Happy New Year!
Submitted by Robert Daeley on Wed, 2008-12-31 18:33.
Quite a year now ending. Lots of good, some bad.
Here’s something of a retrospective, highlighting popular or significant Celsius1414 posts from 2008. Thanks for reading, and Happy New Year!
That’s the last cigarette I ever smoked, which happened five years ago today.
The gravitational pull of Linux
I can see my near-future computing needs handled, particularly on the writing front.
It looks like the Phoenix lander has touched down on Mars!
We had to have Xena put to sleep on Sunday after she was suffering from kidney issues. She was a great cat, and we’ll miss her very much.
It’s always tough when one of your heroes dies.
So in a recent interview, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown compared himself to the Byronic hero of Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff. This has set off a bit of reaction from the press, as in the Guardian article “Brown reveals his wuthering romantic side”…
It isn’t every day you meet one of your heroes. What are you supposed to say?
Praying Mantis Kitchen Attack!
Check out this awesome beastie that showed up in our kitchen the other night.
It’s easy for the 21st-Century reader to dismiss anything not written in the last twenty years, or ten, or five. Or today. To do so would be a mistake.
The War of the Worlds 70th Anniversary
Today marks the 70th anniversary of the infamous 1938 broadcast of “The War of the Worlds” radio play. While there’s some controversy about just how much of a panic the show set off (with the exception of Concrete, Washington), there’s no doubt how large of a cultural impact it’s had over the years.
Luckily for us of the Internet age, both of the 19th Century tales mentioned are available for free via Project Gutenberg. However, I would recommend sticking with reading them by firelight or candlelight rather than the far less dramatic glow of your LCD screen. :)
Compiling Word War vi on Mac OS X
Word War vi is a retro arcade game along the lines of Defender or Stargate, allowing you to play out the Emacs vs Vim wars in all their nostalgic glory. It’ll run on Mac OS X, but it takes a bit of preparation. Here’s what I did to get it running on Leopard (10.5.5); your mileage may vary on older OS versions.
Congratulations to President-Elect Barack Obama on his victory last night.
I was casting around for a replacement for the excellent Tofu screen text reader for Mac, due to some encoding issues. Always wont to explore the command-line options, I turned first to the ubiquitous less pager, available on pretty much every unix-alike system out there.
Agrippa: A Book of the Dead rebooted
A poignant experience on two fronts — via BoingBoing and Slashdot, William Gibson’s 1992 “Agrippa (a book of the dead)”, an electronic poem that came on a 3.5” Mac floppy and which, once it had been read, would encrypt itself into illegibility.
Happy 80th birthday, Philip K. Dick!
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