In the Old Days, we used to make our Lightbulbs by hand, and They Lasted Longer
Treehugger brings us a handcrafted lightbulb in California that has been working since 1901. It was made by the Shelby Electric Company, has a carbon filament and an approximate wattage of 4 watts. It has been left burning continuously in a firehouse as a nightlight over the fire trucks.
It’s portable
WFMU celebrates and sings the Transistor Radio, for each transistor belonging to the radio as good belongs to you.
Poems by a Flickering Green Light
Stewart has generated a pleasant “music video” for the band Grandaddy on a 48K Apple ][
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He Develops Your Film So You Don’t have to, Especially if You’re Dead
Prints made by processing the film found in old cameras.
What to Do After You Hit Return
A Cornucopia of Cassettes
Our kind friends at La Musee de la Boing have directed our all-seeing ear toward Casette Jam ‘05, a rather large (and unwieldy, for those of you with, ahem, slower connections to the Intar-webs) page of images.
Of audio cassette tapes.
And little else.
Well, the glowering eye of Honesty compells us to admit to spotting one, perhaps two, items cassette-shaped and more designed for demagnetizing your electronic auto apparatus or otherwise.
The Muplet Super 8 Projector
Our Friends at Retro Thing have pointed us towards the colorful Muplet Super-8 cine-film projector, a tiny (and, formerly, cheap) battery-and-hand-crank powered device for projecting, ahem, Super-8 films.
Now, if one could only replace the battery-powered lamp with a candle, Your Correspondent would be much happier.
On Locating Amusement Arcade Machines
If, in the winter of your discontent, the juice of the oriental poppy does not sate your jaded quest for amusement, perhaps a jaunt to the gentle arcadias of yore will quench your thirst.
The editors make no (or very close to no) apology for the vast mucilage of mixed, mashed-up and mutilated metaphors, speech, diction and time-periods in the preceding sentence.
Alpacaman
Your editors, whilst in a State of Flux from our Remodeling Project, have nevertheless found time to be amazed by the ingenuity and sheer audacity of conceit displayed by some of you out there. Not that you are the most practicable of sorts, but that you could even conceive of the following warrant our salute.
Alpaca is a small multitasking operating system for Z-80 computers, specifically for Pac-Man/Pengo arcade hardware. It is an expansion upon [the] PTUI project, which was originally just an experiment to see how much of a real GUI can be put into the tight constraints of Pac-Man arcade machine hardware. The limitations are a total of 1kb of RAM (for storage and stack), 16k of ROM, sprite/tile based video hardware (1k color, 1k character ram), joystick, and two buttons.
The features of the OS are:
- up to 4 processes concurrently running
- simple inter-process communication via messages
- simple semaphores
- simple memory management (eventually)
- adjustable priorities (eventually)
The features of the GUI (PTUI) are:
- Joystick and start buttons navigate
- Window frames can be moved about the screen, raised, hidden
- Build-configurable color schemes, frame ornaments
- Many widgets including: push/radio/check/spin buttons, sliders, text display