Blog – Page 115

If Doggerland Had Not Drowned

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

by Lee Rimmer

…

As well additional land around our familiar coastlines, the lower sea level reveals a low lying 9,000 square mile landmass called Doggerland – named after Dogger Bank, the large sandbank which currently sits in a shallow area of the North Sea off the east coast of England (dogger being an old Dutch word for fishing boat).

Doggerland had a rich landscape of hills, rivers and lakes and a coastline comprising lagoons, marshes and beaches. It had woodlands of oak, elm, birch, willow, alder, hazel and pine. It was home to horses, aurochs, deer, elks and wild pigs. Waterfowl, otters and beavers abounded in wetland areas and the seas, lakes and rivers teemed with fish. It was probably the richest hunting and fishing ground in Europe at the time and had an important influence on the course of prehistory in northwestern Europe as maritime and river-based societies adapted to this environment.

…

Lee Rimmer (Abroad in the Yard)

I love a bit of alternative history fiction, and this is a big one, going all the way back to prehistoric times. What if the period of global warming that took place thousands of years ago, “sinking” Doggerland and separating the formerly-connected British Isles from one another and from the European mainland? The potential impact is massive, affecting geography, history, and politics indefinitely, and it’s fun to think – and read – about.

Dan Q found GC1H3PK Keep On Mooving

This checkin to GC1H3PK Keep On Mooving reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Some fellow volunteers and I were staying at nearby Wroxall Abbey following our Christmas party this weekend and I took the opportunity to walk out here between breakfast and check-out to hunt for this cache. Passing GC5RZB4 (and a herd of cows) on the way I was soon able to spot the tell-tale signs of a cache hiding place and soon had the container in my hand.

I love to see a good location with a week maintained cache; nice work CO, and TFTC!

Dan Q found GC5RZB4 #10..CHEWBACCA

This checkin to GC5RZB4 #10..CHEWBACCA reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Staying in nearby Wroxall Abbey for a Christmas party with a nonprofit I volunteer with, I took the opportunity to wander out to find this cache and nearby and GC1H3PK this morning between breakfast and check-out. I was watched suspiciously by herd of cows nearby. TFTC.

Pong

I’ve recently been reimplementing retro arcade classic Pong to show off during a celebration of World Digital Preservation Day 2018 yesterday at the Bodleian Libraries. Here’s how that went down.

The team responsible for digital archiving had plans to spend World Digital Preservation Day running a stand in Blackwell Hall for some time before I got involved. They’d asked my department about using the Heritage Window – the Bodleian’s 15-screen video wall – to show a carousel of slides with relevant content over the course of the day. Or, they added, half-jokingly, “perhaps we could have Pong up there as it’ll be its 46th birthday?”

But I didn’t take it as a joke. I took it as a challenge.

Emulating Pong is pretty easy. Emulating Pong perfectly is pretty hard. Indeed, a lot of the challenge in the preservation of (especially digital) archives in general is in finding the best possible compromise in situations where perfect preservation is not possible. If these 8″ disks are degrading, is is acceptable to copy them onto a different medium? If this video file is unreadable in modern devices, is it acceptable to re-encode it in a contemporary format? These are the kinds of questions that digital preservation specialists have to ask themselves all the damn time.

Emulating Pong in a way that would work on the Heritage Window but be true to the original raised all kinds of complications. (Original) Pong’s aspect ratio doesn’t fit nicely on a 16:9 widescreen, much less on a 27:80 ultrawide. Like most games of its era, the speed is tied to the clock rate of the processor. And of course, it should be controlled using a “dial”.

By the time I realised that there was no way that I could thoroughly replicate the experience of the original game, I decided to take a different track. Instead, I opted to reimplement Pong. A reimplementation could stay true to the idea of Pong but serve as a jumping-off point for discussion about how the experience of playing the game may be superficially “like Pong” but that this still wasn’t an example of digital preservation.

