Category Archives: Link of the Day

Boing Boing: Knitting patterns under Creative Commons license

Materials licensed under Creative Commons licenses are becoming more and more popular, and more and more mainstream. As reported on BoingBoing, Knitty is a web-published knitting magazine, and for a special breast-cancer awareness issue, they decided to publish their patterns under a Creative Commons license, specifically the Attribution-NoCommercial-NoDerivs license. Check out the patterns: I’m more of a crochet guy myself, but can knit in a pinch. The socks look comfy.

Lego, the Type Designer’s Friend

Mark Simonson has a really nifty website on typography. I originally found it because he built a mechanism for holding filmstrips of fonts out of Lego so he could scan them, but if you dig around you will find that there are plenty of other nifty things having to do with type design and typography, including his first attempt to design a font on a computer using a Sinclair ZX80 back in 1980. Good stuff.

The Computer of Today, From Yesterday!

Home Computer of 2004The caption reads:

Scientists from the RAND Corporation have created this model to illustrate how a “home computer” could look like in the year 2004. However the needed technology will not be econimically feasible for the average home. Also the scientists readily admit that the computer will require not yet invented technology to actually work, but 50 years from now scientific progress is expected to solve these problems. With teletype interface and the Fortran language the computer will be easy to use and only…

Courtesy of Metafilter

Gill – Six Months in Ascension

Gill Camp on Ascension IslandThose clever lads and lasses at Metafilter had a very cool link to Isabel Gill’s Six Months in Ascension, written in 1877. Sir David Gill went to the island to observe Mars to determine its distance from the sun more accurately, and his wife Isabel went along to help out. This peek into a Victorian scientific expedition from the views of a non-scientist is revealing both in terms of its historical importance and in understanding the roles of men and women in Victorian society.

Don’t miss out on Thomas Cave’s webpage of his more recent astronomical trips to Ascension Island either.

A brief quote, just to entice you:

I cannot think why the poet says,

“Man wants but little here below.”

It seems to me that man, and woman too, wants a very great deal; and the beauty of the universe and the contemplation of the glory of far-off worlds, what consolation do they give, when the kitchen-chimney smokes, when a tooth aches or a new shoe pinches?

UNIX® on the Game Boy Advance

Unix on the Gameboy Advance!UNIX® on the Game Boy Advance is an implementation of the 5th version of the Unix Operating System for the ARM chip inside the gameboy. To do this, it runs SIMH, a PDP-11 simulator which has been ported to a bunch of different systems. The original RK05 disk image is combined with the PDP-11 simulator to make a functioning 5th Edition workstation.

It’s… just… brilliant.

On the right, you can see a screendump. Notice that it is compiling a simple Hello World C program.

If you are into this stuff, you can get lots of different PDP-11 software off the net with a minimum of searching.