A Love Letter To My Lost Amiga

December 20, 2022 by Jenny List 141 Comments

My first love was a black wedge. It was 1982, and I had saved up to buy a Sinclair ZX81. That little computer remains the only one of the huge number that I have owned over the years about which I can truly say that I understood its workings completely; while I know how the i7 laptop on which this is being written works I can only say so in a loose way as it is an immensely complex device.

Computing allegiance is fickle, and while I never lost an affection for the little Sinclair I would meet my true electronic soulmate around eight years later as an electronic engineering student. It no longer graces my bench, but this was the computer against which all subsequent machines I have owned would be measured, the one which I wish had not been taken from me before its time, and with which I wish I could have grown old together. That machine was a Commodore Amiga, and this is part love letter, part wistful musing about what could have been, and part rant about what went wrong for the best desktop computer platform ever made. Continue reading “A Love Letter To My Lost Amiga” →

Yesterday’s Future Is Brighter Today

December 17, 2022 by Elliot Williams 31 Comments

The demoscene never ceases to amaze. Back in the mid-80s, people wouldn’t just hack software to remove the copy restrictions, but would go the extra mile and add some fun artwork and greetz. Over the ensuing decade the artform broke away from the cracks entirely, and the elite hackers were making electronic music with amazing accompanying graphics to simply show off.

Looked at from today, some of the demos are amazing given that they were done on such primitive hardware, but those were the cutting edge home computers at the time. I don’t know what today’s equivalent is, with CGI-powered blockbusters running in mainstream cinemas, the state of the art in graphics has moved on quite a bit. But the state of the old art doesn’t rest either. I’ve just seen the most amazing demo on a ZX Spectrum.

Simply put, this demo does things in 2022 on a computer from 1982 that were literally impossible at the time. Not because the hardware was different – this is using retro gear after all – but because the state of our communal knowledge has changed so dramatically over the last 40 years. What makes 2020s demos more amazing than their 1990s equivalents is that we’ve learned, discovered, and shared enough new tricks with each other that we can do what was previously impossible. Not because of silicon tech, but because of the wetware. (And maybe I shouldn’t underestimate the impact of today’s coding environments and other tooling.)

I love the old demoscene, probably for nostalgia reasons, but I love the new demoscene because it shows us how far we’ve come. That, and it’s almost like reverse time-travel, taking today’s knowledge and pushing it back into gear of the past.

Students Rebel Against Heat-Sensing Crotch Monitor Surveillance Devices

December 12, 2022 by Lewin Day 180 Comments

Surveillance has become a ubiquitous part of modern life. Public spaces are dotted with CCTV cameras inside and out. Recent years have seen the technology spread to the suburbs with porch cameras spreading the eye of big tech and law enforcement ever further.

Outside of mere cameras, companies are rushing to develop all manner of new devices to surveil individuals, too. One such device intended to track students quickly drew the ire of scholars at Northeastern University, and the cohort fought back.

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Fossil Files: My .Emacs

December 10, 2022 by Elliot Williams 63 Comments

Last week, I wrote about cargo culting in a much more general context, so this week I’m going to come clean. The file that had me thinking about the topic was the worst case you’ve probably ever seen: I have a .emacs file kicking around that I haven’t really understood since I copied it from someone else – probably Ben Scarlet whose name is enshrined therein – in the computer lab in 1994! Yes, my .emacs file is nearly 30, and I still don’t really understand it, not exactly.

Now in my defence, I switched up to vim as my main editor a few years ago, but this one file has seen duty on Pentiums running pre-1.0 versions of Linux, on IBM RS/6000 machines in the aforementioned computer lab, and on a series of laptops and desktops that I’ve owned over the years. It got me through undergrad, grad school, and a decade of work. It has served me well. And if I fired up emacs right now, it would still be here.

For those of you out there who don’t use emacs, the .emacs file is a configuration file. It says how to interpret different files based on their extensions, defines some special key combos, and perhaps most importantly, defines how code syntax highlighting works. It’s basically all of the idiosyncratic look-and-feel stuff in emacs, and it’s what makes my emacs mine. But I don’t understand it.

Why? Because it’s written in LISP, for GNU’s sake, and because it references all manner of cryptic internal variables that emacs uses under the hood. I’m absolutely not saying that I haven’t tweaked some of the colors around, or monkey-patched something in here or there, but the extent is always limited to whatever I can get away with, without having to really learn LISP.

This ancient fossil of a file is testament to two things. The emacs codebase has been stable enough that it still works after all this time, but also that emacs is so damn complicated and written in an obscure enough language that I have never put the time in to really grok it – the barriers are too high and the payoff for the effort too low. I have no doubt that I could figure it out for real, but I just haven’t.

So I just schlep this file around, from computer to computer, without understanding it and without particularly wanting to. Except now that I write this. Damnit.

Featured image: “A Dusty Old Book” by Marco Verch Professional.

Ask Hackaday: Will Your 2030 Car Have AM Radio?

December 9, 2022 by Al Williams 171 Comments

Car makers have been phasing out AM radios in their cars for quite some time. Let’s face it, there isn’t much on AM these days, and electric vehicles have been known to cause interference with AM radios. So why have them? For that matter, many aftermarket head units now don’t even have radios at all. They play digital media or stream Bluetooth from your phone. However, a U.S. Senator, Edward J. Markey, has started a letter-writing campaign to the major car makers urging them to retain the AM radio in their future vehicles.

So does that mean AM lives? Or will the car makers kill it off? The letter requests that the companies answer several questions, including if they plan to discontinue AM or FM radios in the near future and if they support digital broadcast radio.

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Build A Better Mousetrap… But It Better Be Better!

December 8, 2022 by Al Williams 22 Comments

As creative problem solvers, we like to “think outside the box,” and we should strive for that. But what happens if your strange idea isn’t kept in check by cooler heads? There is a real danger — especially if you work alone — to falling so in love with your idea, that you lose sight of what it really means to be better.

Case in point. The self-parking car. Well, not the modern variant, which seems to work pretty well. But did you know that the self-parking car was invented in the 1930s and used an extra fifth wheel? Hard to imagine? See the video below. History tells us that the idea didn’t catch on.

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Love AI, But Don’t Love It Too Much

December 7, 2022 by Jenny List 51 Comments

The up-and-coming Wonder of the World in software and information circles , and particularly in those circles who talk about them, is AI. Give a magic machine a lot of stuff, ask it a question, and it will give you a meaningful and useful answer. It will create art, write books, compose music, and generally Change The World As We Know It. All this is genuinely impressive stuff, as anyone who has played with DALL-E will tell you. But it’s important to think about what the technology can and can’t do that’s new so as to not become caught up in the hype, and in doing that I’m immediately drawn to a previous career of mine. Continue reading “Love AI, But Don’t Love It Too Much” →