I love coffee, and I have for the majority of my life. I’ve also been to a lot of cafes in my time, and they’re one of the things I have enough specific opinions about to feel like it’s fun to share them. This post started as a roundup of cafes I found this year, but I wanted to include more and more, so it turned into a more general list. These aren’t necessarily all of the best I’ve ever been to, just the ones that stick out in my mind.

Massachusetts amateur radio plates look sick. Here’s how to get one: Acquire a ham radio license. There are a few ways of doing this, but hamstudy.org is an invaluable prep tool. Tests are often available at university radio clubs, and I even took mine at an FFRDC, so I guess getting that clearance wasn’t for naught. After you pass the test, you’ll be given a number which you input into the FCC ULS to pay the fee and acquire your license.

Or, Mia’s Adventures in a haunted courthouse

Oh yeah, it’s getting personal

There’s a very specific feeling I get when in a classroom at night. I usually only end up there for some kind of special occasion: the last math team practice of the season, a guest lecturer in college, or a presentation night for finals. Even if there are no windows, the fluorescent lights seem a little brighter, the room a little warmer, focus a little easier. I’d like to imagine that Donald Sherman was feeling somewhat similarly as he sat in front of a green phosphor CRT terminal and a telephone handset perched on top of a wooden box. He was surrounded by a group of at least a dozen people who had filed into the Michigan State University AI Lab on the night of December 4th, 1974 to watch Sherman order a pizza.

This device complies with part 15 of the FCC Rules. Operation is subject to the following two conditions: (1) This device may not cause harmful interference, and (2) this device must accept any interference received, including interference that may cause undesired operation. This incantation has been repeated billions of times: embossed into the injection molded cases of cheap toys, printed on stickers slapped on the bottom of WiFi routers, and tattooed on the back of your local hacker 1. But what the hell does it actually mean? In short, it’s the regulation that allows unlicensed use of certain types of radio transmittors on certain frequencies. To get that far however, three elements had to come together:

I have been interested in computing history for many years now, and I’m still often surprised how deep the literature on the subject is. I’ve had the good fortune of discovering and being told about many amazing books in the field, I’m lucky enough to have gone to a university with a world class library system, so many of these I just found by browsing LoC sections of interest. I’ve collected the ones that stood out to me together into a big list to hopefully help out others who are interested. Thankfully, many of these titles have been scanned, or are widely available in regional library systems through WorldCat. For the WorldCat links, be sure to click “All Libraries”; why this isn’t the default is beyond me. Additionally, there may be a website that ends in gen, and starts with lib, that may have PDFs of most of these titles, but you didn’t hear that from me as it’s not exactly lawful. I’ve tried to group the titles by general vibe, but besides that, there’s no specific order.