nicole_express

The English T-V distinction seems to have originated after the Norman Conquest, where French became the language of the aristocracy; wouldn't be surprised if that was exactly the source.

The eth/thorn distinction was fairly arbitrary in actual written Old English, with thorn being more common. The modern distinction between eth and thorn being based off of voice originated in Ice…

I wouldn't call it a happy accident; JPEG was carefully designed to look good for single-frames with the limitations of the human eye taken into account. WebP is based off of a video format, and …

When I wrote that I assumed it was a physical possibility but I didn't realize people actually did that. It would actually probably work pretty well for a Pong system, since the discontinuity wou…

I'm going to keep using quick insecure PRNGs for my NES games rather than write a 6502 implementation of a CSPRNG... I guess this isn't something that's safe to assume for all game deve…

Refusing to promote? I had to leave my employer entirely because I didn't want to work from an office where none of my team was.

I remember this email chain! I didn't realize you were asking for help, sorry about that... I don't really have any connections when it comes to controllers. Glad I didn't accidentally …

For various reasons autism is often under-diagnosed in women, so I wouldn't be surprised that if this effect holds up it's not actually gender-specific. That's a bunch of big "ifs&…

The Game Boy ran at 5V logic and the GBA 3.3V; my understanding is that there were some technical hurdles to supporting both on the GBA which Nintendo was happy to be rid of-- the Game Boy Micro, the …

In the US it generally seems to end up being natural gas; still a pretty big emissions improvement but not zero carbon by any means.

I believe the Atari 8-bit computers' CTIA/GTIA chips generate their video output through pins in much the same way as the TIA, with digital luminance and a color output, so it makes sense th…

It seems like the key thing here is that Johnson & Johnson ditched the consumer brands, so it wants to ditch the consumer image. Everything else is just marketing puffery. I wonder which side of t…

Phenylephrine did its job of convincing people to accept restricting access to pseudoephedrine, since there was a substitute that could still be freely available. Now it'll be taken off the marke…

They were required to put in USB-C by regulations; makes sense that they wouldn't actually handle anything more than Lightning could, that's definitely what they'd be using if they were…

The big change I'd like to see in the MacBook Air line is the return of the 11" option; I realize that's too small for a lot of people but for me it was the perfect carry-everywhere for…

So, uh, is this bad? I mean, it doesn't sound good on the face of it and we should probably try to avoid, but have microplastics been implicated as responsible for any specific environmental harm…

There's definitely a "suburban Boston accent" where you have most of the terminology and vowel inventory of a traditional Boston accent, but since it's rhotic the speaker thinks th…

It seems like the primary purpose of the IARC Group 2B list is to identify targets for additional study; from that perspective, and thinking about how widely aspartame is used, it makes sense to want …

I hope this questionable categorization doesn't result in aspartame being removed from sodas; I much prefer it to other artificial sweeteners. Can definitely tell when Diet Coke is formulated to …

If you're interested in seeing a Turing machine in action, I really enjoyed this YouTube series where the creator builds a pure Turing machine that can simulate the Apple ][: https://w…

Have you heard of the FCD Railbus? An experiment by the New Haven Railroad in the 1950's to do just that... In the end, it was more cost-effective for the New Haven to just go bankrupt

Only the TMS9928/9A can output component; all NTSC SG-1000 consoles use either the TMS9918A or the VDP mentioned here. It is still pretty much the same as the MSX1. Different sound chip, less RAM…

Unfortunately the site is broken over IPv6, which seems to cause some issues. Honestly since it's just a static site I should probably just blow away the server and restart it, but I'll do t…

I'm sorry that wasn't more clear-- the automatic launcher is an analog knob, so it can be turned to any position and that determines the strength of the shot.

It's pretty easy to get a breakout cable for chrominance and luminance separately into an S-Video port; at that point I just plugged in the Apple II's output into luminance and left chromina…

I'd love to support this use case, but I don't know how? I mean, this is about as plain-text as a site can get without just being text, if there's some tweak I need to make to the site …

I've seen a port of the unreleased SegaSonic Bros., so it's definitely possible. Possibly more work than the Atomiswave ports? Not sure, but the System C is "farther" from the Mega…

Please let me know if you find the issue; I don’t think I’m running anything complex, it’s a wholly static site.