2026-03-19T07:44:49Z https://yabu.me leah's tiny pc retirement home https://yabu.me/npub14fhm8fq6muz9cytfxkd8w3wl5p2m3hk8lx7hkmw9zc88acm3546sc0kjcu https://assets.oldbytes.space/assets.oldbytes.space/accounts/avatars/000/137/950/original/d3929e8c5aa1f765.jpg https://assets.oldbytes.space/assets.oldbytes.space/accounts/avatars/000/137/950/original/d3929e8c5aa1f765.jpg https://yabu.me/nevent1qqsz0fjzr3xg2yl3s2pclv9xrtgk9kh8f98ej74r5mnzkjweyqtvfjgzyz4xlvayrt0sghq3dy6e5a69m7s9twx7clum67mdc5tqulhrwxjh2neu7ez &#34;this meeting could have been an IRC session&#34; 2026-03-10T22:49:19Z https://yabu.me/nevent1qqs8p894ddntxugz3quz633stmteqyyw7k4j7nnhc0euyclqcpnnptgzyz4xlvayrt0sghq3dy6e5a69m7s9twx7clum67mdc5tqulhrwxjh2tz78e8 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 &gt;$13,000 worth of fab equipment...<br/><br/><a href="https://hackaday.com/2025/10/11/a-casio-toy-synth-is-ready-to-rock/">https://hackaday.com/2025/10/11/a-casio-toy-synth-is-ready-to-rock/</a> 2025-10-12T01:37:40Z https://yabu.me/nevent1qqs8ewdyqm4ceetcha0z2gtav776yurzvs634sd0lz2hum0ca0mzfnszyz4xlvayrt0sghq3dy6e5a69m7s9twx7clum67mdc5tqulhrwxjh2qxrj2r In reply to <a href='/nevent1qqsfe0wfc5tax9t73wnwvv7w8hvklq5eg8ua863w742tsct4afa6f4clvnncx'>nevent1q…nncx</a><br/>_________________________<br/><br/>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&#39;s no problem with wasting silicon like that, i guess, but back in the day every spe- uh, gate was sacred 2025-10-09T15:04:59Z https://yabu.me/nevent1qqsp4z77ucwjjkuhq4mxkfykvf9l0nwccdg74pkv6zc934mw0czc3nqzyz4xlvayrt0sghq3dy6e5a69m7s9twx7clum67mdc5tqulhrwxjh23vlzyq 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 &#34;wordlists&#34; 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&#39;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.<br/><br/>(this is not a post about DOES&amp;gt;, despite appearances to the contrary)² 2025-09-11T20:54:48Z https://yabu.me/nevent1qqsf0542ylyzn6p9e9q8hg297v4q0xdasez842nueuy9lmf8u9lv93gzyz4xlvayrt0sghq3dy6e5a69m7s9twx7clum67mdc5tqulhrwxjh2th4xjs In reply to <a href='/nevent1qqsvu33dr8ppurv2w0vpdxd8q5ga7enzkklztf666nul90sp25yq0ss07wtr9'>nevent1q…wtr9</a><br/>_________________________<br/><br/>dear future self: Compose L - 2025-08-07T23:44:15Z https://yabu.me/nevent1qqsvu33dr8ppurv2w0vpdxd8q5ga7enzkklztf666nul90sp25yq0sszyz4xlvayrt0sghq3dy6e5a69m7s9twx7clum67mdc5tqulhrwxjh2vkwz83 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)<br/><br/>...and in sc, i still can&#39;t. which is unfortunate for a spreadsheet :-/<br/><br/>¹ dear past self: Alt-156 2025-08-07T23:02:23Z https://yabu.me/nevent1qqs823aulskaal8jwan55zdhwkm9fhqlpmmma0r6adp77uzvdrnq62gzyz4xlvayrt0sghq3dy6e5a69m7s9twx7clum67mdc5tqulhrwxjh26kjm8n i&#39;d probably appreciate Ada a lot more than i do if i hadn&#39;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&#39;s Sun cluster. i could&#39;ve done my coursework in Pascal, on my own computer, if i&#39;d been allowed...<br/><br/>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! 2025-07-17T19:00:26Z https://yabu.me/nevent1qqsw3jj4wgmayulalvc4ak8ha3k87lxy3qq7g9lxdyw22ey0urehwlqzyz4xlvayrt0sghq3dy6e5a69m7s9twx7clum67mdc5tqulhrwxjh2r55kr9 well, this is definitely weird.