1. Preserving a floppy disk with a logic analyzer and a serial cable
Total comment counts : 8
Summary
The author of this article discusses their interest in preserving floppy disks and mentions that they already have the necessary hardware, a Saleae Logic 8 logic analyzer, to capture the low-level data from the disks. They explain that unlike modern storage devices, floppy drives operate at a more low-level interface and use encoding schemes to represent the data stored on the disks. They go on to describe the signals involved in reading data from a floppy disk, such as the write select signal, read data signal, index signal, and side select signal. The author then explains how to connect the logic analyzer to the floppy drive and captures a trace of the data on a floppy disk.
Top 1 Comment Summary
This article discusses the physical aspects of floppy interfaces, specifically how a track is selected and read. It mentions that the article does not cover the various formats of tracks and sectors. It also recommends two mature open-source alternatives, GreaseWeazle and FluxEngine, which are cheap and effective, utilizing off-the-shelf parts. The article provides links to more information on these alternatives.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The author regrets not having the floppy disks containing their childhood programs and suggests that people today should keep copies of everything they do. The author finds it enjoyable to look back at old work, and emphasizes that preserving these copies is much easier now than it was in the 80s.
2. Ants can carry out life-saving amputations on injured nest mates, study shows
Total comment counts : 12
Summary
Scientists have discovered that carpenter ants exhibit behavior similar to emergency amputations in humans in order to treat leg wounds and prevent infection. This is the first example of a non-human animal carrying out life-saving amputations. The ants were observed cutting off the injured limb at the joint with the hip bone. They appear to tailor their treatment based on the location of the injury, with no amputations observed for injuries on the lower leg. The ants’ nest mates provided essential wound care by licking the injuries. In infected wounds, the survival rates greatly improved if the injured ants either returned to their colonies or had their infected limb amputated by researchers. The researchers found that thigh wounds associated with damage to blood-pumping structures had higher survival rates compared to lower leg wounds. This behavior is believed to occur during territorial disputes with neighboring ant colonies. Overall, this study highlights how ants demonstrate social behavior to aid injured nest mates, similar to other social insects.
Top 1 Comment Summary
According to the article, ants have been observed removing dead workers from their nest and discarding them elsewhere, as evidenced by the author finding ant corpses on their office carpet.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses the unique abilities and intelligence of ants. It mentions that ants are the only animals, apart from humans, that manipulate their environment to grow food by protecting aphids. The article also notes that ants engage in warfare with neighboring nests and even kidnap larvae to grow as workers. A photograph of an ant’s face taken with an electron microscope shows its high level of intelligence.
3. GPU-Friendly Stroke Expansion
Total comment counts : 17
Summary
This article introduces arXivLabs, a framework that enables collaboration in developing and sharing new features for the arXiv website. Individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs align with arXiv’s values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv only partners with those who adhere to these values. The article also mentions the availability of the arXiv Operational Status, which provides notifications through email or slack.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article is promoting the High Performance Graphics 2024 conference, which will take place in Denver, Colorado. The conference will be co-located with SIGGRAPH 2024. The author provides a link to the full program of the conference and discloses that they are on the HPG conference committee.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses how Google Maps uses stroke expansion in WebGL 1 vertex and pixel shaders. The vertex shader converts a linear path segment into a quad with correctly beveled or extended endpoints, while the pixel shader uses math techniques to produce analytically antialiased line segments with circular caps, without the need for an actual distance field texture.
4. Radio Garden
Total comment counts : 25
Summary
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Top 1 Comment Summary
The author of the article mentions retrieving a list of around 20,000 stations in JSON format and converting it to a .m3u8 playlist to use with WinAmp. They mention that the playlist is currently playing a stream with low memory and CPU usage. However, they note that some streams have gone offline over the years and they are looking for a similar website that provides a simple list of public streams without the need for scraping.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The author struggled to find foreign music and encountered mostly American hits from the 80s and 90s. However, they found African revival music and Cape Town talk radio to be truly foreign experiences. They also noted the distinct playlist of the Islamic world.
5. What Happened to Perl 7? (2022)
Total comment counts : 14
Summary
The article discusses the plans for the future of the Perl programming language. Two years ago, Perl 7 was announced to reduce the amount of code needed at the top of programs, but this would require breaking backward compatibility. This sparked debates on who has the authority to make such decisions. As a result, a Perl Steering Council (PSC) was established to make decisions on the future of Perl. The PSC is elected annually and the next election will follow the release of Perl 5.36.0. The strategy for the future of Perl involves using feature guards and version bundles to manage backward compatibility. Experimental features are also introduced for feedback and may be changed or removed in subsequent releases. Additionally, a new line of code can enable stable features introduced in Perl 5.36.0. The article mentions that more features are planned for future versions, including richer object-oriented syntax, and the possibility of a new Perl version bump to 7.0 in the future.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses the renaming of Perl 6 to Raku and states that the Perl language will not undergo significant changes. It mentions that those who continue to work on the language do so in order to maintain the current version. The article also highlights the issue of new features requiring a longer boilerplate section in programs, which can be confusing for beginners.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The author reflects on their experience with the Perl programming language, noting its suitability for text manipulation due to its early use of regular expressions. They mention using Perl for tasks in the field of “DevOps” before the term was popularized. The author shares memories of deploying a web forum coded in Perl and having to debug large Perl scripts. They also mention the novelty of Python at the time and how it was joked about by experienced programmers. The author concludes by reminding readers that any difficulties or mistakes made with a programming language are the responsibility of the programmer, not the language itself.
