The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage

The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage is a steam punk webcomic, and now a book, by Sydney Padua. It tells the story of our heroes Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage who actually do "build the Difference Engine and use it to create runaway economic models, battle the scourge of spelling errors, explore the wider realms of mathematics and, of course, fight crime." Ok its clearly taking liberties with the historical facts (if you want that story read chapter 2 of my book The Universal Machine), but its great to see such interesting characters in the early history of computing entering the realm of popular culture  - perhaps Alan Turing next codebreaker and crime fighter!
[Forgot to mention theres also a free iPad app]

from The Universal Machine http://universal-machine.blogspot.com/

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How the Worlds First Computer Was Rescued From the Scrap Heap

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An ENIAC technician changes a valve

Wired recently published an article on how Ross Perot decided to rescue ENIAC "one" of the worlds first computers (theyre not strictly speaking correct to call ENIAC "the first" computer). Read about this fascinating story here.

from The Universal Machine http://universal-machine.blogspot.com/

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My computer was stolen!

Last week at 3am thieves broke into my house and stole my MacBook Pro and my wifes MacBook Air. After we called the police we immediately logged into iClouds "Find My iPhone" service and locked and erased both Macs. Both of the machines were password protected from the lock screen and their hard drives were encrypted with FireVault. Consequently we were reasonably confident that the combination of lock screen password, encryption and iCloud erasure would keep our data secure.
   When my wife got her replacement MacBook Air (within two days from her employer, Im still waiting on mine) I installed SugarSync (our preferred cloud storage and back-up service) and voila! Within an hour her documents folder and desktop were populated with all her original files. No work was lost. In the last week weve noticed no unusual activity an any of our accounts and were confident our data and identities are secure. What could have been a disaster, thanks to taking reasonable precautions and ensuring our machines were backed up in the cloud, has merely been a minor inconvenience. 

from The Universal Machine http://universal-machine.blogspot.com/

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