<br/><br/>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<br/><br/>but using a custom ALSA setup, i can stream youtube videos in firefox, or play things using mpv, but i can&#39;t play any other audio or video files in firefox, and i can&#39;t play videos in ffplay 2025-03-17T18:02:42Z https://yabu.me/nevent1qqsts0y2qhyctdt56wu8j22wag3q5q0jq3p763um2q0kacj8ctdznfgzyz4xlvayrt0sghq3dy6e5a69m7s9twx7clum67mdc5tqulhrwxjh2l32rpe if only MicroZig was a version of Zig that runs on microcontrollers, in the same way as MicroPython 2025-03-09T03:26:27Z https://yabu.me/nevent1qqswlapjx8hf9ah7auzay535gguyuh58e0egpdpe0zlzkej6qyndgvgzyz4xlvayrt0sghq3dy6e5a69m7s9twx7clum67mdc5tqulhrwxjh2a4q55x wow, uxn11 is *dramatically* faster than uxnemu on bunmark 2025-03-02T14:45:51Z https://yabu.me/nevent1qqswvqm3ju2ynqfs7y7tagvlg9c7wjfgjugeyel3g954e4qltrv0eugzyz4xlvayrt0sghq3dy6e5a69m7s9twx7clum67mdc5tqulhrwxjh2dqrldl seems to me that it&#39;s probably easier to add objects to Forth than it is to add explicit stacks to anything else. the beauty of Forth&#39;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&#39;re back in untyped country<br/><br/>i never understood why people didn&#39;t do more with this - for example, if you&#39;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<br/><br/>especially after ONLY/ALSO made vocabularies actually rather useful (even if the tree-structured dictionary of figForth had some appeal too) 2025-03-01T19:40:56Z https://yabu.me/nevent1qqs2l085vc9z490jhzdn6u4pkkwngyrps5pkmmr0lrpmczzazstp52qzyz4xlvayrt0sghq3dy6e5a69m7s9twx7clum67mdc5tqulhrwxjh25mq3pr i wish i&#39;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<br/><br/>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 2025-03-01T17:40:21Z https://yabu.me/nevent1qqs2fmfj3n6kypt9ua59q9pcnqy26urzutfty2pt4ht779l3xdl8yzqzyz4xlvayrt0sghq3dy6e5a69m7s9twx7clum67mdc5tqulhrwxjh26pnk24 In reply to <a href='/nevent1qqs9rncm6sxhjeh5uay8ttsu95zy46yeeqzh6qatjpav4ju50n0pz2suu0u8y'>nevent1q…0u8y</a><br/>_________________________<br/><br/>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! 2025-02-24T16:57:18Z https://yabu.me/nevent1qqsfm3qapa9hkv5mm0m73nymnczlk3u30clk2qfrypjx6v9rrtgxulszyz4xlvayrt0sghq3dy6e5a69m7s9twx7clum67mdc5tqulhrwxjh2lyv24j In reply to <a href='/nevent1qqs9pnlx86xjucwmp2f2wg7r3c9a3svlzh4saxpql6rcggeev6peyrg53yjma'>nevent1q…yjma</a><br/>_________________________<br/><br/>sorry to pounce, but: how do i persuade left back to using cream12 for a font? (or chicago, which would also work?)<br/><br/>i tried dropping it into the assets.tal, but compilation failed on the lack of an underline sublabel. where would i put one? 2025-02-24T16:52:03Z https://yabu.me/nevent1qqsyvpux8z99kcha37xa2srlxl5v54kk6knv7sqz3kumsdzph3xd23qzyz4xlvayrt0sghq3dy6e5a69m7s9twx7clum67mdc5tqulhrwxjh2hngsm2 i don&#39;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*.<br/><br/>that was two decades ago. things have not, as far as i can tell, improved. 2025-02-08T03:49:33Z https://yabu.me/nevent1qqsz6k9p3s32ssvgjp5k77jtz2uy3fme4av6ssttsn78yxznwg5andszyz4xlvayrt0sghq3dy6e5a69m7s9twx7clum67mdc5tqulhrwxjh24299sx quick question: can C be parsed by recursive descent? or does it require an LALR(1) parser? 2025-02-08T03:04:13Z https://yabu.me/nevent1qqs8t4e5sgp7zsk40n2uua6thn39hm6lk2lp0e784c54hrlw6uhknzgzyz4xlvayrt0sghq3dy6e5a69m7s9twx7clum67mdc5tqulhrwxjh2cc7d8k 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&#39;t get a machine literally a million times faster to keep up with human typing<br/><br/>the thing is, it&#39;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&#39;s just what happens when you let people explore a fixed, but fully documented, hardware configuration for long enough, it turns out... and it&#39;s what the mainstream computer world has lost completely.