Last time, we presented our nifty international time zone conversion utility. Now it has become even better: once, you’ve set up the converter, you may link the current set up in order to share it. There’s a link near the bottom of the page, which will be always up to date. Just right-click it and copy. (This may be helpul for negotiating dates or meetings.)
Moreover, you may also preconfigure a link in order to see, what the current time (or a specific one) will be in certain locations / time zones. See the documentation on parameters at the bottom of the page for details.
Also, I’m finally working on sound for the PET 2001 emulator…
It’s been a while since my last post — sorry (a more substantial post is a bit long in the tooth, but may appear soon) —, so it may time to quickly announce a few updates to the site.
Since it’s end of the year, which is also the traditional time to look for a calendar, there is now one at www.masswerk.at/time/calendar. Pick a year and print it out in order to show off that you really understand how days work! :-). We had this already at our time display, but now you can have an entire year of this! E.g., here’s a link to 2023, which happens to be next year. (Make sure to disable headers & footers and to enable backgrounds in your print dialog.) If you really don’t like the idea of the layout (how dare you?), you may also export a no-frills plain-text version.
Another update is also related to time, namely it’s an international time zone conversion utility. Which can be found at www.masswerk.at/time/convert. Now, JavaScript (and by this, your browser) features localized dates with time zones, nowadays, but this only supports foward conversions from UTC timestamps to localized dates. This, however, also involves finding a corresponding UTC date to a given local date so that you can pick a date and time in one timezone and see what this may be in annother time zone. Which is, what this utility does. (Please mind the disclaimer. Especially mind that things become a bit tricky with DST/standard time crossovers and there may be more than a single UTC reference for a given localized time-date combination. E.g., when a local clock rewinds to 2:00 am at 3:00 am, once a year.)
This is what it looks like. Technically, we use our trusty TZIntl.js library for this. And thanks to this, this utility runs entirely on your local computer, in the browser, without connecting to an external service or leaking any data.
Links to both utilities can be found at the bottom of our fancy time display, which is always behind the tiny clock icon at the very end of the site navigation.
The final news is about the PET 2001 emulator: First, the emulator now supports quantifiers in PETSCII escapes in any BASIC source file or pasted code, like "{4 SPACES}" or "{12 RIGHT}", which adds another layer of compatibility to some listings as may be found in traditional type-in code. (It may even come handy for designing screen output more comfortably.) The other one is a rather major one, but without much of an external effect: The emulator now supports varying ROM sizes, which means, it now also comes with ROM 4.0. However, the IEEE interface emulation still only supports LOAD and SAVE commands, so there isn’t much utility to the advanced disk commands of Commodore BASIC 4.0. Still, there is otherwise full support for ROM 4.0, including text-to-BASIC, BASIC-to-text imports and exports and even click-anywhere-on-the-screen-to-place-the-cursor functionality (AKA, “Touch Cursor”). I guess, still sufficient added capability to elevate the emulator to version 1.5.
To common knowledge, a joke explained is a dead joke. However, apparently it’s totally accepted and “ok” to explain a mechanical joke. As our last installment was pretty much a mechanical joke (it even has a crank!), we may thus feel free to do so. And, as we’re feeling like it, we’ll attempt to do so…
Now this is some rare piece of equipment: An Atari 2600 “Heavy Sixer” running UNIX System V. The venerable VCS is attached to a box branded “pdp11/2600” and runs System V from a DEC cartridge. TTY is looped through the Spectravideo CompuMate keyboard add-on. Must investigate…
A rare sight: System V on a color TV set.
However, the system is a bit finicky and runs about once a year.
*) Original image source, Atari 2600 & Spectravideo CompuMate: Avon Fox, www.the-liberator.net. PS: Check the post date. ;-)
So a boat is stuck in the Suez Canal. Why should this be great? Now, finally something to agree upon: it’s a boat, even a big boat, it’s stuck, and it’s in a canal, yes, in a big canal, in the Suez Canal…
A few notes on the system update process in Apple’s Big Sur (macOS 11)
The joys of Apple’s system update process.
