leah's tiny pc retirement home

a small cryptid caught in time's headlights.
'she/her' unless you know me

32 bits ought to be enough for anyone!

don't assume i know anything about anything

apparently this needs saying, so:
DO NOT BARGE INTO MY MENTIONS
TO PICK A FIGHT. i come here to chill
out, not argue. if arguing chills you out,
go somewhere else.

also, no DMs. ever.

#noai #nobot #nocops #acab

---
our walls have fallen
treasures stolen
our queen is long, long gone
and i dream of fire

favourite instruction: ex (sp),hl
avatar from: cover of BYTE's Aug 80 issue
header from: Mars!

miaowier alt: leah & flutters & nose, oh my! (npub1dx9…0s5v)

Public Key

npub14fhm8fq6muz9cytfxkd8w3wl5p2m3hk8lx7hkmw9zc88acm3546sc0kjcu

NIP-05 Address

millihertz_at_oldbytes.space@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs25man5sdd7pzuz95ntxnhgh06q4dcmmrln0tmdhz3vrn7udc62agpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0ds7a9atj

Publishing to

yabu.me

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub14fhm8fq6muz9cytfxkd8w3wl5p2m3hk8lx7hkmw9zc88acm3546sc0kjcu

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Published at

2026-05-28T17:05:40Z

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Event JSON

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Last Notes

2026-03-10 22:49:19 UTC

"this meeting could have been an IRC session"

2026-03-03 23:56:36 UTC

i'm just going to say this: i remember when Linux could cheerfully run a GUI and a web browser in 64MB RAM. for all people like to say "oh, but web browsers did less then", they had CSS, JavaScript and multimedia capabilities by the turn of the century (the timescale i'm talking about). they also had XSLT, Flash and Java, and they could read email and news, and connect to FTP servers (and i think gopher servers too). so much for "they do so much more now". no, they really don't - they just make a hell of a mountain out of a rather smaller molehill.

2025-10-17 17:22:33 UTC

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i'd argue that first past the post voting systems are a much bigger blight on democracy than tactical voting. if i could specify a list of preferences, i wouldn't need to care about tacitcal voting at all.

2025-10-12 01:37:40 UTC

turn a $5 toy into a serious-looking instrument with integrated effects! all you need is a decent thrift store, $200 of guitar effects, and a garage-sized workshop kitted out with >$13,000 worth of fab equipment...
https://hackaday.com/2025/10/11/a-casio-toy-synth-is-ready-to-rock/

2025-10-09 15:04:59 UTC

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the problem is all of those addressing modes. a pipeline would have to split up their calculation into separate stages, most of which would be unused for most instructions. these days there's no problem with wasting silicon like that, i guess, but back in the day every spe- uh, gate was sacred

2025-09-11 20:54:48 UTC

funny thing about Forth and namespaces. while the rest of the world seems to have either started without them and then rushed to incorporate them or recognised their importance from the start, Forth has managed to do both: Forth had vocabularies from the start, but because figForth and F83 had essentially mutually exclusive implementations, ANS Forth left them out of the standard, instead mandating only "wordlists" which could be built into either kind of vocabulary - but the effect of that was essentially to relegate namespaces out of standard Forth altogether. add to that a slew of implementations which ditched them, most (but not all) of them stemming from Chuck Moore's cmForth... and by the 2010s Forth namespacing was all but forgotten - until recognisers¹ reintroduced them as a byproduct, by allowing Forth words to be qualified with a namespace.
(this is not a post about DOES>, despite appearances to the contrary)²

2025-08-07 23:44:15 UTC

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dear future self: Compose L -

2025-08-07 23:02:23 UTC

fun fact: my first PC compatible came with a US layout keyboard. it took me until my first PS/2 keyboard, iirc, before i could type a £ sign (without looking up which Alt-NNN¹ it was)
...and in sc, i still can't. which is unfortunate for a spreadsheet :-/
¹ dear past self: Alt-156

2025-07-17 19:00:26 UTC

i'd probably appreciate Ada a lot more than i do if i hadn't had to do all my undergrad coursework in it... which, in the first year, meant using the absolute *stinker* that was the Telesoft ADA compiler on the university's Sun cluster. i could've done my coursework in Pascal, on my own computer, if i'd been allowed...
except for the concurrency module, which involved compiled Ada, using its built-in concurrency support, on a little 68000-based demo board - taught by someone i ended up working alongside later!

