Laurence Gonsalves
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laurence.gonsalv.es
Laurence Gonsalves
@laurence.gonsalv.es
540 followers 1.6K following 300 posts
I like old computers, making things, science, math, and science fiction.

Currently making something new at @Nipht.io. Helped create Google Reader.

@xenomachina@oldbytes.space on the fediverse. Formerly @laurence on the birdsite.

IDIC 🖖
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laurence.gonsalv.es
I mean...
Snow Miser and Heat Miser, two characters from the stop-motion animated special "The Year without a Santa Claus" (1974). Snow Miser looks like he's made out of snow and ice, while Heat Miser looks like he's made out of fire.
November 2, 2025 at 4:09 PM
laurence.gonsalv.es
I've been programming in Python for over 25 years, and only just learned that comparison chaining is not just for relational operators, but for all comparison operators including == and is.
“Gru’s plan” meme: 1. Gru smiles: “Complex comparisons 3 > 2 > 1 False.” 2. Gru looks pleased: “Add chaining! >> 3 > 2 > 1 True.” 3. Gru smugly gestures: “is operator chains >> 1 != 1 is False False.” 4. Gru is disappointed: “False.”
September 23, 2025 at 9:42 PM
laurence.gonsalv.es
I wish I had screenshots of the way the clock and phone apps used to look on Android for comparison, because these Material 3 Expressive updates look terrible. The spacing and sizing of everything is so inconsistent, and where did they get this ugly font from?
Screenshot of Material 3 Expressive clock app in the "World Clock" view. The font used for the times looks like it's made out of chopped up noodles.
September 17, 2025 at 6:29 PM
laurence.gonsalv.es
FWIW, the name on unicode.org/emoji/charts... is "oncoming fist", but it wouldn't be the first time their names don't line-up with reality.

For example, 😑 is not an "expressionless face". It's the expression to end all expressions: the "I'm done" face.
August 29, 2025 at 8:20 PM
laurence.gonsalv.es
Mildly interesting for fellow #Amiga fans: TikTok's 404 page has a "guru meditation" message.
Screenshot of 404 page reading: 404 Not FOund Guru Meditation: [long hex number] Goofy Deploy Page Server
August 16, 2025 at 1:23 AM
laurence.gonsalv.es
Lemon dressing
A doodle of an anthropomorphic lemon putting on a grey jacket.
August 7, 2025 at 11:24 AM
laurence.gonsalv.es
Setting timers on other speakers with Google Home has become completely broken in the past few weeks.

When I tell our kitchen speaker to set a timer on our upstairs speaker, it tells me that the timer has been started. However, if then I check what timers are running, there are none. It just lies!
July 23, 2025 at 5:15 PM
laurence.gonsalv.es
At a panel at Open Sauce, and @vsauce.bsky.social concisely summed up how many of us feel about AI generated content:

"why would I want to watch something that someone couldn't even be bothered to make"
Michael Stevens (aka vsauce aka corndogwilly) on stage at Open Sauce 2025.
July 19, 2025 at 10:24 PM
laurence.gonsalv.es
I had a 1660, which was also 300 baud, but could do dialing—sort of. It didn't have Hayes commands. Instead pulse dialing worked by the computer telling it to hang up and pick up very fast. Tone dialing worked by having the computer audio pipe into the modem, so you'd generate DTMF tones in the SID.
Commodore modem /300 model 1660 and Commodore modem/1200 model 1670 side by side. They look very similar: they look sort of like cartridges (but with a user port connector), and have a speaker grill on top. Their coloration is slightly different, with the 1660 being a slightly darker gray compared to the 1670's light beige, and the screenshot text is white on the 1660 but purple on the 1670. The 1660 has a small slider switch on its left side labeled "O"/"A". The backs of the same two modems. They both have two modular phone jacks. The 1670 has a small rectangular window (the type used for dip switches, though they are not actually visible in this photo). The 1660 instead has an RCA jack labeled "AUDIO IN". A top down view of the two modems.
July 12, 2025 at 6:11 PM
laurence.gonsalv.es
I only just now realized that the Omega class from Babylon 5 looks very similar to the Leonov spacecraft from the movie 2010 (1984).
An image of the Leonov spacecraft from the movie 2010. It is gray and covered in greebling. It consists of a longitudinal structure with a few "towers" that protrude from it (including one with a large antenna dish), and a massive rotating piece in the middle.
July 10, 2025 at 9:44 PM
laurence.gonsalv.es
I recently found an Odo rubber stamp I've had for probably 30 years buried in a drawer.

