PopSci

One of the many botched faxes

This is a (rather freely) translated version of this article.

When most people hear «fax», they remember those clumsy hybrids of a telephone and a printer straight outta 80s (unless you're in Japan, of course — they're still common there). But did you know that a similar technology is used to provide ship crews with weather data when there's no Internet connection? And Kyodo, a Japanese news agency (they sure like faxes, huh), still broadcasts news like that. And we can decode all this stuff, too — given a receiver, an audio cable and some software.

Last year 2018, a theatre production series called Tale of the Century was launched in Estonia. Throughout the year, 22 local theatres presented their interpretations of the past hundred years of Estonian history to the audiences. In the draw, the Russian Theatre was assigned the topic of the future of Estonia.

A few years ago I had a feeling that Oleg Chumakov (then working at the game studio Nival) was the most famous programmer in the game development industry. He was giving speeches, hosted Gamesjams and frequently showed up on the podcast How games are made.

When VR hit the market, Oleg was chosen to lead the company’s new department — NivalVR. But, as you probably know, VR didn’t quite take off as much as people expected.

I kind of moved to other to other things in life and stopped keeping up with game development for a while, but after getting into it again I noticed that things were looking up for Oleg’s team. Now it’s called Luden.io, and their machine learning expert simulator, while True: learn() became a huge hit in its admittedly small niche. Lots of cool stories are happening around the game and the team.

We decided to do an interview with Oleg, but I couldn’t stick to one topic — his life up to this moment has been, for the lack of a better word, “interesting”. He’s seen it all. And, to ensure that a programmer could talk about programming without fear of looking too “nerdy”, the interview was conducted by my friend, colleague and an experienced developer of its own fillpackart.

In 2017, the media heard a very interesting story about a startup that robotizes milking cows on industrial dairy farms. The company is called R-SEPT, and back then it received 10 million rubles of investment. But a year has passed, and there's still no news on what happened further. We contacted Aleksey Khakhunov (AlexeiHahunov), the founder of the startup, and discussed the development. It turns out that the whole year his team was getting the prototype of the robot into shape, and just a week ago they conducted their first field test on the farm.

Under the cut there's a story about a robotics student who grew up on his parents' farm, turned the University diploma into an industrial startup, as he collected the first manipulators with his friends, and then scaled up to the level of state programs for the robotization of agriculture. And the most important is how the iron hand of the robot and the machine vision are better than a living milkmaid.

Probably, there are not so many users on Habr who have never heard about the «Internet Archive», a service that searches and stores the digital data that is important for all mankind, whether it be the Internet pages, books, videos or other type of information.

Who manages the Internet archive, when it appeared and what is its mission? Read about it in the today's «Inquiry».

Hi there, Habr!

Remember the story of Steve Jobs and Dennis Ritchie? Without any intention to rekindle the debates or moralize on the subject, let’s face the truth: thousands of stellar techies live in the shadow, while their own stories are hidden in a dusty cupboard.

We, the Habr editorial team, are keen to tackle this injustice. From now on, we will regularly interview people who keep a low profile in media and social networks. So if you have anything to tell about yourself, get ready.

To give you an idea of what this will look like, we will lead the way. Click below to see 10 general questions we will ask every guest. For our pilot episode, the first guest to answer the questions was fillpackart. (This month I’ve had several quite good interview sessions with him, see articles one, two, three). Please read them, and if you make up your mind on telling your own story in a similar way, just send me or baragol a message.

Author of the original post in Russian: frsamara

I always loved playing with things and testing them under all sorts of wacky conditions as a kid and even considered getting a job as a tester, but I never did. Nevertheless, I still like taking things made by someone else and poking them for vulnerabilities.

I remember, when first self-service payment terminals started popping around town, I saw one of them put up a browser window while updating, and the game was on — I broke it almost immediately. There’s been a lot of discussion about it since then and developers have started to pay a lot more attention towards security in these machines.

Recently, fast-food joints have started installing these terminals. Obviously, it’s quite convenient: just tap a couple of virtual buttons, place an order, pay with a bank card and wait for your number to show on the screen.

Also, nearly every big mall has these interactive boards with floor plans and information on various sales and discounts.

How secure are they?

Author of the original post in Russian: old_gamer



I'm a ragman. I have a closet full of old hardware. From Boolean logic microchips in DIP-cases to Voodoo5. Of course, there's no practical value in all of this, but some people enjoy messing with old hardware. If you are one of them, I invite you under the cut, where I will tell you how the computer based on AMD 286 processor worked with a modern network, and what came out of it.

Author of the original post in Russian: HotWaterMusic

The history of the world's gamedev knows quite a few curious bugs that had to be tackled by developers. In fact, judging from the story that Media Molecule's CTO Alex Evans shared on his Twitter page this past weekend, many legends are still waiting to be heard. Evans is famous for his part in a demoscene performance of late 1990s and his work on the LittleBigPlanet game series and on Rag Doll Kung Fu.

The case I am referring to in this article took place ten years ago, in 2008. While working on the first part of LittleBigPlanet — an original puzzle platform video game that was to be released exclusively for PlayStation 3 — the company's developers came across a really hard-to-catch bug.

Normally, for a game to get the green light to be released for consoles, it needs to pass a certification process, i.e. meet a set of requirements predefined by the platform owner. The certification may also include more specific requirements, such as the game running smoothly without crashing for 24 hours.

The development of LittleBigPlanet was at its last stage, with just two weeks to final deployment and distribution. Suddenly a tester from the company's QA in Japan reported that the game was consistently crashing when left overnight. Now the release was evidently out of question unless the bug was fixed.

Darts is one of the most popular games in the world. It’s a good way to challenge your friends and family members, putting your accuracy to the test. However, keeping score can be a challenge. People often needed to rely on pen and paper, tallying up the score by hand. Thankfully, modern technology can help solve this challenge. An app makes calculating the winner easy, giving you more time to focus on the game.

If you’re planning on designing one of these apps, there are a few steps that you’ll need to follow.

Set-Up Players

The first thing that you need to decide is who will be playing the game. This will require the player to enter the input. If more than one person is playing, they will need to enter their names. This will allow the app to keep the scores separate.

Embroidery can be a great way to personalize your clothing. You can add your name or the logo of your business. To make the process easier, many embroidery machines work with computer software. This allows you to create the design, then transfer it to the embroidery machine. By doing this, you’ll be able to automate the process. This will reduce the time it takes to produce beautiful designs.
Because of these benefits, there is a range of software options for you to choose from. This gives you a lot of choices to consider when picking what you want to use. But it can make finding the right one more challenging. Let’s look at some of the best software options to consider.

Hatch

If you’re looking for a leading type of software, you can try Hatch. This is based on three decades of experience. It also has a lot of innovative features that make it easy to use. First, it automatically assigns things like stitch length and placement, to suit the design you create. It also has an automatic branching function, so you’ll be able to sew continuously, rather than in stops and starts.
This software also comes with a lot of tools that are designed to make it easy for you to transform the design onto the computer. For example, you’ll be able to put a hand-drawn sketch into the software. You can also download one of the many existing designs. By doing this, it will be easy for you to create innovative embroidery designs. There are multiple levels, so you’ll only need to pay for the features that you find the most useful.