The Rust Belt

  1. “The Moment of Silence” Looks Promising

    “The Moment of Silence” is a near-future science-fiction adven­ture game with clas­sic point and click game­play, devel­oped by German stu­dio House of Tales and released in 2004. As far as I can tell from play­ing through the first part, the story, set in New York (and other loca­tions) in the year 2044, revolves around Orwellian themes of social con­trol, sub­sti­tu­tion of illu­sory secu­rity for pri­vacy and other human rights and the unholy alliance between multi­na­tional cor­po­ra­tions and governments.

    it gets even rustier →

  2. More on “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”

    I have finally fin­ished the book. It is enjoy­able right to the very end, although I still think the final vic­tory of the rebel­lious Loonies was por­trayed as a bit too easy, despite loses they suf­fered. Lunar soci­ety turned out to be not just “slightly anar­chis­tic” as I have claimed before but rather lib­er­tar­ian to the full mean­ing of this term, with no offi­cial state-like depart­ments or min­istries, full free­dom of mar­riage schemes gov­erned only by mutual con­sent and com­pletely pri­va­tized court system.

    read the rust of it →

  3. Would You Press “Cancel” to Cancel?

    In gen­eral, WinSCP is an amaz­ing tool. I use it to man­age source files of many web sites via FTP or SFTP. It remem­bers ses­sion data, pass­words and authen­ti­ca­tion keys for encrypted con­nec­tions, helps me syn­chro­nize fold­ers, edit files directly on remote machines and some­times serves as a text con­sole for file oper­a­tion com­mands. What is more, the pro­gram is free and open source so I just can­not stop prais­ing it.

    read the rust of it →

  4. Confusing Print Dialogs

    Modern com­put­ers are bro­ken. They are too com­plex, they ask too many unnec­es­sary ques­tions, give choice when none is nec­es­sary, and no choice when one needs it. If a cre­ative and smart kid can­not fig­ure out how to print a doc­u­ment pre­pared ear­lier in Microsoft Word, the prob­lem has to be in the design of the interface.

    read the rust of it →

  5. First Thoughts on “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”

    I am almost halfway through “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” by Robert A. Heinlein and I am enjoy­ing it a lot. This is one of his most famous titles, telling a story of a late XXI-century guer­rilla move­ment. The orga­ni­za­tion was cre­ated and oper­ates on the Moon which in the book is a penal colony with mil­lions of inhab­i­tants, includ­ing not only con­victs but also free immi­grants and peo­ple born there.

    read it before it rusts →

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