Simplicity
‘Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things’
Isaac Newton
Making a core memory USB drive
Despite the drawbacks and impractical nature of this device, space science researcher @dyd_Nao created a USB drive made of magnetic core memory – a technology that was used a lot in space technology of the 1950’s and 60’s.
It’s really awesome – despite the fact it only holds 128 bytes of data and is the size of a small dinner plate.
VGA programming
Ah, the good old days of using INT 10h, AH=0x00 graphics modes to write directly to video memory at 0xA0000/0xB0000/0xB8000 (depending on the mode).
Nir Lichtman walks us through some of the things I was teaching myself in middle school – writing VGA graphics in assembly (often using the great book Programmer’s Guide to the EGA and VGA Cards by Ferraro, Richard F.
I even wrote my own (terrible) little paint program that would then save the buffer into a file and reload it. What good times!
Jon Krakauer Talk
Jon Krakauer is probably most famous for his book Into Thin Air that covered his first-hand experience of the 1996 Everest Disaster, but he also wrote tons for Outside magazine.
What’s interesting about this talk is his description of the climbing and outdoor world of the late 80’s and early 90’s. It is interesting how much of a different world it was back then. This kind of 90’s era spirit of adventure is what got me into Mazamas and climbing in the Pacific Northwest in the early 2000’s. I remember it well. It was a very idealistic time in which people talked about the purity of pushing yourself in climbing. Portland saw famous climbers come through town semi-regularly as they practice on the peaks in the Pacific Northwest and to do talks – as mini-celebrities.
Climbing of that era was almost a religion that saw young, incredibly talented and athletic people from everyday backgrounds flying around the world to the most remote locations when the world was much less accessible as it is today. It’s a great little time capsule of an era that’s long gone.
St Boniface Good Good Friday
St Boniface parish in Lafayette, IN has put on a live stations of the cross passion recreation every Good Friday for years. They have people in costume and even soldiers on horseback. People that have gone say it is very moving and definitely worth going if you have the chance.
Forget your wifi password?
Did a friend come over and you need the wifi password – but forgot it? If you have a windows system that has ever connected to the wifi, you can extract it from your history. Simply open an admin-privledged command prompt and use this line to display the passwords in cleartext:
netsh wlan show profile * key=clearChicken’s as alarm clocks for kids
I’ll stand by my thought that chickens were created solely to be entertainment for farmers.
Polyrhythms
Musical language – Speak what you play
I had no idea with tabla playing, how you say it is how you play it.