a Boeing 777. An Ada program compiled with 3 different compilers and run on 3 different processors. (PDF, via)
- If you’re curious about gold (the software, not the metal) and how linkers work, given DragonFly’s recent switch, the author of gold, Ian Lance Taylor, wrote a 20-part series about the topic. (Linked here before some years ago, but it’s worth reading now.)
- “We got around three“. A lesson in the persistence of Fortran.
- Former Atari Employee Posts Work Email Log from 1982-1992. The source of the link has many choice comments pulled out.
- Four examples of excellent interface design. In games, of course. The only one I’ve tried is Brogue, previously linked here, and its terminal controls don’t feel like terminal controls.
- The Storage Engine: Timeline. History of data storage, an online exhibit at the Computer History Museum. There are some delightful pictures and stories. (via)
- Raspberry Pi Zero: The $5 Computer. Pretty soon it’s going to be possible to sneeze and accidentally lose several computers because you blew them off the table. (via, also here)
- Also, a comparison of price between similarly-powered computers: everything circa 1980 and the Pi Zero now.
- C.H.I.P. vs Pi Zero: Which Sub-$10 Computer Is Better? Topical! “Which runs BSD better?” is the question you should ask, cause price is almost immaterial. (via)
- A browser-based optics sandbox. Funny how this used to require a standalone program. (via)
- The Software Freedom Conservancy is looking for your support. They provide infrastructure to software you use.
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Sunday Comics Kickstarter.
Your unrelated open source game of the week: 0 A.D. Works on FreeBSD and OpenBSD and can run on DragonFly if you can fix gloox. (via)