Tag: history
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Just a Little More Context Bro, I Promise, and It’ll Fix Everything
Based on my experience of 'vibe coding', I think Jim Nielsen's analogies are absolutely spot on.
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Riding With Strangers: California Hitchhikers in the 1970s
From 1973 onwards Doug Biggert, driving around California, took an (analogue!) photograph of every hitch-hiker to whom he offered a lift. Now you can view a gallery and read his story.
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Some time in the last 25 years, ISPs stopped saying they made you "part of" the Internet, just that they'd help you "connect to" the Internet.
Most people don't need a static IP, sure. But when ISPs stopped offering FTP and WWW hosting as a standard feature (shit though it often was), they became part of the tragic process by which the Internet became centralised, and commoditised, and corporate, and just generally watered-down.
The amount of effort to "put something online" didn't increase by a lot, but it increased by enough that millions probably missed-out on the opportunity to create their first homepage.
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Seventy years ago, residents of this part of London would take shelter from V1 and V2 bombs in a tunnel beneath my feet. And today, I'm going down there to take a look!
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Dan, a white man wearing a Goo Goo Dolls t-shirt, stands in front of a sign describing the history of The Drum in South Clapham.
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The Local Historian
This week I (again) helped share my knowledge about a nearby stone circle and henge with a group of children from the local school. And I was overjoyed to receive the most-delightful handmade 'thank you' card from the class.
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Historical Tech Tree
Étienne Fortier-Dubois's excellent Historical Tech Tree is fun and informative, and worth an explore.
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Happy Stone Circle Sunday! The youngest and I went out to Avebury Henge, the world's largest neolithic standing stone circle and henge.
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On verdant grass and under clear skies, a boy in a white-and-blue 'Sonic the Hedgehog' t-shirt strolls in front of a line of about half a dozen enormous standing stones.
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What If the EU Never Existed?
It's Europe Day, and Nebula/YouTube channel EU Made Simple has released a video, What If the EU Never Existed?, describing a chilling alternate-history of post-WWII Europe. Well worth a watch.
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The Devil's Quoits (Stanton Harcourt, Oxfordshire, UK) looks particularly striking in the bright sunlight of this Spring morning.
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A circle of standing stones in a henge, in a clearing flanked by trees, under wispy clouds in a bright blue sky.
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Why is there a "small house" in IBM's Code page 437?
There's a small house ( ⌂ ) in the middle of IBM's infamous character set Code Page 437. "Small house"—that's the official IBM name given to the glyph at code position 0x7F, where a control character for "Delete" (DEL) should logically exist. It's cute, but a little strange. I wonder, how did it … -
My love of the yesterweb forced me to teach myself just-enough Blender to make an animation for a stupid thing: an 88x31 button representing "me" (and, I suppose, my blog, whenever I next end up redesigning its theme).
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88x31 animated GIF button in the Web 1.0 style, reading "DAN Q". The letter Q is spinning.
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The same image, but expanded so it's larger.
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Reading more rolled papyri
In kind-of local news, I see that the folks at Diamond Light Source (which I got to visit last year) have been helping the Bodleian (who I used to work for) to X-ray one of their Herculaneum scrolls (which I've written about before). That's really cool.
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On Wednesday, Vodafone announced that they'd made the first ever satellite video call from a stock mobile phone in an area with no terrestrial signal. They used a mountain in Wales for their experiment.
It reminded me of an experiment of my own, way back in around 1999, which I probably should have made a bigger deal of. I believe that I was the first person to ever send an email from the top of Yr Wyddfa/Snowdon.
Nowadays, that's an easy thing to do. You pull your phone out and send it. But back then, I needed to use a Psion 5mx palmtop, communicating over an infared link using a custom driver (if you ever wondered why I know my AT-commands by heart... well, this isn't exactly why, but it's a better story than the truth) to a Nokia 7110 (fortunately it was cloudy enough to not interfere with the 9,600 baud IrDA connection while I positioned the devices atop the trig point), which engaged a GSM 2G connection, over which I was able to send an email to myself, cc:'d to a few friends.
It's not an exciting story. It's not even much of a claim to fame. But there you have it: I was (probably) the first person to send an email from the summit of Yr Wyddfa. (If you beat me to it, let me know!)
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Horse-Powered Locomotives
You probably know the story of George Stephenson's Rocket beating its competitors and going to to influence steam locomotive design for generations. But did you know that one of its competitors... was a horse in a carriage?
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US Constitution and Presidential Assassinations
A thought came to me this morning: if a US President-Elect dies before their inauguration, does their running mate automatically get the Presidency? Finding the answer led me through a warren of interconnected Constitutional Amendments.