Last week's CSA delivered this week
This week's CSA minus the shishito peppers we already ate
Y’all, this one is close to me. A San Diego mutual aid organizer I’m connected with needs support to pay for a jaw surgery they’re having soon: https://gofund.me/09d07f525
Any amount helps and boosting is much appreciated. 💛
Happy #8bitday yesterday! It was the 256th day of the year.
See last year’s post for why the 256th day is 8-Bit Day: https://tantek.com/2024/256/t1/happy-8bitday-binary-byte
Since last year, the related Wikipedia article on “Programmer’s Day” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmer%27s_Day) was updated to finally acknowledge worldwide observation of the day.
This year, inspired by the old 5k (bytes) competition (https://the5k.org/about.php), I suggested to a few friends that it may be possible to build an entire website where each resource fits into at most 8-bits worth of bytes. 255 bytes maximum size HTML, and maximum size of any linked external stylesheet, image, or even script file.
Constraints are key to good, creative, and often innovative design.
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2023/06/design-constraints-challenges-opportunities-practical-strategies/
I have some ideas for how to create meaningful HTML documents in ≤ 255 bytes. I also have some experience with creating interesting style sheets under similar constraints with the invention of TSS (Tweet Style Sheets or Text Style Sheets) at the 2010 Twitter Annotations Hackfest (#tanhf). TSS links and details on https://indieweb.org/TSS
Intuitively I think a home page ≤255 bytes may be the most challenging, like displaying and linking to a stream of posts, in addition to basic about info. Post permalinks could display short notes (like old 140 character posts), requiring pagination to view anything longer. Images would be another interesting challenge, since even a 32x32 black & white (1-bit) icon would already be 128 bytes. What can fit into a 255 byte PNG or JPEG?, nevermind SVG, which will be much harder than HTML due to its much longer tags and attributes.
The archived FAQ for the5k competition is a good start for answering various questions about how to build an "8-bit" website: https://web.archive.org/web/20050310075803/http://www.the5k.org:80/2001faq.asp
I would add to that proper use of progressive enhancement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement), that is, all the content on a page is viewable, and all links, buttons, forms etc. work without loading any scripts.
Besides the5k.org, have there been any similar challenges or competitions for 1k bytes, or 512 bytes? Why did Stewart pick 5k bytes instead of something smaller?
See last year’s post for why the 256th day is 8-Bit Day: https://tantek.com/2024/256/t1/happy-8bitday-binary-byte
Since last year, the related Wikipedia article on “Programmer’s Day” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmer%27s_Day) was updated to finally acknowledge worldwide observation of the day.
This year, inspired by the old 5k (bytes) competition (https://the5k.org/about.php), I suggested to a few friends that it may be possible to build an entire website where each resource fits into at most 8-bits worth of bytes. 255 bytes maximum size HTML, and maximum size of any linked external stylesheet, image, or even script file.
Constraints are key to good, creative, and often innovative design.
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2023/06/design-constraints-challenges-opportunities-practical-strategies/
I have some ideas for how to create meaningful HTML documents in ≤ 255 bytes. I also have some experience with creating interesting style sheets under similar constraints with the invention of TSS (Tweet Style Sheets or Text Style Sheets) at the 2010 Twitter Annotations Hackfest (#tanhf). TSS links and details on https://indieweb.org/TSS
Intuitively I think a home page ≤255 bytes may be the most challenging, like displaying and linking to a stream of posts, in addition to basic about info. Post permalinks could display short notes (like old 140 character posts), requiring pagination to view anything longer. Images would be another interesting challenge, since even a 32x32 black & white (1-bit) icon would already be 128 bytes. What can fit into a 255 byte PNG or JPEG?, nevermind SVG, which will be much harder than HTML due to its much longer tags and attributes.
The archived FAQ for the5k competition is a good start for answering various questions about how to build an "8-bit" website: https://web.archive.org/web/20050310075803/http://www.the5k.org:80/2001faq.asp
I would add to that proper use of progressive enhancement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement), that is, all the content on a page is viewable, and all links, buttons, forms etc. work without loading any scripts.
Besides the5k.org, have there been any similar challenges or competitions for 1k bytes, or 512 bytes? Why did Stewart pick 5k bytes instead of something smaller?
Made a plan for upgrading the drives in a couple of my NASs. A lot of these 6TB drives are over 5 years old and two of them already failed so I'm sure the rest will be next soon. When I'm done with this migration, I'll end up with 36TB on the primary NAS, and 30TB on the backup NAS.
Did all the prep work for this live edge table and got it cut down to size, but then realized we bought the wrong kind of epoxy so the pour has to start tomorrow.
Cranking through the old 8mm tapes again! These are so old they don't play back well on the 2001-era camcorder, but this Japanese 8mm tape deck handles them just fine!
Want to read: Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by (ISBN 9780060899226)
I set up this box to be able to route phone calls from my FreePBX into my studio recording gear. Why? Just to see if I could I guess.
