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
- Creating a simple hello world DApp. Have I ever mentioned how much a loathe nodejs and Javascript in general? Urg.
- This is gonna need some work. My shots at 25 yards are consistently grouped like this which ain’t gonna cut it. Practice practice practice.
- So cool. Made a jet engine sounding cook fire with a handful of dry twigs. Science is awesome.
- Pocket knives
- This numworks calculator is really fast
- Doing a couple thousand-word article on the history and some usage of the Logo language, including code examples. Here's an example of some supporting stuff I'm creating for it. Fractal tree on Python (turtle) next to the same algorithm on a C64. Super fun. #commodore #python
- I've signed up for 43 Udemy courses over the years. This is the VERY FIRST course I've EVER completed to the end. And… I'm planning to go through it from start to finish again.
- The Commodore 64 was introduced 40 ago at CES. You couldn't get one until about August, but you could argue that today is its 40th birthday. It was and continues to be a heavy influence in my career. This very C64 was in my bedroom for a decade. Still runs like a champ #commodore
- I love a program example that starts with "contrary to most available literature about USR…". This book is SO dense I have to go slow to keep from missing nuggets (rushing is dumb anyway). Like pulling the return address off of the stack at the end. SOOO GOOD. #commodore
- Okay, Julia's plotting syntax is SO much better. Kinda just fits the way I think without having to look things up. Might be my new goto language… #JuliaLang
- Alright, resistors are all placed. I’m leaving two out until I decide if this is going to be a PAL or NTSC board. #commodore
- I’ve had this 250407 replica board for months and haven’t built it yet. Time to get started. #commodore
- I hate it when I break something that’s a result of my carelessness. And… I don’t have any spares. Sigh
- Okay, now I can clearly see why I'm going to keep learning Julia. Python took 18 seconds to do 100k iterations. Julia (almost identical code, definitely same approach) took 706 milliseconds. Dayuummm.
- Completely unscientific and meaningless benchmarks are fun. My favorite BASIC program of all time is this maze from 1981 originally written for the Atari 400/800 and the PET. Turbo BASIC XL sure does help the Atari 800XL be the machine it really is. Impressive. #atari #commodore
- These warnings exist because someone did it. I reserve ruining my broadheads by missing and hitting a tree… like a man.
- Seriously my new favorite album. Listening through my late 80s Boze speakers in my office all day. @lukhash is amazing. Does anyone want to sell me their Vinyl copy?
- Finally acquired an UnoCart (used, chip shortage and all that) for my Atari machines. Now I can properly try Turbo BASIC XL. This evening will be some completely ridiculous and shockingly unscientific benchmarking. #atari
- Stealing my own Assembly code from my Enigma project for another project. Kinda love when you get to that point where you say "oh, I've done a bunch of the work for this already" #commodore
- Working on the next article in my "ciphers on old computer things" series and reviewing some supporting code for a couple of the articles I did last year. Very simple code here but the BASIC built-in string slicing routines are fast enough for many fun visuals. #commodore