Cool stuff to stumble upon, new and old.
Before: What’s Cool? · II · III · IV · V · VI

• EPSON MX-80 Fonts
  Retro fonts are not necessarily made of pixels – here’s some dot-matrix goodness, released as a font pack in all possible formats. I can nearly smell the endless printer paper! Although the letters on the website look a bit squished compared to the specimen in the manual – but what do I know? I had the privilege of starting my home-printing career with a whopping 24 dots… Epson LQ-550 elite, booyah!
• 64’er Magazin
  (German) A fantastic – and crazy ambitious – art project by pagetable.com, a realtime replay of the German C64 magazine where all the original articles show up as they came out exactly forty years ago. This already started in March 2024, and the current issue has a feature on that new supercomputer from Commodore, the Amiga! :) Of course you get PDFs of the original issues, but all texts (and listings!) have also been converted to (translatable) text form. Truly a labor of love!
• Presenting Slides / Media Session Sample
  Not a cool article or blog post, but rather a bit of browser tech I wasn’t familiar with. Did you know your website can add a video or canvas element as a floating picture-in-picture gadget onto your user’s desktop? Interesting! Also, the whole MediaSession API might be worth a look (the thing that lets your browser issue those “now playing” overlays). Could you abuse it for interesting content or games? Think Defender of the Favicon, but with prev/next/pause as controls…
• Deluxe Paint on the Commodore Amiga
  “Let’s crank out DPaint today and see how it holds up!” Hand-pixelling without layers and only one undo level like it’s 1989 – is that as painful as it sounds or is it still fun? A well-written and informative field report – I never knew the perspective mode supported anti-aliasing!
• The day Return became Enter
  Just as I was struggling with carriage returns and linefeeds the other day, I stumbled upon this piece. Of course, this post rather starts out with the physical carriage mechanisms of early typewriters and word processors, not the ASCII control codes 13 and 10. But it’s all related, of course, and so is the path from the mechanically-rooted naming of the “return” key to the space-age moniker of “enter” to, well, enter stuff.

One more meta-recommendation: If you like this kind of stuff, you should check out Two Stop Bits from time to time, a Hacker News clone for all things retro. It’s a great resource to waste spend your time! :)