Laurence Gonsalves

@laurence.gonsalv.es

598 Followers 1784 Following

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 🖖

Screenshot from Star Trek: Discovery. Lorca is saying to Stamets "... Alongside the Wright Brothers, Elon Musk, Zefram Cochrane?"
A still from Star Trek: Discovery. Airiam tells Captain Pike "The probe used multiple SQL injections. I've yet to find any compromised files."
Two human silhouettes, side-by-side. The left one is Myst's "falling man" graphic, but rotated so his feed are facing downwards. He looks like he's trying to comically imitate a zombie in this pose. The right one is the running man from page 153 of Zen & the Art of the Macintosh, blown up to the same size as the Myst guy. He's pixelated, and looks like he's wearing a suit with a jacket and tie, and is running to the right, away from the Myst guy.
Three rows of buttons: 1. From bsky.app: house, magnifying glass, chat bubble, bell, profile picture 2. House, four-pointed star, plus, square with number, vertical ellipsis 3. Left triangle, circle, square
A copy of a comic by Haus of Decline (alt-text copied below), but with every instance of the Loss comic recursively replaced the Haus of Decline comic. A Loss comic with arms and legs barges into a hospital and says "help I'm seeing everyone as "Loss" The person at the desk, also a Loss comic asks "what's "Loss"?" The first Loss says "it would take too long to explain... please hel- URRK" He keels over, to which the hospital clerk shouts "OH GOD! HE'S DEAD!"
A screen recording of a window that says "Test speakers" at the top. There is a large circle in the middle that says "Select a Speaker" in the center. There are two small speaker icons on the perimeter of the circle, one on the top left and one on the top right. A mouse pointer clicks on the left icon and a voice can be heard saying "front left". The pointer then moves to the right icon and clicks, and a voice can be heard saying "front right".
A modified still from the movie Planet of the Apes (1968) depicting a man (Charlton Heston as George Taylor) and a horse on a beach. There are rocky cliffs to the left. The focal point of the scene has been replaced by Alejandra Caraballo's screenshot (of Google search getting basic math wrong) rising up out of the water. (The profile picture in the screenshot has also been replaced by Charlton Heston's face.)
"Everybody Loves Ramiel" poster with the cast of "Everybody Loves Raymond", but Raymond has been replaced with a angelic blue, translucent, regular octohedron.
A screen recording of a grid of moon phase emojis. Most are full moons, but some are other phases, and the shadowed regions form a bit-mapped image of a clock that starts out reading "11:59:00am", but increments to "12:00:10pm". As it increments, the moons "rotate" to update the new time.
The cover of a paperback book, "Internet for Cats", by Judy Heim, illustrated by Alan Okamoto. The subtitle is "A Guide to How You and Your Cat Can Prowl the Information Highway Together". The cover illustration is a stylized painting of an anthropomorphic purple and red tabby cat wearing glasses and plaid vest sitting at a desk in front of a '90s looking desktop computer in a room lined with bookcases, all in front of a large window. A bluish cat is lying on top of the monitor, Pluto to the computer user's Goofy.
A screenshot of Merriam-Webster's Rhymes search for the word "science". Several three syllable words are listed: appliance, compliance, defiance, reliance, alliance, and ex-fiance. A red oval has been drawn on the screenshot around the word ex-fiance.
A screenshot of a Downdetector graph for "Xfinity by Comcast" showing a spike of 6,062 reports on March 16, 2026, at 9:11 a.m, with a baseline of 33.
A screenshot of xfinity.com/support/ showing nothing but the text "Loading..." and 3 orange dots.
Screenshot of the bsky.app "Add App Password" dialog. The unique name field is filled in with the name "CreatedFromAnAppPaswordSignIn", which is highlighted in red as if it was the source of a from validation error. The allow DMs checkbox is unchecked.
Screenshot of Google search for the query "when does daylight saving time start". The results show that it starts March 8th. Below that is a section called "people also ask", which lists a few questions including. "Do I lose an hour of sleep on Sunday?" (The screenshot has been annotated with a red circle around this question.)
A carpeted room with a coffee table to one side. A cat is in the foreground, meowing at the camera. Three burrito-shaped cat toys are evenly spaced on the ground, leading up to a closed door. They all have the same orientation: parallel to the door.
A bird's nest wedged between the top of a wreath and a door. Three tiny eggs are visible inside the nest.
Close up of a Commodore 64 keyboard's cursor keys. There are two cursor keys, one for "up/down", and the other for "left/right".
A van with a a car-sized block of snow on the roof. The van is on a roadway (actually a hotel's drop-off loop) with cars in front of and behind it. The roadway is mostly clear, except some bits of snow around the van. The areas visible off the road are covered in snow, including several coniferous trees trees in the background.
A sign (underneath a much larger informational billboard) that says "No drones / Don't drones" and has a drawing of a drone with a "circle slash" over it.
