Digital Deluge

(See also: web design links.)

Highlights

The Floating-Point Guide - What Every Programmer Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic

2021

The terminal, the console and the shell - what are they? (13 January 2021)
Falsehoods programmers believe about… Biometrics (9 January 2021)
Fostering a culture that values stability and reliability (4 January 2021)

2020

The Psion Organiser II: laying the groundwork of our smartphone world (18 December 2020)
Fixing a Bug in 38 Year Old Software (13 December 2020)
The magic slab of glass that contains all my friends… or not (9 December 2020)
Silicon Graphics: Gone But Not Forgotten (5 December 2020)
Dutch journalist gatecrashes EU defence video conference (22 November 2020)
New lawsuit: Why do Android phones mysteriously exchange 260MB a month with Google via cellular data when they're not even in use? (14 November 2020)
Your Computer Isn't Yours (12 November 2020)
Argument processing in Unix and Windows (2 November 2020)
The Birth of UNIX with Brian Kernighan (1 November 2020)
on abandoning the X server (28 October 2020)
RIAA’s YouTube-DL Takedown Ticks Off Developers and GitHub’s CEO (27 October 2020)
When "progress" is backwards (20 October 2020)
Cemetery of Soviet computers (21 September 2020)
Open Standards Are Simple (13 August 2020)
Jira Is A Microcosm Of What’s Broken In Software Development (12 August 2020)
Code Only Says What it Does (23 June 2020)
History of FreeBSD Part 1: Unix and BSD (12 June 2020)
IBM will no longer offer, develop, or research facial recognition technology (8 June 2020)
Microsoft loves Linux — a little too much? (20 May 2020): just in case you were wondering what Microsoft can do now that they own GitHub.
The Era of Fragmentation, Part 3: The Statists; yet another history of Minitel (17 May 2020)
Why we at $FAMOUS_COMPANY Switched to $HYPED_TECHNOLOGY (10 May 2020)
Introducing Inkscape 1.0 (4 May 2020)
You’d have to be crazy to rewrite GIMP in anything — Interview with Ell (2 May 2020)
A circuit board from the Saturn V rocket, reverse-engineered and explained (April 2020)
Unemployment checks are being held up by a coding language almost nobody knows (14 April 2020)
I went to see a movie, and instead I saw the future (12 January 2020)

2019

My Business Card Runs Linux (23 December 2019)
Silicon Valley hasn’t innovated since 1978 (21 November 2019)
How IBM mainframes stored microcode in transformers (15 November 2019)
IBM, sonic delay lines, and the history of the 80×24 display (7 November 2019)
ACLU: Amazon Facial Recognition Falsely Linked Athletes To Mugshots (22 October 2019)
Computer historians crack passwords of Unix's early pioneers (10 October 2019)
Richard Stallman Does Not and Cannot Speak for the Free Software Movement (16 September 2019)
A computer built from NOR gates: inside the Apollo Guidance Computer (September 2019)
Deconstructing Google’s excuses on tracking protection (23 August 2019)
Moscow's blockchain voting system cracked a month before election (20 August 2019)
Google’s algorithm for detecting hate speech is racially biased (13 August 2019)
Linux Journal Ceases Publication: An Awkward Goodbye (7 August 2019)
Fitbits, other wearables may not accurately track heart rates in people of color (24 July 2019)
Looking inside a 1970s PROM chip that stores data in microscopic fuses (July 2019)
Software woven into wire: Core rope and the Apollo Guidance Computer (July 2019)
Paper Books Can’t Be Shut Off from Afar (30 June 2019)
Microsoft is about to shut off its ebook DRM servers: "The books will stop working" (28 June 2019)
The Slashdot Interview with FreeDOS founder Jim Hall
Samsung accidentally makes the case for not owning a smart TV (17 June 2019)
The reckoning: a manifesto for Code 2019 (10 June 2019)
Comcast is reportedly developing a smart speaker that would track your bathroom habits (21 May 2019)
Does Google meet its users’ expectations around consumer privacy? This news industry research says no (April 2019)
Vendors must start adding physical on/off switches to devices that can spy on us (April 2019)
Is Anyone Listening to You on Alexa? A Global Team Reviews Audio (10 April 2019)
Endlessh: an SSH Tarpit (22 March 2019)
Why Phone Numbers Stink As Identity Proof (March 2019)
What’s wrong with the Raspberry Pi (2 February 2019)
Strategic thinking, or what I think what we need to do to keep FreeBSD relevant (27 January 2019)
Extending Interactivity (24 January 2019)
Accounting machines, the IBM 1403, and why printers standardized on 132 columns (January 2019)

