ecosystem restoration

CuriousMarc inspects a newly arrived Teletype Model 19, an early military unit built around a Model 15 keyboard and printer, after an initial rough cleaning. It is the first part of a restoration series and touches on 5-bit Baudot code.

A 47-minute restoration of a 1920s IBM computing cheese cutter, a machine with parts patented between 1901 and 1907. The video covers the restoration work and explains why it is a computing cheese cutter.

A 4K upscaled restoration of Apple's 1984 Macintosh Super Bowl ad directed by Ridley Scott. The restoration combines various sources and an AI upscaler.

The first episode of CuriousMarc's series restoring a real Apollo Guidance Computer, led by AGC expert Mike Stewart. They set up a makeshift lab in a Houston hotel room to open up a rare machine owned by a private collector.

George Monbiot narrates how reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone after about 70 years set off a trophic cascade. The wolves changed deer behavior, vegetation recovered, and rivers changed course.

A VPRO documentary following ecologist and cameraman John D. Liu. He documents the regreening of China's Loess Plateau and other efforts to restore deserts and biodiversity around the world.

A long talk by rancher Gabe Brown on turning his North Dakota farm into a regenerative ecosystem using no-till, cover crops and integrated livestock. It covers the five principles of soil health and how they pay off financially.

A WIRED Future Cities documentary on Shenzhen, covering its hardware-prototyping culture and shanzhai copycat manufacturing. It looks at how the city's ecosystem evolved and what the rest of the world can learn.

Part one of Look Mum No Computer's series on buying a whole church pipe organ, covering how it was removed from its home. The series goes on to restoring it and rewiring it for MIDI.

Permaculture instructor Andrew Millison visits the village of Garavadi in Maharashtra, India, which took part in the Paani Foundation's Water Cup competition. It shows the water harvesting structures the villagers built in 45 days and how they restored groundwater and the local economy.

Moxie Marlinspike's 36C3 talk examines why distributed and decentralized technology is hard to build into consumer products, from the perspective of developing Signal. It argues that ecosystems move slowly and federation causes problems.

An 8-minute National Geographic short film about David Bamberger, who bought 5,500 overgrazed acres in the Texas Hill Country and restored the land and its aquifers over about 50 years.

A short narrated video describing how reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone triggered a trophic cascade that changed wildlife, vegetation and even river courses. This is a remastered HD version of George Monbiot's viral piece.

CuriousMarc's Apollo Guidance Computer restoration series looks at core rope memory, the ROM that held the Moon landing programs. Mike Stewart builds a custom reader to recover lost AGC programs.

Lyle Bickley of the PDP-1 restoration team tours the 1959 DEC machine at the Computer History Museum and plays the original Spacewar! He covers its graphics display and the MIT student programs written for it.

Footage shot in New York City in 1911 by a Swedish film company, upscaled to 4K and 60 fps with neural networks and optionally colorized. The creator notes the colors are artificial and added only for ambiance.

A critique of the HD remaster of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, walking through cropping, color and effects problems that damaged the original look. It also advises which versions to buy.

A six-minute clip of Adobe's MAX 2011 sneak peek showing a Photoshop prototype that removes motion blur from photos. The audience reacts with astonishment as blurry images become legible.

CuriousMarc connects a restored 1930 Model 15 Teletype to a Linux machine and uses it as a terminal, after commenters requested it. The video shows the challenges of linking a 5-bit mechanical device to a modern OS.

Practical Engineering explains what a black start is: restarting a power grid after total collapse. It shows why most plants need outside power to start and why rebuilding a synchronized grid is delicate and high-stakes.

A neural-network upscaled 4K, 60 fps version of the 1906 film of a trip down Market Street in San Francisco, shot four days before the earthquake. It shows cable cars, horse carriages, early automobiles and pedestrians sharing the street.

The trailer for Peter Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old, a WWI documentary built from restored, colorized archival footage and BBC interviews with British soldiers.

Geoff Lawton documents a permaculture project that turned barren Jordanian desert into green, productive land. It covers the techniques he used.

Permaculture instructor Andrew Millison travels with the UN World Food Programme to Niger to see land recovery within the Great Green Wall, where rainwater harvesting is boosting food security and restoring the ecosystem.

CuriousMarc and colleagues at the Computer History Museum try to compile and run a FORTRAN II program on a 1959 IBM 1401. The machine has only 16k of memory and a CPU not meant for scientific work, so success is far from guaranteed.

Paul Graham gives a keynote in his hometown of Pittsburgh, reflecting on the old and new city and arguing that it could become a startup hub.

Alan Watson Featherstone, founder of Trees for Life, describes nearly 30 years of work restoring the ancient Caledonian Forest in the Scottish Highlands, illustrated with his photography.

Sasa Juric explains what makes Erlang and Elixir suited to server-side systems, focusing on the BEAM concurrency model rather than syntax or ecosystem. He demonstrates processes, supervision, and fault tolerance.

Mirabai Knight's PyCon 2013 talk on Plover, a free cross-platform stenography engine that lets people write at up to 240 WPM on ordinary hardware, including a demo of coding by steno.

Dan Olson of Folding Ideas spends months in the virtual world Decentraland and delivers a long critique of the metaverse, NFTs and DAOs, and why virtual worlds fail as places.

Coffeezilla's investigation into the Counter-Strike 2 skin gambling ecosystem, covering casino sites, influencers and esports teams that profit from it. It is part of a multi-part series on Valve's skin economy and its effects on young players.

Andrej Karpathy walks through how GPT assistants are trained, from tokenization and pretraining to supervised finetuning and RLHF, and gives practical prompting strategies and a view of the tooling ecosystem.

Chris Lattner's ASPLOS 2021 keynote on the golden age of compiler design in an era of hardware and software co-design, covering compiler infrastructure for accelerators and unifying hardware IRs.

Ryan Dahl tells the history of Node.js and why he created it at a Phoenix meetup. He explains the push for non-blocking IO on a clean slate rather than extending an existing ecosystem.

Kurzgesagt's animated explainer on the human immune system, describing the body as an ecosystem and how immune defenses cope with the variety of invaders. It promotes their book Immune.

Bloomberg's Hello World episode in which Ashlee Vance visits Shenzhen, a hub of electronics manufacturing and cloning. He meets tech-fueled entrepreneurs working under an authoritarian regime.

Part 3 of WIRED's Future Cities series on Shenzhen. It examines how attitudes toward patents and intellectual property differ from the West, and how shanzhai (copycat) manufacturing created an ecosystem of rapid iteration and distribution.

Strange Parts builds a working refurbished iPhone 6S entirely from components bought in the Huaqiangbei phone parts markets in Shenzhen. The video explains how the markets work and what the parts cost.

A comedy sketch by Kai Lentit in which a senior JavaScript developer is interviewed, parodying the chaos of the JavaScript ecosystem.

A sound-designed restoration of the Miles brothers' 1906 film shot from a cable car down Market Street in San Francisco, four days before the earthquake. It shows streetcars, horse carts, cars and pedestrians mixing freely.