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Microprocessor Report (article index)
BYTE Magazine Archive (article index)
Unofficial BYTE FAQ ( R.I.P. 19751998 )
Shutterbug Archive (magazine articles)
Unseen Photos of Franklin Castle
Radio Havana 1972 (rare recordings)
Unseen Photos of a Lost Artwork
ROTator (JavaScript applet)
ROTator (Java applet)
JSecure (Java applet)
Tom's Oscar Contest
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Recent Movies
Leave the World Behind narrows the focus of a catastrophe to two families: one middle-class white, the other upper-class black. The interracial characters and atypical status add tension to an already tense scenario that begins with an Internet blackout and gradually deteriorates. Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke play the parents of two teenagers renting a luxurious Long Island vacation home. Mahershala Ali and Myha'la play a wealthy black investment manager and his precocious daughter seeking shelter. The situation is already uneasy when outside events eclipse their personal conflicts. This contrived but plausible thriller heightens suspense by withholding information until nearly the end. Optimists will see a call to change; pessimists will see a warning to prepare for the inevitable.
May December simmers with tension and is a rare example of an actor's film powered by two female leads: Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore. They are subtle but superb. The plot resembles a real sex scandal involving a middle-aged woman and an underage boy (the Mary Kay Letourneau case in the 1990s). Here, Moore plays a woman who (like Letourneau) eventually married the boy and bore his children. Now she's 55 and he's 36, and their twins are graduating high school. Charles Melton skillfully plays her husband as a flat personality who quietly harbors doubts. Portman plays the catalyst that heats the simmer to a boil her character is a famous actress who will portray Moore's character in an upcoming movie. Her immersive research for the role disrupts the shaky status quo, and she begins to relish playing Eve to an immature Adam. But this is a film in which the performances supersede the story.
Rustin tells the story of civil rights activist Bayard Rustin (19121987), who organized the massive 1963 March on Washington at which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous "I have a dream" speech. Although Rustin was a lifelong activist, he's relatively obscure, because his homosexuality relegated him to the background. This film centers on Rustin's planning for the 1963 event and is more accurate than a typical Hollywood dramatization. Colman Domingo was nominated as Best Actor for his lead role. Instead of downplaying Rustin's homosexuality, the screenplay highlights his affairs and shows how they jeopardized his contributions to the movement. It honestly paints Rustin as a tragic figure who nevertheless was an important freedom fighter.
Maestro is a disappointing biopic of Leonard Bernstein (19181990), the famous American conductor, composer, and pianist. If you know little about him, you won't learn much more, except that he was a bisexual chain-smoking philanderer. It centers on his marriage to Felicia Montealegre, a stage actress. Although a few scenes show him conducting orchestras, composing music, and teaching youths, it ignores his philanthropy, influential music, and political activism. Of course, it's not a documentary, but it's not an illuminating biopic, either. The highlights are Oscar-nominated performances by Bradley Cooper as Bernstein and Carey Mulligan as Montealegre. It was also nominated for Best Picture, Original Screenplay, Cinematography, Makeup/Hairstyling, and Sound. Cooper directed and co-wrote the melodramatic script.
American Symphony profiles polymath musician Jon Batiste during an especially difficult period when he was composing and arranging an orchestral performance for Carnegie Hall while his wife suffered a relapse of leukemia. This intimate documentary by Matthew Heineman showcases Batiste's versatile musical talent and his loving relationship with Suleika "Boo" Jaouad, whom he married in 2022. Batiste won fame when his band Stay Human appeared on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert from 2015 to 2022. His music has also won five Grammy Awards and an Oscar. Working at close quarters, Heineman reveals the highs and lows of two people struggling to beat the odds, both professionally and personally. It's one of the year's best documentaries.
See more mini-reviews: Nyad ... Killers of the Flower Moon ... Barbie ... Oppenheimer ... All the Beauty and the Bloodshed ... Moonage Daydream ... Babylon ... Tár ... The Whale ... Top Gun: Maverick ... Elvis ... Nope ... Everything Everywhere All at Once ... Minamata ... CODA ... and hundreds more!
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Tom's Oscar Contest
First Place Prize: Susanne Bergstrom-Null
Second Place Prize: Julia Vosper
Booby Prize: David Hensley
Susanne Bergstrom-Null has won the First Place Prize in Tom's 41st Annual Oscar Contest. Susanne finished with the high score of 123 points.
Finishing second with 119 points were Julia Vosper and Tim Midkiff. However, Julia submitted her ballot two days sooner, so she wins the Second Place Prize.
Finishing last with a perfect zero points were David Hensley and Computer Booby, a virtual contestant created by Tom's OscarCalc program. But the computer is ineligible to win, so David wins the Booby Prize.
