HTTP 418 · Oddities
The report uses PowerShell to produce an alphabetical Active Directory listing through a long detour. A letter loop feeds a second lookup for every name, and the script requests data it never outputs. It also calls FindA…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
IEEE Spectrum revisits an IBM supercomputer built for the U.S. National Security Agency during the Cold War. The machine had one narrow assignment: codebreaking. According to the feature, it processed its jobs 200 times …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Britain abandoned its national Digital ID project in July. On Tuesday, England and Wales began allowing businesses to accept digital proof of age for alcohol sales through certified Digital Verification Services. The opt…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Former FTC chair Lina Khan argues no new legislation is needed to hold AI companies and their executives accountable. She points to consumer protection law, unfair competition rules, and a 92-year-old Supreme Court decis…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Developer Michael Wessel built Perfect Paul ][, a drop-in DECtalk emulator card for the Apple II, using an RP2040-based Raspberry Pi Pico, an I2S DAC, amplifier and speaker. The card occupies a block of memory addresses …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A Daily WTF column describes developer Greta tracking a Pascal bug where existing files were reported as missing. The cause traces into Borland's old Delphi/Kylix runtime library, where FileExists silently depends on a W…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Microsoft's Raymond Chen explains why the x86 opcode ud2 carries the number 2. Before it existed, programmers relied on byte sequences 0F FF and 0F B9 to force invalid-opcode exceptions, and both broke when Intel changed…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
The tiny386 emulator, previously limited to ESP32 boards, now runs on the RP2350 microcontroller through two independent ports, FRANK and a Waveshare Pi Zero variant. Both add VGA and HDMI output and promise better speed…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A new blog series on ZX Spectrum programming revisits the machine's crude piezoelectric speaker, capable only of clicking on and off. Developer Michael Martin's September post on 1-bit sound techniques traces decades of …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
The Interim Computer Museum, a US 501(c)(3) nonprofit, runs interactive exhibits pairing vintage computing hardware with modern add-ons. It operates in partnership with the SDF Public Access UNIX System membership organi…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
The Opcode Collective, led by Ken Shirriff, reverse-engineered the FSCALE instruction inside Intel's 1980 8087 floating-point coprocessor. Though FSCALE just multiplies by a power of two, its microcode spans over 140 ste…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Developer DosFox1 built OSHintosh, an open source hardware board that boots a classic Mac OS image and mimics a Mac 512k. It skips floppy disks and SCSI entirely, loading the disk image straight from ROM, and fits on a c…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A YouTube video titled 'Why do companies stop using Haskell?' appeared on Lobsters' historical tag, reviving a familiar debate about the functional language's longevity in industry. No presenter, transcript or argument d…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A YouTube documentary traces how Microsoft's Visual Studio Code grew from a 2015 side project into the default editor for millions of developers. The piece surfaced on Lobsters under the historical tag. Runtime and produ…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
The Daily WTF collects reader screenshots of rewards systems gone limp: a 0% Steam discount, $0 waiting at Office Depot, zero points expiring at the Unix epoch, and Dutch Railways promising a refund around the year 0. A …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
PJB dug through thousands of early-2000s yaml-core mailing list emails to settle who is to blame for YAML's infamous implicit typing. The verdict: the spec authors always recommended strings by default. Syck, shipped bro…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Raymond Chen reveals how Windows XP chose your first user picture: RtlRandomEx seeded with GetTickCount, a one-pass reservoir sampling algorithm over the Default Pictures folder, and a safety cutoff after 100 files.
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Chris Siebenmann traces three design questions behind the Unix load average: whether it should scale with CPU count, how threads get counted, and whether disk IO waits belong in the number. Different Unixes answered diff…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
The CAA DNS record's critical flag is bit 0, the most significant bit, so the correct value is 128. Countless users entered 1 instead, and LetsEncrypt's validation code now quietly treats both bits as critical. A bitmask…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Vala's core library ships make_directory_async but no async variant of create_directory_with_parents. A reader of The Daily WTF patched the gap with a loop that climbs parent directories on IOError.NOT_FOUND, then replay…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A hobbyist continues his series on playing audio through single-bit beepers, this time on the ZX Spectrum. Pulse code modulation works, pulse width modulation does not yet, and the machine's software-only buzzer is partl…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
An anonymous contributor to The Daily WTF tells how a lucrative late-career contracting gig went sideways. His sponsor died suddenly right as he finished analyzing the legacy core application, leaving him ignored for 18 …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Declan Chidlow has catalogued the non-standard HTML snippets that once fought browser wars and third-party meddling: X-UA-Compatible, conditional comments, Smart Tags opt-outs, Baidu transcoding blocks, PICS labels, and …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Hacker Mike built an 8-bit von Neumann computer from former Eastern-bloc double-triode vacuum tubes, documented on hackaday.io and thetubecomputer.com. Its NOR-based logic recalls NASA's Apollo Guidance Computer, while m…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
NHTSA opened an audit query into Tesla's self-certification of the Cybercab robotaxi hours after its commercial launch in Austin, Texas. The probe examines how Tesla justified skipping standard controls such as steering …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
The Daily WTF reruns a reader submission from Stella, who inherited an XML Schema meant to validate a custom query language for referencing travel booking data. Rather than model the grammar with proper XSD structures, t…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Developer k6lcm built NES Radar, an open-source Nintendo Entertainment System cartridge that shows live air traffic. A Python script on a nearby PC fetches aircraft positions and streams them through the console's second…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
GitHub user nampara-ai has packaged a vintage MS-DOS copy of WordStar with DOSBox and cross-platform launch scripts for Linux, Mac and Windows, plus a WebAssembly build that runs in any browser. Hackaday's Al Williams no…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
The General Conference on Weights and Measures votes in October on a draft resolution making UTC continuous from May 20, 2027, letting it drift from Earth-rotation time by up to an hour instead of correcting every so oft…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A digital sign at London's O2 arena has been spotted displaying a Windows 10 update notification, an awkward backdrop for the indoor skydiving advertised behind it. Statcounter puts Windows 10 near 30 percent desktop sha…