About
I like weird stuff, I am overly verbose and I am prone to overthinking. I use Emacs, program in Python by the seat of my pants, and create Awk pipelines when I'm feeling kinky.
See also: About the name
Log
Entries - shouts, notes, or interesting links I found - are in reverse chronological order (i.e., newest first).
2019-11-24 - Hardware archeology - Mechanical computing mechanisms
A long, long time ago - possibly more than a decade - I stumbled across an old manual on mechanical computers, which were used for fire control systems back in the forties.
I changed my laptop at least twice since, and even if I probably still have that file, I have no idea where that might be.
Today, I found it again, almost by accident, when clicking on a Wikipedia link gave me the magic words I needed for Google to find it again: it was Basic Fire Control Mechanisms, OP 1140, from 1944, and it’s available online from at least two locations.
I can barely wrap my head around the basic components described in Section 2, and they are of course impressively impractical, but also fascinating. Need to implement the trigonometric functions in hardware? Just cut the right groove into a cam! And don’t worry if your computer is starting to look like a dieselpunk torture devices, those are just multipliers and integrators!
Basic
Fire Control Mechanisms - Maritime Park Association
Basic
Fire Control Mechanisms - Historic Naval Ships Association
Archive
2019-06-22
- sl, an useful Tcl script providing an alternative to ls, courtesy of Tom Phelps (GPLv3)
- After stumbling across an already-built hv3 on my SSD, I discovered (PDF; 196 kiB) that there were at least two more Tk HTML widgets beyond TkHtml - htmllib and scrolledtext - and at least another full-fledged browser, BrowseX. htmllib only gets up to ~HTML 2 (no CSS), but hv3 is actually pretty impressive and, if not for the constant error pop-ups, probably still better than both Dillo and NetSurf.
2019-05-17
- I was messing around with my default fonts a few days ago, and disallowed external fonts outright. Sometimes, it messes with the layout of the page I'm browsing, but I like it so far - it's more consistent.
2019-05-04
-
HTML Tutorial - Overview
(1999), by Christian Mogensen at Stanford University - Writing webpages like it's the nineties again
- Templates for Homepages, by the Spiders group of Stanford CSD
-
Graphics for your pages
- Featuring 353 low-res GIFs in
a
.tar.Zarchive, because everyone loves GIFs