Other Things I Think Are Cool

May not *quite* fit in the boundaries of ResearchBuzz. And yet I groove on it.

Slashgear: You can now play the original Diablo game on web browsers

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Slashgear: You can now play the original Diablo game on web browsers. “The gaming industry is pretty terrible at preserving its rich history. The hard and thankless work of making sure classic games are still available to future generations is done by third-parties, some of whom even risk lawsuits from companies that are not at all interested in doing that but continue to close off these games to protect their IPs decades after their day in the market. Fortunately, through odd twists in history, the code for the original Diablo has more or less become available to the public, leading to one of the oddest ports of the game: Diablo on the Web.” I tried this briefly on my Chromebook. It looked a little weird (the colors were off) but played fine.

CBC: It’s all in the plans — or is it? How to take a critical look at architectural drawings

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This is pretty far outside my wheelhouse, but I’ve never read an article like it before. It made me think about things I’d never thought about, in a good way. So I’m sharing. CBC: It’s all in the plans — or is it? How to take a critical look at architectural drawings. “There’s been a lot of opposition to a proposed expansion of the Anglican Cathedral in St. John’s, but the plans have at least one thing going for them, says a retired architect. The graphic, or artist rendering, of the expansion is detailed and realistic, giving residents and decision makers complete picture of what the finished product will bring, says Jim Case. And that’s exactly what people should be looking and asking for from these images, Case said.”

Reddit: Fun little experiment — Using a Raspberry Pi 4 to archive Reddit in real-time

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Reddit: Fun little experiment — Using a Raspberry Pi 4 to archive Reddit in real-time. “I recently got a Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB) and wanted to torture the shit out of it by running an Elasticsearch node on it. Much to my surprise, not only does it keep up with indexing Reddit data in real-time, it offers surprisingly fast searches.”

BIG NEWS: 42 New Girl Scout Badges to Change the World (Girl Scouts Blog)

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Girl Scouts Blog: BIG NEWS: 42 New Girl Scout Badges to Change the World. “The new programming allows girls to make their own choices about how they want to experience and influence the world while preparing them to address some of society’s most pressing needs through hands-on learning and real-life problem-solving in cybersecurity, coding, space exploration, and citizen science.” This sounds sooooo much better than the Girl Scouts of my youth. I’m a bitty jealous.

Ars Technica: Behold, the most (intentionally) poorly designed website ever created

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Ars Technica: Behold, the most (intentionally) poorly designed website ever created. “Sometimes we take Web and user interface design for granted—that’s the point of User Inyerface, a hilariously and deliberately difficult-to-use website created to show just how much we rely on past habits and design conventions to interact with the Web and our digital devices.”

Hackaday: Be On Twitter Without Being On Twitter

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Hackaday: Be On Twitter Without Being On Twitter. “Social media can connect us to a vibrant worldwide community, but it is also a huge time sink as it preys on both our need for attention and our insatiable curiosity. Kept on a leash by those constant notification sounds, we can easily look up from our phones to find half a day has gone and we’re behind with our work. [Laura Lytle] has a plan to tackle this problem, her OutBox project involves a single button press machine that posts a picture to Twitter of whatever is put in it.”