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fluidlogic

@[email protected]

Cishet white male. Offspring of immigrants. Free software and self-hosting advocate. Socialist. Anticapitalist. European. I acknowledge the incongruence of this list!

Right now I'm enjoying retrocomputing projects on an eight-bit Atari 800 and 130XE, a sixteen-bit Atari 520STFM and a 32-bit 1996 IBM Thinkpad.

I'm interested in operating systems, application and utility software, the claims made about the future we were promised with these machines, and the present we've ended up with.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. View on remote instance

@organicmaps@fosstodon.org avatar organicmaps , to random

Thanks to our contributors, Friday is a good time to update Organic Maps!

Zip lines in Organic Maps
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fluidlogic ,
@fluidlogic@oldbytes.space avatar

@organicmaps where do I find out more about how to add the right metadata?

fluidlogic ,
@fluidlogic@oldbytes.space avatar

@organicmaps thank you, that's exactly what I was looking for! The wiki describes interaction with a web-based editor, does it?

I find Open Street Map tooling and documentation mostly baffling, unfortunately.

@fluidlogic@oldbytes.space avatar fluidlogic , to random

and folks: I'm trying to get a sense of the proportion of people here who are into retrocomputing today but didn't experience specific classes of machines when they first came on the market. I want everyone's input! Please boost!

This poll is about minicomputers. I've another poll for consumer home computers.

@fluidlogic@oldbytes.space avatar fluidlogic , to random

folks: I'm trying to get a sense of the proportion of people here who are into retrocomputing today but didn't experience the machines when they first came on the market. I want everyone's input! Please boost!

(I'll ask the same question about minicomputers. This poll is about the early consumer home computers released between say 1977 and 1994.)

@fluidlogic@oldbytes.space avatar fluidlogic , to random

Can someone remind me what type of connector this is? It's in my box of external and internal disk interface cables, but I'm not sure that's what it is.

It's probably fifteen years old. Perhaps more.

A photo of the business ends of a cable with nine sockets and a cutout nested in a rectangular plastic connector.
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@fluidlogic@oldbytes.space avatar fluidlogic , to random

Can someone who uses an iOS device and who understands what a general purpose computer is and what a filesystem is please tell me if today's iOS makes available to apps a common filesystem which can be browsed to access arbitrary files?

Every Apple mobile user I've spoken to - especially the technical ones - use evasive and mealy-mouthed language to describe the consequences of Apple's choice to sandbox apps so they cannot access a common filesystem.

Has iOS sandboxing changed in recent years? Can I download an arbitrary file with one app, and have another app have full read-write access to that file and the portion of the filesystem on which it resides?

fluidlogic OP ,
@fluidlogic@oldbytes.space avatar

I ask because here's the problem I'm trying to solve: I'm recommending to a nontechnical iPhone-using family member that they access their non-DRM audio books via a Nextcloud server which I manage (and on which they have an account.)

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cloudbeats-audio-book-player/id1086480492 seems to be able to access and cache locally audio books from WebDAV/Owncloud, which also covers Nextcloud.

Is this a reasonable approach?

@fluidlogic@oldbytes.space avatar fluidlogic , to random

One case I remember hearing for the push by executive class for the curtailment of was that much of their assets are tied up in commercial property.

Turns out, that's true.

https://www.moneymag.com.au/where-the-mega-rich-invest-knight-frank-wealth

@fluidlogic@oldbytes.space avatar fluidlogic , to random

This is superb:

Paulina Borsook Saw Tech Fascism Coming

More than 25 years ago, Paulina Borsook observed a toxic strain of libertarian-inflected ideology rising up out of Silicon Valley. In 2000, she published Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech, a searing and prophetic takedown of the immature, selfish ,and Ayn Rand-inspired culture of tech.

Few wanted to hear criticism of the tech overlords at the time, and the book wasn’t a big hit. Today, Borsook’s work is experiencing a resurgence as new generations—in the era of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel—discover that she was right.

https://www.thenerdreich.com/paulina-borsook-saw-tech-fascism-coming/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DL-kwZdkiOA

fluidlogic OP ,
@fluidlogic@oldbytes.space avatar

Ooh, I listened to the audio version as a podcast. The opening two-odd minutes of the video are super-cheesy visually. Here's the audio:

The Nerd Reich: The Woman Who Predicted Tech Fascism — Paulina Borsook Was Right

Episode webpage: https://nerdreich.podbean.com/e/the-woman-who-predicted-tech-fascism-%e2%80%94-paulina-borsook-was-right/

Media file: https://mcdn.podbean.com/mf/web/8gs8f3gm4z8s5wyw/Pod_12_-P_Borsook-_Audio6y2hd.mp3

@fluidlogic@oldbytes.space avatar fluidlogic , to random

I think there's a book to be written on the afterlife of based on the goldmine that is the forum.

