The Hang of Thursdays #5
Posted by Dylan Beattie on 03 August 2023 • permalinkHello! This week’s THOTH is coming to you from Camber, a tiny village on the south coast of England, where I’m staying at my parents’ house for a couple of weeks while they’re away. This week so far has been torrential rain and 40 mph winds — aka “traditional English seaside holiday weather” — so the usual Camber activities of walking on the beach, swimming in the sea and cycling into Rye to enjoy its many excellent pubs have been postponed in favour of sitting indoors poking the internet.
The Framework 16 laptop
My main travel laptop these days is a Framework 13. It’s a fantastic machine that I love dearly, and I was really excited when Framework announced earlier this year that they’d be launching a 16” modular laptop. Looks like I wasn’t the only one: the Framework 16 opened for pre-orders last week, and the first batch sold out in less than 12 hours.
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Sean Hollister at The Verge has a great write-up about what makes it special — and how Framework are hoping to succeed where so many other brands have failed in delivering the first laptop that genuinely supports a modular, replaceable gaming GPU.
I haven’t ordered one yet… but I know a few folks who have, and I suspect that after I get my hands on one of theirs to try out, it won’t be long before I’m putting in an order for my own.1
Cree# and Ancestral Code
This has been around for a few years, but I’d never heard of it until somebody pinged me a link last week: Jon Corbett has created a programming language based on Cree, an Indigenous language spoken by around 120,000 people across Canada. Cree# isn’t just another esoteric language, though; it’s been explicitly created to help preserve the Cree language and culture. As Jon puts it:
“My primary target communities here are Cree communities that are looking for new (and exciting) ways to encourage students (especially in the K-12 grades) to use their heritage language as much as possible, and resist using English as their primary language.”
Jon Corbett’s design for a keyboard (Creeboard?) based on the Cree star chart, from https://esoteric.codes/blog/jon-corbett
Cree#’s syntax and conventions reflect the visual art and storytelling traditions of the culture that inspired it, and it’s not quite like anything I’ve seen before.
Fun with Printers
For somebody who works with code, web pages and digital media, I print a lot. I use printed notes and schedules when I’m running online workshops, I rely on printed checklists when I’m packing for conference trips and gigs, and I print proofs of my sticker designs and other odd bits of artwork.
Printers get a bad rap. Sure, you can buy a colour inkjet printer for £50. That’s ridiculously cheap. Printers are big and they’re packed with moving parts; you can’t sell a printer for £50 and make a profit. No, a £50 printer is a loss leader. A £50 printer is a way to get you to spend another £50 on cartridges every few months — cartridges that have microchips in them, which in some cases have been used to store encryption keys so that anybody trying to reverse-engineer them to create compatible low-cost replacements can be prosecuted under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Last month, my printer died. Something something print head won’t align beep beep no more prints for you. It was a Canon Pixma iP4900 that I’d salvaged from an office clear-out nearly 10 years ago; apart from costing me a small fortune on ink cartridges over the years, it was fantastic.
My new printer’s also a Canon. It’s a Canon Pixma G6050. It didn’t cost £50; it cost £240. It’s an all-in-one printer, scanner and colour copier; it’s got built-in wired and wireless ethernet; but most important of all: it doesn’t use cartridges.
If you really want, you can mix all the inks together to make Brown Flavour!
See that? Bottles of ink. Just ink. No microchips, no DRM. Just a couple of big old plastic tanks full of ink. I particularly love that instead of angry messages about how it can’t print because it’s out of cyan, there’s just a message in the UI that says “Hey, ah, please check there’s ink in the tanks before printing and if there isn’t then maybe don’t print right now?”
It’s been a month, and I’ve printed about 150 pages; so far I’m delighted with it, and I’m sure that when I eventually have to fork out the princely sum of £19.99 for a full set of ink refills I’ll be even more delighted.
NDC London Call for Papers
NDC London, one of my favourite conferences, will be back in January 2024, and the Call for Papers is open until 1 September. If you’d like to be part of it, this is your chance. I’m on the programme committee; we’re looking for talks on everything from embedded systems to ethics to web assembly to language models. What are you and your team working on? What problems are you trying to solve? How did you get there?
I wrote a blog post a while ago about how the selection process works, which is still very much relevant, so maybe take a look at Why Your Talk Wasn’t Picked For NDC London before submitting anything.
Kevin Mitnick RIP
I was sad to see the news that Kevin Mitnick has died from pancreatic cancer. Mitnick was probably the world’s most famous computer hacker; his exploits were legendary in the fledgling infosec community when I was an undergraduate back in the 1990s, and following his release from prison in 2000 he reinvented himself as a security consultant.
My favourite Mitnick story has nothing to do with computers. As a teenager, he noticed that when the buses in his home town of Los Angeles broke down or were taken out of service, passengers would be issued with transfer tickets so they could switch to another bus and continue their journey. Mitnick found a stack of unused transfer tickets in a dumpster near the bus station, and realised that if he could find a way to validate them, he could ride the buses for free — so he told staff he was working on a school project about transportation and wanted to buy a ticket punch for his project, and voilà! Free bus rides. I always thought that was a particularly elegant hack: observe the system, find the loopholes, wait for a lucky break, and round it all off with a little social engineering.
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This week I’ve been…
Watching: Barbie — at the first completely sold-out cinema showing I’ve been to since 2019. It’s good. It’s very good. Charming, visually stunning, and laugh-out-loud funny.
Special shout out to the most unlikely credit you’re likely to see in a motion picture soundtrack any time soon, for “I’m Just Ken” — written by Mark Ronson, performed by Ryan Gosling, and featuring Wolfgang van Halen and Slash. Now that’s a supergroup I’d pay good money to see in concert.
Listening to: “Wild in the City”, the new single from Nitrate. Founded by songwriter Nick Hogg, Nitrate are a melodic rock band from Nottingham whose last album “Renegade” has been top of my Spotify playlist for months. Slick, polished 80s-style rock, luscious waves of shimmering synthesizers and screaming guitars, and some seriously catchy hooks.
Reading: “DOOM Guy: Life in First Person” by John Romero. John’s autobiography is as much the story of id Software as it is the story of his own life, from the infamous Super Mario PC demo to Doom, Quake, Daikatana and beyond. I think it’s fair to say that John is better at writing code than he is at writing prose; there’s a wealth of detail here, but the writing can get a little clunky from time to time. Nevertheless, John remains one of the world’s most celebrated programmers, and the story of how a bunch of long-haired D&D fans revolutionised the gaming industry is compelling.
And that’s a wrap, folks. Take it easy, have fun, and be excellent to each other.
Dylan
1 It’s my eyes, you see. 13” screens just aren’t quite big enough for all the really important programming work I have to do. Honest.
