Why 3583 Bytes & What's With the Blue Box?

My first computer was a Commodore Vic-20; it had 3583 bytes of available memory.

That’s about one five-millionth of a modern laptop! So little memory, but still so much you could do with it. While all the cool kids had a Commodore 64, the really cool ones hacked away on their Commodore Vic-20s!

I’m going to try and keep all my blog posts short - REALLY short. I want the text of my posts to fit in to the memory of an original Vic-20. I’ll try to distill ideas down to less that 3583 bytes (or about 500-600 words).

The 3583byte articles aren’t intended to deep dive into a topic. Instead, they’re supposed to raise questions and provide you with some background on an issue. With so few bytes to use, I need to get straight to the point!

So, when you see the blue box at the bottom of a post like so:

Disclaimer: It’s my hook! I’ve taken liberties with what constitutes article content - headings, code and captions aren’t included just the main text of the articles.

Note: I have some longer reads too. These articles will explore in-depth issues and information about my (our) research in detail. Do you actualyl care about a paper on “A Network Timestamp Verification Mechanism for Forensic Analysis” (Hampton & Baig, 2016) – or do you just want to find that article on scraping data with Python and X-Path? :)

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