I write about the past, present, and future of technology across three sites. imapenguin.com explores retro computing and programming fundamentals, milkcrunch.com covers modern software development and engineering culture, and evadot.com examines commercial spaceflight and the new space movement.
Posts
- Pi with logo is not only inefficient but also inaccurate. But it sure is fun!
- Another one of my favorite ways to estimate pi. The PET did a good job with this one in just over an hour. #commodore
- Yep, still satisfying. Gonna see how many people I can upset for one reason or another (Y'all need to relax) by posting all of my favorite ways to calculate pi on old computers today ;-) #commodore
- Ever try calculating pi with only 6502 machine code (KIM-1) and no kernal or basic floating point routines? Not trivial. Happy Pi day!! #commodore
- At some point over the last few years I’ve gone back to getting everything in print. Not even sorry.
- Well playing in the snow is done…today’s learn something every day I broke out the 128 to learn some graphics techniques. I don’t spend NEARLY enough time in 128 mode so maybe this week I’ll do something about that. This is a tricky but fun one(about 40x speed) #commodore
- Well I don’t need to do yard work today…
- Keeping an eye on a large data migration that is taking place this evening so I can’t go anywhere. It’s progressing well enough that I had time to replace a failing PLA. Hey look, when I put it back together it still works :) #commodore
- My slightly convoluted but perfectly serviceable way of getting green/amber out of my Mini PET 40/80 to a 4:3 LCD. Composite to VGA to color adapter to HDMI. Works well. And yes, I do have an Apple Green CRT, but this is a nice solution if you didn't for less than $50 #commodore
- I know it's a little hard to see in the screen capture… I just completed Week 1 of @ShawnHymel's "Computer Vision with Embedded Machine Learning" on @coursera. It's pretty confidently identifying resistors and capacitors out of my parts bin. Neato
- Some more unobtainium has arrived at my house.
- A Patreon exclusive from @8BitShowAndTell released today has me following along on my 128 in 128 mode which is pretty rare in my office. My 128 spends most of its time as a C64 that takes up a hearty amount of desk space. Robin’s deep dives are always fantastic. #commodore
- Good progress this morning. I forgot to take a picture of it assembled, but I did get the rudder and vertical stabilizer mounted permanently. More about the journey than the destination anyway. AND I even remembered where I put the hinge pin this time ;-)
- First time I’ve been out to work on this in 2022. Warm weather helps ;)
- Sometimes dead trees highjack your Saturday.
- Some visualizations don't get old to see on "all the things". MS Basic on the KIM-1 Mandelbrot. 10x speed. #commodore
- In case you were just sitting there wondering how to land in Lunar Lander on the KIM-1 (clone) in just two actions… start the game, count 3 Mississippi’s, thrust to 1. When your speed hits EXACTLY 85, thrust to 6. Works on this Machine... We can all rest easy now. #commodore
- At some point, my KIM-1 setups have become more complicated than a VIC-20 and I'm not even sorry about it. #commodore #problemsthatarentproblems
- Today's "learn something every day" lunchtime edition: Studying this fantastic example of a custom stack implementation to keep track of recursive searches to solve mazes. I ported it to Turbo Macro Pro of course ;-) #commodore
- I suspect no one is surprised that I started studying how to do Machine learning with cameras by detecting Commodore machines right? Eventually want to try detecting skin cancer, but that's a long road ahead. Never know when you might need a Commodore detector though #commodore