One book I read did a similar thing, but managed to do it spoiler-free. There was a magical crystal, I think, that did some magical things. When you pick it up, the book says "To use the crystal, look at paragraph (current paragraph + 20)" and the author actually managed to do that for the most paragraphs from then onwards
An old gamebook series that did lots of this is Steve Jackson's Sorcery! -- I wonder if that could be what you're thinking of?
More recently, Jason Shiga has used clever mechanics like this a lot in comic book form, notably in Meanwhile. He's just finished a three-part series aimed at younger readers, Adventuregame Comics. All Shiga's stuff is great, highly recommended.
I have an Epson LX-350, bought new a few years ago. It connects via USB (but there's also serial and parallel ports). When connected via usb it appeared as /dev/usblp0 or something like that, and yes just cat'ing to it worked. And presumably the customers who buy these things new want them compatible with whatever processes they already have (for the last 30-50 years), so it supports both ESC/P 2 as you'd expect and IBM's escape codes (which I didn't expect and the old matrix printers I had from the 90's didn't).
What's perhaps more surprising, my macbook had an inbuilt driver for generic epson printers and it worked. It was not very good, it printed as graphics but it was there for some reason.
Not sure about modern inkjet and laser printers though. An inkjet Epson I used to have once did support raw ESC/P codes though, but it was 20 years ago.
I have three floppy albums in my collection, and all three had different approaches to fitting an album on a floppy. Namely:
- one is vaporwave, and it's in 24kbps mp3 iirc (need to dig out the floppy drive to check)
- another one is chiptune, and the floppy has the source .mod files. They take about 100kB of the floppy I think — good for another 12 albums or so.
- my favorite one is a split album by two grindcore/noisecore bands. The songs are just very short.
Not quite distribute, it feels like spammers are using dockerhub pages as a free publishing platform for posting links to even more scummy websites in promises to get free ebooks and full hindi movie downloads and my favorite "cleanmymac-x-443-cracked-activation-code-hot".
Docker probably should've started their purge there, not with FOSS orgs...
There's also a non-free program called Grid Cartographer which is aimed mostly at tabletop game developers, I think, but it can also be used for playing old RPGs. It supports EOB and EOB2 and a few other games.
My (technically) waterproof electric shaver doesn't work while being charged, too — according to its manual, it's so that you won't try and use it while charging in a shower and electrocute yourself.
Even then, google likes to link to a twitter account (that is, main account) of some random person who reposted the image three months ago instead of the actual tweet, or author's twitter, or anything usable
It's on youtube, very cool for 1983
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