11.24.08
Posted in Culture, Modern Life, Photography at 10:15 pm by thomas
Just stumbled over this one: Google now hosts scans of more than a million LIFE photos from the 1800s up to today.
From a first glance, there are endless opportunities for research and just idle Googleing. Hundreds of images from the Yangtze in the 1940s, the San Francisco Conference, historic shots of the National Parks, American Diners… there’s lots of good stuff in here that has quite possibly never been published in the magazine.
It’s great to live in a time where more and more of these once unaccessible archives are opened up, never to be more than a few mouseclicks away.
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11.01.08
Posted in Good Stuff, Modern Life, Programming, Tech Nostalgia at 10:29 pm by thomas
This is a little bit geeky, but for the late-thirties/early-forty Euro JavaScript crowd (all five of us) this should be interesting: Matt West just announced the release of his ZX Spectrum emulator completely written in JavaScript.
From my perspective, this counts as OMG-WTF Cool! Excellent coding with a very worthy goal. 
I’d found a working MSX JavaScript emulator a little while ago and had even contemplated reusing that Z80 code for something like a Speccy emulator, but the code had been mostly undocumented and I had a few other projects that were rather more pressing… I’m glad that Matt did this, and from a first glance at his code, it is very well written JavaScript with a lot of opportunity for interesting expansions.
It would be interesting to extend the code with a Debugger/Monitor so that the user can see the Z80 code while it is executed – that would make a great learning tool for assembly language!
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