This is really dope, I love the aesthetic. The varied style of each page is rather appealing to me, in a way I think it reminds me of combing through something like textfiles.com or archive.org, you don't know what to expect next and that's exciting.
Heck yes, I wish more people knew this. It's super easy. There's loads of interesting (and "interesting") stuff in apps. Even better: you can get your phone's framework code (usually in odex files) and decompile it! I've found and worked around some insane things that Samsung has done to their SMS providers on some phones....
Most of them were just half-broken APIs (e.g. some less-used query URIs would just error[1], or had buggy triggers), or only partially-covered indexes (so e.g. the stock app would be able to display conversations quickly, but [your query / 3rd party app] might not), or additional columns or queries (very common, occasionally interesting). A couple had obvious SQL injection bugs (contacts providers sometimes have these too). And most that I looked at were using older versions of the provider than the OS should have had, which is... great. Just great. I don't think fine-grained checks are part of the CTS.
Broken APIs can usually be worked around by doing a couple smaller queries and gluing the data together (often performs better anyway), partially covered indexes often mean the same thing (or just making do with less data in your app). And/or just decompile the stock app and see what it does differently.
SQL injections are fun tho, I managed to use a couple to dump the full databases, or add / repair missing indexes or triggers (never shipped code that did this, but it helped locally! would've probably broken if they ever upgraded the provider version tho). Some phones also try to protect / escalate Facebook data / access, but if there's an injection you can usually change the "protected" marker on its data.
I love that android has these shared providers, they let you do some super interesting and useful things, and for the most part everyone plays nice (but the "social stream" stuff in contacts is... odd, and rare). They seem to get pretty low amounts of attention tho, e.g. the sms provider had a few rounds of "caching bug in stock app" -> "finally make that pk autoincrement so it stops reusing ids" which were painfully obvious from reading the source: https://github.com/aosp-mirror/platform_packages_providers_t... . The current version has most or all of these fixed, but it took a few years to get there.
No shit, Sherlock! They go temporarily away (subscription; every year you can pay again; there was a time where this practice was frowned upon, and I remember that time very well), and my employer is a public benefit organization. 350 EUR a year is a lot of money for some organizations/people, especially non-US or the less rich EU countries.
I liked it a lot, the one page format is awesome, and I like the varying styles - it kept my interest high.
But can I suggest making it half the current size?
By making it smaller you could release more often, keeping awareness/interest alive. It's also easier to read in a single sitting, rather than have to come back to it.
Thanks for the feedback - that's an interesting note :)
I don't think we could speed up releases at this point, but once we have a steady inflow of articles and all the DTP scripts finalized I'll revisit this idea.
The only on-line mention of Algorithm magazine are several articles listed in Mr. Dewdney's curriculum vitae which were published in the magazine. Would this be a good enough source for Wikipedia? The magazine was dedicated to "recreational programming" (but not games) and had a lot of articles about fractals, neural nets, etc. The magazine content was similar to the Scientific American articles written by Dewdney.
I have a few (damaged) issues myself. I'll scan them and put the online if I can get Dewdney's permission.
Nooooo... are you kidding? That's exactly what makes every article a piece. It's perfect as it is! Unify the fonts and you get an academic-style journal.
Sorry, that's one thing we probably cannot fix - the whole idea is that the laying out of the articles is done by authors (not us - the publisher) and the authors have (almost) full control over it.
This means that while we can recommend fonts, we can't really enforce them in this model.
I know the idea for the authors to do the layout is at least 'experimental' (that's the word I prefer to use), but it also gives one more space to be creative (and makes it easier for us from a certain perspective too). See also https://pagedout.institute/?page=faq.php#layout
But it's not the case that on every screen you could fill the page to the desired width and still see a sufficient amount of information to make the tedious scrolling worth it.
This would be really great. The Google Groups thing seems an odd way to handle subscribing to notifications. Especially in a time when people are trying to ditch Google.
This is really cool! Looking forward to the next edition of this.
If anyone could point me to something similar, that'd be great (I know of 2600 and Phrack). I'm aware that Lainchan produces their own community magazine, but progress has been slow.
This is great, it feels like the 90s again- at first I was not a fan of the single page format, it felt a bit short, but I came around to appreciate it- and if anything it will drive traffic to the linked sites if I want more info, which the author's will consider a good thing.
Where did you originally put out a call for articles? I generally feel pretty tuned in to tech circles, but am kind of surprised you were able to get this many submissions without having to spam lots of places and not have been a blip on my radar somewhere- and I also wonder what I may be missing in terms of good communities.
Oh, my! This could not be more perfect for someone like me. I have too short an attention span for long technical articles (not something I'm particularly proud of btw), so the one-page thing is fabulous. I also love that there seems to be such a variety of topics. Finally, I actually really enjoy pulling up and reading a PDF on the iPad. Gives it that real magazine 'feel' that websites just can't get (IMHO). Well done!
I think that's one of their ideas: the author of the article creates whatever format they want for their page and then they glue them all together in their PDF.
This is awesome. Brilliant idea, and some great articles in there too.
One small nitpick that I hope you can fix for upcoming editions is the shocking alignment of the page numbers on the table of contents. It's just so messy and amateur looking, please try and tidy that up!
Reminds me of the zines included in the Zachtronics game EXAPUNKS which serve both as instruction manual and exposition. http://www.zachtronics.com/exapunks/
Love the idea, reminds me of 2600 and I can't way to read it.
Somewhat tangential: I often want to read PDF files and am never happy with my printing setup. Is there a service that will print any PDF at high quality, bind it for larger prints, and snail mail it to me?
I know you said "mail it to me" but if it's a possibility and you find it acceptable to move a bit, why not look for a print shop near you? Where I live there's plenty.
Maybe you can even arrange shipping, after an initial meeting to make sure they're printing what you want, like you want it.
That's definitely a possibility. I could also hit print and start thinking about whether I have enough of the right color ink in my printer.
My motive is that this content is interesting but not enough to get me to setup meetings with local print shops. More often than not people start businesses to save others time/money and offer convenience, I'm hoping someone did it for this particular need.
People could also print the top pages off The Economist every week and I'm sure some do but the overwhelming majority of those who read it on paper have it printed at high quality and mailed to them.
@gynvael - Please add a conventional mailing list option for following the updates/new issues. RSS would work too. Twitter even. I can't be the only HNer for whom the Google Groups option is a no-go for more reasons than one.
I was excited about the idea, but PDFs are a big issue. I want my content as RSS feed, please (although having a RSS feed announcing new PDF issue could work...).
Edit: The problem is that PDFs are basically usability wise readable only on iPad and even then not that spectacular. Also my iPad usually stays at home so no reading from laptop or from phone either.
Why the purple? Dont know if its just me, but found the styling to be a distraction. The content is good enough to stand by itself without the font and color gimmickry.
I hired 5 different artists to design the page decorations, and they delivered cool and interesting assets. But then I decided this doesn't really align with my vision and decided to do the decorations on my own in "my usual style".
So yeah, this is what you get when a programmer does page design. Sorry :)
P.S. Actually it's even worse - I kinda like the outcome, so it will probably stay.
Don't apologize for it! The varying fonts, the purple header and footer, they all add character to it! Thank you for the effort you put into this! It's amazing and truly captures a wonderful old-school zine with new-school content vibe.