Dark Roasted Blend

darkroastedblend.com · Group blog · on HN since 2008

Dark Roasted Blend is a visual blog of unusual photos and articles on technology, space history, odd places, and retro-futurist art.

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What HN saysHN commenters enjoy its Soviet sci-fi art and curiosities like the Curta and Darien Gap, though one notes a post was a re-run duplicate.

34HN people shared it

15linked it in comments

21stories submitted

246story points

3 years agolast shared

2008people per year2026

Most-shared posts

1
Rare Photos of the Russian "Buran" space program
3 people · 59 points · first shared 2009 · 22 comments on HN
2
Most Alien-Looking Place on Earth
3 people · 42 points · first shared 2008 · 12 comments on HN
3
Homepage
3 people · first shared 2015
4
Darien Gap: The Most Dangerous (Absence of a) Road
2 people · 107 points · first shared 2013 · 45 comments on HN
5
Futuristic Concept Cars of the 1970-80s
2 people · 7 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
6
Stunningly Intricate: Curta Mechanical Calculator
2 people · 5 points · first shared 2008 · discussion on HN
7
Early Supercomputers: A Visual Overview
2 people · 3 points · first shared 2015 · 2 comments on HN
8
Machines Alive (The Whimsical Art of Boris Artzybasheff)
2 people · 2 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
9
Epic Abandoned Substations and Power Plants
1 people · 4 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN
10
Inside a Wave: Epic Photography by Clark Little
1 people · 3 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN
11
Friday Photos: Streamlined Soviet Passenger Hydrofoils
1 people · 3 points · first shared 2012 · discussion on HN
12
Attractive, Unique Vintage Telephones
1 people · 2 points · first shared 2012 · discussion on HN
13
Megastructures: Bigger than worlds
1 people · 2 points · first shared 2015 · discussion on HN
14
Weirdest Cell Phones Ever
1 people · 2 points · first shared 2009 · discussion on HN
15
Vintage Construction Toys: Blasts From The Past
1 people · 1 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN

What HN people wrote when they linked it

willvarfar · 2015-03-23

Tangentially related, soviet-era sci-fi illustrations (mostly of the space race and the era the brothers departed from) is really great! There are lots of articles at http://www.darkroastedblend.com

lostlogin · 2017-12-01

The Curta is awesome. Styled as some sort of combination of hand grenade and camera lens. For “maths on the run.” http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/curta2.html Edit: check out its case and the tear down, it’s so great. At the end is the ‘Iron Felix’, a Stalin era arithmometer, which is a bit less compact. http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2008/09/stunningly-intricate-curta-mec…

Animats · 2014-11-04

"What’s a key attribute of a good UI? It disappears. It does not draw attention to itself. It enables the user experience, but is not itself the experience." -- Kathy Sierra, Serious Pony That's the problem. The functional purpose of the UI is to get you to the content or let you do something, then get out of the way. The business purpose of the UI, though, is to get customers to buy the thing. "Sell the sizzle, not the steak". That's the driving force behind this endless tweaking of graphic elements. Here's another kind of UI - automobile dashboards. http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2012/05/car-dashboards-as-works-of-art… This is worth careful study. Match up the dashboards with various computer UIs.

throwaway_yy2Di · 2013-09-21

Here's an exact duplicate of this article on another spammy aggregator from five years ago: http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2008/09/most-alien-looking-place-on-ea… I don't really have a point. edit: I do have a point. This is a "mirror" of the OP's site, now that its server has crashed. And if this one crashes too, just search "blooming elephant leg" for another dozen "mirrors". (Best viewed with AdBlock, Ghostery).

jmyeet · 2023-10-22

The Darien Gap is a fascinating place. Pre-pandemic it was a dangerous place with a high risk of running into drug smugglers or just people who might kidnap you. Some would try and cross it on foot and a fair few of those were simply never seen again. The terrain is horrendous. Mud, mountains, many streams and rivers, thick jungle and often torrential rain [1]. Nowadays there are a lot of migrants that cross the Darien Gap. This should tell you something about how truly epsperate they are [2]. [1]: https://www.darkroastedblend.com/2008/09/darien-gap-most-dangerous-abs… [2]: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/darien-gap-migration-crossroad…

cainxinth · 2023-06-06

Kovah · 2022-09-12

Here you go: - https://cloudhiker.net/ - https://jumpstick.app/ - https://theuselessweb.com/ - https://www.viralwalk.com/ - https://www.boredbutton.com/ - https://urlroulette.net/ - https://links.yesterweb.org/ - https://wiby.org/ - http://theoldnet.com/ - https://www.darkroastedblend.com/ - https://randomwebsite.mickschroeder.com/ - https://theforest.link/ - https://geocities.restorativland.org/ - https://usefulinterweb.com/

ar4herjer5hjr5 · 2020-03-13

There is a now-defunct Soviet-equivalent to HAARP called Sura Ionospheric Heating Facility, as well as facilities in Ukraine that contain similar arrays of antennae: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sura_Ionospheric_Heating_Facility http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2007/10/abandoned-ionospheric-research… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpN3KXLgCz0 (location not disclosed, but this Youtuber makes several videos of abandoned sites around Ukraine)

dredmorbius · 2016-08-22

This isn't the first time gratuitous "technologisation of stuff" has been proposed, though it seems to be proceeding rather apace. From 1922, "Radio All the Things!": http://i.imgur.com/TSJnicdl.jpg (Via: http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2015/01/videophones-from-future-past.h… and origionally: http://wi.mobilities.ca/grant-wythoff-aerophone-telephot-hypnobioscope… Or the original book if you'd prefer: Hugo Gernsback, Radio for All (1922): https://archive.org/details/radioforall00gerniala I think I know what a radio phone might do. Radio clocks even exist (though a networked NTP timekeeper is more useful). I'm not sure I'd care to fly in a radio-controlled airplane. And I'm utterly perplexed at what a radio heater might be -- unless it's a microwave space heater, or an early instance of Nest.

aaronsnoswell · 2014-08-05

Was anyone else taken with the images interspersed throughout that blog post? Does anyone know where they are from? Edit: found them thanks to Google image search: http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2014/01/machines-alive-whimsical-art-o…

eik3_de · 2014-04-07

Nowadays.. not so much better in some places: http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2009/05/cable-blues-tangled-crazy-wiri…

mxfh · 2014-01-16

Not even that faint dot of Socatra just east of it belongs to Somalia, that remarkable island is part of Yemen. http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2008/09/most-alien-looking-place-on-ea…

terhechte · 2013-04-06

rbanffy · 2010-05-26

IIRC Russian rockets are also taken lying down to the launch platform and are rotated into vertical position. You can see a couple pictures of that happening at http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2007/11/rare-photos-of-russian-buran-s… http://www.energia.ru/english/energia/launchers/vehicle_n1-l3_l.html

DanBC · 2015-10-07

These sites may be of interest. They're much more recent than Antikythera. https://calculating.wordpress.com/2011/11/23/calculators-for-computers… http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/calculators/1/44 http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/staff/saj/arithmometer/ http://history-computer.com/MechanicalCalculators/Pioneers/Lebniz.html http://history-computer.com/CalculatingTools/gadgets.html http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2008/09/stunningly-intricate-curta-mec… http://www.vcalc.net/cu.htm

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