Stephen Cass

OMG, this is amazing. Even 35 years after my Chuckie-playing peak on the Beeb, many of the original levels are still hardwired into my brain (at one point I could level one literally with my eyes closed), so it will be amazing to play this, so glad you are using the original sounds!

The Age Verification Trap Platforms are caught in a dilemma: enforce age restrictions or protect user privacy. How are they navigating this tricky terrain?

"Age-restriction laws push platforms toward intrusive verification systems that often directly conflict with modern data-privacy law." spectrum.ieee.org/age-verifica...

The four-bit graphic aesthetic will always have a special place in my heart, so many GameBoy titles did amazing work with it!

Excellent, I'll have to see if I can bring my Ender back from the dead and try this out on a few test circuits, it might make a nice Hands On column for us! I've mostly given up on 3D printing in favor of wood and glue for speed reasons, but these won't take long to print at all!

What's @spectrum.ieee.org, chopped liver? :) :) Would be interesting to try make 2-layer PCBs as well, with crenellated slots for tape around the edges as vias...

Weeps in Doherty Threshold. The road to this particular hell was paved by web apps displacing native OS software, and now the OS itself can't cut it.

don’t worry guys, bluesky can be perfect so long as we all get along. first things first, we just need to agree on that vi is better than Emacs.

Perhaps Comic Sans and Papyrus have finally found their destiny....

Snowcrash for LLMs.

"AI rewrite specialist" is "prompt engineer cosplaying as editor" (or maybe vice-versa. Ugh.

The Texas Instruments 99/4: World’s First 16-Bit Home Computer How a desire for corporate synergy gave rise to the “embarrassing” TI 99/4

The TI-99/4A, which had a cool case but with had bizarre minimal support in BASIC for graphics and sound. It was with great delight that decades later I edited a story by one of its creators fessing up to its problems! spectrum.ieee.org/the-texas-in...

Arundhati Roy is right, not Wim Wenders – here are eight films that have changed politics From ‘honour’ killings to nuclear war, some screen works have led directly legislative action – despite what jury head Wenders suggested at the Berlin film festival

"No movie has ever really changed any politicians idea" is also demonstrably wrong. For example, we have solid evidence that at least two movies altered the shape of real-world policies via Ronald Reagan's watching of "The Day After" and "WarGames." And look! There's 7 more policy-movers here:

Its a classic torture-nexus thing: people always forget that the reason Nell's copy of the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer in "The Diamond Age" is so much more effective than the other copies is because of the ghost in the nanotech, i.e. a non-fungible human actor.

Programmer A: OK, LDA ?HIT, CMP 1, BNE #CONTINUE, ... hmm, I did init DEAD to zero, so now instead of fetching a constant from memory and storing it back, I can save a line by just using INC instead...
Programmer B: But what if...
Programmer A: Mr. Potato Head! What did we talk about?

Normalize "absolutely unreachable" for sure!

The Power of Giving Your Disabled Characters a Happily-Ever-After The day I limped into a seven-month chronic pain rehab program, the first thing they told me was: we don’t talk about pain here. We were not allowed to exhibit “pain behaviors” either, which were p…

This is a really powerful piece from @thatsabrina.bsky.social that also makes me really want to read her new novel: lithub.com/the-power-of...

#romancelandia

If I ever secretly win the lottery, the giveaway will be the collection ofvoriginal art for Byte covers on my wall....

"Shaw is like Arthur C. Clarke with added humanity" as cover copy is an epic diss. "Light of Other Days" and "The Ragged Astronauts" were great original tales: I must reread "Light of Other Days" to see how well it maps to today's omni-surveillance society...

The Scottish island mentioned in this story is worth looking up!

How Will the Tech Industry Handle the DRAM Shortage? Can new technology and fabs solve the DRAM supply crisis by 2028?

Great, if somewhat depressing, assessment for anyone considering buying a PC soon, by my @spectrum.ieee.org colleague Samuel K. Moore:

An ambiguous classic: the Trabant car of the home computer world...

Build Your Own Pico Balloon and Explore the Stratosphere A $4 Raspberry Pi Pico can help you track a DIY balloon around the world.

This is one of my favorite Hands On we've ever published: did you know that with a General-class Ham license and less than $100 bucks you can build, launch, and monitor a globe-circling balloon? #amateurradio #hamradio #picoballoon #citizenscience spectrum.ieee.org/explore-stra...

Purchased! Looking forward to reading this: back in the day before ISPs, getting disks full of shareware programs from the local hole-in-the-wall computer shop was the only way to be connected to the computing zeitgeist.

This looks like the underside of a ZX Spectrum keyboard which did indeed have a REM key: in fact all the Spectrum's BASIC keywords where generated with a single press, which led to me invariably typing things like "RUN un" whenever I used my friend's Speccy: www.usebox.net/jjm/notes/ba...

Gods work.

A book which doesn't get enough credit for its prediction/depiction of the collapse of shared reality into algorithmic slop.

It's clear you tried really hard with the wording of these posts, well done.

I am older than TCP/IP...

Aertel was the bomb: you could e.g. look up arrivals at Dublin airport and see if a visitor's flight was delayed before schlepping all the way out there to pick them up, or get a fresh weather forecast. It's hard to convey how awesome that was to anyone who didn't experience life pre-Internet...