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Hey! I remember that! (Sorry, text only, no video or pictures)

>My PDA doesn't fit in my pocket (well most of the time). Plus, since it's "out of the way", I don't use it.

Exactly why I am still using my REX PDA and LOVING IT! I leave it in my shirt pocket or in my front pants pocket all the time. I use it constantly. I have an old Palm that never leaves it's drawer at home.
I love it so much that when they went on sale for $30 I bought three of them just in case one breaks in the future.

Who needs Doom when C64 users can play

Mood!

URL: http://dunkels.com/adam/contiki/links.html

System information and emulators

Commodore 64/128

The Commodore 64 is based on the 6510 CPU, which is a 6502-derived 8-bit CPU. It has 64k of RAM and 16k ROM which includes a BASIC interpreter and some basic I/O services. Graphics is provided by the VIC chip which has 16 colors and a maximum resolution of 320x200 in hi-res mode. It provides a 40x25 raster of characters in character mode. The three voices of digital sound is produced by the SID chip.

The Commodore 128 is an extended version of the Commodore 64 that contains a 8510 CPU which is capable of 2 MHz operation and can address 128k RAM (hence the name Commodore 128). It also has a Commodore 64 compatibility mode which is extremely similar to a regular C64 but with a few minor differences.

The SuperCPU is a 20 MHz 16-bit 65816-based computer that is plugged into the back of the Commodore 64 or 128. It uses the C64 keyboard and joysticks for input and the VIC and SID chips for audiovisual output. The SuperCPU is capable of addressing several megabytes of memory and is usually used together with a 16 megabytes RAM expansion board.

There are no SuperCPU emulators avaliable.

• The VICE emulator is capable of emulating a large number of Commodore machines. It emulates the C64, the C128, the VIC20, most of the PET models, and the CBM-II. VICE runs under Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and a number of other host systems.
  
• Joakim Eriksson's Web C64 emulator, written in Java, runs as an applet within a web browser.
  
• Per Håkan Sundell's CCS64 emulator works under Windows and DOS.
  
• The ec64 emulator is developed for Linux and was originally written entirely in x86 assembler.
  
• An article by Simon N Goodwin about C64 emulators.
  
• The Commodore emulators category in the Dmoz has more links.
  

Commodore 64/128

There are plenty of alternative operating systems for the C64, mostly written in 6502 assembler. Some of them are far from complete, however, and only appear as dark shadows on a few web pages - MagerValp's SMOS and my own osT are among those.

• GEOS from 1986 probably is the most well-known graphical operating system for the C64. It is still sold commercially by CMDKEY.com.
  
• LUnix NG is an open-source multi-tasking operating system with TCP/IP/PPP-support, a *nix-like command shell, and a number of *nix-like utilities such as ls and cp.
• Craig Bruce's ACE is a text-based single-tasking operating system for the 64 and the 128. It provides a *nix-like command shell, a text-editor, a terminal program for the SwiftLink RS232 interface, as well as device drivers for a lot of devices
  
• GeckOS/A65 is a multi-tasking operating system with TCP/IP support and a *nix-like command shell.
  
• Wheels is a version of GEOS that requires RAM expansion to run.

With its 20 MHz and megabytes of memory, the SuperCPU is powerful enough to run fully-fledged graphical operating systems that rival early Machintosh or Microsoft Windows systems.

• Wings is a TCP/IP-enabled graphical operating system for the SuperCPU. It includes a MOD music player, JPEG viewer, web page download utility, etc.
• JOS is an older version of Wings.
  

TCP/IP and PPP connectivity

To surf the web, send or read email, etc., the first step is to actually get in touch with the Internet. This requires both physical access to an ISP, either via a modem and a phone-line or an Ethernet broadband connection, and the TCP/IP software running on the C64.

There are a number of programs that make it possible to reach the Internet with a C64/C128.

• LUnix NG contains a TCP/IP stack and a PPP implementation which makes it possible to reach the Internet using a modem and a dial-up ISP.
  
• GeckOS/A65 also contains a TCP/IP stack, but no PPP dialer.
  
