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Screwtapello

@Screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy

12 followers 1 following 159 posts

The Revolution will be a teacup in a storm Or a bottle in a message, or a door to a key! The Revolution will always come with fries Because the Revolution will be […] 🌉 bridged from ⁂ teh.entar.net/@Screwtapello, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact

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Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 1h

Back in the day, Netscape Navigator had a "Reload" command in the View menu, advertising the shortcut Ctrl+R (or ⌘R on Macs). When Internet Explorer came out, they followed IBM's Common User Access interface standards, so their View menu had a "Refresh" command with the shortcut F5, although […]

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Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 07/10/2026

[genai discourse] Sometimes I hear people say something like "generative AI is invented now, we can't put the toothpaste back in the tube, we have to live with it." And that reminds me of the history of opium. In the 1700s, the British started massively investing in opium production. In the […]

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Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 01/10/2026

I have been continuing to learn about pitch detection. I got to the point where I could generate a signal with a couple of frequencies, calculate its spectrum, and get a graph with spikes in the right places. So then I decided to throw some short alert sounds at it, to see what would happen […]

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Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 01/10/2026

RE: mas.to/@antongorlin/117364900204982… I love those colours.

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Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 30/09/2026

Today I learned about "magic eye tubes", a visual indicator of voltage levels based on cathode-ray-tube technology. They were used in the early 20th century until needle-and-dial voltage meters became cheap enough to take over. They sure look cool, though […]

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Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 21/09/2026

America has fifty states, the American flag has fifty stars, that makes sense. Australia has six states, the Australian flag has six stars, that also makes sense. Except that five of those stars represent the Southern Cross constellation, not states. On the one remaining star, the *points* […]

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Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 21/09/2026

RE: teh.entar.net/@ckape/11730689096321… This what happens when a goal ("this thing has high-quality documentation") gets a proxy metric ("this thing has a lot of documentation with complex sentences") that becomes a target ("let's automatically generate complex sentences"). People […]

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Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 19/09/2026

RE: mastodon.social/@unsung/11729309558… Being the kind of weird kid who spent lots of time browsing the Character Map application, marvelling at all the weird symbols it provided, I was particularly puzzled by some of the keyboard symbols in the Miscellaneous Technical block […]

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Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 18/09/2026

RE: mstdn.jp/@noco3n_com/11729126794062… I love the contrast of the red petals with the green/blue water(?) behind them.

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Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 09/09/2026

That feeling when somebody asks you to demonstrate something you've done a bunch of times before, you come up with a nice worked example and start going through the steps, but when you get half-way through you proudly say "And now we get X" and press the button and get Y instead.

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Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 09/09/2026

RE: mastodon.archive.org/@textfiles/117… When I was in high-school, I got full marks on a History project by formatting the result as a WinHelp file. If I recall, the input to the WinHelp compiler was RTF files, but you couldn't make them *directly* in Word because it […]

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Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 23/08/2026

[genai discourse] I think there's (at least) two different groups of people interested in #retrocomputing. There's a bunch of people who see generative AI as just the latest in a long, long line of things that have each been "the latest, greatest technology" at different points in history. For […]

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Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 20/08/2026

RE: mastodon.social/@shiz/1171282409639… This is how the FSF delivers the magnetic tapes filled with Emacs source code that people keep requesting.

mastodon.social

Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 17/08/2026

This is a really nice tweak of the standard CGA 16-colour palette, I'm going to use it as my terminal palette for a while and see how I like it. forums.scummvm.org/viewtopic.php?t=… Hat tip to @jplebreton

forums.scummvm.org

EGA games with a more palatable palette - ScummVM :: Forums

Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 09/08/2026

The Amiga "module" music format was hugely popular in the 1990s, with tens of thousands of songs written in "tracker" tools, often used in games and demoscene productions. Mostly on the Amiga, of course, but PC games like Jazz Jackrabbit and the original Deus Ex used music based on the same […]

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Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 30/07/2026

As part of this year's Decker Fantasy Camp jam, I cut the Amen Break up into individual drum-beats, and made a tool to let me put them back together in different ways. It turns out that making drum-beats is really fun - let it play, and add drum-hits, remove them, shift them around, and feel how […]

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Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 21/07/2026

Apparently somebody's designed a brand new 6502-based game console, using only still-in-production chips and no FPGAs. gametank.zone #retrocomputing #wdc6502

Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 27/06/2026

RE: mastodon.social/@kleptones/11682108… "Do not tumble dry. Do not tumble dry! Please! PLEASE! WHY WON'T YOU LISTEN TO ME?"

Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 13/06/2026

RE: mefi.social/@rodneylives/1167398838… Magazines were a huge part of the culture of the microcomputing era, and being able to (legally!) preserve these things gives a lot of context to the disk images you might find floating around. #appleii #apple2

Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 03/06/2026

Good news, nerds! The HP 16C Collector's Edition (a modern-manufactured version of the classic RPN calculator for programmers is now up for pre-order: hpcalcs.com/product/hp-16c-collecto…

HP 16c Collector's Edition - HP Calc

The HP 16c is back as a Collector’s Edition: the iconic programmer’s calculator with a classic design and modern programming functions.

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Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 21/05/2026

I should make a shirt that says "Hamburgefonstiv" with some deliberately unfinished kerning. #typography

Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 18/05/2026

I have begun writing a Decker deck that can import fonts from Rob Hagemans' Hoard of Bitfonts. It's been kind of painful because Decker's scripting language is a bit awkward at text manipulation, and the YAFF file format is geared for human consumption rather […] [Original post on teh.entar.net]

A textual representation of a table with five columns: "encoding", "strike", "left-bearing", "right-bearing", "codepoints". The "strike" column contains periods and at-signs, the others contain numbers.

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Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 22/04/2026

Matt Colville has recently been thinking about the division between people who think of tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons as a hobby (like model railroads, or stamp collecting) and people who think of them as a folk tradition (like hopscotch, or singing). For Matt Colville […]

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Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 18/04/2026

@mwichary talks about the classic "don't write 'click here'" rule of hyperlinking. It's good stuff, as usual: unsung.aresluna.org/use-links-dont-… On the subject of "jack here, lift here, pull here": the reason "click here" is redundant on a website is because there's no […]

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Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 20/03/2026

RE: gamedev.lgbt/@milliesquilly/1162590… Well, I know what *I'm* doing now.

Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 11/03/2026

I know Apple pushed the original Macintosh as "easy to use" but specifically calling out the familiarity of the *keyboard connector* seems a bit much. (from BYTE Magazine, June 1984: archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1… )

A close-up of a diagram of the original 1984 Macintosh. A callout line connects a socket with the label "Keyboard connector — a telephone-type jack you already know how to use."

Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 03/03/2026

In the late 1990s, Pangea Software was a leading developer of Mac-exclusive games. Apple commissioned them to write demonstration code for the first release of the Quickdraw 3D graphics API, and their subsequent games Nanosaur, Bugdom, and Cro-Mag Rally were […] [Original post on teh.entar.net]

A screenshot of the game Nanoraptor, showing a dinosaur wearing a jetpack and running around a chunky late-90s 3D environment.

A screenshot from the game Bugdom, showing a blue-green cartoonish bug (six arms, two legs with cute sneakers) wandering on sandy ground, with a forest of giant grass blades in the background.

A screenshot of the game Cro-Mag Rally, showing a cave-man in a racing car made from a log and primitive stone wheels.

Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 23/02/2026

"At the time we wrote Appler we of course knew that the colors are supposed to be purple, blue, green, and orange, but we had never seen them displayed by an actual physical computer, because the Apple ][ displays that were available in Bulgaria were all monochrome-green. Alex looked at the […]

