What's New and Points of Interest at the Moonspeaker.
Some time ago good fortune led me to pick up and read Katherine Ashenburg's 2007 book, The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History. It is an excellent example of popular history done right. Ashenburg never talks down to the reader while presenting her material in a good-humoured, crisp prose that makes the book tricky to put down. The book designer had a romp through victorian and edwardian era…
An important site cross-referenced by Dave and Steve's blog. It may be of special interest to those hunting for working old macintosh hardware and not necessarily working macintosh hardware that is useful for parts. There are many scans of the original macworld magazines and similar publications, as well as specific issues from other magazines focussed on apple hardware or software.
Among a number of long-delayed projects has been a recent compilation of a discography for a local CD collection including items from a wide range of musical genres, mostly secondhand. As music lovers who browse that hardy species the independent music store carrying a mix of second hand and new items on vinyl as well as CD knows well, some of the most interesting items are hardest to document.…
An excellent blog full of well-researched posts and downloadable resources on vintage apple hardware (as in pre macOSX). The scans of the various Inside Macintosh volumes is an outstanding and generously shared set of files, especially for those who would like to see the now sadly ignored original human interface guidelines . Watch out for the many excellent cross-references to of course, apple…
Perhaps the experience is not so common now, but at least until the 2000s, it was not unusual to encounter apparently fossilized english phrases or references that were quite mysterious in meaning, yet didn't need defining somehow. A light-hearted example is the apparent first word in imperative phrases lke "Let's go!" It was years before I learned explicitly that the first "word" was in fact a…
All too often, while it is easy to find articles and comments decrying all the lies and bullshit posted everywhere online, including active poisoning of search engine results to make finding correct information harder, those articles and comments provide no alternatives. For example, they do not suggest alternative search engines, or admit frankly that depending on topic, it is may be necessary to…
Ready access point for the ongoing series of rangy anthologies of formal papers and blogposts under the site's title, as well as complementary books. Technically these books are supposed to be open access, but so far electronic library catalogues only allow them to be accessed after signing in. No sign in is required for reading the html versions.
Not so long ago, the title of this thoughtpiece was simple common sense. It wasn't hard to come up with recent examples, some with recent impact in living memory to illustrate it, either. But, following the development of Edward Bernays' vile work by the comparably vile Josef Goebbels, not long after COVID-19 was willfully fomented into a raging and still ongoing pandemic by corporate malfeasance,…
A rather intriguing and massive source of links to documentation, podcasts, research, interviews, and articles. It is fabulously retro looking, focussed on information and helping people find it over bells and whistles. It began with one person and now includes contributions from a growing number of volunteers, and it actively seeks to link to other sites with well-researched, relevant posts.
The original "remembrance day" comes from the attempted commemoration of the end of what was originally called "the great war" and then "world war one" because of "world war two." Neither of the terms "world" nor "great" would have been applied to these two wars if they had not drawn in nearly every country of people who think they are white at the extreme west end of asia. "Europe" in recent…
I don't know if this intriguing free (GLPL) software, cocoa-compatible development environment is used by the helloOS project, although it would make sense if it did. It is cocoa-compatible but not restricted from other *NIXes, though it appears to have most affinity to the BSD-derivatives, as should be mostly expected. The example applications look dated, perhaps because they are using X11.
The title of the essay popped up among the many links among my collection of old-fashioned rss feeds. It caught my eye, and I hesitated to open the link. We Are Losing Our Words , by Jeannette Cooperman at washington university's the common reader . The title is on the very edge of clickbait, but unlike clickbait, there is no subheader with some shocking claim about population level IQs or…
From the look of things, this wordpress site has not been updated in nearly five years, so it is best not to wait to have a look around if any of the documents are of special interest. If you are at all curious about the history and underpinnings of the earlier macintosh system software, don't miss the Inside Macintosh volumes under the miscellaneous heading.
The number of histories by Métis historians about their own histories, european-style trained or not, was zero. As a matter of practicality, this is not surprising. Most Métis in the early twentieth century had their hands full and then some with bare survival. Despite having emerged as a people in a key socio-economic niche characterized by extensive travel, trade, and diplomacy, Métis found…
There are many reasons I gave up listening to over-the-air radio, not least the way any and all stations are now like cable television: constant talk and most time taken up with repetitive and generally useless advertising. (No doubt there are sociologists or anthropologists out there who could complete impressive studies of what the advertisements suggest about the presumed listeners.) I had…
A remarkable project by rumanian photographer Mihaela Noroc, who has been travelling the world to capture images of women representing some of the many forms of women's beauty in the world. Her online gallery centres a selection of her series of photographs to date, each captioned with a brief account of the woman featured and how Noroc came to meet and interact with her. Noroc's book was…
In her substack article in her Free Female Speech Friday Series, Sandie Peggie (14 february 2025), Kara Dansky quoted a pointedly apt section of Andrew Doyle's substack post from the day before . Quoting Dansky quoting Doyle: "Trans-identified people are among the most powerful in society....
