How many years ago was this? Do you know if the machine is still there? It is cool that it has been preserved, if not quite in its original form.

I was just at the Louvre and they use a Nintendo 3DS for their entertainment guide. Cheap to replace, easy to program for, durable since it’s designed for kids to drop, built-in wifi and update mechanisms; probably the best choice you could make in proprietary hardware.

Game Boy and Game Boy Colour were not ARM-based, they used a Z80 clone with some operations removed built by Sharp. The Game Boy Advance was the first ARM-based Nintendo handheld, based on the ARM7TDMI, and included a full Z80 chip for Game Boy backwards compatibility.

That is quite interesting :)

I worked a job where I had to get a 1975-era Fortran contour-map library working inside a 64-bit .NET GUI app. My employer had bought the company which made the library in the 90s, and sat on it until they decided it was time to add it to their newest product. Luckily for me, it had a C interface API for the PDP11, so I hacked up the interface and just pretended to be a really futuristic plotter on a really fast PDP11.

Even whittling probably produces tighter tolerances than what SGI was shipping BITD. I lost more sleep than I care to remember over badly machined drive sleds, to say nothing of the software, which was hellaciously fast, particularly at dumping core and rebooting; to be fair, most of those big boxen I used to herd would go tits up twice a day, so IRIX was under serious selective pressure to “reboot quickly”.

Such, such were the joys.

I’m still surprised nobody managed to knock that one out on prior art, I remember fastloaders for 8-bit computers that had a built-in minigame.

I’m a big fan of the Google Arts & Culture plugin for Chrome, which displays randomly-chosen art every day whenever you create a new tab. I’ve used it for years, with only a few repeats. I doubt it works on iOS, but it’s worth a shot.

Yeah, I didn’t like the article’s fixation on said irrelevant details.

What made the old Mac work was its UI; the attention to detail that both Apple and third parties had. Things were consistent, and things felt direct in a way modern Mac OS lacks. You manipulate the actual control panels in the control panels folder; opening them, removing them, booting with them, etc. There’s no mental abstraction like there is on Unix.

Reading this it’s very clear that the author didn’t use an old Mac for their post. The desktop animation is pulled from archive.org.

Low End Mac has a great collection of articles for making use of aging Apple gear.

As for the article; yeah, it does go on quite a bit on the pixels, but I feel that the gist is true: That the limited hardware and the focus on inexperienced users pushed for a UX that had to convey its intentions and affordance clearly, and that the UI/UX design of today doesn’t primarily focus on usability. (Broad strokes, of coure.)

I’ve always loved the classic Mac OS interface (indeed, my avatar is a poor Susan Kare homage), but I’ve thought of it as nostalgia. When I think of it now, I know that it isn’t just a matter of fuzzy feelings, but that the original Mac OS design did a lot of things right.

I believe 7.6 is the first time they used the “MacOS” branding in the OS itself.

Really want to get a development environment set up for my Quadra. I have one for Mac OS 9 on a PPC, but it’s not quite the same, too easy to avoid the Toolbox by using good modern-ish libraries like SDL.

It makes me think we are in need of a less biased search engine. My main concern would be storage space to archive all these sites. Speed would not really matter as long as we can do it in a year’s worth of time. Actually I guess archive.org is sort of like this?

The OPUS cards themselves are anonymous, but purchase info could be tracked if you don’t pay with cash. Cards can also be registered with STM at a service centre. This kills the anonymity factor but is useful if you lose it. I’ve gotten a free replacement this way without having to pay for a full fare again.

I found the USB card reader setup the STM came up with to be kinda lame overall. The last time I tried it (admittedly a couple of years ago), it required some deprecated NPAPI plugins that were no longer supported by their vendor and I had to whitelist them in my web browser, following instructions that would probably scare an average end user. The browser plugin mechanism they used has since been removed by the major browsers. The plugin also only worked on Windows and Mac when I tried it. The next time I tried to set it up, there were a lot of dead links on their website.