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Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 22/02/2026

``` The following package was automatically installed and is no longer required: libplacebo351 Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove it. ``` Was it *ever* required, though? Really?

Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 15/02/2026

RE: mastodon.social/@stonetoolsblog/116… Back in the 1980s, technology was advancing so quickly that every other year seemed to produce new hardware that needed new operating systems and new applications, promising new never-before-seen capabilities. But today the pace has […]

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Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 05/02/2026

If you have some SD cards lying around and want a slightly-more retro-tech aesthetic... charlyn.codes/floppy-stickers

Stickers to turn SD cards into floppy disks!

I designed and printed some stickers to dress up my SD cards as floppy disks! You can too!

Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 01/02/2026

You might remember a few months ago, Linus Akesson released a C64 demo called "Nine" that featured a magician character that summoned nine on-screen sprites from his hat (the C64 only supports 8 sprites per scanline in hardware). Today the demo groups Fairlight and Genesis Project released […]

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Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 21/01/2026

I've been enjoying some Fancy Tea I got for Christmas. I don't know much about Fancy Tea, but my impression was that black tea is generally served with milk, and green tea or things with lemon do not go so well. So it's weird to me that the Fancy Tea with oolong (approximately black tea) […]

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Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 18/01/2026

Massive shout-out to this guy on Reddit, who figured out why Firefox couldn't prevent the screen from turning off when running under the Sway Wayland compositor, and also how to get it working. Lots of people just put up with it, or grumbled about GNOME or Firefox being buggy, but this guy […]

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Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 06/01/2026

A "photo" of the product packaging of Microsoft CoPilot Standard, including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. It looks like it was made in 1993 and sat in a dusty attic for thirty years.

Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 02/01/2026

Welcome to 2026, and welcome to another round of classic artworks entering the public domain! This year (in America) works from 1930 and before have become legally available. If you don't happen to have memorised the copyright dates of your favourite books and movies, the Center for the Study of […]

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Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 22/12/2025

The first time I played DOOM in the 1990s, the first thing that amazed me was the transition from the title-screen to starting a new game - No loading screen, no tasteful fade-to-black, but the menu you'd just been using crumbled away revealing the level running behind it - it set the tone of […]

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Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 22/10/2025

Moravia (the current owner of the HP calculator IP) has announced they'll be making a Collector's Edition of the 16C RPN programmer's calculator next year: youtu.be/vwgQu2s7rxY?t=1185 HP made dozens of scientific and business calculators over the years, but they only ever made one […]

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Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 21/09/2025

Today I learned: in 1919, the Treaty of Versailles formally ended World War I, establishing the A note above middle C as a frequency of 435 Hz. In 1939, an international conference recommended that the note's frequency be changed to 440Hz, and World War II broke out […]

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Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 19/09/2025

Mathematicians occasionally uses "tack" symbols, ⊥ and ⊤, for various purposes. They're called that because they look like thumb-tacks from the side. But if you need a particular tack, what do you call it? Is "⊥" the "up" tack, because the pointy bit is up? Or is "⊤" the "up" tack, because it's […]

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Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 17/09/2025

I love that Free Software means people can make the things they want to make in the fashion they want to make them without having to get permission from other people. And yet, it's stressful when I want to contribute to some project and I can't figure out whether my contribution would be […]

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Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 28/08/2025

I'm more than the sum of my experiences, I'm the *product* of my experiences.

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Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 29/07/2025

Today I learned that Magic: The Gathering had a miniseries of cards with pixel art. scryfall.com/search?order=set&q=e%3…

e:sld cn≥325 cn≤329

5 Magic cards found where the set is “sld” and the collector number >= 325 and the collector number <= 329

Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 19/07/2025

Could the 2006 Pixar movie "Cars" be set in the far future of the 1965 NBC TV series "My Mother the Car"? In this essay, I will...

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Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 17/07/2025

GAR. ``` $ /bin/bash -c 'x="2 + 2"; echo $((x * 2))' 8 $ /bin/bash -c 'x="2 + 2"; echo $(($x * 2))' 6 ``` bash(1) says "All tokens in the expression undergo parameter and variable expansion, command substitution, and quote removal" which I *think* is meant to imply that you can use a variable […]

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Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 13/07/2025

From a 1982 text adventure, "Marooned" (h/t @jdyer)

A screenshot of a Scott Adams style text adventure:

I'm in mid air. Visible items:

- Plane out of control
- Geese

Some obvious exits are: DOWN

Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 04/07/2025

I spent some time messing around with Snow, a new low-level emulator for classic 68k Macintoshes. It doesn't support hard-drive images from Basilisk II (the most widely-used 68k Macintosh emulator), so I had to make a fresh, blank hard-drive image, grab some […] [Original post on teh.entar.net]

A black-and-white screenshot of System Software 7.5 being installed on an emulated Macintosh SE FDHD. We're up to disk 2 of... many, so clearly the floppy disk images are working.

Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 22/06/2025

Today I learned why magnets were horseshoe-shaped, and why we don't do that anymore: www.kjmagnetics.com/blog/why-horses…

kjmagnetics.com

Why are Magnets Shaped like Horseshoes? | K&J Magnetics Blog

Explore the history and significance of horseshoe magnets and why they have a unique and enduring appeal.

Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 02/06/2025

From the Olean Herald, New York, on the 13th of September, 1884 (page 7, column 4), presumably quoted from a newspaper called the London Graphic.

Bill Stickers Frightened
[London Graphic]
A countryman named William Stickers, flying to London to escape from rural justice, was appalled at reading on a wall: "Bill Stickers Beware!" He went a little further, but reading again, "Bill Stickers will be punished with the utmost rigor of the law," gave himself up for lost and surrendered.

Screwtapello @screwtapello.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 22/05/2025

A lovely review of desktop icons from the 1990s and before: www.datagubbe.se/icons #pixelart #retrocomputing

Desktop Icons of Yore | datagubbe.se