pointer pointer

Paul Irish explains how pointerpointer.com works. It uses a hidden canvas of colored Voronoi regions to look up which photo matches the cursor position.

Casey Muratori argues against smart pointers and RAII, advocating grouped-element thinking, zero-is-initialization and stubs as better ways to structure memory and handle errors.

Herb Sutter's CppCon 2016 talk on lifetime safety in C++, aiming for code free of leaks and dangling pointers by default. It covers smart pointers, ownership, reference counting pitfalls and deferred reclamation resembling garbage collection.

AlphaPhoenix shows off a new camera that films at two billion frames per second and uses it to film a laser pointer pulse. He investigates a strange quirk in how the speed of light appears on camera.

Eskil Steenberg's two-hour talk on his personal approach to writing C, covering code style, structure, naming, pointers and large-project organization. He warns it contains a fair bit of programming religion.

A one-minute Sesame Street animation of a counting pinball game focused on the number 12, set to Pointer Sisters music.

Kate Gregory argues at CppCon 2015 that C++ should be taught without starting from C: no char* strings, printf or raw arrays at first, with references before pointers.

3Blue1Brown explains fractal dimension and shows why many fractals are not strictly self-similar. Self-similarity turns out to be a special case of the broader idea of fractional dimension.

Posy gives a short history of the computer mouse cursor, from early straight pointers to the tilted arrow, comparing Apple and Windows designs. He then explains why he designed his own cursor set and offers it as a free download.

Technology Connections explains how the simple American drip coffee maker works, including the bimetal valve and bubble-pump heating, and compares the original Mr. Coffee with modern machines.

A JSConf 2014 talk visually breaking down algorithms behind everyday UI patterns, such as dropdown menus that vanish when the mouse drifts and picking the nearest target to the cursor. It shows how these are implemented in JavaScript.

Festo's promo video of SmartBird, an ultralight bionic flying model inspired by the herring gull that flaps and twists its wings to fly. It shows the robot in flight.

Aditya Siram introduces ATS, a statically typed ML-like language that compiles to C and offers type-safe pointer arithmetic and a full proof language. The Strange Loop talk shows off C interop, concurrency and verification features with non-trivial examples.

Scott Meyers explains how CPU caches work and why they matter for performance, covering cache levels, access speeds, associativity, and effects in multithreaded code. The focus is C++ and cache-aware, data-oriented programming.

Aaron Hsu shows how to manipulate and transform tree data in APL using arrays and inverted tables instead of pointers. He claims much smaller code, better performance and easier parallelisation.

Emery Berger's CppCon 2019 talk introducing Mesh, a drop-in malloc replacement that compacts memory in unmodified C and C++ programs. It tackles fragmentation by merging pages without changing pointers.

Dan Gelbart shows his home-built air bearing CNC lathe and grinder, which reaches about 1 micron accuracy. He demonstrates the machine and its parts.

A PBS Space Time episode on fuzzballs, the string-theory proposal for black holes that replaces the singularity with a tangle of strings. It explains why black holes seem to both have to exist and break known physics.

A Cracked video about the experience of intervening in a violent stabbing attack and the lack of police protection afterwards.