In Academia We Write Throwaway Code

This week, Rock Paper Shotgun presented their best games to play on the PC today list or the RPS 100 (2024), another interesting PC video game top 100 list. Another heavily biased top 100 list, which calls for a good doze of armchair scientific analysis to determine exactly how reliable this list is. I do like the presentation of the list: click...

Remember when I said that if you muddle with vintage hardware mixtures, one thing gets fixed but the other has a very big tendency to break? I was trying to save this for the PicoGUS post but that’ll have to wait as debugging the current problem is giving me a headache. You see, I kind of sort of maybe perhaps broke my Vintage Sound Blaster 16. I...

These past few days we’ve been greeted with a damp, cold mist: finally autumn is really here. Last week’s Halloween was celebrated with a local organized stroll through the park obstructed by everything scary that the organizer’s minds could think of. During the day, the walk was supposed to be child-friendly, but the masks managed to evoke...

It took me more than two months to finally unwrap that eBay present containing a Pine Technology PT-428 baby AT Socket 3 motherboard. The original one in the 486 case, a PCChips M602, died on me this summer. Well, died is perhaps a bit exaggerated: the keyboard suddenly refused to be recognized and the HDD controller started getting funky. Since...

As I wrote in last year’s Coping With Loss, just before my wife gave birth to our daughter, my father-in-law passed away. Needless to say, last year has been very hard—and to a certain extend, this year as well. We’re nineteen months later now and the resulting grief still hits us when we least expect it to, as in a sudden wave that brutally...