Inklings: a tumblelog

Makeup and Vanity Set: Low

This’d be great expanded into a Tangerine Dream style 20m epic!

TIO: Try It Online

This is neat! It’s a language demoing site with ~400 different languages, where you can type in some code and some input to send to standard input, run it, and see the result. Certainly more practical than installing a bunch of compilers and interpreters if you’re trying to get a feel for some more obscure languages.

Atom Feed Format Was Born 20 Years Ago

Somehow almost perfectly synchronised with when my seething loathing of Dave Winer began.

I try not to hold grudges, yet all too often do, but this grudge is one I don’t feel remotely bad about.

Homebrew and private Github repositories

I’ve been looking for a good way to do this for a while, but the Homebrew documentation isn’t particularly good at describing how to do this. I’m not a fan of the javadoc-esque documentation that’s popular in the Ruby community: it’s heavy on the what, but lacking on the how and why.

In my case, I want to find a way to fetch stuff from Artifactory or, failing that, set up some shadow IT by downloading stuff from Github or Bitbucket.

MNYNMS - DENIAL

Lester

The Space Station Factory orbiting the planet is undergoing an unprecedented mutiny.

The main computer of the space station UNSS ASAMI has gone rogue during decommissioning and gained control of the guardian droids.

After winning a short battle with the UN army dislocated on Mars, the rebellious mainframe is now pointing the station towards earth with its load of uncontained radioactive material.

You are the android L-3573-R, the first of a new generation of guardian droids independent from a central AI. Given your strengths, you are the only hope to stop this threat and figure out what happened to the station.

A metroidvania for the C64!

Atari 2600 Hardware Design: Making Something out of (Almost) Nothing

You may find the book Racing the Beam interesting, as well as the Stella Programmer’s Guide (archive.org version) too, as well as 8bitworkshop, which has the in-browser Atari 2600 dev environment from Making Games for the Atari 2600.

The community spectrum: caring to combative

Last year one of the designers at my work linked me to The Competitive Spectrum over at the Yahoo Developer Network, and it introduced me to a whole new way of thinking of the variety of communities. It’s part of a larger set of social patterns related to reputation, which is a whole nother subject, but for now I just want to talk about the spectrum itself.

See the original in the Wayback Machine.

PicoCSS

Minimal CSS Framework for semantic HTML

Looking at it as a basis for styling this and other sites better, given how tremendous behind the times I am with CSS.

Archimedes Live!

In-browser Acorn Archimedes emulator. It covers a selection of the major machines before the RiscPC arrived on the scene.

How did I not know about this already?!

The Archimedes should be a relatively easy machine to emulate: the ARM3 and earlier have a straightforward ISA, and the MEMC and VIDC chips are the only other complex custom hardware, and are relatively simple for what they manage to do, as the Archimedes was all about raw processor grunt.

Italy’s pasta row: a scientist on how to cook spaghetti properly and save money

Seems like a perfectly good method! If anything, pre-hydrating the spaghetti might make it easier to get the texture just right and avoid overcooking it.

Flashing LineageOS 14.1 to a Nexus 7 (2012)

Because I’d like to make this usable again, as mine ended up unusable, not least because Asus screwed up with the onboard storage and Google’s last update didn’t fix TRIM support.

Fork Awesome

A fork of Font Awesome from before the licensing got confusing and it got awkward to use. I’d switched to using their SVGs, but the copyright messages attached to them imply they’re under a commercial license, so I’d prefer to use something with more straightforward licensing. This covers all my uses.

Life Universe

Infinitely-recursive Game of Life

hcloud-freebsd

Hetzner Cloud auto-provisioning for FreeBSD.

I’m planning on moving a VM I have in DigitalOcean away from them to Hetzner. It might work out, or it might not. The main reason is that their prices have gone up sufficiently to be annoying and their remaining FreeBSD support is rather hosed. If it doesn’t, then even then I think it’ll be worth playing with to get a feel for how their systems work and to maybe prep something to set up WordPress for a friend there.

"Impossible to update UEFI dbx"

I hit this issue when recently updating my laptop. I’m a bit wary of applying the fix given here because I’m not 100% sure everything on my laptop is backed up, but it looks promising.

Concatenative programming: from ivory to metal

Ghosthustler - Parking Lot Nights

Putting Amazon’s PR/FAQ to Practice

20 Mechanical Principles combined in a Useless Lego Machine

Simple DIY method to get unfiltered high quality sound on your Archimedes!

Also see: Better sound for the Archimedes with OPA4134PA Burr Brown OA.

A computer built from NOR gates: inside the Apollo Guidance Computer

We recently restored an Apollo Guidance Computer, the computer that provided guidance, navigation, and control onboard the Apollo flights to the Moon. This historic computer was one of the first to use integrated circuits and its CPU was built entirely from NOR gates. In this blog post, I describe the architecture and circuitry of the CPU.

Why Write ADRs

I tried getting us writing something along these lines within my team at work. I think I might revive the effort along the lines of what’s outlined here.

The Re-Org Rag

Making python fast for free - adventures with mypyc

I hadn’t known about mypyc, and I don’t have a use case that requires me to get a speed-up from compiling anything, but this certainly looks like a promising alternative to the likes of Cython.

zerolog

Zero Allocation JSON Logger for Go.

Also see: A Complete Guide to Logging in Go with Zerolog.

Lightning CSS

An extremely fast CSS parser, transformer, bundler, and minifier.

The only unbreakable law (of software architecture)

Foclach

Wordle, ach as Gaeilge!

The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction

The whole book is available for download as a PDF.

Using a Wii Nunchuk with Arduino

Apparently it uses I²C.

tetr.io

puzzle together in this modern yet familiar online stacker. play against friends and foes all over the world, or claim a spot on the leaderboards - the stacker future is yours!

It’s Tetris. I’d a bit of fun with it.

Hexstatic - Chase Me

xa

xa is a high-speed, two-pass portable cross-assembler. It understands mnemonics and generates code for NMOS 6502s (such as 6502A, 6504, 6507, 6510, 7501, 8500, 8501, 8502 …), CMOS 6502s (65C02 and Rockwell R65C02) and the 65816.

This looks to be packaged on Ubuntu as xa65.

Hscope

A digital oscilloscope interface for Android. I’m planning on trying its Hantek 6022BE support. While OpenHantek6022 is working just fine for me, this is an option to save desk space.

OpenHantek6022

OpenHantek6022 is a DSO software for Hantek USB digital signal oscilloscopes 6022BE/BL.

Deliberate Note-Taking

I recently read this book called “How to Take Smart Notes”. As the title suggests, the book is largely about taking notes. I came to find that it is about more than that. The note-taking is just a means to an end. The note-taking technique that the author discusses is a way to make you a more effective reader and writer.

What I learned in this book is that to really be reading effectively, you have to be taking deliberate notes. Underlining, scribbling in the margins, and copying down quotes do not provide the same benefits as taking deliberate notes.

HOWTO: Solder by hand

While my first attempt in decades of soldering didn’t go too badly, it was way more frustrating than it should’ve been.

I need to do some reading. And maybe steadier hands.

Upgrading My Acorn A3010

I have two (yes, two) A3010s sitting in my parent’s place. This looks interesting…

TL866II+ EEPROM Programmer Review