6. Antidotes for Melancholy in Early Modern England
Total comment counts : 2
Summary
The article discusses the prevalence of books and songbooks marketed as cures for melancholy in early modern England. These collections, often referred to as “pills to purge melancholy,” contained a variety of content such as ballads, songs, jokes, stories, and poems. The titles of these books often featured keywords like “antidote” and “purges,” and some editions went through multiple reprints. The most famous collection, “An Antidote Against Melancholy: Made Up in Pills,” was published in 1661 by John Playford. Comic variations of these titles also emerged, such as “A Tory Pill, to Purge Whig Melancholy.” Many of these collections brought together works from different authors, sometimes obtained through plagiarism and piracy. Overall, these miscellanies covered a wide range of topics, including politics, history, and entertainment.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article talks about a genre of songs called nubbe-visor in Sweden that are often humorous and romantic about alcohol. The songs sometimes incorporate a pause for you to drink a small glass of spiced booze. The author suggests that these songs are more effective than their sertraline prescription in combating melancholy.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses the simple folk’s strategy for escaping their sadness and boredom. According to the dialogue between Guinevere and King Arthur, the common people sit around and speculate on how the royal folk would handle their situation. The context of this conversation is set long before early modern England.
7. DuckDB Community Extensions
Total comment counts : 8
Summary
DuckDB recently launched its Community Extension repository, allowing extension developers to easily publish and users to install extensions. This repository simplifies the process by allowing extensions to be downloaded and loaded into DuckDB instances, avoiding the need for compilation and distribution. DuckDB’s extension mechanism allows for the addition of new functionalities such as functions, file formats, compression methods, and network protocols. Popular features like the Parquet reader, JSON reader, and HTTPS/S3 connector are implemented as extensions. The new extension repository enhances the experiences of both users and developers, with easy discovery, installation, and maintenance of community extensions. For example, the h3 extension, which implements hierarchical hexagonal indexing for geospatial data, can now be installed using the repository. The repository also handles the building, signing, and distribution of extensions for various platforms. Overall, DuckDB aims to foster a community extension ecosystem and facilitate the publication process for developers.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article states that web assembly is supported by DuckDB, and provides a link for more information on DuckDB extensions in web assembly.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses the shellfs extension for DuckDB, a command line analysis tool. This extension allows users to use shell commands for input and output, making DuckDB even more useful. The author suggests that this feature could streamline multi-step data processes, although they are unsure of the specific use cases.
8. RadioSide turns your spare device into a radio
Total comment counts : 19
Summary
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Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses blocking IPs from Mexico and expresses confusion as to why people engage in such practices.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses the author’s uncertainty about whether their device, which is slightly older with macOS Big Sur, is the reason why a certain content doesn’t play. They also consider the possibility that their IP might be blocked by Cloudflare. Despite the issues, the author appreciates the idea behind the content.
9. How to implement a hash table in C (2021)
Total comment counts : 13
Summary
This article explains how to implement a simple hash table data structure using the C programming language. The author discusses linear and binary search as alternative methods and then proceeds to demonstrate how to design and implement a hash table. The article emphasizes that hash tables are not difficult to understand or build within certain constraints. The author provides code examples in C for linear search, binary search, and hash table implementation. They also mention the use of a hash function and “linear probing” to create a functional hash table. Overall, the article aims to demystify hash tables and provide guidance for building them in C.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses a benchmark of C and C++ hash tables that was recently conducted. The author suggests that using an off-the-shelf hash table implementation is preferable unless there is a specific reason not to. However, building one’s own hash table is still an enjoyable exercise.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The author discusses their attempts to optimize code similar to the tr utility, specifically focusing on speeding up the process of replacing characters. For an eight-bit character set, they found that building an array to map every character was more efficient than using a linear search. However, when working with Unicode characters, they experimented with simple hash tables. They found that using the low-order bits of a hash function’s output was more effective for short input strings, as opposed to using the high-order bits.
10. Writing GUI applications on the Raspberry Pi without a desktop environment (2019)
Total comment counts : 14
Summary
This article explains how to configure and use a framebuffer on a Raspberry Pi to display graphics on an LCD screen. A framebuffer is a virtual device that can be used to read from and write to in order to display graphics. The article provides instructions for configuring the framebuffers on a Raspberry Pi and discusses the low-level interface for writing to the framebuffer. It also mentions that libraries are available to abstract over the low-level interfaces. The article concludes by mentioning that mirroring one framebuffer onto another does not change the color depth of each framebuffer.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses how AvaloniaUI can be used with a framebuffer to run on Raspberry PI. The link provided contains a guide on how to run AvaloniaUI on Raspbian Lite via DRM.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses the author’s experience using TekUI on an Allwinner A10 board. They mention that TekUI was able to display GUIs on the framebuffer without the need for an underlying X environment. However, they note that TekUI is an old project and does not seem to be actively maintained. Despite this, the author points out that TekUI still compiles fine and suggests that it could be relatively easy to port it to other languages.