2025-03-17 18:02:42 UTC

well, this is definitely weird.
using the default ALSA devices, i can stream youtube videos or audio from just about anywhere in firefox, and play videos with mpv or ffplay, or... anything, really
but using a custom ALSA setup, i can stream youtube videos in firefox, or play things using mpv, but i can't play any other audio or video files in firefox, and i can't play videos in ffplay

2025-03-09 03:26:27 UTC

if only MicroZig was a version of Zig that runs on microcontrollers, in the same way as MicroPython

2025-03-02 14:45:51 UTC

wow, uxn11 is *dramatically* faster than uxnemu on bunmark

2025-03-01 19:40:56 UTC

seems to me that it's probably easier to add objects to Forth than it is to add explicit stacks to anything else. the beauty of Forth's syntax (or lack thereof) is that if you want to have everything on the stack be an object you can write that in low level Forth, put it all in an **objects** vocabulary, and switch to that vocabulary when you want to do those things - and when you switch back to the **forth** vocabulary you're back in untyped country
i never understood why people didn't do more with this - for example, if you'd rather do maths on floats by default, but you want to keep the integer operations available (eg for calculating addresses), define a **floats** vocabulary which redefines the f* words without the prefix and renames the integer operations
especially after ONLY/ALSO made vocabularies actually rather useful (even if the tree-structured dictionary of figForth had some appeal too)

2025-03-01 17:40:21 UTC

i wish i'd had a V20 machine. but sadly, the weird little Trigem 88s (iirc?) that was the first PC i owned was a backplane design - the CPU and I/O was on one card, the memory and floppy controller on another - and i think the 8088 might have been soldered onto the CPU board
it was a rather nice machine all told - 640KB RAM, albeit with 2 wait states at 10MHz, a switchable Hercules/CGA card (the machine came with an MDA monitor), and a 40MB hard drive that i thought i would *never* fill! all for the bargain price of £400

2025-02-24 16:57:18 UTC

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not at all familiar, but (a) this seems like a good way to get more familiar, and (b) i have nothing but time on my hands ;-) thanks for the offer though!

2025-02-24 16:52:03 UTC

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sorry to pounce, but: how do i persuade left back to using cream12 for a font? (or chicago, which would also work?)
i tried dropping it into the assets.tal, but compilation failed on the lack of an underline sublabel. where would i put one?

2025-02-16 16:48:59 UTC

if someone really wants to make me happier than a happy thing on a very good day, they will make a Linux distribution that explicitly bans python and everything that depends on it

2025-02-15 17:19:36 UTC

well, that's weird. Voidlinux has a 32 bit version of calibre in the x86_64 multilib section, but not in the actual i686 repos (although the debug files for version 5.44 are still there)

2025-02-08 03:49:33 UTC

i don't know how obvious it is from my posts here, but one of the problems i ran into during the 8 years or so i spent trying to make a living by touching computers is that *everything is just utterly horrible*.
that was two decades ago. things have not, as far as i can tell, improved.

2025-02-08 03:04:13 UTC

quick question: can C be parsed by recursive descent? or does it require an LALR(1) parser?

2025-02-08 01:36:24 UTC

the fact that people are *still* wringing more - and discovering more! - from platforms that are over 40 years old, and were painfully inflexible even then, stands as a permanent reproach to the modern industry, which can't get a machine literally a million times faster to keep up with human typing
the thing is, it's not just the C64. even in the five years of its viable life, games for the original Playstation improved immeasurably as people happened upon tricks and techniques that made the previously impossible suddenly not just possible, but the only way to do things themceforth. that's just what happens when you let people explore a fixed, but fully documented, hardware configuration for long enough, it turns out... and it's what the mainstream computer world has lost completely.
i mean, i'm typing this on an HP T630, which by all standards should be an absolute worldbeater. a 2GHz CPU that can perform 4 ALU ops per cycle; 8GB of RAM; a GPU that's basically a 384-core vector processor; half a terabyte of non-volatile storage...
yet it's regarded as slow. (granted, AMD's TDP-based throttling doesn't help... but still.)

2025-01-30 16:54:27 UTC

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except burn a chunk of the planet off in order get trained

2025-01-23 20:33:31 UTC

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neither do i. hell, it's hard enough to make a dynamic one...
it'd be interesting to see whether anyone has made a static chromium, though. especially if they degoogled it too
or really, anything WebKit based

2025-01-23 20:31:17 UTC

ooh, there are a couple of statically linked Linux distributions? how do they cope with, say, Firefox?
> "oasis uses smaller and simpler implementations of libraries and tools whenever possible:
> ...<li>netsurf instead of chromium or firefox...</li>
ah. they don't. that's... pretty much as i expected, tbh

2025-01-19 13:19:42 UTC

"two threads, one core" is an allusion *nobody* wanted :blobscream:

2025-01-16 17:24:33 UTC

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not quite the same, but i think bitlbee has an ActivityPub module?
it's an appealing idea; my favourite twitter client (waaaay back when) was ttytter, which made it look like IRC. but then the switch to a new auth API killed it, and having to use the web interface again was a big chunk of why i gave up on twitter

2024-11-29 20:15:53 UTC

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ticky boxes please?

