So I hit up a garage sale over the weekend and bought a genuine, working-condition Atari 2600, with a huge stack of games nearly mint in their boxes, for a song. I thought I’d scan the box covers and give … Read more
There are many places around the City of London to see its old Roman Wall, notably alongside Noble Street, in Barber Surgeons’ Meadow, through the Barbican, in St Alphage Garden and just outside the entrance to Tower Hill station. Here … Read more
A few months back, while playing around with , I came across something that completely derailed my plans. Strange attractors – fancy math that creates beautiful patterns. At first I thought I’d just render one and move on, but then … Read more
2024-09-11 “That’s a non-trivial computation” ~Prof Kahan on the time-value of money calculation The HP-12c is probably the most iconic financial calculator. Not being in finance myself, and in fact being terribly bad at that kind of thing, I never … Read more
Enlarge Benj Edwards / Jonathan Zufi / Apple Forty years ago today, Apple released the first Macintosh. Since that fateful day in 1984, Apple has released hundreds of Mac models that run the gamut from amazing to strange. In honor … Read more
This blog article is part of the 20sPeople season – a season of exhibitions, activities and events from The National Archives that explores and shares stories that connect the people of the 2020s with the people of the 1920s. With … Read more
Every once in a while, people recognize strange loops in unexpected places. This is one of them, in the form of a Haskell function. loeb loeb is one of those functions in Haskell that are amazing, crazy, simple and complicated … Read more
By growing an unusual tentacled microbe in the lab, microbiologists may have taken a big step toward resolving the earliest branches on the tree of life and unraveling one of its great mysteries: how the complex cells that make up … Read more
Tonight’s story time: the Power Macintosh that wouldn’t make any sound in BeOS R5, how I figured out the problem, and how I hacked the sound driver to fix it. (Download link at the end.) My favourite beige Power Mac … Read more
The Penrose tiling pattern is a type of quasicrystal, which means that it has an ordered yet never-repeating structure. The pattern, composed of two shapes, is a 2D projection of a 5D square lattice. Credit: None By shining a laser … Read more