Rain, with a touch of rain, interspersed with periods of rain today. A good day to live vicariously through the web 
Happy invoicing!
- The Birth of Pong - Excerpt from Walter Isaacson’s new book, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution: ”As they were working on the first Computer Space consoles, Bushnell heard that he had competition. A Stanford grad named Bill Pitts and his buddy Hugh Tuck from California Polytechnic had become addicted to Spacewar, and they decided to use a PDP-11 minicomputer to turn it into an arcade game… Bushnell was contemptuous of their plan to spend $20,000 on equipment, including a PDP-11 that would be in another room and connected by yards of cable to the console, and then charge 10 cents a game.”
- Aleister Crowley’s curried rice recipe - Yesterday was the 139th anniversary of the birth of The Great Beast, so here’s one of his recipes. Crowley was proud of the malign effects of his cooking, once inflicting it upon his fellow mountaineers during an expedition: ”It was very amusing to see these strong men, inured to every danger and hardship, dash out of the tent after one mouthful and wallow in the snow, snapping at it like mad dogs.” Yum!
- What The Hell Was Megadeth, Arizona? - Twenty years ago, the first band website was launched: ”During the meeting, the executives stressed the importance of this album release, so it seemed like the perfect opportunity to do something big and bold on the World Wide Web. Having never heard of the Internet, the record executives were like “yeah, whatever kid” and defaulted to the usual checklist: “Who will shoot the album cover? How many radio stations will play the single? How many posters should we print for the record stores?” So even though no one had a clue what I was talking about, I wrote a proposal to create a “virtual cybertown in cyberspace.” It would be called Megadeth, Arizona—based on where the band lived and recorded their album.”
- How GameCube/Wii emulator Dolphin got a turbocharge - A look at the techniques used to provide a huge performance boost for a venerable emulator: ”This many years into development, most emulator projects have been abandoned, but Dolphin keeps making major, sometimes huge improvements to compatibility and performance. In August, Dolphin’s CPU core emulation saw a 26% boost in performance. In September, another update brought a 16% performance boost to all games, with some specific games seeing boosts of over 100%… Those are almost unbelievable improvements, and most of them are due to one contributor. She goes by the handle Fiora Aeterna online, and she’s only been contributing to Dolphin for two months.”
- Alan Penn on Shop Floor Plan Design, Ikea, and Dark Patterns - Overview of a talk by architecture professor Alan Penn, examining the techniques used to incite customers to buy more stuff in shops: ”Ikea is highly disorienting and yet there is only one route to follow… Something in the order of 60% of purchases at Ikea are not the things that people had on their shopping list when they came in the first place.” Here’s the full talk:
- AWS Tips I Wish I'd Known Before I Started - "A collection of random tips for Amazon Web Services (AWS) that I wish I'd been told a few years ago, based on what I've learned by building and deploying various applications on AWS." Loads of useful stuff here if you're planning to use Amazon’s cloud.
- Eyes! - Brian Allanson explains a technique for getting more realistic eyes in 3d games: ”In the old days they were usually textured on to the face (in many mobile games they still are), but eyes that are modeled onto the character are more common lately. Whichever way an artist chooses she/he will have to ask themselves a question: “How do I make the eyes look good from the side?””
- The Beatles Never Broke Up… - James Richards met a traveller from an alternate version of our reality, and was able to nick a tape of a Beatles album from that timeline, which never existed in ours. Here he tells the story, and you can download the album: ”We also started talking about music, which was an interesting topic because there were many of the same bands between our worlds that existed, including The Beatles. When their name got brought up Jonas mentioned that his brother just got back from seeing them perform at a concert recently, which I gave a weird look to and said "you mean they are still together?", and he said yea. I then told him about how they broke up in our world and that John & George passed away, apparently in his world they are all alive, healthy and on tour still.” However, you may also want to bear in mind that, according to another site, The Beatles Never Existed. (I was also going to link to another site with some interesting theories about the death of John Lennon, but some time in the five days since I bookmarked it, it’s been replaced with a legal notice from the FBI: "This domain name is subject to both civil and criminal forfeiture. This seizure is based on probable cause to believe that this domain name was involved in money laundering derived from racketeering based on prostitution in violation of state and federal law." Ho hum
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- Wordoid - "Wordoids are made-up words. They look nice and feel great. They are good for naming things." Now your Plan B can have a name that seems like a word, but isn’t. I’m trying to think of something that would do well with the name “Levidia”, but it keeps making me think of “lividity”
- Wrecked Exotics - probably the web’s most extensive collection of photos of very expensive cars, wrecked; such as this chrome Lamborghini, which some rich parents thought would make an ideal runabout for their student daughter, who proceeded to crash it into a Jeep:
Happy invoicing!
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