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September Linkfarm

Monday 30 September 2024

• Mars water: Liquid water reservoirs found under Martian crust - I’m old enough to remember when we were all convinced Mars was dry as dust. I was in a seminar at The Open University where we were shown pictures of what looked like river flood plains on the Martian surface and the phrase "what don’t know the mechanism, but God forbid it was liquid water" was used.
  Friends, it was liquid water.
• They don’t make readers like they used to - Now here’s a funny thing: readers (and viewers, and players) ask questions.
• What’s the best way to pass an istream parameter? - How do I write a parameter that accepts any non-const std::istream argument? I just want an istream I can read from.
  Super simple. Aha-ha-ha!
• Common food dye found to make skin and muscle temporarily transparent - The Invisible Man, well Mouse, is real!
• The Internet Archive Loses Its Appeal of a Major Copyright Case
• Americans’ love affair with big cars is killing them - For every life that the heaviest 1% of SUVs and trucks save, there are more than a dozen lives lost in other vehicles.
• Sarah Storey wins 19th Paralympic gold and refuses to rule out LA 2028 return - Sarah Storey is an incredible athlete. I love her.
• String Theorists Accidentally Find a New Formula for Pi
• All-rounder Moeen retires from England duty
• 8 FREIGHT - Me and My Bike With the Legendary Mike Burrows - I have an idea that our 8 Freight might be the last one Mike Burrow’s made. My visit to pick it up from him was a delight, and very much like that in this video.
• Oh, Snap! - A randomly lossy hybrid esoteric sorting algorithm
• 1/0 = 0
• Why Test-Driven Development is an investment that pays off - In his talk, David calls this approach “Test-After-Development” (TAD) or “Q3 Development”, because knowing the implementation but not what exactly the desired behaviour looks like is quadrant III between the two axes “Behaviour known/unknown” and “Implementation known/unknown”.
• The Games Behind Your Government’s Next War
• Voyager 1 Team Accomplishes Tricky Thruster Swap The team determined that the best option would be to warm the thrusters before the switch by turning on what had been deemed non-essential heaters. However, as with so many challenges the Voyager team has faced, this presented a puzzle: The spacecraft’s power supply is so low that turning on non-essential heaters would require the mission to turn off something else to provide the heaters adequate electricity, and everything that’s currently operating is considered essential.
  Fucking incredible work.
• Incorrect TDD: What Can We Learn From It?
• Index of /UnixArchive/Applications/Software_Tools/STUG_Archive
• Zombie in my Pocket
  Absolute banger of a solo print-n-play game
• Paul Graham and the Cult of the Founder - "Founder Mode" is such garbage
• Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech
• Reasons I still love the fish shell
  I’ve started using * the fish shell since I read this, and it’s pretty great.
• Earth Had Rings Like Saturn Millions of Years Ago, Study Suggests
• Linux/4004 - Slowly booting full Linux on the Intel 4004 for fun, art, and absolutely no profit
• Fixing a medium sized crack/chip in a (field) hockey stick
• Misconceptions about Loops in C
  My friend Martin has fun asking "just was is a loop, actually?"
• The Mysterious Visit of Mr Babbage, by Bruce Sterling Either Babbage was supremely good at creating elaborate machine diagrams — that is possible — or maybe, somebody actually really did build Difference Engines. Or, maybe, pieces of Analytical Engines, or even an entire one. Or more. Maybe these machines existed, but were covert, in the way that the machines of the NSA do exist, but are covert.
• Big publishers think libraries are the enemy
• ‘The data on extreme human ageing is rotten from the inside out’ – Ig Nobel winner Saul Justin Newman
• The dinosaur killer asteroid came from deep space, in the outer solar system
• BBC Archive: Ceefax and the birth of interactive TV - Ceefax was the world’s first teletext service, going live on 23 September 1974. In a pre-internet world, the revolutionary system allowed people to check the latest BBC news and sport updates at the touch of a few buttons.
• Bronze Age cheese reveals human-Lactobacillus interactions over evolutionary history
• Multidimensional social influence drives leadership and composition-dependent success in octopus–fish hunting groups - group composition altered individual investment and collective action, triggering partner control mechanisms (that is, punching) and benefits for the de facto leader, the octopus

Taggedboardgames, mars, and linkfarm

August Linkfarm

Saturday 31 August 2024

• There are 2,000-plus dead rockets in orbit—here’s a rare view of one
• This might be the funniest reason I’ve seen a game be shut down
• Building a Debugger - If debuggers seem like magic to you, there is no better way to demystify them than to write your own.
  My friend-in-code Sy will show you how.
• Fixing digital holes
• Hacking a Virtual Power Plant - I recently had solar panels and a battery storage system from GivEnergy installed at my house. A major selling point for me was that they have a local network API which can be used to monitor and control everything without relying on their cloud services. My plan is to set up Home Assistant and integrate it with that, but in the meantime, I decided to let it talk to the cloud. I set up some scheduled charging, then started experimenting with the API.
  The next evening, I had control over a virtual power plant comprised of tens of thousands of grid connected batteries.
  Well, this isn’t alarming at all.
• Understanding the users - Almost every assumption we’d made about how they would use the software was wrong.
• Get the Drop on Sorting. - Let’s look at dropsort, another NSFW sorting algorithm to see what we can learn about algorithms, coding styles, control flow, software architecture, performance qualities and the nature of software development.
• Building My Own Streaming TV Station
• Acknowledging Good Java Code with Code Perfumes
• Code comprehension: Chunks and Beacons - We talk about making source code readable and it turns out that this isn’t just stylistic interpretation; there is actual research into this topic. As we read through the code, what we’re scanning for are chunks and beacons. Chunks and beacons are similar in that they’re both code fragments, yet they’re used differently.
• Pendolino plan for HS2
• How not to use box shadows
• 200 meteorites on Earth traced to 5 craters on Mars
• Alice and Kev | The story of being homeless in The Sims 3

Taggedmars, and linkfarm

Rockin’ With Maria : Yr glygfa o Hescwm Uchaf, rhif 16

Wednesday 28 August 2024

When Harry was about 6, we were out and about on the high street when we bumped into my friend Maria.

“She used to be a pop star” I told him on the way back, and to prove it pulled up this video where she’s violining away with The Nightingales, Ted Chippington, and Fuzzbox.

Rockin’ with Rita

It’s a catchy little number and by the end of the weekend we were all doing our best Ted Chippington impersonation around the house.

Few days later, I pick him up from school to discover Harry’s somehow got half the kids in his class singing it too. The trend faded pretty quickly, but I consider it a parenting high point

Older posts are available in the archive or through tags.