For anyone who has looked at the annotation of the "Hunting of the Snark" and been dissatisfied with note 6 to the preface on the Bellman, this update may be especially pleasing. To wit, I finally stumbled upon better information about that specific role on a ship, which as a confirmed landlubber to begin with I lacked even helpful search keywords to try out. Of course, sailors and aficionados of…
Early last year, one of the latest publications on a tiny carving from a site at dolní vestonice in the czech republic raised an understandable stir. As Kristina Killgrove wrote at livescience , among the artefacts recovered from the site is what is now understood to be the oldest known human portrait in the world . Not only the oldest human portrait, but a portrait of a woman buried at the site…
Founded in 1981 in part under the impetus of an english language teacher turned archaeologist named Peter Francis Jr., this society is just what it says. Today its membership fees continue to support publication of an annual journal, student travel award, the society's website and a generous selection of pdf copies of out of print early monographs and newsletters.
No doubt there are exceptions -- there are always exceptions -- but overall, I think it is fair to say that in most places today people are horrified by the destruction of libraries. By this I mean libraries in the common english language sense, a place where many books and other sorts of reading matter are collected together (at minimum) so that they may serve as a shared resource for a group of…
One of the stalwart 1990s-style websites still online, full of useful photographs and basic information related primarily to glass trade beads. Its archives are free to view, including thirteen exhibits. The site is also a modest storefront for a imported beads and a handfull of catalogues. The sales aspect is low key, leaving the well-lit photographs of samples to speak for themselves.
People who think they are white deciding they would rather be Indigenous and then presenting themselves as such is far from a new phenomenon. From the look of it, this was a thing from at minimum the beginning of the creation of settler states, which are what colonies are transmogrified into after the invaders manage to impose control by violence over the land and hem in Indigenous peoples. The…
The current state of public discussion and debate is terrible. The difficulties are about more than just the continuing crack down against actual "free speech" let alone "fair speech," although at the moment the most widely recognized sources of trouble are so-called "social media" and the rest of the media, which is generally a corrupt mess in the putative west. These are two real factors, and…
Another project devoted to out of print and/or misinterpreted or otherwise ignored books dealing with anti-colonial, anti-imperial, and revolutionary topics. This site focuses specifically on providing meaty book reviews and has produced at least one anthology to date. The editors of the site are also involved in translating and republishing the subject books when they have no english translation,…
In the course of hs lectures on "Reading Marx's Capital," specifically in his series on Volume 1 , he refers to technological change. Technological change is one of the factors affecting the productivity of labour and therefore how much profit capitalists may extract from the workers completing the labour. It seems to me that the usual understanding of what "technological change" refers to is…
A useful and regularly updated site listing and documenting user agents. It also provides some useful tools, although they are not always accessible due to server overloading. It is well worth checking out the list of browsers as well, as it turns out there are many more of these than it may seem. The parser page functions appear to be overwhelmed or broken.
Among today's steady stream of space-filler articles and alas often dubious listicles is an entire genre of "attention span" interest pieces. Based on my observations, they have apparently distinct threads for small children versus teenagers versus adults, and they often trace all ills back to screens, although some more recent ones keep trying to invoke something-something-covid. I have also…
An interesting project apparently intended to generate open access website index logs. Overall their bot is well-behaved, and the project is intended to run only from august 2022 to august 2025. The focus is on creating a proto-index for european use, due to belated concern about european sovereignty. So it seems like a project with half of the right idea at least (open indexing), but it is hard…
Among my various readings in the course of completing my mot recent major academic project, I managed to borrow a copy of the brilliantly titled and genuinely interesting, though occasionally hard going book, Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation by Seo-Young Chu. I have mentioned it from time to time and wrote an essay about Chu's theory and how she…
Due to recent abuse by a variety of bot proprietors, including the more than execrable openai, it is necessary to update how websites and server software to counter it. Today it is more effective to adjust firewall and .htaccess file settings, but it doesn't hurt to set up a robots.txt file. If nothing else, it is a good way to see which bots are set up to be rule abiding.