• My own uIP TCP/IP stack has been used for some time to run a web server on a Commodore 64. uIP currently does not include a PPP dialer.
  
• Novaterm 10 contains a PPP dialer and enough TCP/IP code to be able to run telnet over the Internet.
  

SuperCPU

All of the above mentioned SuperCPU operating systems have TCP/IP support.

• The Wave is a web browser for the SuperCPU (and not for the Commodore 64/128 as the web page claims) that runs under the Wheels operating systems. Here is another page with information about The Wave (that also falsely claims that The Wave is for the Commodore 64/128). The latter page also includes screenshots of The Wave in action.
  

Small graphical user-interfaces (GUIs)

User interfaces for embedded systems range from the simple buttons on the front of a washing machine to those of fully fledged web browser type interfaces on information stations. The underlying technology varies from simple electronic circuits to full-scale PC compatibles.

• PicoGUI is a GUI architecture designed for embedded systems to desktop machines. It does not require any supporting GUI system and can be used on anything from graphical screens to text based systems. Their smallest target system are handheld terminals and the compiled object code size is on the order of hundreds of kilobytes.
  
• Microwindows/NanoGUI is a graphical user interface system designed to run without support from an underlying system. On 16-bit systems Microwindows is about 64k large.
  

The smallest web browsers are usually specially designed for the limitations of embedded systems and other specialized computers such as car navigation systems, set-top boxes and medical equipment. There are also a few small web browsers for old DOS PCs available.

• Interniche's NicheView Portable Embedded Web Browser is probably the smallest full-featured web browser around with its 35 kilobytes code footprint. There is also an additional JavaScript module available.
  
• AU-systems' AU Mobile Internet Browser supports both HTML/TCP/IP and WML/WAP as well as SSL. It occupies 340 kilobytes of code (plus an additional 190 kilobytes for the protocol stacks) and uses 5 kilobytes of RAM when idle (plus 8 kilobytes used by the protocol stacks). Extra RAM is used when downloading web pages.
  
• The Fusion WebPilot Embedded Micro-Browser supports much of the features found in modern web browsers including frames, authentication, and JavaScript. The web page does not specify memory footprint.
  
• MicroDigial's Graphical MicroBrowser supports tables, frames, images as well as FTP as uses 260 kilobytes of code memory and requires a minimum of 210 kilobytes of RAM apart from that. A demo version is available.
  
• The 2net Alice Web Browser is intended for handheld computers and PC based architectures and requires 400 kilobyte of free RAM and 200 kilobytes of code memory. It includes a TCP/IP stack.
  
• WebBoy is a fully-fledged browser with SSL support intended for 386 DOS boxes with more than 4 megabytes of memory. Includes a TCP/IP stack.
  
• The Arachne web browser runs under MS-DOS or Linux and requires at least 1 megabyte of memory. Does not include a TCP/IP/PPP stack.
  
• Lynx is probably the most well-known text-based web browser around. It is ported to many different operating systems and architectures including MS-DOS.
  
• The Off by One Web Browser has been labeled as the smallest web browser ever, but is quite large in comparison with other small web browsers. It is 1.1 megabytes large and requires support from an underlying Windows operating system.
  
• Mirko Sobe's BOSS-X HTML browser for 8-bit Ataris is not a full web browser, but an off-line HTML viewer with hyperlinking abilities written in three days.
  
• The pre-alpha v0.3 GEMWeb browser supports 640x480x16 VGA.
  
• The Atari Phoenix Web Browser is a non-existant vapor-ware web browser project intended for the 8-bit Ataris.
  

i was a game tester back before the dot.bomb

much of what testers examine is not top-rated games. for example, i tested a large number of kids' games (far more than the other, more fun/challenging and graphic ones). i may not be typical among testers, though; my company repackaged and distributed games over the internet, so i tested everything from unreal tournament, theif 3, and civilization II to tonka's garage and learn windows 98. most of testing is non-sequential; when i tested evercrack (err, i mean everquest), i didn't keep the same character for too long. essentially a tester's job is to break a program.