2024-11-29 19:29:52 UTC

operator precedence is silly

2024-11-23 01:06:18 UTC

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it does, if it's linear. btw,
result.X = background.X + (foreground.X - background.X) * A
saves you one multiplication per component, which may or may not be significant

2024-11-15 19:59:12 UTC

i can respect picoLisp as being an intentionally old-school Lisp (dynamic scope, shallow binding, only CONS cells) going all out for speed; but i can't respect anything claiming to be Lisp where (cons 'a 'b) returns (a b)

2024-10-21 00:49:29 UTC

well, using picom to make the output of X.org greyscale (which i need to for this Barco monitor, because rather than do the sensible thing and combine all the outputs into grey, it just cheerfully ignores everything but the blue channel... ***WHY?!***) does work. it just... obliterates the performance of the machine. (it also seems to leak memory)

2024-09-10 19:49:32 UTC

wow, check out the economist-think!
> "With C being effectively high-level assembly code this is probably no surprise, but languages such as C++ and Ada should see no severe performance penalty over C due to their design, which is the part where this particular study begins to fall apart."
umm.... no. when you have empirical results that contradict your beliefs about the aspect of reality being studied, it is the height of foolishness to claim that the results must be wrong, and that therefore the study that produced them must be flawed! by all means go looking for flaws, but not on the basis that they must be there - simply on the basis that an unusual result should be checked!
science *requires* that people park their hobby horses outside the lab. sadly, it doesn't always happen. so we get articles like this one:
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/10/assessing-the-energy-efficiency-of-programming-languages/
trying to find out what's "wrong" with a study simply because it produced a result the author didn't like.
Hackaday: do better.

2024-09-03 06:24:34 UTC

Perl and i go way back... and that's where we stay, because i burned out hard on Perl in 2003 - hard enough to end my career as a coder altogether
anything that looks like Perl now makes me queasy. that includes PHP and, sadly, Rust. but funnily enough i can just about deal with shell scripting (although god knows i'd rather not)

2024-09-03 04:42:53 UTC

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i could say more about this - note that macro processors as part of the language (except not), and header files that are basically duplicaes of half of the source code, are reflections of both fundamental weaknesses in the language and the state of the art in softare development **half a century ago** - but... i dunno, i'm just tired

2024-09-03 04:30:14 UTC

one of the worst things about computer language development is that with a few blessed exceptions, everyone seems to think their shiny new language has to look like C to be acceptable.
C's syntax isn't magic. it's not even that well thought through; Dennis Ritchie openly regretted its declaration syntax, but apparently too late to reverse course in the way he did when he realised that writing the increment operator =+ was a mistake. (incidentally, those operators? came from it being more efficient to implement in the threaded code to which B compiled; they predated both the PDP-11 and, well, C. but they were, nonetheless, not a good idea, sacrificing clarity to terseness.) but it feels like every new language adopts it slavishly, and sprinkles its own mix of shiny sparkles on top of it.
declarations, being things that should only ever be written once, can afford to be loquacious.
for everything else, there's no excuse for writing anything but a name. let the declaration do the work.

2024-07-04 01:10:46 UTC

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"but we can't go back to the days when computers ran in lockstep with memory! how slow would things be if we did that?!" - well, all the mitigations for speculative execution are going to slow things down to that point anyway. and hey, now that CPU speed has hit a wall even with all our architectural hacks, maybe now the semiconductor companies can go and spend the money where it really matters - on RAM that can keep up with modern processors, rather than on ensuring processors only rarely have to slow down for RAM

2024-07-04 01:05:19 UTC

it's becoming depressingly clear that speculative execution is an inherently insecure - and unsecurable - feature. it speeds single threaded systems up massively, and obliterates any hope of keeping processes safe from each other in multiprogrammed environments.

2024-07-02 02:06:32 UTC

re LB: so i guess NixOS is done

2024-06-30 02:39:47 UTC

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other: i reprogrammed my trackball (a Logitech Marble PS/2, from back when they only had two buttons) to emulate a scrollwheel if i hold down the right ear. i actually prefer it to using a scrollwheel, oddly enough.
also i inverted its directionality, so it scrolls down when i move up

2024-06-29 23:22:19 UTC

if only someone could build something like The Forth Deck around a dsPIC
or even a PIC32, to be really ambitious - which could support colorForth-style direct machine code compilation, even if the MIPS M4K is a less than ideal platform for extremely incremental compilation because of the branch delay slot, by compiling code into, and running it from, RAM on demand
something like the [Amethyst](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GKgxBEGH1M ), but with a much faster and more powerful CPU, a rechargeable battery and a built in SPI-driven LCD

2024-06-29 20:20:15 UTC

using alt text is *especially* important if you want people who don't speak your language to understand the cool cartoon you just shared with them

2024-06-27 12:55:52 UTC

computers were a mistake, entry #385879:
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/26/llama-ttf-is-ai-in-a-font/
HarfBuzz will happily run wasm code embedded in a font. i don't even