HTTP 418 · Oddities
Italian researchers fed over 3,700 dream and waking-life reports from 287 adults into NLP models. The verdict: dreams don't replay your day, they mash it up — and COVID lockdown dreams were measurably grimmer. Your 3 a.m…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
The Daily WTF dissects a WPF IValueConverter whose Convert method does nothing and whose ConvertBack maps empty text-box strings to null for a double? field. The author's verdict: the API is awkward, the implementation w…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
IEEE is honoring Colossus, the first large-scale programmable electronic digital computer, with a Milestone plaque at Bletchley Park. Built in 1944 by Tommy Flowers, it cracked Germany's Lorenz cipher and is credited wit…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A new archival project from Paul McJones's Software Preservation Group collects surviving materials from John Backus's two-decade functional programming project — from the 1969 RedSys sketches to the FP84 language — incl…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A Register reader photographed a malfunctioning information kiosk at a Six Flags park in San Antonio, its fluid-streaked screen stuck on an error demanding installation of a custom app via an invalid URL. The rides nearb…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Two Flock Safety license-plate readers near Albany, Georgia, were set ablaze, and police are treating it as arson. The incidents land amid a growing national backlash against the ALPR network — featuring canceled contrac…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
The Daily WTF's Error'd column rounds up reader-submitted fails: inflated Amazon billing emails, a form field that is simultaneously optional and required, a roof-cleaning site with a two-dimensional 5-star rating grid, …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
The UK government plans a 20 percent business rates cut for pubs, clubs and live music venues from April 2027, worth around £100 million a year. To pay for it, ministers want online marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Etsy a…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Tesla's Q2 capital expenditure jumped from $2.5 billion to $5.8 billion, leaving negative free cash flow of $1.1 billion. Musk touted the Austin 'Terafab' chip plant as vital for scaling the Optimus robot, while vehicle …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
German developer Tuan Anh Bui built ScreenWall, a free beta web platform that turns spare phones, tablets or monitors into wall displays for clocks, weather, status boards or signage via QR-code pairing and the Screen Wa…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A revisited Daily WTF classic follows developer Adam C., hired to fix a VXML platform that kept collapsing under light load. Digging through logs full of a cryptic 'Exception encountered writing error log' message, he tr…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Daisuke Yamazaki restored a Java Ring, a 1990s iButton wearable once handed out at Java conferences to store coffee preferences. Using a Blue Dot adapter and a downgraded 32-bit Java 1.8 runtime, he diagnosed CRC errors …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Early Gnutella used naive flood routing, forwarding queries to all peers regardless of relevance, creating exponential bandwidth waste as the network grew to millions of nodes. The Query Routing Protocol (QRP) replaced t…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A developer discovers an ITableSelector interface with 31 hard-coded methods—selectTable1() through selectTable31()—each returning a string. A masterclass in how not to abstract database logic: the German programmer's ex…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
The Zilog Z80 8-bit processor turns 50 this month, having debuted in July 1976 and gone on to power home computers, arcades, and industrial gear. Its current owner Littelfuse discontinued the standalone chip in 2024, but…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
BASIC-256, an educational dialect derived from KidBASIC, has been ported to QT6 by developer UglyMike. The new release includes a WebAssembly build that runs in browsers, plus native versions for macOS (Apple Silicon), x…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Three decades after its debut alongside Internet Explorer 3, Microsoft has released Comic Chat under the MIT license. The tool converted IRC conversations into comic strips using rule-based character poses and expression…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A digital billboard in Derby provided an accidental public service announcement when it froze on a Windows nag screen. Instead of advertising, the sign spent the day pleading with passers-by to sign into a Microsoft acco…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
SpaceX is scheduling flight test 13 of the Starship rocket for Thursday, July 16, with a 90-minute launch window opening at 2245 UTC. The mission will deploy 20 Starlink V3 satellites, with six equipped with cameras to m…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Before NFS arrived in SunOS 2.0, diskless workstations used nd, short for network disk. It bypassed standard transport protocols and left partition management entirely to administrators, making data corruption easy to tr…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
In a mostly C project, a veteran developer inverted the usual Boolean convention: functions that return TRUE on success are stored in a variable named error, and the code branches on error == FALSE to handle failures. Th…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Sebastian's deep dive into K&R C — the 1978 dialect that preceded ANSI standardization — uncovers a language without void, const, enum, or variadic prototypes, where string literals were mutable, octal constants accepted…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
At the suggestion of a programmer whose work he respects, Ken Whitesell opens a career retrospective with his first semester of high-school programming in early 1978. The school HP-2000F ran time-shared BASIC through Bel…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Developer Ahmed Amer has created CSS-DOS, a 300 MB CSS stylesheet that encodes a full IBM PC compatible emulator complete with a simulated 8086 CPU, 640 kB RAM, floppy controller and VGA. The project exploits the idea th…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Karen's TypeScript specification tests failed a few times per thousand. The culprit was Node.js setTimeout, which unlike standard JS can fire before the requested delay. She replaced a simple Promise-based wait with a lo…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Developer lcamtuf built a retro-style calculator that uses voltmeter dials instead of modern digital displays. It looks like a relic from an earlier era, but a microcontroller handles the logic behind it.
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Drawing a humorous parallel to the Beaufort wind scale, Verity Stob defines 'cruft' as the inevitable corruption and accumulation of useless data and dead code over time. The Stob Cruft Index categorizes PC degradation f…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A tech support engineer investigates a printer issue in HR, only to discover an IP address conflict with a decommissioned server. The 'zombie' server, which once hosted an anonymous employee complaint system, may have be…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Sun-Ways' pilot project in Switzerland proves that installing photovoltaics between railway tracks is technically viable, with 11,000 trains passing over the panels without incident. The CEO notes that the real bottlenec…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
FlohOfWoe has created a collection of lightweight, browser-based emulators for a vast array of 8-bit systems, including the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, and Robotron. The project transforms complex CPU architectures into a…