Spacewar! was one of the first video games and in 1972, Rolling Stone magazine sent Stewart Brand — 33 years old at the time — to document the early days of computing as entertainment. The photographs were taken by a young Annie Leibovitz (23). Play the original 1962 game code running on a PDP-1 emulator in your Java-enabled browser. [via]

Hack a Day serves up fresh hacks each day, every day from around the web and a special How-To hack each week.

Photo Credit: “Hide the Graffiti!” by incurable_hippie

Here’s a small but incredibly useful snippet of code I’d like to share. When I’m developing WordPress websites, I often find myself in a situation where I need to code on a site that’s actually live. Naturally I want to keep my prototyping invisible to the visitors of that site. After all, I don’t want anyone seeing all my mistakes now do I?

The following wrapper can be applied to a block of code and the results will only be visible on the live site to users who are logged in with admin privileges.

Continue Reading…

An amazingly detailed series of essays by Shamus Young culminating in an amazing Windows screensaver that generates an entirely procedurally-generated cityscape, at night, with lighting… without a single graphical texture. Absolutely stunning work.

The Royal College of Art’s graduate show has opened, and this year, the show-stopper was a plug. Min-Kyu Choi impressed every passer by with his neat, apparently market-ready plug that folds down to the width of an Apple MacBook Air. “The MacBook Air is the world’s thinnest laptop ever. However, here in the UK, we still use the world’s biggest three-pin plug,” says Choi.

The idea produced a spin off, too. Choi created a multi-plug adaptor, a compact standard plug sized unit with space for three folded plugs to slot in, as well as one that charges USB devices.

This simply has to be commercially produced.

Photo Credit: “Ormai” by pierofix

Back when I rebooted the Urban Mainframe and made my big switch to WordPress, I registered with wordpress.com and started recording traffic data for this site — looking for an ego boost, like you do. I also installed the WordPress.com Popular Posts plug-in and it is this which drives the “What’s Popular Here?” widget in the sidebar.

I had hoped that the Popular Posts widget would drive some traffic to some of my older posts and indeed it did, but with an unexpected consequence.

Continue Reading…

Two heavyweights prepare to do battle. Google versus Wolfram Research (awesome screencast). This is going to interesting.

Understanding computing history is very important because, if you look across the sweep of it from the 1940s to today, it’s much easier to see where we might go next.

Programmers who hack their own bodies don’t need exercise and never get sick. A short story by Cory Doctorow.

You might be interested in learning how to install OS X on netbooks from the likes of Dell, MSI or Lenova… then again, you might not!