However, I get around the renewal hassle by signing up online for a yearly subscription. In this case, they send you a new OPUS smart card, which comes with some benefits (like only paying 11 of 12 months each year and getting a decent discount off of the Bixi bike sharing and/or Communauto car sharing programs, one free guest on evenings and weekends, and free rides on RTC in Quebec City after your first year).

This card is auto-renewed and you can access your account online, so you avoid waiting at the kiosk, and it saves you from having to buy the $16.66 USB card reader. Of course, it only works if you’re a frequent enough STM user to justify a yearly subscription. The yearly subscription cards are also automatically registered with the STM. If you want to take advantage of some of the benefits (free rides on RTC), you have to have your picture taken and stored on the back of the card. Before I did this, I would lend my yearly subscription out to my friends to use when I was travelling out of town but now I can’t anymore.

Since OPUS cards have been hacked several times, an artificial life span of 3 years is imposed so they can push out new revisions using different encryption methods.

I bought the USB card reader, anyway, because I like to collect gadgets. It was cheap and I wanted to mess around with OpenSC in Linux. It’s a Watchdata W1981-Plus and I believe it is the same device used by STIB/MIVB (Brussels) and RATP (Paris).

I had originally thought OPUS was a province-wide smartcard system but STO in Gatineau uses a different card, MULTI. To make things even worse, Ottawa’s OC Transpo, which overlaps some services with STO, uses yet another competing card- Presto, which is also used in the Greater Toronto Area. I’m really disappointed that a country with a population the size of Canada can’t get their smart card act together to standardize on one system. In the Netherlands, you use one card for all transit systems and it seemed to work beautifully.

we have a similar system locally which allows recharging on the buses themselves (smaller buses let the driver access it, bigger buses have a vending machine) and in train stations, so you don’t have to go out of your way. It might be more convenient than online payments.

It also makes it easier for people to hack their own cards in their possession to give themselves free rides. There’s possibly a cryptocurrency-like solution to this problem, that would make it possible for the transit system to centrally store the amount of money a given patron has loaded onto their card and used for farepaying, without tracking exactly where they go within the system, but I don’t think it’s a straightforward problem at all. Unfortunately, centralized tracking of where and when people get on and off the system is actually a very natural fit to the problem at hand of letting people pay for use of a public transit system.

Besides, public transit cars generally have security cameras, right? You can get tracked that way too.

Japan has a similar cash-card system (Suica, among others) that you can buy using cash and recharge online (although I think online recharging needs it to be tied to a bank account/mobile account, or to own a special, if common, card-reader/writer for your computer). I don’t see why the Montréal system wouldn’t be able to do the same, other than perhaps the slow-moving nature of the STM and the relatively small (compared to Japan) usage.

It is a pretty heavily used cash card though, so perhaps all the vendors (other than just transit) accepting it helps things like that along. Probably not as decentralized as I think it is, either, now that I’ve spent some time puzzling it out.

Interesting, what on earth do you need that for?

The sandbox engine downloading and running ESET actually appears to be in Chromium: https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/chrome/browser/safe_browsing/chrome_cleaner/ so developpers are free to review it and remove any reference to it. If my memory serve me well, Chrome Cleaner is not special and should appear in chrome://components/ along other optional close source components, although I don’t have a windows machine to validate right now. It should (Or at least used to) be disabled for other build than Google Chrome.

isra17’s reply implies there’s no scanner in Chromium, only Chrome. [I wrote this referring to his separate comment–now he has another reply here.] It probably wouldn’t make sense to have this on Linux anyway, just because there isn’t the same size of malware ecosystem there.

(And I think the reporting/story would be different if the scanner were open source–we’d have an analysis based on the source code, people working on patched Chromium to remove it, and so on.)

It seems to be still under active development, which is great. There’s a few little quirks that I got used to in HyperCard that seem to be missing here (command-click button creation is one I noticed right away). Would be nice to have an in-app feedback tool, because the Google Group doesn’t feel like the right place to do it.

I was working on a HyperCard stack parser for a few evenings but got stalled when it came time to build a WOBA decompressor to get at the BMAP data. Might still go back to that…