Bruce Sterling posted a rather rough wakeup call about the state of current literature and publishing at his beyond the beyond blog – Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature. The recent wave of layoffs in the publishing industry was probably just the beginning in a process that will eventually lead to a new equilibrium far away [...]
After a few months of not much time (actually that’s still true, I’m just coping better!) I have dug up my unfinished emulation project. The 68K emulation now knows maybe 75% of the instruction set and my virtual Atari ST runs through a good chunk of the early initialization code, before it currently all blows [...]
This has been going around the blogosphere for a few days now, but I just have to say – the Big Mess o’Wires is one of the coolest hardware projects I’ve seen in a long while. Steve Chamberlin set out to build a CPU and the computer around it from scratch – as in, he [...]
Here’s an interesting new clone of 80s home computers: The FPGA Arcade (not sure if that’s the final name) is based on a Xilinx FPGA and will be a multi-machine clone for the Atari ST, Amiga and older 8-bit systems all on one main board. From the blog it looks like they will be very [...]
While walking through Chinatown a couple of days ago, I had this intense flashback – suddenly I was back in Shanghai… in May 1989. Memories just came flooding back, the smells, the sounds… the view along the Bund through the hazy air, heavy with thick smoke from the ships. There were the banners, held high. [...]
I’m currently glued to NASA TV’s YouTube channel, with its daily dosage of videos from the Hubble repair mission in glorious HD. It’s quite astonishing to think that the Hubble telescope has been in orbit now for 19 years – I was in university when Hubble was launched into space! It’s been out there, faithfully [...]
I’ve written before about the roots of my programming life – while I first had a ZX81, I really consider the Sinclair ZX Sepctrum as the machine where I developed a taste for programming and thinking in algorithms. Most actual Spectrums are now rather long in the tooth, and many have probably near irreparable damage [...]
Last year I had picked up the first US translation of one of Arimasa Osawa’s books – Shinjuku Shark, and just recently I’ve found a new translation in his series around a cop in Tokyo in our local Japanese bookstore. The title is The Poison Ape, and where Shinjuku Shark was an in-depth study of [...]
Last weekend we had a chance to see the Japanese movie “Departures” as a preview of its official release in the US during the San Francisco International Film Festival. Departures won this year’s Academy Award for best foreign film, and it must have been a close call as best film all around. Where to begin? [...]
I’ve been gone for quite a while from this blog… it’s been a busy few months! To restart the blog, here first something geeky: 25 Microchips that Shook the World. A great article with short histories of 25 chips that had wide-ranging influence on… really, everything. Between them, there is no part of modern human [...]