Link Cleanup, 2025-01-15
Cleaning up some of the hundreds of tabs I’ve got sitting open, here are a few worth saving. I miss feeling like pinboard was a good place to put this. It would be better to get these tagged and whatnot, but this is better than them sitting on my phone forever.
Docubyte’s Guide To Computing
I forget where I found this, but for the right kind of geek (👋🏼 hi, it’s me!) this is really beautiful. Many of these devices had such style in them, beyond just utilitarianism. His other projects are lovely, too.
This is wild: a fully-functioning 35mm camera made entirely out of LEGO.
I got to go to the Portland Zine Symposium last year and it was great. It was really encouraging to see the wide variety of topics and styles. I had a great time and learned a lot, and the kids thought it was a blast. I hope to get to next year’s.
This is a neat overview of the design system used for National Parks brochures. I didn’t know it was designed by Massimo Vignelli, probably most famously known for theNYC Subway map. Now I want a few Unigrid templates.
The least enjoyable entry on this list, but this People’s Guide to Project 2025 is important and well done.
How to Build a Small Solar Power System — I haven’t tried it yet, but would like to.
This is a hell of a paper title subhead: Workarounds to Computer Access in Healthcare Organizations: You Want My Password or a Dead Patient?. Good reading for anyone in UI/UX design, especially (but not only) around security, access control, and so on.
I’ve been working with some old SPARCstation boxes recently. This article on Care and feeding of a Sun Ultra 5/10 is describing newer systems, but especially the bits on OpenBoot are very helpful. The described “hack” for mkp and dead nvram worked wonderfully.
Information on NEXTSTEP and OPENSTEP for SPARC Workstations, half of what the above SPARCstation work is for. I made some progress on this early last year and then stalled out. I’m hoping to come back to this in the spring.
I got to see this pop-up exhibit on Calculators 1968-1983 and loved it. The evolution of capabilities and design in industrial artifacts like this is always fun, but here especially the evolution of the assumptions for a device which we think of as commonplace and “obvious”. Anyone who’s used an RPN calculator or an adding machine knows this, but there’s a lot of choices that go into making something “obvious”.
Relatedly, here’s the Old Calculator Museum’s list of exhibits. I love that this exists. I came upon this while looking for information on the Monroe Trader, a specialized calculator used for bond traders around 1980. I’ve got one I’d very much like to get repaired, and nobody seems to do that for things this old. I bought a Monroe 425 partly for the power cord and partly for practice, before learning they’re more different internally than I’d realized. They’re both very good looking devices; I’d love to get a working one on my desk (and hack up a non-working one into something else).
I don’t agree with all their choices, but this list of Every Studio Ghibli Film, Ranked is pretty good, and was particularly helpful when we started introducing the kids to them. God, I just want to go watch one right now. So much beautiful art here.
I think every website (and every book) should have a colophon. You put a lot of work into that thing, and I’d love to know more about the choices behind that. This is a really good example.
I love Cistercian numerals and wish they’d taken off more. I get why normal Arabic numerals are easier, with their more straight-forward positional nature, but Cistercian numerals are super functional, information dense, and wonderfully regular, aesthetically. They’re better than Roman numerals in every way, that’s for sure. At some point, I’d really like to grab some of these RGB Cistercian Display chips and build them into a project.
Well, that’s ~100 links down. Just… 400 to go.
On this device. 🤦