Two participants play Pong on the Heritage Window — Bip… boop… boop… bip… boop… bip…

Here’s the skinny:

A web page, displayed full-screen, contains both a <canvas> (for the game, sized appropriately for a 3 × 3 section of the video wall) and a <div> full of “slides” of static content to carousel alongside (filling a 2 × 3 section).
Javascript writes to the canvas, simulates the movement of the ball and paddles, and accepts input from the JS Gamepad API (which is awesome, by the way). If there’s only one player, a (tough! – only three people managed to beat it over the course of the day!) AI plays the other paddle.
A pair of SNES controllers adapted for use as USB controllers which I happened to own already.

I felt that the day, event, and game were a success. A few dozen people played Pong and explored the other technology on display. Some got nostalgic about punch tape, huge floppy disks, and even mechanical calculators. Many more talked to the digital archives folks and I about the challenges and importance of digital archiving. And a good time was had by all.

I’ve open-sourced the entire thing with a super-permissive license so you can deploy it yourself (you know, on your ultrawide video wall) or adapt it as you see fit. Or if you’d just like to see it for yourself on your own computer, you can (but unless you’re using a 4K monitor you’ll probably need to use your browser’s mobile/responsive design simulator set to 3200 × 1080 to make it fit your screen). If you don’t have controllers attached, use W/S to control player 1 and the cursor keys for player 2 in a 2-player game.

Happy 46th birthday, Pong.

Digest for November 2018

Summary

This month I reimplemented arcade classic Pong for its 46th birthday/World Digital Preservation Day (note 1, note 2) and set it up to play on a 15-screen videowall at the Weston Library in Oxford.

I also shared thoughts on why web developers should use CSS before adding JS, an explanation of the history of the North Sentinelese, and a tear-jerking Christmas short film.

All posts

Posts marked by an asterisk (*) are referenced by the summary above.

Articles

Pong *

Notes

Reposts

Reposts marked with a dagger (†) include my comments or interpretation.

Videos

Pong on the Heritage Window

Note #11906

Playing Pong at the @bodleianlibs for #WDPD2018 #dp0c.

Note #11897

The Prime Minister’s New Bill

With apologies to Hans Christian Andersen and thanks to JTA, both of whom deserve the credit for this more than I.

Once there lived a Prime Minister, and she loved to wear clothes made of strong international relations. One day a Swindler came to the Prime Minister and he promised that he could equip her with clothes of the best and strongest international relations. The Swindler claimed that all the people of the realm loved the new material he was producing, and the Prime Minister was delighted. She appointed a man to be in charge of ensuring that the Swindler did the job he had promised, and then she got back to her important work.

Her man soon reported to her a most alarming fact: the Swindler wasn’t at his loom. He was just sitting in the pub, sipping distinctly-English beers and seemingly making no progress on the bill at all. The Prime Minister was alarmed, but didn’t say anything: after all, she would soon be on the way to wearing clothes of the most beautiful and strong international relations. Besides, she’d been promised that all the people loved the new material that the Swindler worked with. So she appointed a second man and asked him to keep an eye on the Swindler, instead.

The second man checked in on the Swindler, and then reported that the Swindler still wasn’t weaving. The Prime Minister challenged the Swindler, but he claimed that he’d had car trouble while returning from France, where he’d been acquiring supplies, and would be getting back to his work soon. Clearly the second man had been too hasty in his judgement, so the Prime Minister appointed a third, who’d surely be less-judgemental as he saw the job through.

The third man checked on the Swindler, and discovered that while he was at his loom, he didn’t seem to be working at all and the loom stood bare. “The Prime Minister is concerned,” said the man “That no progress has been made whatsoever on her new clothes of strong international relations.”

“But progress has been made,” said the Swindler, “Can’t you see? I promised the Prime Minister that I would weave, and weave means weave! I am making clothes of the finest international relations; they’re made out of a Bill so lightweight and flimsy that it’s almost invisible. Only the cleverest of people can see it.” The Swindler reached into the loom and scooped his arm under the place where the fabric should appear, and raised it to show the third man.

“Ah yes,” said the third man, “I can see it.” But the third man could not see the Prime Minister’s new strong international relations.

Soon the clothes were ready, and the Swindler brought them to the Prime Minister to try on. She seemed confused at first: where were the clothes? But then the swindler explained: “These clothes are made of the finest international relations, in the fashion that is most-popular with the people,” he said. “Only the most-intelligent of people can see how beautiful, how elegant, how economically-viable they are!”