What do they do as a hobby? Accounting, maybe?

i was kind of known for "testing" ebay while at work, as it was my only internet connection and i was growing/selling my magic collection.

As to a real hobby, we would play speed bughouse (team chess) during lunch and Dungeons and Dragons after work on days we didn't hit the bar down the street (on the company of course)

I call Goodwin's Law! You lose!

From Cigarettes: A Huge Cost to Society:
Smoking as of 2002, costs Americans $157.4 billion per year. The annual amount is about $3,391 per person. Each pack leads to medical costs. Each pack reduces productivity. The total per-pack cost is calculated at $7.18. -- U.S. Centers for Disease Control.
Some people say this is all just "opinion." But think about it, the mathematical calculation aspect. Add up the costs of the tobacco-related medical care, divide by number of packs.
As each pack costs smokers far less than the actual cost impact on America, nonsmokers pay the difference. Nonsmokers pay the difference via increased taxes and insurance premiums.
For this reason alone, the per-pack tax should be $7.18. States receive only about $16 billion a year from tobacco taxes and the widely touted Attorney-General-initiated settlement. This is barely 10% of the aforesaid costs.

The Centers for Disease Control has much more on this.

The aliens and their demand we stay off the moon?

Anyway, when I got tired of my collection and knew others were, too, I wondered if Dr Pepper would want it for their Dr Pepper Museum. Although they make it impossible to find a way to contact them, I eventually did, and was replied to with a form letter about where I can buy merchadise.

I felt loved.

I'm glad I've been so loyal.

Anyway, here is my sadly outdated page

an example of a rogue fork is the spork.

Then why did Cleopatra 2525 fail, where Baywatch succeeded?

I've noticed that KDE is significantly slower on a faster machine, and both KDE and its apps crash tons [kprinter corrupts often, resulting in a lot of wasted ink, Kwrite, like Abiword, can't stand to run; kformula just doesn't work; kpaint works for about 30 seconds before a crash]; Gnome doesn't crash.

So as far as I can tell, it is KDE that is lame. I've heard that it is because KDE doesn't take advantage of the Xserver capabilities, nor the graphic card capability. But boy, it really is feature rich; but feature rich and slow is still lame, especially if the features actually working must wait till a later version.

That said, I can't get the sound working on either system -- but after reading a lot about it, I think that's really a Debian problem. As one website puts it, "ALSA is Debian is completely broken". [Beyond that bit of wisdom, they still weren't any help.]

All of which may make it sound like I don't like Linux or Debian. Quite the contrary, Debian/Gnome is excellent at what it can do.

KDE isn't; but it *is* more user friendly, and belongs in the home environment. It is marginally better than Windows {95, 98, 2000, ME, Expectorate} in a lot of ways.

at-home snowmaking

Those pictures are great. I've always wanted to see a yard with freezer burn. Seriously, that's what it looks like. =)

I picked up my copy of MoO3 earlier today, and I've been playing it ever since. The transition from MoO2 (which I was playing just last night) is rough, to say the least. Many, many things have changed. Not better, not worse, just very different. I don't know if I like it yet. Some things seem to be more complicated than they need to be... Others seem too simple... The in-game documentation is either well hidden, or missing. There isn't much of a tutorial. Numbers appear to be the preferred representation...rather than any kind of graphical charts or meters. And there's an awful lot of AI assistance available to keep things moving along. Visually, it's a disappointment. The graphics are very dated. The GUI is stark, dull, and cluttered. But... I'm still being drawn back to it, to play some more. We'll see.

If anyone is curious, I'll be posting my impressions to my blog.

yrs,
Ephemeriis

There is a more or less loosely Nethack-based webcomic somewhere out there.

I don't know of the comic you speak of, but I'll take this time to plug "Final Fantasy @," an eight panel doujinshi (fan comic) for Final Fantasy X, done in the roguelike style. I'm not particularly fond of the game, but there are so many Final Fantasy doujins out there, I couldn't resist.

