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Monday Night (0 Comments) (link)
 Monday, 18-November-2024  21:18:21 (GMT +10) - by Agg

We seem to be hitting that age where a lot of computing pioneers are passing away. Recently Thomas E. Kurtz, co-inventor of BASIC, interpreted his final GOTO command. In the early days of academic computing in the 1960s, there were no simple non-professional programming languages available for undergraduates. BASIC was aimed at this audience. To realize their vision, Kurtz and Kemeny concurrently developed the Dartmouth Timesharing System, allowing BASIC to be accessed by students around campus using Teletype terminals. Like many people, BASIC was my first computer language - before I even had access to a computer!

Half Life 2 is 20 years old now, and there's a documentary about it linked in this post. It's also free on Steam (again) at the moment, but only for a few more hours.

kombiman sent in (a while ago) this cool urban Spotify project. I installed a box high up on a pole somewhere in the Mission of San Francisco. Inside is a crappy Android phone, set to Shazam constantly, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It's solar powered, and the mic is pointed down at the street below.

If you're sick of running out of storage on Dropbox or Google Drive etc, StorageReview have an article about building a Nextcloud server instead. Nextcloud is a free and open-source cloud storage platform that puts the power and flexibility of the cloud into your hands. It supports several popular Linux distributions, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. In this article, we’ll use Ubuntu Server 24.04.1 and Nextcloud Hub 9 (30.0.0) to build a high-performance, completely customizable cloud storage server. Some of the steps shown here might require some background knowledge of Linux server administration and the command line interface, so put your thinking cap on and get ready to get technical! There's a Nextcloud thread here in our Storage & Backup forum.

Voyager 1 keeps chugging away in deep space, after a days-long comms outage. Voyager 1 is now using a radio transmitter it hasn’t relied on since 1981 to stay in contact with its team on Earth while engineers work to understand what went wrong.

Supermicro is having financial issues which are attracting attention from the US Justice Department. Last month, Supermicro's auditor EY said it was “unwilling to be associated with the financial statements prepared by management" and resigned effective immediately. Supermicro was temporarily delisted in 2018 for failing to file financial statements and in 2020 was fined by the SEC for “widespread accounting violations."

Before crypto mining, before Folding@HOME, we used our computers to look for prime numbers - turns out it's still going, and they found another one recently. For many people, prime numbers have faded into the background since distant grade school days. However, for Luke Durant, a 36-year-old former Nvidia programmer, prime numbers became an all-consuming passion. He devoted nearly one year and invested a considerable sum of his own money to uncover the world’s largest known prime number.

Turns out OCAU isn't the only Forum still going nowadays, thanks Simon - there's a list of them here - but we're not on it! When I want information, like the real stuff, I go to forums. Over the years, forums did not really get smaller, so much as the rest of the internet just got bigger. Reddit, Discord and Facebook groups have filled a lot of that space, but there is just certain information that requires the dedication of adults who have specifically signed up to be in one kind of community. This blog is a salute to those forums that are either worth participating in or at least looking at in bewilderment.



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All original content copyright James Rolfe. All rights reserved. No reproduction allowed without written permission.