The world will be a poorer place if the database underlying that forum is irretrievably lost. It's such a hodgepodge of nuggets of tribal knowledge. Several entire "Missing Manual"s-worth of valuable information on hardware, emulators, programming languages old and new and much more.

Try the discussion thread on the release of the Action! programming language source code, as just one example of the rich lore shared by the Atari retrocomputing community: https://forums.atariage.com/topic/217770-action-source-code/

@fluidlogic@oldbytes.space avatar fluidlogic , to random

I am in my element rediscovering the rich world of 8-bit Atari that completely passed me by during the years the Atari was my primary computing device. I had no access to information; none of my friends cared about computers, I had no money for books or magazines and the Internet effectively didn't exist.

Here's the very terse help page for SpartaDOS "EDIT" 2.2, now provided as part of (actively maintained) BW-DOS.

I've printed this to have as a cheat sheet beside me while I work.

A photograph of an LCD panel displaying the analogue video output of an Atari 130XE 8-bit computer. The 40-column, 24-line screen is packed with 8x8 characters very tersely summarising the keystrokes for use with the EDIT text editor.
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@hp@tmm.cx avatar hp , to random

Are you ready for a new world of power and performance!

A picture of an os2 2.1 box. "A whole new world of power and performance"

A picture of an os2 2.1 box. "A whole new world of power and performance"
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fluidlogic ,
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@hp wow, never knew about this before. At first I thought it was a shim to allow OS/2 applications to run on Windows 3.1, but it's the opposite!

Version 2.1 added improvements in performance and usability, as well as
Windows 3.1 support and built in multimedia. IBM then followed this up with OS/2 for Windows, which would take users' existing copies of Windows, and modify them to allow them to run under OS/2.

(From http://www.faqs.org/faqs/Team-OS2-FAQ/, via Wikipedia.)

@fluidlogic@oldbytes.space avatar fluidlogic , to random

I'm really enjoying on ! It feels much more modern* than other languages on the platform, and the native IDE booting from BW-DOS has just enough utility to make it viable to write code on an Atari 800 or equivalent. (I miss vi's 'join' and a search and replace utility, but the edit/save/run cycle feels very natural.)

FastBasic's author is active on , and has also contributed to the recent 1.5 release of BW-DOS, in conjunction with Jiří Bernášek, the original author of BW-DOS.

It's extraordinary; the scene is more lively and robust than ever, between new hardware add-ons and new programming languages.

  • Well, 1970s structured programming modern; in FastBasic, there's no scoping of variables, nor functions that return values, nor hand-holding error messages. Lots of great utility in the several looping constructs and 16-bit DPOKE and DPEEK, and the recent addition of commands is intriguing, on top of the existing support.

..... PROCedure definitions ..... PROC ToggleBit bitPos . ? "Toggling bit " bitPos newBits$="" FOR pos=1 TO LEN(plyrBits$) IF pos=bitPos IF plyrBits$[bitPos,1]="⚪" newBits$=+" " INC pos ELSE newBits$=+"⚪" INC pos ENDIF ENDIF newBits$=+plyrBits$[pos,1] NEXT plyrBits$=newBits$ ? clrScrn$;pad$;plyrBits$ ENDPROC
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@fluidlogic@oldbytes.space avatar fluidlogic , to random

The wonderful @organicmaps doesn't have a layer for rail lines, or otherwise highlight rail lines at zoomed-out map resolutions.

However searching for "train station" or "railway station" gives you a good-enough approximation for planning an itinerary.

Check out, for example, in the second screenshot, the suspicious lack of lines between Serbia (in the lower left) and Romania. It turns out there are effectively no public transport links across the border between the two countries. (Foot, bicycle and car options exist.)

A screenshot of Organic Maps showing the search results for "railway station" on the map. An area of eastern Serbia and southern Romania at a resolution of about 150*100km is shown. Patterns of blue dots provide an indication of the absence of rail links between the two countries.

