HTTP 418 · Oddities
A flaky CI/CD build led Nikolai M to a test that rejected any GUID string containing “000”. The check was meant to catch GUID.Empty, but three consecutive zeroes are common in UUID text: Nikolai measured them in 0.5527% …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
In 1993, Phil Hogan put a Stratus fault-tolerant server into service at Great Lakes Works in Dearborn, Michigan. Twenty-four years later, it had suffered no unplanned shutdown, with about 80% of its hardware still origin…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Heathrow’s departure displays recently exposed more than flight times. One showed a Windows activation notice alongside flights to Milan and Cairo, while another carried dates from September 21 and September 12. A later …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
COMETLINK relaunches as a dial-up-style online service with six chat rooms and a sign-on screen. A screen name is enough to join. The same rooms appear inside 56k.rip's Windows 95 desktop and dialup.rip's Macintosh deskt…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
fakecloud is a standalone local emulator for AWS integration tests. Applications keep using standard AWS clients, while test code can inspect state and control asynchronous processors through SDKs for TypeScript, Python,…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Ken Shirriff traced the Intel 8087’s FPTAN instruction from microscope images and 1,648 micro-instructions. The 1980 coprocessor combines 16 CORDIC iterations with the Padé formula 3x/(3-x2), then returns numerator and d…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Floci packages AWS, Azure, GCP and OCI emulators as local MIT-licensed binaries. Its pitch is a credential-free development loop, with startup claims as low as 24 ms and an AWS endpoint on port 4566. The cloud stays remo…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
This Lobsters /t/historical link points to a YouTube video titled “The Graveyard of Good Ideas.” The available source provides no description, speaker name, publication date, or list of examples. Its subject can therefor…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
An essay by mmagueta connects Cato the Younger’s warning about corrupted political language with software’s growing appetite for plausible labels. It argues that business systems, engineering practice and machine-generat…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
An illustrated primer explains why Amiga users still defend screens: independent display areas could vary in resolution, colour depth and palette, overlap, scroll and slide across one another. The article covers OCS-era …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A Mac Mini M6 running a modified 86Box 6.0 build holds a Windows 98 SE machine at 600 MHz Pentium II speed. A base M4 reaches 500 MHz. The test includes emulated Voodoo 3 graphics, Winamp audio, Cinebench 2000 and 3DMark…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Tim inherited a Visual Basic application from before 2000, written before VB .Net, that adds one leading zero to years below 1000. For Caesar Augustus's death in 14 AD, the output becomes "014". The four-digit form would…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Matt Birchler found that a chilled La Croix can keep an iPhone 18 Pro out of iOS’s serious thermal state during a 20-run transcription benchmark. The phone sustained 400.4 words per second on the final run, while the tes…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Yeo Kheng Meng has built an xHCI host driver that lets Windows 98 talk to modern USB controllers, including the hardware in a 2020 ThinkPad. The LLM-assisted project is available as xhci98 on GitHub and still has bugs. I…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Metaphors make unfamiliar ideas accessible, but they also hide what they leave out. Evan Meagher uses the familiar claim that consciousness is computation to question how much we understand about the brain. He traces ear…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Ed Nather’s 1983 USENET account about programmer Mel follows the construction of a blackjack demo for Royal McBee’s drum computers. Mel hand-coded hexadecimal, placed instructions by rotational timing, and exploited arit…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A programmer recalls an entry-level job in 1999 built around Pick, a system that later cost him about $1,000 to leave behind. Pick began as GIRLS for IBM System/360 in 1965 and reached commercial release in 1973. Its dat…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
KAIST's RAIBO2 quadruped covered 42.195 km at South Korea's Sangju Dried Persimmon Marathon in 4:19:52 on one battery charge. A Nature paper published nearly two years later credits lightweight construction, efficient mo…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Discord has started deploying age estimation after shelving the rollout for more than six months amid user backlash. The model studies account behavior and social connections, while message and call content stay outside …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Dave Plummer has connected his upgraded PDP-11/83 to pdp1173.com, where visitors can watch 2.11BSD processes refresh every five seconds. The site accepts no commands and shields the machine with a cache. Its four megabyt…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
An early-2000s trading-systems project treated documentation and schedule control as the product. A developer at a stock-market surveillance startup built a needed reporting module over one weekend and revealed it on Mon…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
An Atari 2600 project has squeezed a demake of the 1990s PC adventure Myst onto original hardware. The console offers only 128 bytes of RAM, so Vince built a specialized cartridge from a BurgerTime donor and used E7 bank…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
James Gosling's account settles the origin story behind Java's 0xCAFEBABE marker. The value grew out of
HTTP 418 · Oddities
An animation script contains a C++ call with a parameter named `length4_3_3`. Remy Porter treats the identifier as a disguised range expression, probably equivalent to `length4[3]`, and connects its shape to John Cage’s …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Sheila Dixon is recreating a period terminal for the RC2014 retrocomputer with an Alphacom thermal printer, a keyboard and a ROM-based driver. The printer connects to the Z80 bus, while an 8255 I/O card scans the keys. I…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
In 1996, Bill Venners asked comp.lang.java why every Java class file begins with 0xCAFEBABE. Patrick Naughton later supplied the answer: the team had selected a distinctive, memorable value before the language was called…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A YouTube video asks how computers acquired their familiar forms. The available listing provides no speaker, runtime, or technical outline, so the premise is the full report here. Its subject is an old design lesson: com…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
TruStage’s July 10, 2026 cybersecurity incident left major functions unavailable for months and put insurance policies at risk of lapsing when customers could not make payments. The disruption spread through partners suc…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
An Android display in a Mövenpick hotel elevator in Amsterdam stopped running last week, during rain and a 24-hour public transport strike. The screen identified the failing software as LOTA and offered a “Close app” con…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
An unofficial community project is bringing Commodore’s Amix, the System V Release 4 variant shipped for the A2500UX and A3000UX in 1990 to 1992, to 68040 and 68060 Amigas and modern accelerators. Amigaux.org combines a …