Stephen Cass

I've got a new #teletext art #exhibition launching in #Montreal. Inspired by @anginedepoitrine.bsky.social, it features portraits and album covers of over 30 artists - including the aliens! Expect pyramids and dice... #pixelart #CheapThrills #anginedepoitrine teletextart.co.uk/angine-de-la...

For my latest Packrat Monday video short, I was inspired by @davidkuszmar.com's cover story on hacking LLMs with prompt injections for @spectrum.ieee.org to dig out some payphone keypads I got at a @hope.net conference about a decade ago and build a blue box because of the weird parallels...

This is the kind of delightful thing that reminds of the flavor of early shareware...

When I first moved to NYC on an editorial assistant's salary, these were a staple: inexpensive, microwavable, and they didn't take up much room in shared freezers, especially when you took them out of the box and stacked them in their plastic wraps.... www.boston25news.com/news/trendin...

We're seeing these pitches too. But we could actually keep relying on email if we went turn-of-the-century and brought back PGP signatures... Plenty of journalism orgs around that could help with any key exchange issues! www.cjr.org/analysis/fak...

Our new zine, 'How to Spend Ten Years Repairing a Computer and Why You Should Too', is here! We'd like to send out some free copies, so the first 50 emails with the subject line "Zine, please" to mediaarchaeology+zine@proton.me will get a copy (U.S. only, sorry folks)

We can make things better: "A remarkable effort by the government and the city’s distribution utilities has turned Delhi’s grid into a reliable, modern system. Power losses have shrunk from over 50 percent in 2002 to 5 to 6 percent in 2026—on par with France and Belgium."

I'll be honest: when Dave Schneider started pitching the idea of measuring the starlight shadow of an asteroid as it passed across the face of the Earth for an @spectrum.ieee.org Hands On, I thought it sounded impossible. But I was wrong! #diy #astronomy #CitizenScience

I have just discovered, from some of the comments on my last Packrat Monday's video about a sample of Trinitite, that there is an active conspiracy theory that nuclear weapons don't really exist. What's next? Nitrogen is a hoax? Blood circulation is fake? Kangaroos are real?

Nice campaign by the Norwegian Consumer Council about the declining lifespan of products. Enjoy!

Latest Packrat Mondays, in which I delve into the radioactive portion of my stash... #radiacode #gammaray #trinitite www.youtube.com/shorts/-QDeU...

And by the way, from our scoop, we also discovered that Anthropic is also using human reviewers to read conversations.

Elsewhere on Bluesky folks are noting that The Kids These Days aren't much into Douglas Adams. As someone who is much into Douglas Adams (and in fact wrote an intro to new edition of his works) allow me to remind folks that it's not actually surprising when The Kids aren't into decades-old stuff.

In 1980, Intel introduced the 8087 floating-point coprocessor chip. Plugging this chip into your IBM PC made math 100 times faster, good for CAD and spreadsheets. I opened up the chip to reverse-engineer exactly how it does complicated calculations. Let's take a look inside...

Our #teletext art exhibition with Finland's Yle Teksti-TV has begun! "Yle 100" celebrates a full century of the broadcaster, and is the first of a 2-part celebration that continues with "Yle Text 45" next month. View here: yle.fi/aihe/tekstit... teletextart.co.uk/yle-100-on-y...

My latest Packrat Monday for @spectrum.ieee.org features the Cat-O-Tron, which uses a 60 GHz radar to avoid surprising feral cats… #CommunityCats #DIY

This was an interesting one to edit: come for the future crewed spaceships to Mars, stay for the time they deliberately blew up a prototype nuclear rocket engine back in the day: spectrum.ieee.org/bimodal-nucl...

As we conclude, > [LLM] users encounter a fundamental asymmetry: they must singlehandedly supply much of the sequential structure that is ordinarily co-constructed by multiple participants ... This hidden labour challenges accounts of LLM use that focus on performance and optimization

There are very few specific objects (especially 1-of-1 devices) I can think of that have a specific tie-in to open culture and open knowledge in the way this one does. Amazing find.

When "concerning" replaced "worrying" within the space of a few years like a linguistic find-and-replace, that was odd enough, but now "lessons" is being replaced wholesale by "learnings" the same way. Or is this just my own personal Mandala effect?

