git

Linus Torvalds gives a Google tech talk on git, the source control system he created two years earlier. He argues for distributed version control over centralized systems such as CVS and Subversion.

The 1992 SIIA anti-piracy rap video Don't Copy That Floppy, warning kids against copying software, remastered and uploaded.

Dick Hardt's fast-paced OSCON keynote on Identity 2.0 and the move toward user-centric digital identity. It is also famous for its rapid-fire, many-slide presentation style.

A four-minute 2006 explainer on trusted computing, describing what it is and whether users should support it, with a skeptical DRM angle.

A short concept video of Microsoft's unreleased Courier, a dual-screen tablet designed as a digital notebook with clippings and annotation. It was first leaked by Gizmodo in 2009.

A short anarchist-leaning video by Larken Rose arguing that the Constitution and similar documents cannot legitimately grant anyone the right to take other people's property. It uses a rhetorical 'paper that lets me rob you' setup to challenge belief in political authority.

A 2008 Google Tech Talk by the creator of Org-mode, introducing the Emacs subsystem for plain-text note-taking and project planning. It covers outlines, TODO states, tags, dates and priorities, and later shows using Org-mode as a spreadsheet.

David MacKay's 2007 Google Tech Talk presents Dasher, a text-entry system driven by continuous gestures and a language model, reaching about 35 words per minute with one finger and 25 hands-free. It explains the information-theory reasoning behind the design.

A binaural audio demo, the 'Virtual Barber Shop', that places a barber moving around your head. It works best with headphones and closed eyes.

A two-minute 2008 clip from Sun's Fishworks team in which Brendan Gregg uses DTrace to show disk latency spiking while he shouts at a rack of drives. Bryan Cantrill narrates the demonstration.

The first installment of a hobbyist's video diary documenting his build of a giant walking spider-like vehicle. The footage is casual and self-shot, following the early stages of the project.

Kirk McKusick gives a narrative history of BSD from its start at UC Berkeley in the late 1970s through the 1980s releases and the lawsuit that led to 4.4BSD-Lite in 1992. It is full of anecdotes from a key developer.

A two-minute demonstration of the loudness war, showing how heavy dynamic range compression in CD mastering makes music louder while degrading sound quality. It uses audio examples so you can hear the distortion.

Misko Hevery's Clean Code Talk shows how to use object-oriented techniques such as polymorphism to remove repeated if and switch statements. The result is code that is easier to test, understand and maintain.

A short animation reconstructing a planet's looping orbit using Ptolemy's epicycles and deferents, with the epicycles tracing out the face of Homer Simpson. It shows how enough circles can reproduce nearly any shape.

A 1080p widescreen capture of the Deus Ex conversation between JC Denton and the AI Morpheus. It is a philosophical exchange that includes surveillance as a replacement for God.

Linus Torvalds tells the story of Linux in a 2001 talk at the Computer History Museum, from writing code as a graduate student in Helsinki in the early 1990s to becoming an icon of open source. It covers the project's origins, its growth, and his views on licensing and kernel design.

A short comparison of the retail release of Metallica's Death Magnetic against the Guitar Hero 3 version of the same song. It switches between the two so you can hear and see the heavy clipping in the retail master.

A 2007 Google Tech Talk in which Bryan Cantrill demonstrates DTrace and explains how it improves debugging of both development and live production systems.

John Allspaw and Paul Hammond's Velocity 09 talk on how Flickr achieved ten or more deploys per day through close cooperation between development and operations.

Vim author Bram Moolenaar's 2007 Google Tech Talk on habits for efficient text editing: find inefficiencies in your own editing, then learn the Vim commands that fix them.

A clip from the film The Lives of Others showing Wiesler as a ruthless, efficient Stasi interrogator who uses a recorded interrogation to train new officers. HN uses other scenes from the same film as well.

Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Conservancy speaks at the 2009 Law of the Commons Conference about free and open software as a model for a new intellectual commons. The talk covers the legal and social case for sharing knowledge.

A clip in which Eben Moglen tells how he grew up when software was freer and how his path crossed Richard Stallman's. He describes how they came to work together to make software free again.

Ten minutes of ultra-slow-motion footage of bullet impacts filmed at about one million frames per second by Werner Mehl of Kurzzeit. It includes hollow points in ballistics gel and impacts on glass.

A roughly ten-minute demo of Microsoft's Intentional Programming research system, showing its editor and an unusual way of working with code. It is the first of two clips cut from a longer video.

A how-to video on datamoshing, the glitch-art technique of removing keyframes so that motion data smears across video. It walks through the tools needed, such as ffmpegx and Avidemux, though the author notes parts are outdated.

A brief demo of the Smalltalk debugger, including defining a method that doesn't exist yet while the program is stopped mid-crash.

A one-minute CNBC clip in which Google CEO Eric Schmidt says that if you have something you do not want anyone to know, perhaps you should not be doing it. The remark became a notorious line in privacy debates.

A one-minute 2007 clip of Barack Obama, during his campaign, opposing warrantless wiretaps. It was later reposted with a campaign call to action.

A spectrogram analysis of Aphex Twin's track commonly called [Equation] from Windowlicker, rendered from a lossless version. At about 5:30 the spectrogram reveals an image of Richard D. James's face.

A short promotional video of a 5-axis CNC machine milling an elaborate helmet, made by DAISHIN SEIKI with a DMG machine and hyperMILL CAM software. It shows what 5-axis machining can produce.

Part 2 of an old Microsoft Research demo of Intentional Programming, showing the compiler side of a system that stores programs as abstract structure rather than text. The uploader says the companion editor clip is clearer.

A WiebeTech marketing demo of HotPlug, a device that moves a running computer onto battery or another power source so it can be transported without shutting down.

A satirical Onion news segment announcing a Google feature that lets users opt out of Google's data collection by moving to a remote village without Google products or sunlight.

A subtitled edit of the 1987 Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion, in which hijackers interrupted Chicago stations WGN and WTTW.

A 2007 side-by-side demo comparing Windows Vista's Aero interface with Ubuntu running Beryl/Compiz, showing effects such as the desktop cube and burning windows.

Michael Wesch's five-minute video about Web 2.0, showing how the read/write web, XML and user-generated content change how people create and share information.

Matthias Wandel shows his wooden machine that adds binary numbers using marbles. It demonstrates computation with purely mechanical logic.

A 2-minute scene from the film Amadeus in which the emperor says Mozart's opera has simply too many notes and Mozart asks which few to cut.