Damian’s notes

Fifty years of text games: 1976: Adventure. My dad introduced me to this game (a version named ADVENT) when he took his children to the college where he worked. We typed commands in to a terminal connected to a networked PDP-11.

BBC 1968 radio dramatization of The Hobbit is available to listen to gratis on archive.org.

Type & Media graduates for 2020

Carry-propagation is expensive in modern CPUs because it reduces parallel processing, so adding 256-bit integers by switching to base-2**51 and deferring carry propagation until the end can counterintuitively be faster.

I really enjoyed Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop, a Japanese animated film available on Netflix. The setup is as old as time: haiku-writing boy collides with live-streaming girl in a shopping centre built on the site of an old vinyl-pressing plant. Energetic, colourful animation that makes a lot of anime look pastel by comparison.

(Linking to the Japanese site because there isn’t an official one in English.)

Breakdown on life on Earth in terms of biomass (measured in millions of tonnes of carbon). Scroll down for a surprise!

Simon Willison’s approach to creating template repositories in GitHub, with a Cookiecutter step to set the name of the components in the source code automatically when someone uses the template.

ComicAd is an attempt at being what Project Wonderful was: an ad network that does not rely on intrusive tracking of individual users‘ behaviours. A lot of what is wrong about the internet can be blamed on the reliance on advertising to fund sites. ComicAd aims to provide an ethnical alternative that also helps people discover new webcomics.

Information about how you might want to tweak your website design for Safari 15 in a video from WWDC 2021 with Jen Simmons. There are new CSS features for exposing the "safe" viewport (where you know browser chrome will not occlude your page's text).