“Oh!” said the Prime Minister, and examined her new clothes. “I… um… see you’ve put a lot of work into stitching the hem: these borders will surely be well-protected.”

The Prime Minister tried on her new clothes, and observed that they were so light that she might as well have been wearing nothing at all. She wasn’t sure that she wanted to be seen wearing these new clothes because they made her feel naked and vulnerable, but she didn’t want people to think that she was stupid by confessing that she couldn’t see them. She resolved to show them to everybody she could find.

First she went to her Cabinet. “Do you like my beautiful new clothes?” she asked, “They’re made of strong international relations, and only the cleverest of people can see them!” And her Cabinet all nodded and said that yes, of course they liked them. But they could not see the beautiful new clothes. (It’s worth noting that half a dozen of them walked out at this point without saying a word.)

The Prime Minister went to see the Old People, and she said, “Do you like my beautiful new clothes? They’re made of strong international relations, but only clever people can see them.”

“Yes, they’re wonderful,” said the Old People. But they could not see the strong international relations.

The Prime Minister went to talk to the Emperor of America, and she said “Do you like my beautiful new clothes? They’re made of strong international relations, but only clever people can see them.”

The Emperor of America looked the Prime Minister up and down, and made a strange face that made the Prime Minister suspect that the Emperor didn’t even WANT to see the strong international relations, but he said: “Yes, they’re great clothes. The best clothes.” But the Emperor of America could not see the strong international relations.

The Prime Minister went to talk to the Racists, and she said “Do you like my beautiful new clothes? They’re made of strong international relations, but only clever people can see them.”

“Yes, they’re fantastic,” said the Racists, and they genuinely meant it, because they’d already persuaded themselves that because the new clothes had been made in their own country they were inherently superior to any clothes that might have been made by foreigners. But still, they had to admit, they couldn’t actually see any strong international relations nor did they want to.

The Prime Minister went to talk to the Under Thirties, and she said “Do you like my beautiful new clothes? They’re made of strong international relations, but only clever people can see them.”

The Under Thirties stared at Prime Minister, and then looked at each other, and then looked back at the Prime Minister. “You’re not WEARING any clothes,” they said. And the Prime Minister knew that they were right.

JUST LEARNED THERE ARE 16 OUNCES IN A POUND

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

by @innesmck

JUST LEARNED THERE ARE 16 OUNCES IN A POUND AND I AM FUCKING LIVID

SIXTEEN???

WHAT THE FUCK KIND OF NUMBER IS THAT

i have had no reason to actually look into imperial measurements until now and frankly i immediately regret it finding this out it makes some sense though because a pound is defined as being 7000 grains so that makes each ounce a nice round…

437.5 grains

and then, oh my word, oh my fucking actual god
GUESS HOW MANY POUNDS THERE ARE IN A STONE

you’ll never get it, it would be fucking impossible to guess this

THERE ARE FOURTEEN POUNDS IN A STONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

THAT’S A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT FUCKING NUMBER! FYI!!!!

THERE’S LITERALLY NO WAY TO KNOW HOW MANY OUNCES ARE IN A STONE!! NO-ONE CAN KNOW THIS “but innes you can just multiply up the fourteen by sixteen and you’ll g-“

NO

MATHS HAS CLEARLY ABANDONED US. NUMBERS MEAN NOTHING AT THIS POINT

WHAT THE FUCK KIND OF ANTIQUATED JOKE SYSTEM ARE PEOPLE WORKING WITH

my mum: wow count yourself lucky you only need to learn your 10 times tables, when i was a kid we had to go up to 12

me, a child: oh, for weights and stuff?

mum, a liar: sure

TURNS OUT NO-ONE ON THE PLANET IS TRAINED TO WORK WITH THESE FUCKED UP NUMBERS. THEY JUST MAKE STUFF UP. NO-ONE KNOWS HOW MUCH A POUND IS BECAUSE IF THEY’D EVER USED THIS BULLSHIT SYSTEM THERE WOULD BE RIOTS

and then how many ounces go in a cup?

