Multimedia software
Sandbox games and interactive encyclopedias
- Tyto Ecology lets you create
a biome (rainforest, desert, grassland, tundra, …) under a dome. You
have to select the species and their number to create a stable
ecosystem.
- Sim City
- The Sims
- Cell to Singularity - Evolution Never Ends
is an exponential game in which the milestones are important aspects
of evolution from the first cells to civilization as a tech tree.
- Dorling Kindersley:
User interface
Fonts
Fonts with ligatures to display programming symbols
Public Domain fonts
Tiny fonts for the last level of detail of zoomable user interfaces
Icons
Public Domain icons
Terminal
- Rich terminal emulators
- Terminal multiplexers
Software engineering best practices
Software Engineer's Reference Book,
John McDermid, 1992. ISBN-13: 978-0750608138, ISBN-10: 0750608137
This is a compilation of surveys written by people in the fields of
testing, systems design, and so on. Each survey describes the
practices and techniques used in that field, and include a rich
bibliography
Programming practices (human-human interactions)
- The psychology of computer programming silver anniversary edition
Hardware
CPU and integrated circuits
- Wikipedia's illustration of a NAND gate's physical layout clearly shows how NMOS and PMOS transistors are created on a silicon substrate, as well as a schematic representation of the resulting layers. Page visited on 2019-03-12.
- Some people have built small integrated circuits (e.g. inverters) at home, using simple equipment: Jeri Ellsworth, HomeCMOS.
- visual6502.org, a sumulation of the 6502 CPU based on photos of the silicon die. It features an online zoomable view of the CPU with different colors for the logic states, in which wires and transistors blink as the CPU executes instructions.
Keyboard
- N-shot injection keycaps
- Planck keyboards have only four rows. The first row is usually activated with the thumbs, and all other keys are at most 1 key away from the home row.
- WASD Keyboards does full-color print on keycaps. Examples:
- Manufacturers and sellers:
- Massdrop gathers enthusiasts to buy medium-sized batches of random items (including keybords) to reduce the costs of small series that would not be commercialy viaable otherwise.
- Relegendable keycaps, a paper label can be placed below a transparent snap-on top. Other source.
- Apple Touch Bar
- Optimus Maximus keyboard has OLED screens below the keys, which are transparent, so that the symbols or icons under the keys can be changed.
- Time Tyler: My keyboard, My low force microswitches, (My mice)[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Flk-_8cYxw], My foot switches
- Optical switches: possibly more durable than rubber contact switches. TODO: check the names and other kinds of switches.
Other input methods
- Mouse
- MousePoint (ThinkPad)
- Trackball
- LEAP
Screen
OLPC display
The OLPC (One Laptop Per Child project) integrates a Pixel Qi
screen. This screen uses subpixels (red, green, blue) with a square
aspect ratio using a non-traditional layout of the subpixels. It
features a reflective higher-resolution black and white display,
which works in bright sunlight. Behind that black and white layer,
there is a backlit screen with colored pixels. This means that
depending on the lighting of the environment and backlight
brightness, the color may fade away, but a crisp black and white
picture will always be visible. This also allows for reduced power
consumption if the backlight is disabled or its brightness reduced.
Touchscreen
- TODO: Capacitive vs. Resistive (one of the supports using a stylus on the same screen)
File format standards
Used to generate or write files in this project
Used to read files
Graphical and alternative representation of concepts
- [46] graphical representation of linear algebra, with a discussion
on non-copyable resources (related to linear programming) in one of
the articles
Bootstrap
Concise software
- Frank by the ViewPoints Research Institute is an operating system including a
document editor, which fits in 20000 lines of code (no complete
buildable source code repository, the source is scattered in several
places). It relies heavily on domain-specific languages (DSLs), and
their implementation is included in the count of source lines of
code.
- Small linux distributions
- Other small operating systems
Operating System tutorials
Real-world bootstrap
Bootstrapping is an important facet of technology. By having a clear
path to bootstrap a given branch of science or technology we can
explain it in a more synthetic way, implement things in a clean way
while getting rid of historical blunders and baseless
traditions.
Having some hindsight on the shortest path to success can give some
foresight on the future directions to explore. If the failed paths are
also made clear, this foresight might extend to knowing which future
directions should likely be avoided.
The references in this section are not limited to computer-related
technologies.
RepStrap
RepRap is a 3D printer that is capable of replicating most of its
parts which are not off-the-shelf.
RepStrap projects are about creating an initial RepRap without an
existing RepRap and without advanced tooling.
Global Village Construction Set
The GVCS aims to design construction kits for 50 industrial machines
which would be necessary for a self-sufficient village. Among these
are the compressed earth brick press (used to make bricks for
buildings), a tractor, a wind turbine, or the Fabrication
Construction Set which can be used to build the other machines.
- The Knowledge How to
rebuild our world from scratch, Lewis Dartnell, ISBN-10: 0143127047,
ISBN-13: 978-0143127048