It's not that good, but the juxtaposition of the expensive FMV of FF being replaced by ASCII amuses me.

Halfway down the page:
http://worldrim.tripod.com/comics.html.

Ask Joe Biden? You've got to be kidding. He's still a senator from Delaware!. Yeah, he lost the Democratic nomination for President in 1988. So did Gary Hart.

Nothing of major consequence happened to Biden. The people of Delaware have continued to elect him.

Have a looksie.

Guess it's a good thing I use JunkBuster and wear my tin foil hat while surfing the web...

Have a day..

This is going to sound sad, but here goes. So, PA wants to keep me from seeing bad things and is forcing my ISP to block these sites? Oh my God! I'm just so happy to have a government that wants to do something totally useless when it comes to protecting me while I surf the web!

Look, in all honestly, I only have a few websites that I ever visit with any regularity. Those sites are:

1. Of Course, Slashdot.
2. 1 Wrestling Dot Com - My Pro Wrestling Fix
3. My Site, Rancho Relaxo - Checking on the site, updating, etc.
4. AnimeFu - Opinions are like Escaflowne DVDs: Everybody Has One...
5. Keeping Up On That Wheaton Kid - Because the Real-Life Wil is much cooler than Wesley...
6. Cartoon Orbit - Their gToons game is neat, and yes, I'm addicted to cartoons.
7. Yahoo! Games - Pinochle and Spades.

That's it. At least once a day, I visit these sites (my own site even less). Sometimes I Google for info and images. But there is one thing that I'm most certainly not sick or stupid enough to go after, and that's child pr0n. Honestly, I don't have to go looking for regular, legal porn, either.

So, my ISP is now going to have to filter out sites I don't even care to think about, let alone visit. Not that I much care, really. Just interesting to know that I'm being protected by a state government that spawned the first ever Secretary of Homeland Security (Tom Ridge, who's only positive achievement as our governer was finally raising the highway speed limit to 65), cost my father his job twice (taking two state hosipitals and making them private), screwed up my student loans (AES/PHEAA is guilty there), can't maintain roads properly...

You get the idea, right?

I was always wondering about this. The history is quite interesting and thorough. It's located in Idaho. It's where they developed the nuclear jet engine.

Sadly, the website has exceeded it's alloted slashdotting (it's tripod), but it's worth going back for the read.

Be sure to check out this page.

In my many years of travels working as a flight crewman for a well known commercial airship company, I spent many many days in those massive blimp hangars.

They are truly national landmarks, and are breathtaking to see. Both inside and out, they are unbelievable. As the page says, they are the largest wooden structures in the world.

While I was there, MCAS Tustin was still operational, but there were talks of destroying at least one of the hangars. The other was to become either a museum or something else.

Now that The base has been officially closed, friends from the area said that those plans have been scrapped, and both hangars will be destroyed.

This is truly a shame, since these hangars have such history in them. Also, they are tremendously usefull for the current airship industry. Sometimes, the airship has to be hangared, and you can't exactly stuff one into a normal sized hangar. There aren't too many hangars this big left in the US, and it would be a terrible shame to destroy them.

My favorite is Big Beaver Airport in Michigan. I kid you not - Big Beaver is Exit 69 on Interstate 75.

Apples have been heat resistant since the days of the Apple II Plus!

http://skintigh.tripod.com/atari/solaris.html

Interesting. I cheated my way through Solaris some years back as well, using maps I found elsewhere on the web, and by hacking the ROM directly for play on the MacStella emulator (also for infinite lives, I think - or maybe infinite fuel). I also recall mentioning the trick I'd used (ROM hack) to someone on rgvc sometime afterward, and they seemed very excited by the notion. I don't suppose that was you? Or parallel evolution, more likely. ;)

I think the person whose map page I used claimed to have won without cheating, but it was a long time ago and my memory is fuzzy. I've never heard of anyone else who claims to have won. The main flaw in the game IMO is the stupid point where the controls are reversed - always a cheap trick in any game.

Why do people not provide links any more? Isn't that what the web was supposed to be all about: not having to know the actual location for documents?