WHICH FUCKING CUP, AMERICA

HOW DO YOU ALL OWN THE SAME SIZE OF CUP

WHO HAS A MONOPOLY ON THE ONE GOOD CUP SIZE

PRESUMABLY THIS IS JUST STRAIGHT UP BULLSHIT TOO TO COVER FOR THE FACT THAT NO-ONE KNOWS HOW MANY ANY QUANTITY OF ANYTHING IS

me: so, the recipe calls for 2 lbs 3 oz of flour, you got that?

you: uhhhh, sure. yeah. that’s like… 3 cups, probably. this is a great system.

AND THEN

THEN WE HIT THE BIG NUMBERS

PRESUMABLY. I ASSUME THAT’S THE ORDER WE’RE GOING IN

though judging from american dates IT IS KINDA HARD TO TELL

so what’s heavier, a ton of feathers or a ton of gold?

IT’S THE TON OF GOLD BECAUSE UNDER IMPERIAL MEASUREMENTS THESE ARE COMPLETELY FUCKING DIFFERENT SCALES

SEE ALSO: WOOL, COINS, MYSTERY ENGLISH ILLEGAL POUND, MISCELLANEOUS

THE ONE JOKE WHICH MAKES IT CLEAR THAT MASS IS A UNIVERSAL METHOD OF COMPARISON REGARDLESS OF MATERIAL HAS NO BEARING ON THE FUCKED UP BIZARRO WORLD OF YESTERDAY THAT IS THE IMPERIAL SYSTEM

I AM 30 YEARS OLD

I’VE GONE MY WHOLE FUCKING LIFE BELIEVING THE IMPERIAL SYSTEM WAS DIFFERENT, SURE, BUT I THOUGHT IT HAD AT LEAST SOME GROUNDING IN REALITY

but NO

I AM SO ANGRY RIGHT NOW

I CANT UNDERSTAND WHY YOU’VE DONE THIS TO ME

go on

say it

but if anyone tells me anything other than one hundred here I am tearing this entire fucking place to the ground

Have you ever wondered how many pounds are in a hundredweight? That’s an actual name of an actual measure. Go on, guess.

oh my sweet jesus

OF COURSE

OF FUCKING COURSE IT DOES

WHY WOULD WORDS MEAN ANYTHING ANY MORE

I HATE ALL OF THIS, AND I HATE ALL OF YOU FOR MAKING ME KNOW IT

THIS IS WHY IM NOT TAKING ANY OF YOUR SHIT WHEN YOU TRY AND TELL ME FAHRENHEIT IS A MORE LOGICAL SYSTEM

HOW MANY FAHRENHEIT ARE IN A CUP

i cant take this right now im going for a fucking walk

everyone is just saying terrible number conversions at me i hate this

no-one has even mentioned oxgangs though so you’re all fired

trying to get to sleep but all i can hear is your voices chanting “pints a pound the world around” over and over in my brain

Pints A Pound The World Around

i still don’t entirely know what it means but I am 100% fucking sure it’s not even true

im not sure anything is true any more

@innesmck (via Thread Reader)

Note #11893

Some days my job… isn’t like other people’s jobs. Lately, I’ve been reimplementing Pong in Javascript for the @bodleianlibs’ video wall for an event on Thursday.

Pong on the Heritage Window

Testing a few days prior to public display.

Also available on YouTube and on QTube.

German chat app slacking on hashing fined €20k

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

by Richard Chirgwin (The Register)

German chat platform Knuddels.de (“Cuddles”) has been fined €20,000 for storing user passwords in plain text (no hash at all? Come on, people, it’s 2018).

The data of Knuddels users was copied and published by malefactors in July. In September, someone emailed the company warning them that user data had been published at Pastebin (only 8,000 members affected) and Mega.nz (a much bigger breach). The company duly notified its users and the Baden-Württemberg data protection authority.

…

Richard Chirgwin (The Register)

Interesting stuff: this German region’s equivalent of the ICO applied a fine to this app for failing to hash passwords, describing them as personal information that was inadequately protected following their theft. That’s interesting because it sets a German, and to a lesser extend a European, precedent that plaintext passwords can be considered personal information and therefore allowing the (significant) weight of the GDPR to be applied to their misuse.

