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
- For the #AdventOfCode Day 2 Part 2 my 8 Bit platform is short a single digit to display the precise 2 billion+ answer (intentionally blurred). So my 1983 Tandy PC-4 got recruited for the assist. I’m counting this as fair play. #commodore #PET
- Blurred my answers ;-) Weapon of choice for #AdventOfCode Day 2 is the #commodore #PET #AdventOfCode2021
- The two best Christmas albums of all time. We have many, many albums and these two are the best.
- The #AdventOfCode Day 1 part 2 was a three-measurement sliding window. See, who needs more than 8 Bits in a computer? I blurred the answer, no cheating ;-) Url if you want to participate is: https://adventofcode.com/ #commodore #C64
- Doing the #AdventOfCode for December using my weapon of choice. Day 1 part 1 was a snap. If I don't print the lines (looks cooler if I do) it gets the correct answer in 31 seconds. Not bad for a 39 year old machine #commodore #c64
- Today's learn something every day: Back implementing manual stack and memoization on systems that don't REALLY do recursion. To help visualize loops, I started printing the status on every loop on a delay and reversing the stack pointer digit so I could follow it. #commodore
- Christmas AND math. Sign me up.
- Today's "learn something every day": Been studying recursion implementations in modern languages like Python. Taking this back to 8 Bit machines...this is the first time I've ever studied implementing a manual push/pop stack pointer combined with memoization. Got a lot of uses to ponder for this. #commodore #VIC20 #python
- 25 years together and she still takes my breath away.
- Back to noodling during lunch with the "AI" computer player algorithm for this "connect five" game which I can still pretty handily beat. #commodore #appleII
- Apparently it’s Fibonacci day (who makes up these days). Anyway, seems like a fun job for my crazy slow 1991 Sharp 9300C Hat tip to Andy Anderson for bringing this to my attention #FibonacciDay
- This took me a while to figure out: All permutations of a naturally ordered string. In Python/Rust I'd use recursion, but on an 8-Bit you run out of space on the stack pretty quickly. Managed to come up with a working iterative version. Now I'll redo it in Assembly ;-) #commodore
- Writing some weighted depth first searches for some security software in my day job. Can't think of a better way to refresh my tree searches knowledge than doing it on a PET. #commodore
- I’ve never cared for the 80 Column hacks for the Commodore 64, but I love the Mandelbrot PETSCII program on the PET 8032 so much I could not resist. On this weeks episode of “Stupid Races Between Old Computery Things" PET vs C64(80 columns) vs 128 (10x speed) #commodore
- I acquired this white TI nspire today. It’s disqualified from being on my episodes of “Stupid Races between old computery things” because it’s not old and with an ARM9 @ 396 MHz is more like a baby Raspberry Pi than a calculator. Still will be fun though.
- Slipped out to the Christmas tree farm yesterday during lunch.
- I'm always looking for something to do with an 80 Column PET. Mandelbrot in PETSCII might be cooler than any high res versions I've seen. Real-time took about 13 mins. #commodore #mathisfun
- Barnsley Fern on Apple IIe, Commodore 64, and TI-84. The 8-bit machine videos are sped up 300% to match the much faster calculator render speed so they complete at similar times. This was VERY satisfying to do. #TI #commodore #appleIIe
- I think today's learn something every day is going to be to take this Apple II Barnsley Fern (sped up) and port it to a #commodore
- What? I'm just sitting here thinking about how to best do recursive backtracking in BASIC... #commodore