Dolly Parton's scientific, public health, and educational philanthropy was so significant that @nature.com is running a piece on the impact she had.

This girl I used to waitress with in Austin, we moved to New York together in 2003 on a literal Greyhound bus. Shared a fifth floor walk-up studio that, when it rained, had more leaks in the ceiling than we had pots and pans. We used to get drunk and smoke off the fire escape and do “sad-offs.”

Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, and Emmylou Harris performing “Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow” on The Dolly Parton Show (1976)

A massive update: At least ~15 companies~ are selling scientists antibodies using faked validation data. We've documented 18,000+ manipulated images on 17,000+ products sold by leading laboratory suppliers including Thermo Fisher, Abcam, Santa Cruz Biotechnology, Millipore Sigma and Bio-Techne. 1/🧵

A hacking device the size of a quarter can be plugged into a port accessible from the exterior of a Boeing 737 to change its autopilot navigation or tamper with values used to calculate its takeoff speed, a group of security researchers has shown. 🧵👇 www.wired.com/story/this-c...

I pitched this idea to a business magazine, and it never went anywhere. I then pitched it to IEEE Spectrum as a more technical piece, and over a year later, it's finally published online and in print. With amazing photos and layout, it looks great! spectrum.ieee.org/nokia-phones...

What were the odds that *this* was the part of "Rainbows End" that would actually come to pass?

Another great HOPE conference this weekend by the @2600.com folks, with a lot of grist for the mill. But mainly I'm happy to get these Toilets on the Air ham radio certificates, (even if there were few actual toilets) :) Next year my goal is to have a proper rig for SSTV transmissions! #AmateurRadio

Finally we have the evidence. Let's see Big Trebuchet get out of those warning labels now!

It's a new Packrat Monday! (The reason behind the facial hair continuity error will be revealed soon :) ) Our amazing citizen scientist David Schneider came in to talk about making a balloon & payload that can report from circling the globe! #DIY #Pico #HamRadio youtube.com/shorts/xiALW...

One of the great joys of my adult life has been realizing that I can just pick up a new skill every so often, take a fun little class in it weekly for a year or two, and simply enjoy meeting people and getting medium proficient and not attempting to become professional in it at all!

Ken once again doing the work of angels...

Python's "for" loop syntax.

Oh yeah, did you read the thing I wrote? Its also in the August print issue of @spectrum.ieee.org. spectrum.ieee.org/jailbreaking... All about the exploits and jailbreaking I did when I first got started in AI/LLM research.

Get in nerds, we're going to play electronic battleship! (My latest Packrat Monday for @spectrum.ieee.org ) #VintageToys #DIY, #Repair youtube.com/shorts/BZkJa...

Finally got my own copy of the TI logic datasheet book: so much fun to leaf through, and when the apocalypse comes I won’t have to stop making projects! Ah, time enough at last…

You do not need to save your "nice" protoboards for a special occasion. You do not need to save your "nice" protoboards for a special occasion. You do not need to save your "nice" protoboards for a special occasion. You do not need to save your "nice" protoboards for a special occasion....

ICYMI from us at @spectrum.ieee.org: the fundamental challenge to orbital data centers is good old fashioned heat: "Ultimately, the physics tax is universal... the constraint is never the silicon. It’s the thermodynamics." spectrum.ieee.org/orbital-data...

Larry laid his mouse in front of the press to be photographed. Lest you ask, this is a real photograph via the Press Association.

FYI, my tech journalism peeps!

My latest Packrat Monday for @spectrum.ieee.org , in which I get paid to write Commodore 64/6502 assembly code! #C64, #retrocomputing, #DIY youtube.com/shorts/V1QaS...

Old web forums were poorly coded and rough around the edges, but maybe we gave up on them too quickly in the social media era.

Fell into a teletext hole thanks to @nmsni.co.uk 's most recent YouTube video () and I suddenly remembered a long forgotten memory when I noticed that a text service's clock once looked different. I remember emailing the editor who was all "erm, the computer broke". And now I know why

Just another Packrat Monday, ooooh ahhhwooo.... 🎵🎶 In which I find a wonderful Psion 5 to play with #retrocomputing #VCF youtube.com/shorts/GREZO...