Warp and Weft?

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Warp and Weft by Paul Robert Lloyd (paulrobertlloyd.com)

Earlier this month I had the good fortune to attend Material, a conference that explores the concept of the web as a material and all the intrinsic characteristics that entails. The variety of talks provided new perspectives on what it means to build for – and with – the web, and prompted me to …

…

What it means for something to be of the web has been discussed many times before. While the technical test can be reasonably objective – is it addressable, accessible and available – culturally it remains harder to judge. But I don’t know about you, I’ve found that certain websites feel more ‘webby’ than others.

…

Paul Robert Lloyd

Despite being nonspecific on the nature of the feeling he describes, Paul hits the nail on the head. Your favourite (non-Medium) blog or guru site almost certainly has that feel of being “of the web”. Your favourite API-less single-page app (with the growing “please use in Chrome” banner) almost certainly does not.

Baby Burping Robot

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Useless Duck Company (YouTube)

At the moment at which he described the machine’s success, I completely lost it.

We Watched the Toy Story Porn Parody So You Don’t Have To [NSFW]

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

A wise man once said “To Infinity and Beyond”, Unfortunately there’s no way of knowing who that man was or in what context it was meant to be understood, so let us instead turn our attention to the Toy Story porn parody – Sex Toy Story The XXX Parody Part 1.

It says Part 1, but I searched and there’s no Part 2. Unless they’re doing like a Toy Story 3 thing where they wait like ten years for Andy to grow up and go off to college, in which case we will have to wait with bated breath for ten years for Part 2.

We open on an unnamed woman played by Veruca James (Lesbian Anal Vampires, Emo Teen Fucks at Work) getting ready to masturbate. She does so the normal way we all do, by rubbing her clothed body.

…

Ryan Creamer (CollegeHumor)

“Does it exist?”, I asked, when the conversation drifted perilously close to this topic. Well of course it exists: Rule 34, duh. I was so glad that this article existed, to spare me from having to watch it to work out how much I didn’t want to watch it. Now all I have to do is scrub the idea of this article from my mind, which is hopefully easier than the retina-burning image of the film itself would have been.

Resulting link NSFW, obviously.

When to use CSS vs. JavaScript

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

CSS before JS #

My general rule of thumb is…

If something I want to do with JavaScript can be done with CSS instead, use CSS.

CSS parses and renders faster.

For things like animations, it more easily hooks into the browser’s refresh rate cycle to provide silky smooth animations (this can be done in JS, too, but CSS just makes it so damn easy).

And it fails gracefully.

A JavaScript error can bring all of the JS on a page to screeching halt. Mistype a CSS property or miss a semicolon? The browser just skips the property and moves on. Use an unsupported feature? Same thing.

…

Chris Ferdinandi

This exactly! If you want progressive enhancement (and you should), performance, and the cleanest separation of behaviour and presentation, the pages you deliver to your users (regardless of what technology you use on your server) should consist of:

HTML, written in such a way that that they’re complete and comprehensible alone – from an information science perspective, your pages shouldn’t “need” any more than this (although it’s okay if they’re pretty ugly without any more)
CSS, adding design, theme, look-and-feel to your web page
Javascript, using progressive enhancement to add functionality in-the-browser (e.g. validation on the client-side in addition to the server side validation, for speed and ease of user experience) and, where absolutely necessary, to add functionality not possible any other way (e.g. if you’re looking to tap into the geolocation API, you’re going to need Javascript… but it’s still desirable to provide as much of the experience as possible without)

Developers failing to follow this principle is making the Web more fragile and harder to archive. It’s not hard to do things “right”: we just need to make sure that developers learn what “right” is and why it’s important.

Incidentally, I just some enhancements to the header of this site, including some CSS animations on the logo and menu (none of them necessary, but all useful) and some Javascript to help ensure that users of touch-capable devices have an easier time. Note that neither Javascript nor CSS are required to use this site; they just add value… just the way the Web ought to be (where possible).