brandnew ancient games
On collective participation in gaming culture, PCs and consoles, open and closed technological ecosystems, and all in all a bit of a rant … ;)
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Category Archives: hardware
the differential gear
The above is the most clear-cut explanation of ‘how a ↑differential gear works’ I’ve ever seen. The video below is complementary—↑Richard Feynman explains why a train car stays on its tracks when ‘going around the corner,’ although no differential … Continue reading →
african telecom reach
From ↑ITU statistics intac made some interesting infomap posters. The above one shows the ↑Internet usage around the globe (click the picture for full-size). The lighter a nation state is rendered, the lesser percentage of its population are using the … Continue reading →
frankenrifle in mali
The above screencap from a BBC report on the conflict in Mali was made by @ByronDoerfer and sent to ↑C. J. Chivers, who gave a ↑first diagnosis: This gentleman, reportedly a Chadian soldier in Mali, is holding what appears to … Continue reading →
wireless devices 1906
Kip W ↑unearthed the above wonderful, stunningly up-to-date ↑Punch cartoon (Williams 1955: 164) by artist ↑Lewis Baumer (1870-1963), which first was published in 1906! It’s great historical evidence for how early in the development of a given technology people not … Continue reading →
the coming war on general computation
The copyright war was just the beginning The last 20 years of Internet policy have been dominated by the copyright war, but the war turns out only to have been a skirmish. The coming century will be dominated by war … Continue reading →
the witch reboot
Last Tuesday the ↑Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computing from Harwell (WITCH) was rebooted for the first time since the 1970s. For two and a half years volunteers had restaurated the machine, which was built in 1951, at Great Britain’s … Continue reading →
science as servant
A 1946 advertisement for the ↑Bendix Corporation, scanned and put online by Paul Malon—↑click for larger versions, in order to be able to read all of the small text, too. The slogan ‘Creative engineering makes science your obedient servant’ not … Continue reading →
flippy floppy sim
A well-known carrier over here once advertised the iPhone 4 as featuring a ‘new ↑SIM card technology.’ ↑What they meant was the so-called ‘micro-SIM.’ Well, meanwhile we have reached the ‘nano-SIM’—yet another unbelievable leap of technology. But hold your breath, … Continue reading →
nand to tetris
Two years ago I belatedly ↵reported on Shimon Schocken’s and Noam Nisan’s book ‘The elements of computing systems: Building a modern computer from first principles’ (2005). Since then quite some things have happened, and at the website ↑From NAND … Continue reading →