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
RSS- 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
- I think this is the first time I've ever used the BIT operator in my life. No longer a virgin ;-) #commodore
- Compute's BASIC Toolkit book example 3 is passing parameters to SYS. So satisfying to be just getting into the weeds with 412 pages to go in the book ;-) #commodore
- My linear algebra is really rusty so I'm going back and reviewing today. SO much better if you can visualize along the way and the tools for this these days are crazy good. How can you not love open source and the people who pour themselves into these libraries?
- Still not decided on Assemblers on the VIC-20 so just doing it in the monitor for now. #commodore
- Cold front will be here soon, so putting some miles in. We moved here 10 years ago this month and I still have to pinch myself that we live here.
- I'm planning to go through this book this year on the 64 and VIC-20 at the same time. It may very well take me a good part of the year, but there really aren't shortcuts to anything worth doing. Means I need to re-evaluate VIC-20 assemblers again which is fun. #commodore
- I eat broccoli sprouts by the fistful. If you grow then at home a quart costs like 3 cents.
- Might not seem like much, but set out at the beginning of the week to get past the raw beginning stages of FPGA development. Button presses, LEDs, seven segments, counting… check. Super happy with my progress.
- Spending some time learning <a href="https://twitter.com/JuliaLanguage">@JuliaLanguage</a> this week. Just realized arrays are 1 based instead of zero. I don't know Julia, this new relationship might not be working for me.
- Went the fairly traditional route to get this <a href="https://twitter.com/lukhash">@lukhash</a> program from the album onto my 64. Played it onto a tape and into the datasette. Other than having to hook up one my PAL 64s, was a snap. Very very cool. But I NEED this on Vinyl now ;-) <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/commodore?src=hashtag_click">#commodore</a>
- This finally arrived today. I was disappointed the LP was sold out when I ordered it back in November, but having it on CD does make it easier to get the bonus track, a Commodore program, onto my C64 so there’s that. Awesome artwork @lukhash #commodore
- Challenging by myself to do this part, but got the elevator on today and it has all the right clearances for good movement. Now to balance it. #myzenith750
- Change of pace for the build today. Working on the interior which is currently a hot mess. #myzenith750