<br/><br/>i mean, i&#39;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&#39;s basically a 384-core vector processor; half a terabyte of non-volatile storage...<br/><br/>yet it&#39;s regarded as slow. (granted, AMD&#39;s TDP-based throttling doesn&#39;t help... but still.) 2025-02-08T01:36:24Z https://yabu.me/nevent1qqsfuh45dl8ll5z882jxhnzggg37gyeqg920e5m4e5fxju40l0v7qwszyz4xlvayrt0sghq3dy6e5a69m7s9twx7clum67mdc5tqulhrwxjh27mawez In reply to <a href='/nevent1qqsgfgufa62mcxk8r6qyvpu8e92rtw59jhdv9crve5zymwp47rzzddsnextrz'>nevent1q…xtrz</a><br/>_________________________<br/><br/>except burn a chunk of the planet off in order get trained 2025-01-30T16:54:27Z https://yabu.me/nevent1qqswkyxjqmrp0z86h8gq0squz3ajwzr7p5wdf58026lsld5xxkgx07gzyz4xlvayrt0sghq3dy6e5a69m7s9twx7clum67mdc5tqulhrwxjh2a74g8y ooh, there are a couple of statically linked Linux distributions? how do they cope with, say, Firefox?<br/><br/>&gt; &#34;oasis uses smaller and simpler implementations of libraries and tools whenever possible:<br/>&gt; ...&lt;li&gt;netsurf instead of chromium or firefox...&lt;/li&gt;<br/><br/>ah. they don&#39;t. that&#39;s... pretty much as i expected, tbh 2025-01-23T20:31:17Z https://yabu.me/nevent1qqsyn38304c96yhpjwt3uzp44zzlct4tmdhvsyvjsms3t9s7qws4yqqzyz4xlvayrt0sghq3dy6e5a69m7s9twx7clum67mdc5tqulhrwxjh25wzkzs In reply to <a href='/nevent1qqs8xdqe2jxltf75pql5nzw794xerylc9kfcfptxs9rjjyyhzynfv3cmkdt6c'>nevent1q…dt6c</a><br/>_________________________<br/><br/>not quite the same, but i think bitlbee has an ActivityPub module?<br/><br/>it&#39;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 2025-01-16T17:24:33Z https://yabu.me/nevent1qqs8dc5rks9czgww6la7mf3y6d6lzf3s7x7ysjafu46ur50p2ux8c9gzyz4xlvayrt0sghq3dy6e5a69m7s9twx7clum67mdc5tqulhrwxjh2l3rpxx In reply to <a href='/nevent1qqsve8ftjwkqe6n4hays88dmp883w4geknhtjutn68jurdg3pppafrsr5q8jw'>nevent1q…q8jw</a><br/>_________________________<br/><br/>ticky boxes please? 2024-11-29T20:15:53Z https://yabu.me/nevent1qqsvzja052p7vzc6tcuf6khtf253ln7utjsukfw20ghnn8qqzkgm6jszyz4xlvayrt0sghq3dy6e5a69m7s9twx7clum67mdc5tqulhrwxjh29kpqcn operator precedence is silly 2024-11-29T19:29:52Z https://yabu.me/nevent1qqsz7luuxhtfglnk6r9rz74r3ffg02ac5fmc7umda4f0tglplr342fszyz4xlvayrt0sghq3dy6e5a69m7s9twx7clum67mdc5tqulhrwxjh2xgk6qe In reply to <a href='/nevent1qqszhdk542yhj5d4rn4m2hrtk9d93u7w2d920zppt737wskqtkuvjgsdvu72c'>nevent1q…u72c</a><br/>_________________________<br/><br/>it does, if it&#39;s linear. btw,<br/><br/>result.X = background.X + (foreground.X - background.X) * A<br/><br/>saves you one multiplication per component, which may or may not be significant 2024-11-23T01:06:18Z https://yabu.me/nevent1qqsdk02463pnma79t2mphuw497v3zdpe0fh4qkuxrqr9pl6a0dg5cfczyz4xlvayrt0sghq3dy6e5a69m7s9twx7clum67mdc5tqulhrwxjh2zn5lkw 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&#39;t respect anything claiming to be Lisp where (cons &#39;a &#39;b) returns (a b) 2024-11-15T19:59:12Z https://yabu.me/nevent1qqs2mnxu3e6h3wyhtvh84wf8smr8py7gvu7n6xkkyh67ut2fy5fa2tczyz4xlvayrt0sghq3dy6e5a69m7s9twx7clum67mdc5tqulhrwxjh2tfh5gt 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) 2024-10-21T00:49:29Z https://yabu.me/nevent1qqsgl2xjhpcc0wgldy86klne4rm56asx0c62vhp96fs60ndu090t2qgzyz4xlvayrt0sghq3dy6e5a69m7s9twx7clum67mdc5tqulhrwxjh2rvp2m0 wow, check out the economist-think!