2018

“Help, I want to move my webcomic to an independent host using WordPress, how do I start??” (December 2018)
Discovering Interactivity (13 December 2018)
Amazon’s Disturbing Plan to Add Face Surveillance to Your Front Door (12 December 2018)
What makes BeOS and Haiku unique (30 November 2018)
Report: Microsoft’s enterprise products covertly gather personal data on users (15 November 2018)
The Source History of Cat (12 November 2018)
Systemd is bad parsing and should feel bad (October 2018)
Where Vim Came From (5 August 2018)
On FOSS as a capitalism-like structure (8 June 2018)
Steve Wozniak Talks Disk ][ (19 May 2018)
Retro Computer Badge for Hackaday Belgrade Has Everything You Wished for Back in the Day (15 May 2018)

2017

Interviewing Jörn Proda aka “Prodatron”, SymbOS creator and retro enthusiast (23 December 2017)
Repairing a 1960s mainframe: Fixing the IBM 1401's core memory and power supply (December 2017)
Waking Up From Electric Dreams (December 2017)
What Have We Learned from the PDP-11? (4 December 2017)
Trackball History: Canada's Earliest Gift to Computing (12 October 2017)
The history of *nix package management (15 August 2017)
Why you'll never make really big money as an AI dev (21 July 2017)
How to make a racist AI without really trying (13 July 2017)
Fonts on Unix (4 June 2017)
Lost Generation: The Relay Computers (10 May 2017)
Silicon Jungle’ now free via PG: Read about Kaypro, WordStar, Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘2010’ modem connection (15 March 2017)

2016

Wrong things that programmers believe, a curated list (18 October 2016)
Interesting Photos of Computer Stores in the 1970s and 1980s (October 2016)
How to choose your *BSD OS to begin with? (20 August 2016)
Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer (June 2016)

2015

Taking OpenStreetMap into the Field (18 December 2015)
How Machines Write Poetry (15 December 2015)
The History of Text Generation (15 December 2015)
JPeg lockdown: Restriction options sought by committee (15 October 2015)
Auto-Generating Clickbait With Recurrent Neural Networks (13 October 2015)
Examining the core memory module inside a vintage IBM 1401 mainframe (August 2015)
A Constructive Look At TempleOS (8 June 2015)
Peripherals Behind The Iron Curtain (13 April 2015)

2014

Home Computers Behind The Iron Curtain (15 December 2014)
The story of Grace Hopper (aka Amazing Grace) (9 December 2014)
Barack Obama just became the first US president to write a computer program (8 December 2014)
Pulling JPEGs out of thin air (November 2014)
NVIDIA's new GPU proves moon landing truthers wrong (18 September 2014)
Please don't use externally hosted JavaScript libraries (30 June 2014)
The revenge of QWERTY (25 June 2014)
Destructive DRM Strikes Again: Creative Professionals Blocked From Using Adobe Products For Days (18 May 2014)
Things that drive me nuts about OpenGL (May 2014)
Samsung NX300 Gets Rooted (14 May 2014)

2013

https://www2.dmst.aueb.gr/dds/blog/20131211/index.html (11 December 2013)
56 Unique Lorem Ipsum Generators (11 July 2013)
Cory Doctorow: Teaching Computers Shows Us How Little We Understand About Ourselves (3 July 2013)
MPEG1 Video Decoder in JavaScript (May 2013)
Open Source Is Old School, Says The GitHub Generation (15 May 2013)
Adam “Always Online” Orth no longer employed at Microsoft (April 2013)
IT Security in a Nutshell (14 April 2013)
An Interview with Computing Pioneer Alan Kay (2 April 2013)
Steve Mann: My “Augmediated” Life (1 March 2013)
The Reality of Developer's Life (February 2013)
The impending crisis that is Windows XP and IE 8 (January 2013)
Sell Microsoft NOW! Game Over - Ballmer Loses (20 January 2013)

2012

CA to app devs: get privacy policies or risk $2500-per-download fines (December 2012)
To understand the command line... (30 September 2012)
Homebrew 68k extravaganza (4 September 2012)

2007-2011

Text Editors in The Lord of the Rings (29 July 2011)
Taco Bell Programming (October 2010)
Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names (17 June 2010)
Realtime Raytracing in Javascript! (2 June 2010)
Exceptions vs. error returns, quantified (21 January 2009)
Gates sends angry e-mail, sounds just like a customer (25 June 2008)
A day without X (21 May 2007)

Unsorted