November 14, 2011

• My Son, The Hacker

  So I get home from six hours of demon slaying (it's kind of less heroic when the living incarnations of chaos and malice are trying to be calm and rational, and the heroes are being merciless engines of doom, but anyway...), and find that my son has taken after dear ol' Dad in a new and exciting way... he's somehow managed to turn Beth's laptop screen upside down. An assortment of random keypresses accomplished nothing, and my computer was turned off (an extreme rarity, I know), so it had to wait until morning. Finally, I did some googling (you don't need to actually know anything, anymore, except "how to use google") and found a lot of hits on terms like "laptop" "screen" and "inverted", and a surprising number also involved the word "cat". For those who are concerned, ctrl-alt-uparrow or ctrl-alt-downarrow will do the trick, but you need to be logged in (at least in Windows 7 on a Dell Inspiron); it didn't work on the launch screen. I am very proud of my son; I didn't even know that was possible to do just by PLOKTA. (Google it.) It reminds me of some of earliest coding efforts... on my Atari 400, with its cassette drive, 16K of RAM, and membrane keyboard. There was a POKE command that would cause the text on the screen to be inverted and mirrored. I have no idea why you'd want to do it, but I did it, because you could, and that is the essence of the hacker ethos. (Those of you who know what POKE was, give yourself some geek points... and take some ensure, you old fogeys.)

  PS: The area under the bed is now officially the Rocketcave; the shelf in the kitchenette area is the Fortress Of Rocketude. Just thought you'd all like to know. 

  • 9:08 am
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