No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

Slashdot appears to be dead - or, at the very least, deeply resting. Now it's not been a healthy place for a very long time - just compare today's sanitised front-page with the blinkenlight hacks you'd get before the turn of the millennium - but, even in it's current state, for it to have lasted over 20 years, under so many owners, while the web undertook such rapid change, was a deeply impressive achievement.

Now it's death shouldn't be that big a deal for me, my tastes have changed and I've not been a regular reader for over a decade but... it's Slashdot! And Slashdot made up a pretty big part of my original forays onto the internet and, for better or worse, pointed me in the direction of a number of things that had a long term impact on my development as a person. To let it pass without even a murmur of acknowledgement would be a mistake.

It's the end of an era. 

And I feel old.

Sorting Lego

Sorting Two Metric Tons of Lego

Unfortunately I have neither two metric tons of Logo or the space to build a similar contraption. It's still neat to see how he did it tho'.

Things of Interest

Things of interest for August-ish 2017.

SIGGRAPH

Well... it's SIGGRAPH week. Which means it's time to engage in that bi-annual ritual of of feeling somewhat stupid and ever so slightly scared.

Convert Apple binary plists to xml plists and back again

Apple binary plists can be converted to human readable xml thus:

plutil -convert xml1 binplist.plist

And, should you have the need, can be converted back again:

plutil -convert binary1 binplist.plist

It's worth noting that this is an in-place conversion that will overwrite the original file and so you should make a copy if whatever part of the OS you're messing around with first.

Never gonna let you down...

And this, of course, is absolutely fabulous.

"As far as the Atari 2600's concerned, it's a cartridge - one that happens to have enough horsepower to read the audiovisual data off an SD card and feed it as a program to the 2600."