The Meeblip is a nifty little synthesizer with MIDI input. If memory serves it seems to have a set of oscillators, filters and LFO that’s about the same as the original Mini Moog.

meeblip.com

You don’t have to use Django, Flask, Cherrypy, or even web.py. It’s all about WSGI. Guess what. Everything you need is already built into Python. After all, Python promises “batteries included.”

How To Write a Python Web Framework From Scratch

These are fascinating little computer boards and boxes that seem perfect for making firewalls and such. Boards are available with three gigabit ethernet ports. Prices are in the $100 range and there is support for Linux, e.g., Ubuntu. Steve Gibson mentioned them on Security Now.

pcengines.ch
Security Now 534

There’s one thing Twitter has done and that’s change the language of reading news and stories so I’m going to try an experiment.

From Wikipedia:

The Apollo 11 missing tapes refers to Apollo 11’s slow-scan television (SSTV) telecast recorded in its raw format on telemetry data tape during the time of the first Moonlanding in 1969. The recordings were discovered to be “missing” after a team of retired NASA employees and contractors tried to locate the tapes in the early 2000s.

Michael Steinmann of Swiss Micros is building new, little, fully-functioning HP-11 series, and other, HP calculators.

Peruse Michael’s site and you won’t find carbon copies of the HP-12C. Instead, you’ll discover a range of miniaturised versions – hardware emulations no less – of the most popular models in that early generation of HP calculators, all powered by a low-power LPC1115 ARM processor.

I never owned the HP-11C though I have a nifty emulator on my iPhone. I had owned the HP-25 and 29C before its time and later the HP-41CV and the HP-48S. I definitely wanted one of the little sideways 11C’s though.

The rebirth of the HP-12C: How one man reimagined a calculator from 1981 by Steve Cassidy on Alphr.

I’ve finally upgraded to Mac OS X 10.11 at home. There’s really not much to say so far. The only new/changed feature I really see and use is Mission Control. Ohter than that it’s pretty much business as usual.

The process went quite smoothly. I started the download and left it unattended. Then I returned later and started the install and left it running unattended. Note that I usually never leave an upgrade running but they did take a few minutes and I had other things to do including even being out of the house for a while.

When I came back and the new login screen was presented I logged in with no trouble and only had to enter the Apple id for iCloud.

There may be features I’m using that are new or changed and I haven’t used them enough in the past so I’m unaware of the differences.

I hear that Notes has become quite good but I’m sticking with Evernote and Drafts on my phone.

I don’t recall ever having heard of this operating system. The ideas sound quite interesting and nice. There’s a lot I have imagined in here.

From the abstract:

The KeyKOS nanokernel is a capability-based object-oriented operating system that has been in production use since 1983. Its original implementation was motivated by the need to provide security, reliability, and 24-hour availability for applications on the Tymnet® hosts. Requirements included the ability to run multiple instantiations of several operating systems on a single hardware system. KeyKOS was implemented on the System/370, and has since been ported to the 680x0 and 88x00 processor families. Implementations of EDX, RPS, VM, MVS, and UNIX® have been constructed. The nanokernel is approximately 20,000 lines of C code, including capability, checkpoint, and virtual memory support. The nanokernel itself can run in less than 100 Kilobytes of memory.

KeyKOS is characterized by a small set of powerful and highly optimized primitives that allow it to achieve performance competitive with the macrokernel operating systems that it replaces. Objects are exclusively invoked through protected capabilities, supporting high levels of security and intervals between failures in excess of one year. Messages between agents may contain both capabilities and data. Checkpoints at tunable intervals provide system-wide backup, fail-over support, and system restart times typically less than 30 seconds. In addition, a journaling mechanism provides support for high-performance transaction processing. On restart, all processes are restored to their exact state at the time of checkpoint, including registers and virtual memory.

The KeyKOS Nanokernel Architecture

The Snowflake Method for writing a novel by Randy Ingermanson is just brilliant. I’m convinced this would work and it’s so nicely done, I’m drawn to try it and I don’t even want to write a novel.

It’s very similar to the approach I take to writing in general, though, and in fact I guess it’s how I was taught to write in school.

The Snowflake Method For Designing A Novel

This is an interesting take on style, typesetting, publishing, and CSS. I don’t agree with all of it but there are some nice ideas here and the page/approach is very nice looking.

The main thing I disagree with is Tufte’s strong preference for text and prose rather than lists. I think this is highly dependent on a person’s individual taste. Also I’m not convinced that a person who’s scanning an email message or document will absorb a paragraph of prose as well as a bullet list.

Tuft CSS