Launcher icon that looks like the Chrome logo with a mini Chrome logo in the lower right corner.
"Are you two friends?" meme, a 2-part image: The top part shows a woman asking "Are you two friends?". The bottom one depicts two characters from Star Trek: Voyager, both in uniform: Ensign Kim, labeled "cryptocurrency", responds "yes". Tuvok, labeled "cryptography", responds "no".
A screenshot from Pluribus, with the yellow subtitle, "this #D1AD2C powdery stuff".
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.
“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.”
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.
Screenshot of 404 page reading: 404 Not FOund Guru Meditation: [long hex number] Goofy Deploy Page Server
A doodle of an anthropomorphic lemon putting on a grey jacket.
Video is a close-up of a Google Nest mini sitting on a countertop.
Michael Stevens (aka vsauce aka corndogwilly) on stage at Open Sauce 2025.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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."
A screenshot of the output of Sterogram solver on the aforementioned sterogram, showing the block letters "LGR".
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.
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.
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.
New! Import bookmarks from Chrome to Niphtio.
A screenshot of my Bluesky "followers" list, showing "499 followers" but then "No results found; You do not have any followers".
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.
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.
The interior of Brittle Hollow, from the game Outer WIlds.
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.)
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.
A man in a green, military-looking, jumpsuit holding two "aircraft briefing sticks". They are small models of fighter jets (about 10 inches long), each on the end of a rod (again about 10 inches long) that acts as a handle. The man is holding them as if the two planes are in flight.
The image is titled "Oops! All D-Pads A blobby looking "keyboard", except instead of keys, it's a bunch of d-pads, tessalated together, each with 4 key labels. It mostly follows a qwerty layout. Each modifier is on 2 d-pads, making it possible to combine up to two modifiers. There are also two "spaces", so just like with a space bar, either hand can press space. The arrow keys are on a single d-pad, near the bottom, middle.
Courier Crisis (a screengrab of the pulsating game title from the video in the parent post)
A picture of Lily, the purple-haired girl from Duolingo, with the text: Hey, it's Lily. Monolith says you're ignoring him.
A worn mass-market paperback book, resting on a wooden surface. The book's cover reads "Classic Science Fiction; The Best of Hal Clement; edited by Lester Del Rey". The cover art depicts a large, gray, eel-like alien with alarmingly large yellow eyes standing over an unconscious boy. The alien's tentacles seem to be holding a glass bottle connected to the boy's head by a reddish tube. The bottle is half-full of reddish liquid.
The cover art for The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, except the subtitle has been replaced with "Tears of the Kingdom" (in a very quick and dirty MS-Paint style). The text is coincidentally on top of a rift depicted in the cover art, which looks like a big purple tear in the landscape.
A photo of a light gray filing cabinet with a badge that says "Commander". The filing cabinet is covered in various magnets. The visible magnets are: Amiga check mark, Amiga boing ball, I ❤️ C64, Commodore "chicken head", Amiga insert workbench disk, Google Reader play, Reading rainbow, CHM, Team FranLab, I adore my 64, "50" Star Trek Delta, Mozilla.org "hack" with red Dino in a star, a felt rainbow, Commodore ViC-20 the friendly computer, one of those Blinky LED magnets, Neelix's chef hat, Canadian flag, a comic strip with a stand-up comedian robot (The robot says. "Greetings, fellow constructs. I just flew in from Data-Comp III, and boy are my upper limb units unfit for further service"), a Thinkgeek "ANNOY" circuit board, an old ad for Google ads ("own the words that define your business" with a picture of an early 2000s Google search box underneath).
A screenshot of a chicken patty from an online order form, titled "Chicken Patty" with "Please Select ... (Optional) • Select up to 2" written beneath, and 4 checkboxes labeled "FROZEN", "Takeout", "GROUP", and "END GROUP".
A photo of Geordi LaForge standing in front of a large techinical diagram, apparently talking and pointing at some detail.
An Aranet4 air quality monitor with the battery cover and batteries removed. In the foreground are two AA batteries with the text. "Varta" printed on them in large block letters.
A doctored image of an Apple Lisa on a red surface. The keyboard and mouse are resting on the surface in front of it. On the screen is a blue-tinted monochrome image of Tommy Wiseau raising his fists in anguish, from the infamous "You are tearing me apart, Lisa" scene from the film The Room (2003).
A dark brown fluffy cat bed upside down, and tilted at an angle. An off-white cat peeks out. The pad that's normally on the floor of the cat bed peels away from what is now effectively the ceiling, covering one of the cat's ears.