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Oh, it includes the Abuse-like HL2 platformer that I played while waiting for HL2 to install, apparently named "Codename: Gordon". https://delistedgames.com/codename-gordon/

I'm glad I found this, as it includes a steam:/ URL that lets me re-install it if I'd like to play it again.


The URL is actually owned by a Youtuber.

https://www.nuclearvision.de/ (the link in the game) now redirects to his Youtube video.


> A gift card isn't a credit card, though... ?

I supposed it's a matter of semantics, is a prepaid credit card that is gifted not a "gift card"?


The page talks about what I'd consider the first web _site_, but is missing info on the first web _server_, which was preserved and is displayed at a CERN museum.

Wikimedia link to an image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:First_Web_Server.jpg


Note to readers: the heavily dithered websafe thumbnails lead to full-color photos when clicked.

Why is it dithered like this? To save bandwidth? I wasn't on the internet much before 2010, so maybe this is an old technique you don't see anymore.

Author answered below, but dithering techniques like these were common on old computers like the C64 and others, due to the limited ammount of graphics colors available ( 16 colors on C64 if I remember correctly), plus there were usually limitations on how many colors you could use within one 8x8 block , commonly 2 - 1 foreground , and one background color. C64 had a multicolor mode with 1 background, and 3 forground color. But that was still just 4 colors (out of 16 available ) usuable for each 8x8 character block. However switching to multicolor mode took you from high resolution ( 200x320 px) to low res ( 200x160 px) - and yes thats for the entire screen (25 x 40 chars)

Originally, sort of. But also to work around limitations in GIF (which is palette-based; but see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#True_color) and because people didn't always have true-colour monitors (or ran the monitor in a different mode due to VRAM restrictions) anyway.

In today's context, more for the aesthetic, presumably.


Author - yes, it's "aesthetic", albeit not my best work and I might revert that decision at some point. Was inspired by lowtechmagazine but they did a much much better job.

I do care about the blog being snappy and working also on very low-end, vintage hardware though, so that also somewhat achieves that goal.


I like the aesthetic choice

it seems obvious for nostalgic reasons

I'm in my early twenties. I only really associate this dithering with comic books, not C64s (much before my time, i've seen one in a tech museum lol)

I think the author did it for C64 reasons, but for other reasons it was a vibe in 1995: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors

(And, once, also HDR.)

only most do

This is my first time noticing one of their posts, but to me it evokes the ideals of the Long Now Foundation, putting our thoughts in a future-forward stance.


Here's an example image: https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2022/09/Prorotype-Digit...

Captured on Kodak film, I suspect.


I wonder if that's actually original capture or just an emulation for the purposes of the exhibit.


The PetaPixel article has a sample, though the original photo from this article is lost.

https://petapixel.com/how-steve-sasson-invented-the-digital-...

https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2022/09/Prorotype-Digit...


It's a shame they didn't capture that first image. You'd think someone would have had a camera handy!

I was glad to hear Sasson found a place at Eastman-Kodak and worked there for the rest of his career.


Do you know if those characters are in supplemental planes? The BMP would only be glyphs from U+0000 through U+FFFF (though the first 32 and last two aren't printable, and wouldn't be included in this font).

Another example would be emoji, which would probably now be considered "basic" by most people but have always been in a supplemental plane.


Lots of the rarer CJK ideographs are outside the BMP.


This was actually the first issue for my kanji learning app

https://github.com/runarberg/shodoku/issues/1

A classic utf-16 bug, where I failed to grab the two remaining bytes of these ideographs.


Yes that section raised my hackles too, to the point where I'm suspicious of the whole article.

The solution, in my opinion, is to either document that strclone()'s return should be free()'d, or alternately add a strfree() declaration to the header (which might just be `#define strfree(x) free(x)`).

Adding a `char **out` arg does not, in my opinion, document that the pointer should be free()'d.


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