zengargoyle

Reminds me of the old SmokePing.

Freshman year of high school I took a class called "Business Computer Applications". It was 1983 and I was 13. We were using Apple II+ computers or their clones. I had an Apple II+ since they came out and knew lots of things by then. I "wowed" my teacher with 3 line programs and such. On our classroom floppy I had a file with a control character in it's name, it was a disk editor. Knowing the disk directory layout things (it was a linked list of blocks), I carved out a whole hidden set of directory entries. So each day of class I would load up the disk editor using the invisible control characters, patch back in my hidden blocks, play with my hidden files, then at the end of class I'd load the disk editor up again and hide my files. Teacher never saw what was really on that disk.

Back in middle school, like 1981-ish I had this hardback book with a title of something like "A Shocking Story". The inside was hollowed out to hold about the same but it was rigged to go off when you opened the book. It got confiscated.

Technically, yes for about seven years. We were introduced by a mutual friend because we were both staying on campus over the Christmas holiday. We hooked up on Christmas Eve and dropped some acid and had a fun few days. We were both the oddly precocious types who graduated high school at 16/17. We were both sorta slutty. We just became best of friends for the next few years (we both went our own separate ways romantically, we would eventually even go out and hook up with each others roommates...) We went out and got tattoos together on her 18th birthday. It was a couple of years later that we got married (I like to pontificate that we got married by the justice of the peace in the Blade Runner building. It was justice of the peace and somewhere in an old downtown LA building, no frills). She had her mothers or grandmothers ring or such, mine was a Peace symbol ring from a gumball machine with the Peace symbol torn off.... It turned my finger green unless coated with clear nail polish. About six months later I left university and moved halfway across the country. It was always interesting to eventually tell girlfriends and such that "by the way, technically I'm married". Around seven years later I ran into another mutual friend who told me that she had been looking for me to sign papers and such and couldn't find me. We did meet up again a few years later and nothing came up, she finally settled down and got really married. I assume she got a rubber stamp divorce for abandonment or even non-consummation (almost, but we were both so "too drunk to fuck" on Extacy that we gave up and just went back to the party). She's still a fond memory of a bestest friend for years, we could like read each other's minds, almost too dangerous to be serious.

I married my best friend of several years so she could get financial aid. Her financial aid counselor told her about the lengthy emancipation legal process or marriage. She came over one night with a "I have a huge favor to ask of you" and about a week later we were married.

Back in the late 1980s when I was a teenager I found plans and built this little circuit with a LED that would light up if someone else in the house was trying to listen in on my phone calls. More than one phone off the hook... LED lights up.

The first program I ever keyed in was the one dimensional lunar lander simulation on my dad's HP calculator. Must have been 6 or 7 years old (by 9 years old I was doing BASIC on an Apple ][ with floating point card and programming intersections of two pipes to make cutting templates). Even back then I got to the 'suicide burn' approach. Made playing the arcade game pretty easy years later.

This is why you fail. Thirty years ago I could make a wire wrapped 68000k board that did nothing but play music. CE/CS was different back then. I'd cut pins and solder in chips to twiddle the filters on audio output. You could know the entire process from power on to running of your computer and it was easy to change bits even down to the hardware level like adding a 'no place to put it unless you build it yourself' CPU/MPU/RAM upgrade and make it work. Adjust your NTSC video output, just cut that resistor in lieu of replacing it with something really high resistance, it'll be better. Let's build our own new high speed serial port for MIDI. How about a graphics co-processor that only does Mandlebrot calculations, let's build three of them. Only few of the younger generation comprehend the old ways. And the machines have changed to fewer chips and machines have turned into system on a chip. It's a bit of a shame.

Tell them the object system was stolen from Python and they'll really freak out.

Something like `read` gives a better example. Like `man 1 read` is "read — read from standard input into shell variables", "read [-r] var...", a shell function. And `man 2 read` is " read - read from a file descriptor", "ssize_t read(int fd, void buf, size_t count);". You can also get into `man 8 catman`, "catman - create or update the pre-formatted manual pages", "catman [-d?V] [-M path] [-C file] [section] ...". The `catman` is a mirror-like hierarchy of man pages (usually in troff format using the 'an' macro package) pre-formatted for the standard terminal or whatever to shave off a bit of time running roff on the source files all the time.

This is all ancient knowledge and well in place back in the mid 1980's long before Linux or any of that stuff. The `man` page sections used to be different 3-ring binders all printed out sitting on a table in the computer lab. The 'sections' were just different binders of documentation. Get off my lawn!!!

My pre-internet 16yr old ancient self (late bloomer) who had to read books in libraries and bookstores who lost first girlfriend by not kissing her and second girlfriend pinned me down and started sucking my face off while growing four extra hands... Kudos. There's an art to the kiss and so much more, a worthy field of study for a young gentleman. Next do the non-actual-sex parts of the Kama Sutra and the art of sensual massage. There are more appendages and nerves than one might think of....

I used to mess around with Anki many years ago while studying Japanese. The approach I took was to figure out the database structure, then write a bit of code to expand the information on cards. Just alter the database directly. Mostly for things like adding dictionary words to existing kanji decks. Looks like it would be a nice addition to genanki to be able to read/modify/save existing an existing apkg.

    $ perl -E 'my $f=[[{X=>{Y=>["FOO"]}}]]; say $f->[0][0]{X}{Y}[0];my $g=$f->[0][0]{X}{Y}; say $g->[0]'
    FOO
    FOO

Seems pretty trivial.

Same, I had my books from 1986 (when I was 16) bought from Caltech's bookstore while I was there at a summer program (YESS, Young Engineer Summer Scholars) that went on for months where I learned 2-3 semesters worth of undergrad physics/calculus. Such a wonderful summer nerd program for the day and age. Best summer camp ever! So many stories. Lost the books in a move in the late 1990's, still a bit sad about it. One of these days I'll add them back to my shelf.