" PHP protect all your pages so if a counter increments by a certain count within a certain amount of time (say 30 mins or an hour) for the next 2 hours, it will remove all of the inline images, run them through an ascii-art converter, and replace it, so you're transferring at most a couple kilobytes of text which is gzip compressable through most browsers now and checks every 2 hours until the slashdot (or fark, or k5, or memebutt) effect subsides... Any techheads wanna get crackin'?"

It's an interesting idea but it could make things worse. I was just using bg_ascii to convert some images to color ascii. My first test was on a 480x480 jpg that was about 33kb. The corresponding html looked neat(and was a little bigger) but it was about 170kb.

Of course, this might still be a neat project, have it check to see if someone is using lynx and then substitute the ascii images in that case. :) (lynx supports color right? it's been a while since I used it)

If you're wondering how loads of those ascii-pictures are made, check out BG_ASCII. It's a wonderful program (Yes, it can convert JPG to ASCII), and by the looks of things, this is what they used. If you're loooking to do original ASCII art, check out Email Effects, and check out #SAC on EFNET for the Superior Art Creations!

Bzzzt! Wrong. It's illegal as per the Berne Convention.

Read: Japanese Animation Legality and Ethics FAQ, by Andy Kent

> Apu is not a common Indian name, of course.

It's a common enough contraction. Lots of Sanskrit names start with Apu. Apurva ("Excellent / Without precedent") is a common one that comes to mind. Actually, Apu in the Simpsons was named after the title character in a rather well-known trilogy of films called the "Apu trilogy" made in the 1950s.

Old, but very sweet!

GotSpud?

Tony's page

Spudweizer

Simple Spudgun

My mom would never let me build one when I lived at home, so now's my chance. AND, I'll be prosecuted as an adult, and possibly an 'American Terrorist'

Of course, if you have worked with ABAP before, then you will know why this is so....

By the way, the suggestion to switch Linux distrubutions in order to get a single app to work might sound absurd at first. And that's because it is. But I've been saturated with Unix-peanut-gallery effluvia for so long that it no longer even surprises me when every question -- no matter how simple -- results in someone suggesting that you either A) patch your kernel or B) change distros. It's inevitable and inescapable, like Hitler.

I take it that you either forget or don't know about the US government putting nuclear missle launch sites hidden in rather urban areas? In fact, from where I sit right now (Auburn Hills, MI, a fairly commercial area) there are old launch silos in the wooded parts of the campus of Oakland University, right next door. (See http://members.tripod.com/nikehercules/d-97.html for more information.

So while I believe you are correct in theory, in practice sometimes the public isn't quite aware.

Paul Di Filippo. -- For instance The Steampunk Trilogy. Great SF set in the Victorian era.

Kim Stanley Robinson -- Somehow writes hard SF and social SF at the same time. You can't miss the Red Mars series, a mastodontic saga about the terraforming of Mars.

Some other names to look out for is Ken MacLeod and Alastair Reynolds.

AOL on that. On the hard SF front, I also enjoy
Alastair Reynolds's work (e.g. Revelation space). Other writers I'd recommend are Peter F. Hamilton (in particular the Night's Dawn series - wide-vista space opera with a touch of horror), Allen Steele (Clarke-esque near-future SF), Robert Charles Wilson and on the more slipstreamy side, Michael Marshall Smith and Jeff Noon.

AOL on that. On the hard SF front, I also enjoy
Alastair Reynolds's work (e.g. Revelation space). Other writers I'd recommend are Peter F. Hamilton (in particular the Night's Dawn series - wide-vista space opera with a touch of horror), Allen Steele (Clarke-esque near-future SF), Robert Charles Wilson and on the more slipstreamy side, Michael Marshall Smith and Jeff Noon.

Barcode interfaces are a minor addition to the user interface. Too bad X11 doesn't provide cleaner alternative input interfaces (there were some removed before a recent release...).

Why not go with a Rune based system for the LOTR fan base?

Moderators: this is a trek rant and I'm posting at 1 not 2. Don't bother modding me down, it's not worth it.