One of the great joys of working with older documents and sources is that they turn up unusual research rabbit holes. The most recent examples of these I have encountered started from a reference to "the Indo-European notion of the stone sky" with no source cited. It is clear why there is no citation: the author was a philologist working on indo-european languages writing for her colleagues, who…
A worker-owned small scholarly press originally founded in 2017 as the Center for Communist Studies. They republish important historical works, new translations, and a modest selection of original books. They are strongly committed to making their books as widely available as possible, producing free high quality pdfs as well as low-priced soft cover hard copies. While it is probable they will…
With the ongoing controversies over so-called social media, the question of "accessibility" keeps coming up, alongside the more important issue of "transferability." Now, to be clear, the "accessibility" I have observed being discussed most is not about whether people who live with various sorts of physical and mental disabilities are able to participate in "social media," but whether the barriers…
Harvard is a fading institution these days as its fundamental role as credential mill for the hyper-rich is overwhelming its more constructive possibilities due to united states politics. Meanwhile, there are disciplines in which the practitioners are striving to make their research more accessible all the same, which is probably the only way to preserve the original upper class twit credential,…
Admittedly, going by the state of the mainstream news, such as it is, the phenomenon of "swatting" is apparently no longer newsworthy. The term refers to the phenomenon of calling or otherwise contacting a law enforcement agency to report a false claim of a hostage taking, mass shooting, or similar incident to which a swat team would be sent. But that leaves a big part of the definition out should…
This project seems to be dead, but the pages and software are still up. The idea behind it is to support a return to self-hosted webpages and websites written by actual people without forcing them to use rigid templates or software along the lines of wordpress. It is too bad this project seems to have vanished, although it may have been absorbed by other projects such as the small web and indie…
The title of this thoughtpiece is the rather surreal response of an acquaintance to my answer when they asked me what I thought of the then new Star Trek series Picard . All I said was that it didn't interest me much, as it seemed to me we have lots of stories and information about the erstwhile successor to James T. Kirk. Let's move on to somebody else. Now I would add, clever as it was to…
Shirriff is a vintage computer restorer and hardware history enthusiast. The result is a blog chock-full of longform, well-annotated (including endnotes) posts and a quality source of technical and historical information. For visitors who visit with javascript off, this index page is the better starting point, but the main page does have archive links and similar, just at the very bottom instead…
Sometimes it is important to check on the origins of the various publications vaunted as "the media," especially the examples that seem especially broken. Hence I undertook some basic research to develop a better sense of the origins and development of the things we typically refer to as "newspapers" although they may not literally be printed on paper anymore. I had the definite sense that in the…
A full scan of a first edition copy of the very first Unix programming manual, scanned and posted by none other than Dennis M. Ritchie. He passed away in 2011, and in one of those quiet, utterly appropriate and generous memorials, his personal page remains online on the Bell Labs website.
Due to a recent server move, the Moonspeaker suffered an outage over the first two weeks of April. The issue should be resolved, and the backed up rss postings appear soon. Email service was unaffected. Of course, "should be resolved" is not the same as "confirmed resolved," so there will be some additional testing and monitoring which may slow the site somewhat over the next two weeks.
I admit to having no idea "moving the goalposts" has been such a popular meme and framing for various blogposts about business life, let alone sports. It is a well-established metaphor, widely used and understood in english, and likely in other languages where at minimum actual football (the kind without helmets and body armour) is widely played. More recently some goalkeepers have engaged in…
A history of the MULTICS operating system compiled and written by many people who worked on and with the system through its research and commercial existence from 1969 to 2000. MULTICS is the (in)famous inspiration of the original UNIX operating system. An unusual but instructive place to start exploring the site is with the Multicians page proper.
After a point, it is difficult to know what to say or do on encountering european and european-identified people who repeat, in an aggrieved tone, always with an added side of "how dare they not do as we tell them," how terrible it is that those awful foreigners won't enter agreements with them. In the mainstream media where the anglophone practitioners are completely fixated on the united states…
Dan Walsh's remarkable and ongoing collection of Palestinian poster art, for which he has created a gallery of excellent scans. He also provides a brief history of the genre and the artists, annotations of the posters, related readings and videos, and information on how to provide additions.
Thanks to the combination of my day job and my research work, I often have to look up older sources, including many books commonly referred to as "classics" and translated from the original language, typically french or german, unless the "classic" is much older, in which case some variant of latin is more likely. However, this also means that sometimes I end up having to spend time sorting out…
An important, ongoing effort to provide well-written, thorough, manuals, books, and pages on many utility programs and other elements of linux systems. Materials range in level from beginner to medium-high level kernel programming. The contributors and maintainers are all volunteers.
Of course, as soon as we pick up such a loaded question, we have to deal with the issue of definitions and lack of specificity. It makes total sense to ask what "settle" means here, and furthermore, settle for what? Revealingly, "settle" is a verb with so many negative connotations I can't help but think the various colonizing nations and those committed to their exploiting ways have taken against…
A relatively new project focussed on women's history through the medium of biography. There is a bit of a knack to getting into the main essays, perhaps due to heavy use of javascript. The essays so far indicate a very promising project, even if it is persistently limited to women from "the west" and its few references to what are considered "worthy orientals." This gives the coverage an…