I’ve used these guys. Fast, courteous and acceptable price. Still, unless you live in Portugal, I don’t think it will help you much. Might give you an idea of what to look for, though!
I’ve used these guys. Fast, courteous and acceptable price. Still, unless you live in Portugal, I don’t think it will help you much. Might give you an idea of what to look for, though!
There are companies specializing in document management. One of the services they offer (besides archiving, secure destruction, etc.) is scanning books and creating high-quality pdfs of their contents. This is usually a (semi-)automated process that uses a machine that opens the book only as much as necessary, to try not to even damage its spine. I’ve used it professionally and can vouch for this kind of service, even if I cannot really recommend you a particular provider, since I very much doubt you live near me, in Europe. Still, I’m pretty sure you can find one close to you if you search.
This will only take you halfway there, by producing a good quality pdf version of the book that you could share with others. To go the extra step of OCR’ing it, proofreading, adding the links, would need something else…
I read the first book in the series and found it… nice, but certainly not up to all the hype. Is it because it is just setting things up? Does it get better, more compelling, in subsequent books?
How about, instead of spending millions on marketing and exercises or graphical virtuosity that do nothing in terms of playability, innovation and fun, focusing on what matters and do games where $70 still turns a huge profit?
Alan Dix’s book (aptly named “Human Computer Interaction”) is quite good, even if somewhat old by now. HCI is an actual academic discipline with, yes, tons of theoretical and empirical results that govern what a good UI should be. Many of which are indeed grounded in psychology, others in physiology, etc (what we call Human Factors). There is a whole special interest group of the ACM just about it: SIGCHI.
Do not confuse this with fashion/trends/taste. These change, resulting in widely different possible flavors of UI over the years. But the underlying principles are the same.
Another thing to remember is that the fact that Apple, Google, or someone else implemented an UI in a certain way doesn’t mean they are following best practices and guidelines. Novelty sells, even if at the end of the day it does a worse job of things…
Edit: added link to SIGCHI
I wish that would work. My Epson was always on and the ink kept drying. After it clogged the print head once too many times and I could not fix that in less than 10min, I just gave up on the piece of crap. I now go to a print shop to print what I need which, admittedly, nowadays is just a couple of times a year.
Nice try, Guybrush!
Neat! I’ve always been a fan of roguelikes!
#Rogule 2024-3-25 🧝 4xp ⛩ 93 👣 streak: 1 🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜ ⚔ 🐺🐗🧛 🌰🌰 🍄
While I’m not entirely sure wat it actually means, the message you get on that site right now might be the reason (some kind of experiment gone wrong artificially inflating the numbers):
I was creating an implementation for the activity pub instance service transfer, but it seems to have spread far. We are very sorry to those who have experienced inconvenience.
All temporarily used data has been removed and all data has been removed. The figures in the data will soon converge to zero.
I trawled unintentionally.
99% Invisible - An excellent design/architecture podcast
20k Hz (“twenty thousand hertz”) - great show about the audio that pervades our daily lives, from notification sounds to movie special effects, passing through game sounds, sound history,etc.
Imaginary Worlds - in their own words, “ a podcast about science fiction, fantasy and other genres of speculative fiction”.
All three are done by professionals in their respective fields, exceedingly well researched, and with superb production values.
Went through this some years ago with my daughter. She was around 8 and came home from school all excited about Pokémon cards, as some colleagues started showing up with them. After getting her some, I realized that they liked to look at them, compare powers, do the odd trade and that was it…
Still, I feel it all got sorted out in the end. That fleeting interest planted the seed of interest in TCGs and now she’s 11 and we regularly play MTG against one another 🙂
Still, El Niño happens cyclically every few years, and this dataset spans decades. There are no other years in there similar to 2023….
This takes many forms. A recurrent one is for the take place right out of college (or while still in it!), taking advantage of the naïveté of those just entering the job market, and often as a precondition to access any kind of paid job some months later. The employer gets free qualified labor, the intern eat lots of ramen… families put up with it as a natural extension of paying for college, for a few more months… it’s exploitation pure and simple.
A “joke” I’ve heard several times over the years (not recently, though) summarizes the level of assholery that’s going on (warning: some may find this offensive)
“it is better to have an intern than a slave, because you don’t need to feed, house our clothe the intern”…
I guess someone should come up with an idea for config.sys next!
The ones with the rabbits are pretty messed up as well!
Yah, I can’t imagine finger being widely deployed nowadays, the huge security and privacy hole it would be!
As for nntp and email… I also remember using email relay proxies for FTP way back when! FTP access to some places was spotty at best, so I sent a GET request to an email server that would get the file, UUENCODE it, and send it multipart by email. Not that files were big back then, but not was it possible to attach more than a few hundred KBs at once, if that.
In fact, I just remembered a funny story from when I was using the Usenet. I used a client that ran on our VAX/VMS mainframe. While browsing the newsgroups, I would get a figure for the transfer rate at the bottom of the screen. It was usually in tens of bytes per second, sometimes a few hundred. Often it stalled, etc. One day, out of the corner of my eye, I see it is showing “1”. My immediate thought as the most plausible interpretation: “damn, one byte per second. this is especially slow today!” And then I noticed the units: one KILOBYTE per second. it was the first time I had ever seen such a fast transfer rate!
A few years later, mid 90s I was trying to download a video that accompanied a conference paper. It was 6MB in size if memory serves. It took me from Friday afternoon to Sunday to manage it. Not only was it slow, but it kept interrupting and I had to start over numerous times. But I did manage in the end, and walked away with it split into a few floppy disks 🙂.
We’ve certainly come a long way since!
So much this! I am old, I guess, but I was on Usenet for years before the web was even invented. When I became aware of the fediverse, I got serious Usenet vibes. A decentralized model, several servers, you access one and get what it sends you, but it syncs with all other servers. You‘re getting everything in the entire Usenet and what you post gets everywhere too… we’ve come full circle, I think, even if we now use ActivePub instead of NNTP… a shame people nowadays know of it as “that piracy thing” instead of what it once was (and was designed to be).
This. Inform was the language/platform developed back in the day to author/interpret Z-code, the basis for Infocom’s text adventures. It went beyond just that in more recent versions, but it is designed from the ground up for text adventure creation.
This is like saying “you can write ransomeware in C++” and implying it is the language’s fault, somehow. ChatGPT is a tool, it does what the user asks it too (or it should, anyway). It has no agency nor morals. The argument that it makes it easier to write ransomware is silly as well. From high level languages to libraries and IDEs, we’ve always been developing tools to make programming easier! This is just the latest iteration.
1643 day streak here, and it still looks like it’s going to die on me any second now. I guess it was just an icon change (but… why?!)