A screenshot of Organic Maps showing the search results for "railway station" on the map. An area of eastern Serbia and southern Romania at a resolution of about 150*100km is shown. Patterns of blue dots provide an indication of the absence of rail links between the two countries.
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@JustCodeCulture@mastodon.social avatar JustCodeCulture , to histodons group

Box of advanced copies of Just Code: Power, Inequality and Political Economy of IT just arrived!!! Partnering w Con & teaming w 19 brilliant STS authors was such a joy. Authors Ya-Wen Lei; Meg Leta Jones; @histoftech , Hector Beltran, Stephanie Dick, Elizabeth Petrick, Gili Vidan... The full list & ToC will be in replies below.

sociology@a.gup.pe icon sociology group
@communicationscholars
histodons@a.gup.pe icon histodons group
politicalscience@a.gup.pe icon politicalscience group
anthropology@a.gup.pe icon anthropology group

Box of advanced copies of our Just Code: Power, Inequality and the Political Economy of IT book from Johns Hopkins University Press. Two books are out side by side with the front and back covers showing, propped up on the rail of the balcony of my condo in Minneapolis. The cover is bold black lettering with pastel color trails off the letting. In the background is sunlight and trees.
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fluidlogic ,
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@JustCodeCulture @histoftech sociology@a.gup.pe icon sociology group @communicationscholars histodons@a.gup.pe icon histodons group politicalscience@a.gup.pe icon politicalscience group anthropology@a.gup.pe icon anthropology group

Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction:Encoding an Analytic 1
Gerardo Con Díaz and Jeffrey R. Yost

PART I. HOW DOES CODE BECOME BOTH A SUBJECT AND A MEANS OF GOVERNANCE?

  1. Delivering Solidarity:Platform Architecture and Collective Contention
    in China's Platform Economy 23
    Ya-Wen Lei
  2. Consent Code and Default Dramas 64
    Meg Leta Jones
  3. A Mirror, Not a Glass Door: Legal Code and Software Code in Practice 87
    Justin Petelka, Megan Finn, Janaki Srinivasan, Elisa Oreglia, and A. P. Janani
  4. Algorithmic Collusion, Modern Monopolies, and Their Market Power 109
    Hamid R. Ekbia
  5. Reopening the Politics of Openness in the Age of Cloud Computing: Reflections on Recent FOSS Relicensing 127
    Shun-Ling Chen
  6. The Great E-book Conspiracy 148
    Gerardo Con Díaz

PART II. HOW DOES CODE BECOME INFUSED WITH SOCIAL VALUES, ASSUMPTIONS,AND BIASES?

  1. The Standard Head 171
    Stephanie Dick
  2. Spanning Space and Tim Barriers: Computerized Conferencing, Disability, and Citizenship 193
    Elizabeth Petrick
fluidlogic ,
@fluidlogic@oldbytes.space avatar

@JustCodeCulture @histoftech

  1. Pushing Fintech: Testing Mobile Money, Financial Inclusion,and "Rural Women" in Peru 212
    Maricl Garcia Llorens
  2. Corporate Culture Made Material: Ephemera and In/equity at Control Data Corporation, 1957-1975 236
    Elizabeth Semler
  3. Reassessing the Iconic and Unbundling the lronic: IBM System Engineering, Gender, and Antitrust 255
    Jeffrey R. Yost
  4. Y2K and the Politics of Labor 274
    Dylan Mulvin

PART III. WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO GRAPPLE WITH CODE?

  1. From Programming to Platform Expertise: Technical Reformers and the Reinvention of Institutions 295
    Shreeharsh Kelkar
  2. Computers as Colonizers: British Computing Companies and Indian Technological Resistance, 1955-1975 325
    Mar Hicks
  3. The Mask of Humanity: Manipulation and Psychopathy at the Human-Computer Interface 344 Jennifer Alexander
  4. Cryptography Goes Public: Contesting the Meaning of a New Field in the 1970s United States 372
    Gili Vidan
  5. Nodes and Codes: Iterating with the State in México 388
    Héctor Beltrán

Epilogue: Artificial Intelligence - Braiding Irony, Paradox, and Possibility 411
Jeffrey R. Yost and Gerardo Con Díaz

fluidlogic ,
@fluidlogic@oldbytes.space avatar

@JustCodeCulture @histoftech

Looking forward to picking this up!

@organicmaps@fosstodon.org avatar organicmaps , (edited ) to random

Try Organic Maps beta version with new OSM data, hiking trails from OSM in the Outdoors map style, track elevation graph on Android, new route planner on iOS and many other fixes!

APKs:

Hiking paths from OpenStreetMap.org
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fluidlogic ,
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@organicmaps will this replace my existing installation of Organic Maps, or is it a parallel installation which will need its own data?