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
- What, that program only took... 29 hours. Don't ask questions ;-) #commodore
- I really enjoyed Nick’s “Racing the Beam” so I figure this will be my next weekend reading.
- Making and breaking codes Part 14: VIC Cipher on the Commodore VIC-20 · imapenguin
- Can you do #adventofcode with 40 year old machines? The answer is “some of it”. Even counting takes a long time, let's get into some of the details. https://imapenguin.com/can-you-do-advent-of-code-on-8-bit-machines/ #commodore
- Can you do Advent of Code on 8-Bit Machines? · imapenguin
- Finally getting back to writing up some of the ciphers I’ve done but not yet published. Only took like a 5 month break (detour?) Tomorrow I’ll post the VIC Cipher on the VIC20 which does just barely fit on an unexpanded VIC. #commodore
- Hard not to be in awe of nature sometimes. These burrs are particularly good at clinging to sweatshirts.
- I have been doing Breadth and Depth First Searches on Apple II and Commodore for a couple months, so Day 12 of #AdventOfCode was doable (but slow) on a C64. END is a keyword in BASIC so I changed it to FIN #commodore
- Airplane isn’t going to build itself even if it’s 38 in here. #myzenith750
- We bought a whole Mangalica pig from a local farm, used a local butcher. Having the whole animal means you have to use scraps, everything. Made some “cottage bacon” with some pieces and happened to have decent ingredients for an English breakfast (dinner).
- For #AdventOfCode Day 8 Part 2, figured it out in Python first to wrap my brain around how to do it iteratively. After an "ah ha" moment in sorting the unique segments it clicked. Python: 0.04 seconds and PET: 25 minutes.I could refactor it to be faster but not bad. #commodore
- Still having fun doing these #AdventOfCode puzzles in the morning. I changed the delimiter from "|" to a zero since old computers don't always have that character. Part one was a lot of data, but the PET got through it pretty quickly. #commodore
- Something interesting I like to do on these long calculations is to compare machines to the fastest Commodore computer, the PAL VIC-20. In this case, the VIC-20 finished 48 minutes sooner than the NTSC C64. Very scientific of course 😉 #commodore
- Part 2 of #AdventOfCode Day 7: my rough estimate is that my current code will run for… well a LONG time on a lowly #C64. So what to do… I know! Run the exact same code on BBC Basic on a 2.6Ghz i7 in 60 seconds ;-) Cheating? Maybe. Am I happy anyway? Yes #commodore #BBCBASIC
- Might have to start doing these in Assembly starting tomorrow if I want to keep using 8 Bit (around 1Mhz ish) computers. Part 1 of #AdventOfCode Day 7 took almost 6 hours. Good thing I started it in the middle of the night ;-) #commodore
- Trying this out for more or less the first time ever. Feels awkward...
- Been working on a magic square solver for a couple weeks now. My recursive backtracker in Python typically takes about 290 tries. Iterative approach on the PET I've got down under 100 tries (although it takes 15 minutes). Pretty happy with this. #commodore
- Most of my favorite antidotes for a great many things cost no money at all.
- Used my favorite VIC-20 for #AdventOfCode Day 3. Did need to use a RAM expander on the lowly VIC, but it worked out okay. #commodore
- Quick look at the Biltmore Christmas decorations with my favorite person.