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Monday Links from the New Year Sofa vol. DCXXVII

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    Monday Links from the New Year Sofa vol. DCXXVII

    Are we doing this again this year? Might as well, I suppose
    • The Epic Battle to Break the Mississippi River Canoe Record - Not the most relaxing form of messing about on the river: ”[Bobby] Johnson noticed a pull to the right. For a second, he wondered why Casey Millhone, a 20-year-old in the stern who was taking a semester off from Colorado College, had ruddered that way. He quickly realized she hadn’t: a massive whirlpool was drawing them in.”
    • The tangled history of mRNA vaccines - Seeing as some people seem to be a bit confused about the subject, here's Nature's detailed account of how we got to where we are: ”The debate over who deserves credit for pioneering the technology is heating up as awards start rolling out — and the speculation is getting more intense in advance of the Nobel prize announcements next month. But formal prizes restricted to only a few scientists will fail to recognize the many contributors to mRNA’s medical development. In reality, the path to mRNA vaccines drew on the work of hundreds of researchers over more than 30 years.”
    • How One Man Caused A Baby Boom In Toronto, Years After His Death - Unexpected consequences: ”Millar, having made a vast fortune as a lawyer, made an even bigger fortune through his brewery and several racehorses that he owned… In essence, he decided that his legacy was going to be to mess with people in ways that proved it was absurd to have so much darn cash.”
    • Beyond Sherlock Holmes: five Victorian detective stories you must read - ”In December 1893, just six years after his first appearance and at the height of his popularity with the late-Victorian reading public, Sherlock Holmes, the world’s most famous fictional detective, was killed off by his creator Arthur Conan Doyle… A vast (and largely uncharted) treasure trove of detective stories was published in periodicals, newspapers and magazines between 1893 and 1900, as Holmes rivals, clones and parodies emerged to fill the great detective’s deerstalker hat and cape.” Not sure you must read them, but they sound like they might be fun if you like that kind of thing
    • When two punk bands came to a psychiatric hospital, beautiful chaos ensued - ”Born in the New York City punk explosion of the 1970s, the music of the influential band the Cramps was built on guttural yells, dissonant electric guitar clangs and a not-insignificant amount of LSD… Their most famous show was held in Napa, California alongside the San Francisco-based band the Mutants – and played, for free, to an audience of psychiatric patients at the Napa State Hospital.” This short documentary We Were There to Be There by Mike Plante and Jason Willis tells the story
    • To Catch a Turtle Thief: Blowing the Lid Off an International Smuggling Operation - ”When a padded envelope at the Calgary airport started to move, officials jumped into action.” Tracking down the wildlife smugglers.
    • How I Came to Be the Third Person in North Carolina to Hear FM Stereo - Christine Hall's father worked at the local radio station, and seems to have had an unconventional approach to parenting: ”I’m guessing that the time was late 1961 or early 1962, as the FCC approved FM stereo broabdasts in April, 1961… Any scheduled transmitter maintenance that would require the carrier to be on with no programming had to be done after 2 a.m., so sometimes Dad would wake me up to take me to the station to help him work. This was the case on the night we installed the stereo generator.”
    • Aviator source code - Aviator by Geoff Crammond (later to create such classics as Revs, The Sentinel, and F1GP) was a Spitfire simulator for the BBC Micro. Following on from his great work on the Elite source code, Mark Moxon has now created this detailed guide for it: ”This site contains source code for Aviator, Geoff Crammond's epic flight simulator for the BBC Micro, with every single line documented and (for the most part) explained… Check out the deep dive articles for lots of details about how Aviator works under the hood.”
    • Reverse-engineering a tiny 1980s chip that plays Christmas tunes - Ken Shirriff moves on from the Yamaha DX7 to a true musical masterpiece: ”For the holidays, I decapped a chip that plays three Christmas melodies. The UM66T melody chip from the 1980s was designed for applications such as greeting cards and toys. It looks like a transistor, but when connected to a battery and speaker it plays music.”
    • Roger Schall: Paris by Night in the 1930s - ”Roger Schall (1904-1995) is best known for his sumptuous photographs of Paris in the 1930s and 1940s. He began working with his father, a portrait photographer in 1918. In the early 1930s, he picked up a Leica and Rolleiflex, which enabled him to satisfy his passion for images taken from everyday life.” This is Les Quais in 1935.


    Happy invoicing!

    #2
    IIRC (which is increasingly unlikely ), there are some of those UM66T devices in the stores at Ye OldeNewe Sloughe of Desponde.

    I'm not sure I ever bothered doing anything with them.

    Apparently another use was as a flickery LED driver (IIRC).

    According to

    https://hackaday.com/2021/12/20/a-pa...hip-decapping/

    I'm not as senile as I'd thought.
    Last edited by DoctorStrangelove; 3 January 2022, 14:12.
    When the fun stops, STOP.

    Comment


      #3
      Originally posted by DoctorStrangelove View Post
      IIRC (which is increasingly unlikely ), there are some of those UM66T devices in the stores at Ye OldeNewe Sloughe of Desponde.

      I'm not sure I ever bothered doing anything with them.

      Apparently another use was as a flickery LED driver (IIRC).

      According to

      https://hackaday.com/2021/12/20/a-pa...hip-decapping/

      I'm not as senile as I'd thought.
      Surely the point is like the 555 they are everywhere?
      Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.

      Comment


        #4
        Originally posted by vetran View Post

        Surely the point is like the 555 they are everywhere?
        Indeed...
        https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/t...rete-555-timer
        Old Greg - In search of acceptance since Mar 2007. Hoping each leap will be his last.

        Comment


          #5
          I hope that discrete 555 faithfully emulates the current shootthrough that requires some care in cct design (in contrast with the CMOS version where they fixed it).

          Unlike the 555, which is everywhere, I've only encountered the UM66T once in my career and used it exactly never.
          When the fun stops, STOP.

          Comment

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