ReHacked vol. 267: Roger Corman Dead, Atari’s Mike Jang, The people who won't give up floppy disks and more

Atari’s Mike Jang – The Arcade Blogger #computer #games #history #atari #longread

I started the concepts for the Star Wars cabinet and later another designer did more detailed work on the plastic part in front of the monitor. One of the main elements I sketched up were the hydraulic ram shapes on the plastic parts. Those rams were often seen in the movie, especially the ramp to the Millennium Falcon. Also I wanted to continue the mechanical theme by adding that truss style design to the sides of the roof. I was concerned because that was a particle board part that was cut with an angled router bit. Then the bare particle board was just painted black. I was worried about the wood texture appearance but nobody noticed after everything else was put in place.
-- Mike Jang discussing Star Wars cabinet design

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Roger Corman Dead: Pioneering Producer and King of B Movies was 98 #promemoria

Legendary B-movie king Roger Corman, who directed and produced hundreds of low-budget films and discovered such future industry stars as Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, has died. He was 98.

Corman died May 9 at his home in Santa Monica, Calif., surrounded by family members, the family confirmed to Variety.

“His films were revolutionary and iconoclastic, and captured the spirit of an age. When asked how he would like to be remembered, he said, ‘I was a filmmaker, just that,'” the family said in a statement.

Obsolete, but not gone: The people who won't give up floppy disks #technology #history

There are also those who depend on them. Various legacy industrial and government systems around the world still use floppy disks. Even some city transport systems run on them. And while these users are slowly dying out, a handful cling on, despite the fact that the last brand new floppy disk manufactured by Sony was back in 2011. No-one makes them anymore, meaning there is a finite number of floppy disks in the world – a scattered resource that is gradually dwindling. One day, they might disappear entirely. But not yet.

Some 787 Production Test Records Were Falsified, Boeing Says | Aviation Week Network #security #aviation

Boeing must inspect undelivered and in-production 787s to ensure some steps in the aircraft’s assembly were done correctly after learning that required tests to validate the work were recorded as complete but never conducted.

A Boeing employee in the company’s South Carolina 787 final assembly facility “saw what appeared to be an irregularity in a required conformance test in wing-body join,” Scott Stocker, 787 vice president & general manager said in an April 29 email to employees that revealed the issue. The employee told his manager, who alerted “executive leadership,” the email said.

Blinded by the Light: Megaconstellation Clash with Astronomical “Peer” Groups #astronomy

Google Fit APIs get shut down in 2025, might break fitness devices | Ars Technica #software

Google is killing off the Google Fit APIs. The platform originally existed to sync health data from third-party fitness devices to your Google account, but now it's being killed off. Deprecation of the APIs happened on May 1, and Google has stopped accepting new sign-ups for the API. The official shutdown date is June 30, 2025.

The Google Fit API was launched in 2014, just a few weeks after Apple announced Healthkit in iOS 8. The goal of both platforms is to be a central repository for health data from various apps and services. Instead of seeing steps in one app and weight in another, it could all be mushed together into a one-stop-shop for health metrics. Google had a lot of big-name partners at launch, like Nike+, Adidas, Withings, Asus, HTC, Intel, LG, and app makers like Runtastic and RunKeeper.

The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound - Audio Academy Audio Legends #history #music

The mammoth structure was massive, made up of over 600 hi-fidelity speakers that sat behind the band as they played. It used six separate sound systems which were able to isolate eleven separate channels with vocals, rhythm guitar, piano each having their own channel. Another channel each for the bass drum, snare, tom-toms, and cymbals. The bass was transmitted through a quadraphonic encoder, which took a signal from each string and projected it through its own set of speakers. The result of each speaker carrying only one instrument or voice at a time was crystal clear audio, free of intermodulation distortion.

Olympic Basketball & The Grateful Dead | Sports History Weekly

Steve Albini, Storied Producer and Icon of the Rock Underground, Dies at 61 | Pitchfork #promemoria

Steve Albini, an icon of indie rock as both a producer and performer, died on Tuesday, May 7, of a heart attack, staff at his recording studio, Electrical Audio, confirmed to Pitchfork. As well as fronting underground rock lynchpins including Shellac and Big Black, Albini was a legend of the recording studio, though he preferred the term “engineer” to “producer.” He recorded Nirvana’s In Utero, Pixies’ Surfer Rosa, PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me, and countless more classic albums, and remained an outspoken critic of exploitative music industry practices until his final years. Shellac were preparing to tour their first album in a decade, To All Trains, which is scheduled for release next week. Steve Albini was 61 years old.

Worldcoin booms in Argentina amid 288% inflation - Rest of World #economy #money

• Worldcoin’s iris-scanning centers have proliferated in Argentina as the country faces economic turmoil.
• A network of intermediaries has emerged to recruit new customers.
• Authorities have called for Worldcoin to be investigated.

Proton Mail Discloses User Data Leading to Arrest in Spain #privacy

Proton Mail has come under scrutiny for its role in a legal request involving the Spanish authorities and a member of the Catalan independence organization, Democratic Tsunami.

Proton Mail is a secure email service based in Switzerland, renowned for its commitment to privacy through end-to-end encryption and a strict no-logs policy. In 2021, Proton Mail faced controversy when it complied with a legal request that led to the arrest of a French climate activist. Under Swiss law, Proton Mail was compelled to collect and provide information on the individual’s IP address to Swiss authorities, who then shared it with French police.

Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?' | The MIT Press Reader #philosophy #longread

When Daniel Dennett’s essay collection “Brainstorms” was published in 1978, the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science was just emerging. Dennett was a young scholar who wanted to get philosophers out of their armchairs and into conversations with psychologists, linguists, and computer scientists. “I tried in ‘Brainstorms’ to write about the problems in language accessible to all serious thinkers, as jargon-free as possible, with lots of examples,” he writes in the preface to the 40th-anniversary edition of the book.

Some of the chapters contained in the collection cast longer shadows than others. “Where Am I?,” featured below in its entirety, has had a remarkable trajectory. In 1979, it was nearly turned into a Hollywood film (ultimately abandoned when it was found that a sci-fi magazine with a faintly similar storyline published a few years earlier). In 1981, the main scene from the essay was rendered in a BBC science documentary “in which,” Dennett writes, “I appear, looking at my own brain in a fabulous fountain/vat on a pedestal in front of whirring computer tape drives (remember those?), and wondering why I am saying ‘Here I am staring at my own brain in a vat’ instead of ‘Here I am, in a vat, being stared at by my own eyes.’” Later it was represented in both a Javanese shadow puppet play and a feature-length film starring Dennett and the computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter.

World Food Atlas: Discover 17187 Local Dishes & Ingredients #culture #travel #food #fun

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