That really wasn't the point of my joke, though.

I know. It just reminded me. :)

On the design of the reliant: There was a fan publication that had imagined movie-era ship designs (TacResFleet review, I think?). One of the most innovative designs they had was the Thruxton Class light cruiser: the basic idea was to reduce the profile of the z-axis and thereby reduce the profile, making it harder to hit from the side. There was a minimal secondary hull with the nacells mounted along its length (like the constitution class if the nacelle struts had no z-axis depth, if you can imagine that.)

The truly innovative thing was the placement of the mega-phaser cannon. On the Reliant they were mounted on the rollbar making it quite difficult to hit anthing coming at them from below (which unintentionally mirrors Khan's 2-dimentional thinking). On the Thruxton they were mounted on the nacelles, offering a close to 360-degree phaser arc. Neat.

Neat! There's a page on it here.

Triv

Fortunately some of us still know how to RTFM

Ah yes... Mind control devices through radio and micro waves, CIA conspiracies, drugs slipped into the water and food supplies, and of course contrails. It warms my heart to see that there are people more insane than I am...

HAARP is an endeavor by the US gov't to attempt to tweak the ionosphere by the way of something akin to a huge electromagnet, near the North Pole.It's a wonder they haven't downed Santa's sleigh! :)

Seriously, though, this is one project that has been accused of causing El Nino.

For you who haven't followed my links, HAARP stands for High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, and is run by the Naval Research Laborarory.

As you've seen from my links, there are many zealots who would claim that HAARP causes weather disturbances. The Official HAARP FAQ, though, claims quite the contrary.

Personally, I tend to take the side of the zealots; the US gov't is well-known to hide issues of widespread importance and, in many cases, outright mislead its citizens. Hence my opening statement.

stop purposely crippling their low-end machines. That means it should have PCI and AGP-slots

BZZT. A tower model that starts at $1700 (sans display) does not count as low-end.

I've been harping on Apple ever since the "four quadrant" lineup began. There needs to be a prosumer model in between the iMac and the PowerMac -- a $999 "iMac II" (aka eMac LC if you prefer). Low cost, small form, with easily accessible AGP and IDE, and it would be a huge sales success.

Except the profit margin might be lower, and Apple doesn't want that. Mac advocacy is definitely a love/hate relationship.

his homepage
download page for gui

follow the discussion in:
alt.binaries.e-book
alt.binaries.e-book.d
alt.binaries.warez.pocketpc.lit

some have claimed that the macro posted here broke lit a long time ago, not so. It only worked on unprotected lits (if copy/paste was disabled in the reader, it wouldn't work.

This is better in the sense that it will work with secure lits that have copy disabled. Also it retains all formatting (exporting to html) while the previous script could only capture text (and poorly at that)

The one major limitation is that you must be able to view the lit on your computer. If your copy of ms reader can't open the file, neither can this program

There's been a Windows macro floating around for a long time that converts lit to text. It basically sends window events to the MS Reader program to scroll through the e-book, and more windows events to dump the text to Wordpad. It's just a few dozen lines long and isn't much of a jump in sophistication over taking screen shots. Face it Microsoft, as long as the book content is displayed on the screen where people can see it, there's no way to stop it from getting captured.

Too bad that TRS-80 dungeon game that tried to be realtime but couldn't keep up with my typing as a 10 year old isn't on the list.

Surely you don't mean one of the greatest games of all time, Dungeons of Dagorath do you? Incredible sound effects (for the era, of course), inventive gameplay (having to actually figure out how to use falsks and rings?!?), probably one of the first good FPS ever made! Interesting factoid: DoD was only about 8KB in size!

I have many memories of when I was 4, and some memories of 3, including briefly tricking my parents into believing I could spell, using a fisher price school days desk. I am 34 now and can spell quite well on my own.

I call Goodwin's Law! On the first post too, tsk tsk.

Yes, it was Impossible Mission. Man, I wasted so much time on that game. Here's a good site for it:

http://members.tripod.com/~impossible_mission/

but we still love you, Oscar!