Intermission – it’s time for a nerdy, niche, and pointless nitpick again!
Back in Frankfurt, I noticed a detail about the emergency exit signs that has bugged me ever since. It kept nagging in the back of my head…
What is the skewed area below the person running through the door meant to represent? I think it’s supposed to be a shadow:
But… how can the shadow of the stretched-out leg have the same angle as the shadow of the door? That’s not how shadows work!
There’s an ISO standard for these kind of signs, and all the renditions for this specific sign (ISO 7010-E001) depict the shadow like that.
Yes, these are icons, not photos. The light source is idealized, emitting perfectly parallel light rays. But even then, or especially then, you would expect this shadow:
…and not this:
Okay, so the leg shadow cannot be parallel to the door, got it. If we apply this to the original icon and construct a “fixed” version, we get:
Huzzah! Amazing, and totally worth the trouble. Thanks for following along. :)
I was attending a little tech conference this week (organized by my employer), and I did a presentation about the Amiga Pointer Archive. Preparing that kept me quite busy, and I still had to omit some things, like the media aftermath and the case of the impossible hot spot. Maybe I should spend less time drawing memes by hand for the presentation?
Naw, that’s crazy talk. Look at that cute mouse!
Don’t look at the 1980s wallpaper, though, which seems to be a very special edition where both sides of the paper are printed…
If I get around to it, maybe this time I can double-check all the images for correct attributions so I can post the slides. After all, the memes are hand-drawn already, and I made the important pics myself:
As well as a special prop, the pointer-pointer… :)
What did I learn from all that for my next talk? Nothing! :)
But I did learn about a cool project by a fellow presenter, and what you can achieve with GBStudio, Photoshop, and a lot of preservence. Check out Pocket Collection by n3rdlich (Instagram has a lot of pics), it’s awesome: real hardware, handmade pixels, zero handmade assembly code if I understood correctly, and a lot of consideration on how to bring a modern user experience to 37-year retro devices. Great talk, too!
After some legalese back-and-forth among copyright holders, licensers, and licensees that makes you think there’s a multi-billion dollar brand involved (I’m not a lawyer, but it sounds like a good thing, I guess, agreements and all?), a revamped Amiga logo has been revealed. I like it! A lot of careful tweaking and deliberate design decisions, and I do prefer the good old rainbow double-checkmark over the somewhat overused Boing ball.
Together with the revamped checkmark, a set of brand colors and an “Amiga gradient” were devised:
I gotta say… I like these colors! Hmm, yes, I like these colors a lot!
The design team’s got taste! :)
For its 30th anniversary, a very special and universally loved game that brought hours of joy to so many people is celebrating the occasion with a special expansion pack!
No, I’m not talking about the PeeCee lamers. :) This is the real shit, an expansion pack and tons of specials for Worms DC on the Amiga, the original platform where it all started!
I supplied the synthwave-style mountains for BigD’s “GRAIL” custom landscape – with the “grail” being Andy Davidson’s Amiga 1200, the very machine Worms was created on!
Also, the worm.net homepage has a link to my browser-based Worms asset tool that helped create some of the new custom landscapes. That was a fun little reverse engineering project…
Worms will always have a special place in my heart (see also my Teletext-on-Amiga adaptation Worms VBI), and I’m very glad I could contribute to this project a little. Keep wormin’! :)
Over on *cough* TikTok, mostly-retro influencer MLGonzo (he has a COBOL beard, but also talks about contemporary geek stuff) states:
Everyone should have their own favourite HTTP request response codes!
And that’s true, of course! Just a day after I watched this clip I checked in at a hotel, and by coincidence, the room number was my favorite HTTP response code!
Everybody knows HTTP 404 (Not Found), and every other backend jester will probably pick HTTP 418 (I’m a Teapot) as their favorite. But HTTP 204 is special and weird, and it’s my favorite for nostalgic reasons as well.
GET /some/url HTTP/1.1 Host: heckmeck.de HTTP/1.1 204 No Content
What do you mean, “No Content”? No response body, no redirect? What should I do with that?
Well, nothing, and that’s the beauty of it! Back in the late 1990s, it was the go-to solution to make a browser-based chat server work:
- Everything was frame-based (a proper <FRAMESET>, in uppercase)
- You didn’t have an XMLHttpRequest to issue custom requests
- You couldn’t even rely on JavaScript (of course, JavaScript was there, but many tech-savy power users had it deactivated, and you didn’t want to piss them off – using JavaScript was mostly fine, but requiring it for your website to function was lame)
- You didn’t want to reload the chat input frame every time the user typed something (because submitting the single-input chat form would trigger a POST-clear-load-render cycle – slow, brittle-looking, and flickering!)
- But you still wanted the chat to work in the browser – without any plugins and especially without launching a Java applet, which was a tedious, ugly process (and lame)
“No Content” to the rescue! When the server responds with HTTP 204, you can submit the input form as much as you like, without the browser ever repainting anything. Oh, the response is No Content? Let’s just keep the current document, then! Observe this <iframe>:
Sadly, you can only really “observe” what happens in the browser debugging tools – cooking up a purely HTTP-based toy chat server would have been fun, but allowing even the tiniest amount of unmoderated user content on my website is too much of a headache…
Anyway… the trip to Siegen was nice, and this was a nice trip down memory lane. So much content about no content! :)