<br/><br/>&gt; &#34;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.&#34;<br/><br/>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!<br/><br/>science *requires* that people park their hobby horses outside the lab. sadly, it doesn&#39;t always happen. so we get articles like this one:<br/><br/><a href="https://hackaday.com/2024/09/10/assessing-the-energy-efficiency-of-programming-languages/">https://hackaday.com/2024/09/10/assessing-the-energy-efficiency-of-programming-languages/</a><br/><br/>trying to find out what&#39;s &#34;wrong&#34; with a study simply because it produced a result the author didn&#39;t like.<br/><br/>Hackaday: do better. 2024-09-10T19:49:32Z https://yabu.me/nevent1qqsr4eefd8g36apgllqrr4fts707v3uuaua93wy9md3n44xt5y5p8fqzyz4xlvayrt0sghq3dy6e5a69m7s9twx7clum67mdc5tqulhrwxjh2u2c4p5 In reply to <a href='/nevent1qqsxjkvkf8590chd4t82ehkf02crrzhf3380vmk5qezqnsl5geykufq0258kq'>nevent1q…58kq</a><br/>_________________________<br/><br/>&#34;but we can&#39;t go back to the days when computers ran in lockstep with memory! how slow would things be if we did that?!&#34; - 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 2024-07-04T01:10:46Z https://yabu.me/nevent1qqs9cpfakj8c04yxyed6kg5ku0z73ca5ffkjjrkk7sdxqjv9zys3nwgzyz4xlvayrt0sghq3dy6e5a69m7s9twx7clum67mdc5tqulhrwxjh234mrue re LB: so i guess NixOS is done 2024-07-02T02:06:32Z https://yabu.me/nevent1qqs2c5d9qjyydjy0vxyzf9ztfl673mjqmwlxdgel79whldvwa229fxqzyz4xlvayrt0sghq3dy6e5a69m7s9twx7clum67mdc5tqulhrwxjh2tjhpn2 In reply to <a href='/nevent1qqsrelscv50nnt5fe0tuu2477pthj3huq6ushyvchts7t9dxw0zaufsn6ch0t'>nevent1q…ch0t</a><br/>_________________________<br/><br/>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.<br/><br/>also i inverted its directionality, so it scrolls down when i move up 2024-06-30T02:39:47Z https://yabu.me/nevent1qqsz2f240qe4r6aqxl0k3u4gcqntkvpzt96r4jgnl534wgzfuattalgzyz4xlvayrt0sghq3dy6e5a69m7s9twx7clum67mdc5tqulhrwxjh26gezu4 if only someone could build something like The Forth Deck around a dsPIC<br/><br/>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<br/><br/>something like the [Amethyst](<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GKgxBEGH1M">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GKgxBEGH1M</a> ), but with a much faster and more powerful CPU, a rechargeable battery and a built in SPI-driven LCD 2024-06-29T23:22:19Z https://yabu.me/nevent1qqsd9j02lg4s5yvugge5608njp2thtle55atw7lruzvp9g0x2peegqqzyz4xlvayrt0sghq3dy6e5a69m7s9twx7clum67mdc5tqulhrwxjh2j2d7sj using alt text is *especially* important if you want people who don&#39;t speak your language to understand the cool cartoon you just shared with them 2024-06-29T20:20:15Z https://yabu.me/nevent1qqsdxxqvpym2w7sd0tu7jusmgyhd4k8gcg24lqgmpwwza8ttffmlpjqzyz4xlvayrt0sghq3dy6e5a69m7s9twx7clum67mdc5tqulhrwxjh2x66nyj computers were a mistake, entry #385879:<br/><br/><a href="https://hackaday.com/2024/06/26/llama-ttf-is-ai-in-a-font/">https://hackaday.com/2024/06/26/llama-ttf-is-ai-in-a-font/</a><br/><br/>HarfBuzz will happily run wasm code embedded in a font. i don&#39;t even 2024-06-27T12:55:52Z