A 110-year old map of undersea communication cables from. The Portuguese coast is quite busy and I wonder if this is still the case today (via Boing Boing).

On a related note, Neal Stephenson’s Mother Earth Mother Board, a surprisingly entertaining (at least for me) account of the laying of undersea fiberoptic cables in late 20th century.

Backupday. I always make a point of having at least two separate copies of every single digital file I have, ever since I lost my entire digital life up to 1998 in a thunderstorm. It was mostly kid stuff, PaintShop Pro doodles, Doom level designs, etecetera, but it hurt, becoming one of the things I’m somewhat paranoid about.

Anyway. It’s incredible to look at all the years past since I started producing videos (depicted is one of my two video backup external drives), while at the same time it is depressing all my work fits in a single drive (I only backup the final exported video files, not the sources, but still).

Wired: Photo Enlargers Loom Like Dinosaurs of the Film Age. Requiem for a technology. Even if film is still marginally hip, making color prints in a home lab is just insanely difficult, compared to scanning and (eventually) printing on an inkjet. And since you can’t flaunt your enlarger in public, unlike that old FM of yours, why put up with inconvenience?

Yep. But Asteroids is quite a sophisticated example, isn’t it? (via Abstruse Goose)

Mad Men set photos. Someone really ought to do a gallery of ‘laptops from the future’ in stages and film sets. Previously. (via Boing Boing)

I can’t explain why I like this. Suddently I hope someone would actually write a Tumblr client for the Atari 2600 as they did a Twitter client for the ZX Spectrum. I actually had a 2600 when I was a kid, a few year after I had my Spectrum. It rocked my world despite the much poorer graphics and sound (if such a thing is possible), because the games loaded instantly.

My fastest machine ever. (via Topherchris)

“Neco Toüch is a game “all the rage among German children” that awards points for befriending feral cats with careful touches on the nose (eliciting purrs is a 1000pt bonus).”

Feral cats, really? I’d like to see the real version of that. Famicase Gallery: 2010’s best imaginary 8-bit games.

Visual Aesthetics in Early Computing (1950-80).

Nick Gentry, for instance, uses floppy disks as canvas.

Not long ago I wrote about my first computer, which my father got me for my seventh birthday. But I had never seen an advertisment for it before. (via Pedro Quintas)