Turning to the back page of a recent copy of The Economist to read the obituary of Paul Alexander the eye is assaulted by The Economist's new, ugly, hard-to-read typeface (which came about bec...
http://blog.jgc.org/2024/04/the-economists-ugly-new-print-typeface.html
Since this doesn't seem to be findable online anywhere here's a PDF generated from the original .tex files that I kept on a floppy for 30 years! If you're curious about formal methods a...
http://blog.jgc.org/2024/03/the-formal-development-of-secure.html
I have a copy of Taschen's huge book The Computer . 472 pages of computer history with lots of lovely photographs. Which is great, except that I turned to the page that covers one of the com...
http://blog.jgc.org/2024/03/taschen-acorn-and-knolls-law.html
Cliff Stoll (who is probably most famous for writing the wonderful Cuckoo's Egg about tracking a hacker when doing so was almost recreational) runs a business making Klein bottles: Acme Klein B...
http://blog.jgc.org/2024/03/the-acme-klein-bottle-from-cliff-stoll.html
The W3C has a page with the original WWW proposal from Tim Berners-Lee. One of the downloads says The original document file (I think - I can't test it) The "I can't test it" made me sad. Th...
http://blog.jgc.org/2024/02/the-original-www-proposal-is-word-for.html
I have a couple of fancy Dyson fans that do cooling (or at least blowing air around) and heating. They use a little IR remote control that attaches to the top with magnets. One of the remotes dec...
http://blog.jgc.org/2024/02/repairing-sort-of-dyson-fan-remote.html
I was doing some clean up on my main laptop and realized it had been a while since bought a new computer. Turns out it was a lot older than I thought: Apple considers this machine to be vinta...
http://blog.jgc.org/2024/01/my-daily-driver-is-older-than-i-thought.html
Eleven years ago I blogged about a solution to the "Never Gonna Give You Up" compression code golf challenge: what's the smallest program that output the lyrics of Rick Astley's phenomenon? My so...
http://blog.jgc.org/2023/12/compression-of-lyrics-of-12-days-of.html
Just over a year ago there was a discussion on Hacker News about the IBM ThinkPad 701c (the one with the lovely folding "butterfly" keyboard). In particular, it was a discussion about the incred...
http://blog.jgc.org/2023/12/restoration-of-ibm-thinkpad-701c.html
This is a story about connecting a Minitel 1B via the phone line as you would have done in the 1980s and 1990s. It's a story about enthusiastic nerds who've stood up Minitel servers that you can ...
http://blog.jgc.org/2023/11/using-my-minitel-1b-over-phone-network.html
But, I guess he did win the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2020 so I can't really brag. However, it was a great surprise when looking at two pages from Penrose's notebooks that two columns of cod...
http://blog.jgc.org/2023/11/my-primality-testing-code-is-6x-faster.html
The April 1962 edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (published the the US Department of the Army) is a strangely easily readable book about a hideous topic: the effects of a nuclear blast....
http://blog.jgc.org/2023/11/reading-lovelace-foundations-nuclear.html
Some years ago I wrote about programming a KIM-1 in 1985 . By that time the KIM-1 was old, and definitely not state of the art. After all, it was released in 1976. But it's a machine I enjo...
I'm closing in on completing the restoration of an IBM ThinkPad 701c (the one with the butterfly keyboard). Sitting on my desk right now is a fully working machine made from parts of three diff...
http://blog.jgc.org/2023/11/why-is-internet-so-popular-according-to.html
There I was, sitting on the Eurostar to Brussels when I remembered that I had with me a Raspberry Pi 400 , an Adafruit CYBERDECK HAT and a Joy-IT 3.5" display . I'd been traveling with the Pi us...
http://blog.jgc.org/2023/10/cyberdecking-raspberry-pi-400-on.html
I noticed over time that I was drawn to the retro computing or gaming posts on Hacker News . So, I've set up a dedicated web site in the same style called Two Stop Bits . The site works pretty mu...
http://blog.jgc.org/2023/10/hacker-news-for-retro-computing-and.html
Around 25 years ago I bought an Aiwa HV-MX100 VCR for $799 in Fry's Electronics. This particular VCR is multisystem and can handle NTSC, PAL, SECAM (and variants) for recording or playback. It w...
http://blog.jgc.org/2023/10/the-demise-of-my-aiwa-hv-mx100-vcr.html
I quite often have to photograph little things I've been working on for the blog and getting the lighting right is a pain. So, I took a trip to what's locally referred to as a loja chinesa (a sho...
http://blog.jgc.org/2023/09/weekend-bricolage-lightbox-for.html
The Le Nez du Vin MasterKit 54 is a set of 54 aromas found in wine varieties across the world and is designed to help you develop your ability to distinguish aromas. The aromas range from l...
http://blog.jgc.org/2023/09/weekend-bricolage-aroma-picker-for-le.html
Regular readers will know that I have a lot of love for the French Minitel system and own a couple. In the past I've written about using a Minitel 1B as a terminal and replacing the EPROM in a M...
http://blog.jgc.org/2023/09/breathing-life-back-into-minitel-1b.html
I love calculators and have written about old calculators that I've owned over the years (including my Commodore P50 (and programming it to do primality testing in just 23 steps) and Rockwell...
http://blog.jgc.org/2023/09/swissmicros-beautiful-hp-calculators.html
So, a while ago I built a gaming PC with the following specification: Case Dan A4 v4.1 Motherboard Z690I Strix Gaming Processor i5-12400F CPU Cooler ...
http://blog.jgc.org/2023/08/retrieving-1tb-of-data-from-faulty.html
There I was quietly minding my own business watching Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One when who pops up on screen? None other than Polish actor Marcin Dorociński playing a char...
http://blog.jgc.org/2023/07/the-easter-egg-that-wasnt-in-mission.html
Back in 2011 I put together an implementation of Pong that uses an Arduino Pro, a couple of resistors, a couple of potentiometers, and two sweet cans from M&S . I called it the Cansole: video gam...
http://blog.jgc.org/2023/07/revisiting-cansole-my-silly-pong-game.html
Here's what a muted Google Meet call looks like on CarPlay and here's what unmuted looks like. 1. The "End" and "Add Call" buttons have actions under them. If I press them the call wil...
http://blog.jgc.org/2023/07/is-it-hard-to-design-mute-button-or.html