As a rubber stamp, maybe not so useful. However, because it looks like Odo's head and shoulders on a (mostly) flat base, you can rest it on a random object to make it look like it's Odo mid-transformation.
Screen grab from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine depicting Odo and another changeling mid-transformation. Their bodies look like translucent orange goo, with a humanoid (partial) neck and head sticking out the top. Odo stamp resting on a red rotary telepone. Or is it a telephone turning back into Odo? Odo stamp resting on a tin robot. Or is it a tin robot turning back into Odo? Odo stamp resting on a cat. Or is it a cat turning back into Odo?
July 10, 2025 at 4:01 PM
laurence.gonsalv.es
The box for the Lego Chrysanthemum set has a banana for scale!
The box for the Lego Chrysanthemum set sitting on a beige carpet in front of a white wall. There's a picture of the completed set on the front of the box, but on the top edge is a square with one of the "petal" pieces from the set in the square. A close-up of that square. The "petal" piece is actually a Lego banana piece, but reddish orange. "1:1" is printed next to it, as the picture is printed "actual size". It's a banana for scale.
July 10, 2025 at 5:41 AM
laurence.gonsalv.es
I love/hate that "Breaking Change" is an exception because making it "Breaking-Change" for consistency would probably be a breaking change.
Screenshot of text from the linked blog post. It reads: "But why make an exception for BREAKING CHANGE ? Why not have it as Breaking-Change ? It’s not like it adds or remove any character, all that would change is it would stay consistent with other keys."
July 7, 2025 at 1:29 AM
laurence.gonsalv.es
You can use piellardj.github.io/stereogram-s... and upload an autostereogram image. It'll add shading to show the silhouette of the 3D shape.
A screenshot of the output of Sterogram solver on the aforementioned sterogram, showing the block letters "LGR".
May 6, 2025 at 7:26 PM
laurence.gonsalv.es
The "you probably don't know about" part here is killing me.

The last version of Windows that I used regularly, required that you press Ctrl+Alt+Del just to log on. This was supposedly a security measure, to make it harder for someone to create a password harvester.
Screenshot of the Windows NT Workstation splash screen with a "Begin Logon" dialog that reads "Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to log on". There's a little icon of a hand reaching for three (keyboard) keys.
May 6, 2025 at 4:05 AM
laurence.gonsalv.es
I thought it might be from Usborne's "The World of the Future" series (1979), but I don't see it in those books, and they use a different typeface for headings.