Over several years — that is, the last decade — we have seen the principal mindset directing the user facing aspects of application and system design shifting from the concept of usability towards UX (user experience). As we’re almost there, it may be worth confronting these two apparently synonymous concepts of design guidelines and directions, here on the example of Apple’s Big Sur system update process.
Veering off of our usual topics for a bit of political economy.
Thresholds — Hum…
Since everything is a bit out of the ordinary recently, here’s a somewhat different post, diverging from our usual path. Yes it’s about the current “Corona” situation, but also about a somewhat broader perspective. Since my educational background is in such things like philosophy, sociology and even a couple of semesters of political science, I can’t help including this perspective. On the other hand, I’m clearly not a medic nor do I have any relations to that honorable profession. So I’m entirely without expertice in this field and relying on what is to be learned from public appearances of epidemiologist who speak on the matter. (In other words, anything regarding the current situation and its epidemiological perspectives is just hearsay and lacking any further foundations. Any inferences and/or conclusions drawn from this kind of awareness are not any better than the foundations on which they are built.)
Trigger Warning I’m sorry to say, this will not be another pep talk on the subject. If you feel apprehensive about this or do not feel like in the right mood for this, better skip this post.
Learning from history: How to keep calm while panicking and carry on with face masks
Wear a mask or go to jail — California, 1918. (Raymond Coyne, 1918-11-03)
Influenza and influencers, and a friendly customer information from 1918. Apparently, it’s not the first time, we’re facing an epidemic. Some prefer doing so while wearing a face mask, others may prefer desinfectants. Arguably, masks make the better photographs.
“Today, you are an Astronaut. You are floating in inner space 100 miles above the surface of Earth. You peer through your window and this is what you see. You are people watching. These are fleeting moments. ¶ These videos come from YouTube. They were uploaded in the last week and have titles like DSC 1234 and IMG 4321. They have almost zero previous views. They are unnamed, unedited, and unseen (by anyone but you).”
Astronaut.io (screenshot).
This is a great little project! — Don’t fail to experience this inner journey through these ghostly voids of abandoned footage! Ephemeral at its best! Chapeau!
Images from the outer limits of numeric precision.
Take any numeric renderer which allows you to zoom in repeatedly. For instance a Mandelbrot set renderer, because, Mandelbrot sets are always fun. For instance this one (by your’s truely). As you keep zooming in and zooming in, after a while, eventually, the rendered image will suddenly show pixelation. And as you are zooming in again, the pixels will increas in size. However, this is not a fault of the visualization layer, it’s just that you hit the mathemitcal barrier of numeric precision. The grain in binary computers…
Reverse engineering the command and control structure of a Wordpress attack.
Software archeology usually relates to dated programs, like the bit we did on a 1960s graphics demo for the PDP-1. However, the same skill set also applies to reverse engineering more recent bits and bytes. In this case it’s about a Wordpress attack and its command & control structure. Recently, I discovered a new variation of the command & control structure…
Portraits have always been a means of self-celebration and display, both of figure and social status, but also a means of reading – not only of physiognomy, but also of the essence of a person. By the democratization of photography and increasing accessibility of technological tools the portrait in its current form of the selfie hasn’t only become ultimately linked to narcissism, but has also become a means of linking over social networks and accumulating symbolic wealth on the respective status page, the new symbolic home.
Image: Dito von Tease, 2018.
Dito von Tease, a Bologna (Italy) based digital artist, has ingeniously mixed the two forms, the traditional portrait and the selfie, “showing subjects [of traditional art] in authentic and modern selfie poses. An iconoclastic project that blends together two apparently heterogeneous aesthetics, creating an ironic and surprising result.”
It may be just the right season to remind of one of the first computer animations, “Snowflake” written in the 1960s for the DEC PDP-1. Despite various research efforts, the author of this amazing little program remains still unknown, which is quite a bity, since s/he deserves to be rembered along with the program.