Enter your ballot password on this page to read the thrilling story of this year's contest, check the final scoreboard, see how Tom's OscarCalc program fared with its Oscar predictions, and view the Oscar contest Hall of Fame.
Tom's Inflation Calculator
Tom's Inflation Calculator includes the latest U.S. government inflation data for 2023 plus alternative data sets. It's free and should run automatically in your web browser after clicking on the link above. By using historical data and forecasts, it can adjust U.S. dollar amounts for retail price inflation either forward or backward in time for any years between 1665 and 2100.
Tom's Inflation Calculator also includes the Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index, which the Federal Reserve uses to guide its monetary policy, plus an alternative data set from ShadowStats, a private company. It's the best inflation calculator on the Internet!
Computer Dictionary
Are you baffled by a technical term or acronym you've never seen before? Or just curious about the latest techie slang? Tom's Computer Dictionary may have the answer. From "AAC" to "zoo virus," it defines more than 900 terms in plain language. Learn to speak geek!
Mini Movie Reviews
Tom's one-paragraph reviews of more than 1,900 movies and documentaries, including shorts, silents, independent productions, and experimental cinema. Special attention to old classics, film noir, science fiction, and horror thrillers!
Unseen Photographs
of Haunted Franklin Castle
Franklin Castle is said to be Cleveland's most haunted house. Now you can see rare interior views I photographed in 1980 while guided through this spooky 1881 mansion by a ghost hunter. My photos have never been seen before! I shot two rolls of film that dark night, including infrared film in an attempt to capture phenomena beyond the spectrum of human vision. Follow this link to Franklin Castle as it was in 1980 and will never be again!
Radio Havana 1972
On this page you can listen to rare recordings of English-language shortwave-radio broadcasts from Radio Havana in Cuba. In April 1972, I recorded these shows from an antique radio and learned about propaganda. One recording is "The Voice of Vietnam," with news of the Vietnam War from the communist side. Another is "Post Office Box 7026," which answers questions mailed by listeners from all over the world. These echoes from the past are historical, interesting, and amusing. The MP3 files will play in most web browsers.
Unseen Photographs
of a Lost Earth Artwork
"Partially Buried Woodshed" was an unorthodox earth artwork created in 1970 by Robert Smithson at Kent State University in Ohio. After an arson attack and decades of deterioration, only traces remain, and new campus buildings and parking lots occupy the site. I took numerous photographs of the artwork while it still existed in 197576. Now you can see a few, never before published.
Guitar Cheat Sheet
Do you want to learn the most common major and minor guitar chords? Instantly transpose songs from one major key to another? Find out which major and minor chords go together? Play scales in any major key? Learn the notes on the fretboard? It's easy! And it's free! Just print Tom's Guitar Cheat Sheet.
Index to Tom's Articles
Here's an index to more than 500 of Tom's articles in Microprocessor Report, the insider's guide to microprocessors, networking chips, and mobile-phone chips. Learn about embedded processors, microcontrollers, digital-signal processors, and related topics. (TechInsights subscription required to read most articles.)
Scramble Text With ROTator
ROTator is an applet that lets you encode and decode text in the popular Internet format known as "ROT 13." Lots of other programs do that, but my applet goes further by allowing you to encode and decode text in any rotational letter-substitution format. You can shift the letters left or right, and you can shift them by any number of letters from ROT 1 to ROT 26. Use my all-new JavaScript version (recommended) or the original Java version.
Test Your Java Security
How safe is your system from hostile Java applets? Find out with JSecure, one of Tom's free applets. JSecure harmlessly tests the security manager of your Web browser or applet viewer by trying to access information from your computer's operating system and hard disk. Try it today!
BYTE Magazine Articles
Here's an index to more than 180 of Tom's computer articles from BYTE Magazine published from 1992 to 1998. (BYTE ceased publication with the July 1998 issue.) All of my articles are available online and some include the original photographs and figures.
And more stuff...
- Tom's Mini Movie Reviews. Snappy reviews of recent movies, like those in the blue column at left. Reviews that scroll off the column land on the Mini Movie Reviews page.
- Shutterbug Articles. More than a dozen of Tom's photography articles from Shutterbug magazine are now online. Learn how to personalize your film speed, banish dust from your darkroom, make postcards, find the best deals on used cameras, create special effects with open flash, and more.
- The Death of BYTE Magazine. In 1998, after 23 years of operation, BYTE Magazine was folded by its new owner. To learn the inside story about what happened to the world's second personal computer magazine, see Tom's Unofficial BYTE FAQ.
- Tools for Web Builders. The hardware, software, programming tools, and books used to build this web site. Some tools may be useful to you, too.
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Last site update: March 17, 2024
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