Here's a virtual meeting and a smart watch from "Future Cities".
An illustration of a virtual meeting, with 3 participants on the left side of a conference table in front of a window showing daytime scenery, and one participant on the right in front of a window showing a nighttime city skyline. There is a fussy white band down the center of the image. The caption reads: The magic of laser-holography, a new technique which creates 3-D pictures, apparently out of thin air, could result in business conferences like the one shown above. On the left. The heads of a branch office have just come to their boardroom, first thing in the morning. Across the table is their boss. He is in the head office of the company in the center of a major city, thousands of miles away. It is night time there and it is the end of his day. 3-D cameras hanging from the ceilings of each room. Create the illusion of a complete room with the two sides present (this picture has been split down the middle to avoid confusion). Electronic conferences like this would save enormous amounts of time, money, and energy. An illustration of a hand wearing a complicated digital watch, with text labels pointing out various parts. The labels read: Digital telephone number read-out (a red on black single-line display) Digital time read-out (another red on black single-line display) Pop out aerials (four small metallic rods that extend from the four sides of the watch face, making a "plus" shape) Push buttons to programme telephone calls (a number pad) 'Emergency' button (a button with a red triangle) Button extends pop out aerials (a red button on the integrated wrist strap) Microphone/loudspeaker (a grille across the center of the watch face)
May 5, 2025 at 7:55 PM
laurence.gonsalv.es
Does anyone know the original source of this image? It's usually described as a 1970s or '80s vision of what a PDA or smartphone would look like, but the book it came from is never named. It resembles the style of some Usborne books (and the spelling of "colour" suggests that it isn't American).
Illustration showing a "Pocket computer". The text reads "In the very near future you will probably be able to buy, quite cheaply, a pocket computer with all the features shown below. See if you can think of things you would do with a pocket computer if you had one." The computer itself is a yellow rectangle with labeled areas: "colour display screen" (a black CRT with orange pixels) "touch sensitive controls" (a red square and a blue square) "sound synthesizer for music and speech" (a 3x3 grid of dots) "microphone for voice input" (three differently colored squares) "keyboard" (a green grid and a blue grid of keys) "sockets for tape cassette, TV, other computers, printer, etc." (small protrusions on right side) There's a hand holding the device, just like one would hold a smartphone. There is a border around the illustration, with some bits of other illustrations visible, including the back of a person's head, and the side of a house with stairs and a corner of what might be a car.
May 5, 2025 at 7:55 PM
laurence.gonsalv.es
Tired of manually moving bookmarks from your browser to Niphtio? Now you can import directly from Chrome (and Chromium browsers)! 🤯Save time, effort, and more easily organize all your links in one place. Give it a try today!
#Niphtio #Chrome #BookmarkImport #TechTips
New! Import bookmarks from Chrome to Niphtio.
April 17, 2025 at 7:53 PM
laurence.gonsalv.es
Weird but interesting sculpture (?) at SJC.
April 11, 2025 at 10:50 PM
laurence.gonsalv.es
It looks like if you block enough of your recent followers (my guess is the last "page" worth), then the UI doesn't display your list of followers.
A screenshot of my Bluesky "followers" list, showing "499 followers" but then "No results found; You do not have any followers".
April 9, 2025 at 6:23 AM
laurence.gonsalv.es
I saw this mural in a restaurant the other day. To drink is human, but to eat salad is divine?
A mural depicting two hands reaching towards one another, the hand on the left holding a glass of liquid, and the one on the right holding some leafy greens. The hands have the exact posture as the hands in Michaelangelo's "The Creation of Adam" in the Sistine Chapel.
March 6, 2025 at 10:39 PM
laurence.gonsalv.es
It always cracks me up when a site uses a spinner (the up/down arrows) on their security code input. To get to a random 6-digit code is going to take a *lot* longer (on average) than the 30-second timeout.
A screenshot of Kickstarter's MFA code form. It says "Enter the code generated by your authenticator app to continue", and the code field has pair of buttons, up and down arrows, for adjusting the number.
March 4, 2025 at 10:51 PM
laurence.gonsalv.es
Not my home, but I know my way around.
The interior of Brittle Hollow, from the game Outer WIlds.
March 2, 2025 at 11:54 PM
laurence.gonsalv.es
Here's a terrible UI from Nextdoor. Dark pattern, or incompetence? I'm not sure.

Does this mean one is *unsubscribed* from all of their emails, or *subscribed* to all of their emails? How is one meant to interpret the double-negative of "you will no longer receive the following" with an OFF switch?
Screenshot of Nextdoor's unsubscribe UI with "Unsubscribe successful" as the heading. Below that it says "You will no longer receive the following emails" and lists several categories, but each has a turned-off switch control. (The categories are "Lost & found", "General posts", "Recommendations", "Safety", "Polls", "Posts from Nextdoor" and "Group posts". There's also a "Manage notification settings" link below the list.)
March 2, 2025 at 9:05 PM
laurence.gonsalv.es
Not for mobile phones, but I just learned of PyDPainter (pydpainter.org) which is a very faithful knock-off of Deluxe Paint.
A screenshot of PyDPainter. It looks almost exactly like Deluxe Paint on the Amiga running at 320×200 with 32 colors, even down to the bitmap "Topaz" font. The one notable difference is that the leftmost menu is called "PyDPainter". The classic DPaint "King Tut" image is loaded.
December 18, 2024 at 7:53 PM