Bookwyrm account I love fantasy fiction. Mastodon: @confusedbunny@oldbytes.space Avatar is from Little Monster's Word Book (Mercer Mayer)
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Shadows of Self shows Mistborn’s society evolving as technology and magic mix, the economy grows, democracy contends with corruption, and …
The story takes place on the fictional planet Urras and its moon Anarres (since Anarres is massive enough to hold …
The story takes place on the fictional planet Urras and its moon Anarres (since Anarres …
"My world, my Earth, is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and gobbled and fought until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first. There are no forests left on my Earth. The air is grey, the sky is grey, it is always hot. It is habitable, it is still habitable - but not as this world is. This is a living world, a harmony. Mine is a discord. You Odonians choose a desert; we Terrans made a desert... We survive there, as you do. People are tough! There are nearly half billion of us now. Once there were nine billion. You can see the old cities still everywhere. The bones and bricks go to dust, but the little pieces of plastic never do"
— The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (Page 286)
Rather prescient writing about Earth!
This is a very good guide to the computers that made the 1980s(ish) in Britain. It covers computers that were influential, not just those that were made here. It's refreshing to see a history which isn't US-centric, where even Commodore tends to get written out.
Hmm, this is missing a "what came next" section for the Amiga.
The story takes place on the fictional planet Urras and its moon Anarres (since Anarres is massive enough to hold …
Filled with first-hand accounts of ambition, greed, and inspired engineering, this history of the personal …
The engineers wanted to improve the colour on the chip. "It was the same thing with the Apple and Atari computers," explains [Bob] Yannes. "You would get interaction between the luminance signal, which is the black and white information, and the colour signal. So you would end up with these various colours on the screen which weren't really what you wanted, but it was just the nature of the NTSC video standard that the luminance and chrominance signals interact with each other." To purify the colours, [Al] Charpentier made a risky last minute change. "Al had the idea that if the two clocks were independent from each other, then that interaction wouldn't happen," says Yannes. "We separated the clock generators on the VIC chip so that the colour crystal was a separate clock from the video shift rate." The engineers noticed the default white on dark blue screen no longer looked appealing. "Even though it has good contrast, the transition from blue to white produced kind of an ugly edge," explains Yannes. "We ended up having to make it light blue on dark blue."
— Commodore by Brian Bagnall (Page 412)
Bob Yannes (designer of the SID chip) explains why the Commodore 64 had default colours of blue on blue.
Lisa checked into a nearby hotel so that she could be on call if needed, and early that evening my surgeon, Chris Young, came to see me.
— And Away... by Bob Mortimer (Page 35)
I would like to assure everybody that I am not Bob Mortimer's heart surgeon.
I didn't like this as much as the previous books in the series. Too much recapping, but it did solve the mystery of the land of the dead, so definitely worth the effort.
