Carlos Fenollosa @cfenollosa@mastodon.sdf.org

Are you a #cli lover? How about #plaintext ? Check out the power of GNU Recutils for your lightweight database needs.

https://labs.tomasino.org/gnu-recutils/

KnightOS is a Unix-like operating system for Texas Instruments calculators that I started 10 years ago. It had a Unix-like filesystem, preemptive multiprocessing AND muliththreading, assembly and C programming environments, and supported 8 different calculator models based on the 8-bit z80 CPU.

Some of the constraints it worked within made for interesting challenges:

- There were 64KiB of usable RAM. The kernel stored *all* of its state in just 1024 bytes of statically allocated memory. Many subroutines had overlapping storage areas and everything was carefully planned to consider this. The userspace memory allocator was a very simple linked list, with minimal storage overhead to maximize available memory for userspace programs.

- The filesystem was stored in (worst case) 128 KiB of NOR flash, which was shared with the kernel - whose core code was <4KiB. The filesystem was carefully designed to maximize space and Flash wear cycles (unlike modern SSDs, our kernel directly managed our Flash storage), which meant designing all everyday filesystem operations to only RESET bits in the underlying storage medium. It also used minimal metadata, to maximize usable storage space for the users.

- When writing to the filesystem, the kernel code resident in Flash became unreadable - so we had to copy bits of the driver code to part of our 1024-byte statically allocated RAM and execute them from there.

- We had some basic networking working based on the I/O port, which is a 1.5mm jack similar to audio jacks (we also had a music player if you had a 1.5mm -> 2.5mm adapter, btw. MIDI and WAV). We directly controlled the voltages on the ring and tip of this port and had to design a and implement very low-level Layer 1 protocol for it.

One thing KnightOS couldn't do is math - once you installed it you basically gave up using your calculator as a calculator.

Do U love UNIX, *nixes etc? Do vintage computers & OS's interest you? R U an SDF member? (even if u r not we wld like u to join us!! you've got nothing to lose http://sdf.org ) SDF is looking for someone in the Seattle area to staff SDF (SDF Public Access UNIX System - our online community/a public access UNIX system/retro-computing/old BBS-like system/community)'s booth at the Vintage Computer Festival Pacific NW!! here is our leader's official announcement:

https://mastodon.sdf.org/@smj/103545267545242799

@cfenollosa
#Cloucflare constantly censor and harass #privacy conscious users. Their algorithms are purposefully discriminatory, they require users to forego #anonymity and they serve #Google #ReCaptcha.

They also are serve a growing number of extreme right-wing services, like #Gaþ, #bitchute, #AlexJones and #8chan.

Avoid Cloucflare like the plague - we suspect they have an agenda and apparently serve a whopping 10% of sites.

I'm so happy to have found SDF. It really is a *social network*.

People with similar hobbies have been landing there, and have built projects, communicate through many channels, yet here we are.

COM, bboard, irc, mastodon, pixelfed, whatever it takes.

It's just friendly people having fun. Just like in the old times of the net.

So, SourceHut is not hosted in anyone's cloud. I own all of the hardware outright and colocate most of it in a local datacenter.

I just built a new server for git.sr.ht, and boy is she a beat. It cost me about $5.5K as a one-time upfront cost, and now I just pay for power, bandwidth, and space, which runs about $650/mo for *all* of my servers (10+).

Ran back of the napkin numbers with AWS's price estimator for a server of equivalent specs, and without even considering bandwidth usage it'd cost me almost TEN GRAND PER MONTH to host JUST that server alone on AWS.

AWS is how techbro startups pile up and BURN their investor money.

"Writing Software to Last 50 Years"

https://bytes.yingw787.com/posts/2020/01/13/50years/

Party like it's 1999

I only now realized that the ANSI color codes for red (1), green (2), and blue (4) are arranged on powers of two and that the rest correspond to addition of the primaries: 3=yellow, 5=magenta, 6=cyan, 7=white.