Metafilterfilterfilter

February 24, 2005 3:50 PM

The 0xdeadbeef mailing list, an early Metafilter, predates most of the Interweb and continues to this day. Run by nerd kernel hacker Glen McCready, it chronicles such gems as the Windows 95 RTM Baby Benchmark, Steve Job's Theory of Life, how to use sendmail.cf to play Towers of Hanoi, the eskimo's (purported) 100 words for snow, our terrible historical beer shortage, the Shift Key FAQ, the one click guide to becoming an international arms trafficker, the Rockwell corporation's theory of near space defense, the world record for an encased pork product, Abbott and Costello Speak Unix, the deer paving incident, the Etch-A-Sketch Support FAQ, the debunking of the don't run in the rain study, entertaining error messages from Netscape beta releases, the world's worst PDA-related simile, the coolest smooth move ever, suggestions for improvements to the Matrix, and the secret habits of VPs. Among about 20,000 jokes, news items and random bits. A mother lode of archaeological timewasting goodness.
posted by felix (12 comments total)

[this is good]
posted by bonaldi at 4:09 PM on February 24, 2005

[this is good]
posted by killdevil at 4:44 PM on February 24, 2005

....timewasting....
posted by nj_subgenius at 5:32 PM on February 24, 2005

heh, I remember being on this list. awesome timewastage. I even once had a local cache of the archives so a few of us could browse them without long page fetch delays. We read through many years of 0xdeadbeef one swotvac :)
posted by polyglot at 5:34 PM on February 24, 2005

My new favorite (that only unix geeks will understand): the case of the evil mirroring ftp warez site
posted by felix at 5:44 PM on February 24, 2005

For you non geeks, 0xDEADBEEF is one of the more popular hexadecimal numbers, since it actually spells something. The 0x means 'hexadecimal', and the rest of it is the number.

If you assume it's a 32-bit unsigned integer, it's equal to 3735928559.
posted by Malor at 5:47 PM on February 24, 2005

My favorite similar site is Norman Yarvin's collected Usenet archives on selected topics.
posted by mrbill at 5:49 PM on February 24, 2005

For you non geeks, 0xDEADBEEF is one of the more popular hexadecimal numbers, since it actually spells something.

I always liked CAFEBABE, but it doesn't go as well with 0x, unless you assume she's at Oxford. More hex words.
posted by dhartung at 5:58 PM on February 24, 2005

Pretty great post, but it could use some links, don't you think?
posted by dong_resin at 6:19 PM on February 24, 2005

Reminds me of another classic time sink: textfiles.com
posted by Loser at 7:35 PM on February 24, 2005

<3 Felix! *Great* post.
posted by absalom at 8:01 PM on February 24, 2005

My night shifts have been saved! Thanks.
posted by Bugbread at 4:02 AM on February 25, 2005