The Amiga "module" music format was hugely popular in the 1990s, with tens of thousands of songs written in "tracker" tools, often used in games and demoscene productions. Mostly on the Amiga, of course, but PC games like Jazz Jackrabbit and the original Deus Ex used music based on the same technology.

The very first "tracker" composing tool was The Ultimate Soundtracker by Karsten Obarski in 1987, a commercial release with one disk containing the program and some example songs, and a second disk containing a selection of instrument samples composers could use.

In the very early days of tracker modules, those were the only samples available, and they were heavily used by just about everyone. Even once people started making their own samples, they were still heavily used, and to a certain extent became the unofficial Amiga soundfont.

Today I learned that despite its significance, this first sample disk is lost media. All the samples survive in thousands of modules, but every sample has a bunch of variants from accidental disk corruption or intentional modification, and it's not always clear exactly which one is the original. Even among things *claiming* to be images of the original sample disk, different images have different sets of samples, or different versions of the same samples. We don't even know if Obarski kept the same sample disk for each release of his software, or if he updated it over time - and if he did, which versions shipped with which samples.

#retrocomputing #preservation #amiga

Commissions are open

@foone so, antennas need to radiate photons. An antenna is "just" an arrangement of components that turns a changing electrical stimulus into enough of an electric/magnetic field flux that it emits photons.

Anything can radiate photons. Yes, people have hooked up bed springs and lightbulbs to HF radios to emit shortwave frequencies.

It's a question of what's in phase, what's out of phase, and how much is radiated versus reflected back down the antenna versus converted into heat.

(ctd)

When you're nearly 2m tall you need big inflates to feel smoll!
Fursuit: Sarah Cat Fursuits (https://www.sarahcatfursuits.com/ )

#SarahCatSunday #Fursuit #Furry #Photography #Inflatable

Inflatable rubber synths and protogens and such...

Idk why but "robot but is now a balloon" is very cute to me

And also I might inflate them big and round

Last weekend's RFM (Ruhr FurMeet) noir.

Featuring @Samyofo, Arko, Cipher & Paka

Apple did a good job with Voice Control (not Siri) which lets someone who can’t use their arms control basically everything on an iPad with their voice. iOS app developers, sadly, don’t always support it well. Latest: HBO. Now if you pause a video, an ad slides in at the side of the screen… and prevents you from restarting with Voice Control.

When you have a disabled family member, you become quite attuned to all the things that short circuit good tools that already exist for them.

https://danluu.com/web-bloat/

When I was at Google, someone told me a story about a time that “they” completed a big optimization push only to find that measured page load times increased. When they dug into the data, they found that the reason load times had increased was that they got a lot more traffic from Africa after doing the optimizations. The team’s product went from being unusable for people with slow connections to usable, which caused so many users with slow connections to start using the product that load times actually increased.

It's still summer somewhere right ?

HTTP response status codes as taidums #taidum #furryart #torrnart

I regret to inform everyone that my copy of QBittorrent escaped its sandbox last night and downloaded a whole bunch of content owned by major corporations, and then my copy of Jellyfin broke containment and added those unfortunately-downloaded media files to its various libraries. I'm conducting an internal investigation to figure out how this happened, which will involve consuming these media files until the answers become apparent. Thank you for your cooperation during this trying time.

so i reverse-engineered the code that draws InstallShield's famous background gradient and text and reimplemented it in C https://gist.github.com/whitequark/203f60a101db4bd9f876654eb0c6e837