Op oudejaarsdag liep ik een rondje door Amsterdam. Ik begon in Bos en Lommer, zakte af door het Vondelpark en via de Bilderdijkstraat en Jan van Galenstraat weer terug.
Kinderen gooi je niet bij het afval.
OB tampons en een gietertje te koop.
Gedisciplineerde rijen bij de oliebollenbakker en de Hema.
Hokjesgeest bij het parkeren van fietsen en brommers.
Een toetsenist op weg naar een oudjaarsfeestje.
Er gebeurde niet veel maar ik heb me wel vermaakt.
Two books I read recently: The Hours, which I read this week, and Fahrenheit 451 today. (That makes Fahrenheit 451 the first book of 2022 – not a bad start.)
The impossible: comparing these two totally different books. I’m going to try, very briefly. I will tell you in advance that I found Fahrenheit 451 to be a lot more my thing.
The story in The Hours is told from a three-person perspective. The story contains a lot of monologue interior and relatively little action. I would call Cunningham’s style baroque. The main characters in The Hours suffer under the great lives of others, which makes them feel limited. They want to break free from that, which is this book’s theme. It reminds me of Hanya Yanagihara’s overrated A Little Life, but in The Hours, unlike the pathetic protagonists in A Little Life, the protagonists do manage to move themselves to positive action.
The story in Fahrenheit 451 is told from the perspective of one person. The story is built primarily around action, and the background is mainly told in dialogues between the protagonist and the extras. Bradbury’s style is tight and firm. The main character lives in a dystopian country in the future, where people’s abilities are suppressed, and all books must be burned. The protagonist “awakens” from his role in this dictatorship and takes action against it, which reminds me of 1984.
Uitgeest.
Read The Lunduke Journal and you get tremendous joy from someone’s dedication to
something – anything. In this case, Computer History.
A nice article is for example The History of The Graphical User Interface.
A personal inventory, from TI-99/4A to MacBook
At some point, I realised that I have owned more computers than I could easily remember. Not because I collect them, but because they have quietly accompanied different phases of my life: learning, working, travelling, writing.
I felt like making a nerdy list. The computers I have owned. A history.
BTW also worked with DEC 10, VAX, ICL mainframe – VME, IBM mainframe – System 390 and beyond, Solaris, Aix.
Talks BASIC. Peek and Poke to move you directly into its memory.
Running the failed MSX operating system standard. You could already do a lot more with it.
Entering the world of the wonderful 5¼-inch floopy disk, after the horror of using cassettes with the home computers.
Yes Tulip was a Dutch brand making computers. We did computers in the Netherlands. Philips has made computers, but missed a boat. Tulip was a nice brand, and worth a rabbit-hole but not now, just one mention: it bought the Commodore computer brand in 1997.
Unimaginative bulky thing. Dialed into the Internet with it for the first time. Via Compuserve. Forums were the big thing (in nerd world, that is). Email. DOOM.
My first portable, in quotes. The thing weighed a ton. Literally a brick.
All very good and enormously robust laptops. Great trackpoint thing to move the screen pointer. Missing that today still.
After IBM sold the PC division to Lenovo, switched to that brand.
This was my first MacBook. Only then did I notice that the Mac user experience was so incredibly better than that of Windows. It also boots within 10 seconds, whereas my Windows machines always take over a minute or even (much) longer.
By far the best of them all. Still performs top notch. Indestructible.
Becoming a freelancer, I needed a Windows machine.
This is a plastic device. Poor touchpad. But then again, it is by far the cheapest on the list.
Pretty robust and comfortable. But not at the Lenovo level with comparable models.
.
With touch bar. Could have left that out from me. Steve Jobs said correctly that people don’t know what they want, but the touch bar is definitely not what I want.
Nice machine. If it had the track point I had on the IBM T40 and follow-on models, I would be happier. The touchpad is ok, but not at the Mac level.
Update 2025: still working on a Lenovo Ideapad, and the MacBook. The gap between macOS and Windows is narrowing. I have some old laptops running Linux, which is doable but only because I am a techie. I think my next machine will be a Framework. We should be able to repair our stuff.