Friday, June 30th 2023
There’s a million different tough to navigate websites that have all the days and times for local canyons. This collection is mostly for my benefit, but if it helps others, even better!
Utah Road Status
Alpine Loop (Highway 92)
Website
The Alpine Loop is open from approximately late May to late October. There’s an additional road that connects to Heber.
Big Mountain Pass (SR 65)
The road over this pass usually closes sometime in November and opens around Mother’s Day. There’s usually a number of weeks where the gate is closed but the road is clear for cycling on the road south of the pass. The north side of the road pass usually takes a few more weeks for snow to melt but can easily be hiked over the few remaining road drifts.
The Mormon Pioneer Trail sections that follow alongside the road usually open in May.
Butterfield Pass
This is a gravel road that connects Salt Lake and Tooele valleys and runs near the open pit mine. The sign states that the road opens on June 1 and closes November 1.
City Creek Canyon
Website
Memorial Day weekend through the end of September: The road is open to bicycles on odd numbered calendar days.
The rest of the year: open to bikes every day.
Guardsman Pass (Highway 190)
This road closes in fall and typically opens in May or June to traffic. There’s often a short spring window where it’s clear enough for biking but still closed for cars. It’s usually not too bad to deal with traffic when it is open to cars, especially on weekdays.
Millcreek Canyon
Website
Even-numbered days: bikes are allowed on Big Water, Little Water, and Great Western trails. Dogs must be on-leash at all times in all areas of the canyon.
Odd-numbered days: bikes are not allowed on the upper Mill Creek Big Water, Little Water and Great Western trails. Dogs are allowed off-leash on trails.
The gate to upper road usually opens on July 1st and closes on November 1st. This is an ideal canyon to bike when the gate is closed to cars.
- Bikes are always allowed on the Pipeline Trail.
- Bikes are never allowed in the Mt. Olympus Wilderness Area.
Mirror Lake Highway / Bald Mountain Pass (Highway 150)
This road is usually open to cars mid-May to mid-fall. I haven’t figured out yet if there’s a window in the spring for bikes to ride while the gate is still closed to cars. If you know, please let me know. Otherwise, the road is pretty narrow. I do see bikes on the road, but the shoulder seems pretty small for cars passing at 50+ mph.
Saturday, Feb. 4th 2023
The Verge: Lisa’s Family Photos
Today, in partnership with The Computer History Museum, we’re excited to share another part of what makes the Lisa feel, well, human: a selection of exclusive Polaroid photos from the Lisa’s development taken by Bill Atkinson, the designer and developer of the computer’s graphical user interface. Atkinson sat down with CHM for an interview about his time at Apple and offered a tour of his photo album. We’ve chosen some of our favorite photos from the collection alongside selected remarks from Atkinson’s interview.
The 40th anniversary of the Apple Lisa content continues! The Verge has been doing a really great job with a couple of pieces dedicated to the Lisa. This is a good followup to my previous post that also linked to Folklore.org.
"He said: think how fun it is to surf on the front edge of a wave and how not fun it is to dog paddle on the tail end of the same wave. Come to Apple and you can change millions of people’s lives.”
Can you imagine getting a pitch like this from Steve Jobs?
“Without Lisa, there never would’ve been a Mac.”
The advances that they made by bringing this UI to the public cannot be understated.
Related:
Apple releases source code to the Lisa
Thursday, Jan. 26th 2023
Alongside the source code is this a great post about the place in history that the Lisa had in the development of GUIs.
The Lisa: Apple’s Most Influential Failure
Happy 40th Birthday to Lisa! The Apple Lisa computer, that is. In celebration of this milestone, CHM has received permission from Apple to release the source code to the Lisa software, including its system and applications software.
The invention of the GUI, especially in the form of windows, icons, menus, and pointer (WIMP), controlled by a mouse, occurred at Xerox PARC in the 1970s, on the Alto, a computer with a bitmapped graphics display designed to be used by a single person, i.e. a “personal computer,” despite the research prototype’s high cost. Key elements of the WIMP GUI paradigm, especially overlapping windows and popup menus, were invented by Alan Kay’s Learning Research Group for their children’s software development environment, Smalltalk.
I could read about this kind of content all day. This article also links to one of my favorite folklore posts about the early Macintosh drawing primitives.
It’s so interesting to me that both Sun Microsystems and Apple—alongside others!—saw similar demos at Xerox PARC and had quite different takeaways. Sun was excited about the massive potential of networking and Apple saw the future of GUIs. There’s many different paths in computing history, but it’s undeniable that Xerox PARC was an inflection point.
Related:
Why Apple is still sweating the details
Wednesday, March 2nd 2022
typeof.net/Iosevka/
Iosevka is an open-source, sans-serif + slab-serif, monospace + quasi‑proportional typeface family, designed for writing code, using in terminals, and preparing technical documents.
While not quite as visually pleasing as IBM Plex, Iosevka looks like a great alternative supporting a monospaced version that has a classic terminal feel to it.
Edit
I recently saw Berkeley Mono (via) which is a similarly interesting mono spaced typeface.
Related:
New Typeface from Hoefler & Co: Ringside,
Typeface Mechanics: 001
Monday, Dec. 13th 2021
The Verge
Often going back to play classic games like this can be a reality check. There have been plenty of times when I’ve popped in an old cartridge only to realize that these games I grew up with just don’t look the way I remember them. But that hasn’t been the case this time — in fact, they’ve looked better than ever. This is the promise of the Analogue Pocket.
…
The biggest change, though, is the incredible screen. The Pocket features a 3.5-inch LCD display made of Gorilla Glass, with 1600 × 1440 resolution. That’s 10 times the resolution of the original gray brick Game Boy.
…
The handheld also supports pretty much everything the original hardware did, which Analogue says is nearly 2,800 cartridges.
YouTube:
Related:
Game Boy Advance Architecture