Paradroyd @paradroyd@mastodon.sdf.org
I'm into #retrocomputing and #retrogaming, including emulation, lots of real hardware, & #FPGA. I also dabble in electronics, #microcontrollers, and coding.
Joined Oct 2018
Pinned toot
On the web, you can do other stuff while reading an article. On a BBS, get distracted and it will kick your ass off!
Paradroyd
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Paradroyd
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Silk woven portrait of Joseph-Marie Jacquard, woven by Michel-Marie Carquillat on a Jacquard loom - France, 1839.
The program for this weave required Carquillat to encode ~24,000 Jacquard punch cards.
The image is fine detailed enough to capture detail like the translucency of the curtains over the window.
This achievement was one of the main things that later convinced Babbage to use punch cards for his Analytical Engine, cascading into actual use in computing later on.
I have one of these Navetel Datatest 2 Plus serial analyzers on the way.
I used to have one at a job _many_ years ago and have been watching the Ebays for one in good condition to come available. everything finally lined up.
All of the talk of Google hobbling ad blockers and the general deteriorating privacy (or maybe deteriorating _illusion_ of privacy) has gotten me motivated to get Firefox fully set up everywhere and to start migrating to it (back to it, actually).
I'm not going to be able to completely get away from Chrome / Chromium right away, but the process is started.
Home Depot has apparently made the switch to Windows 10 for their new self-checks.
Paradroyd
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World: Google, you are so smart, impartial, and benevolent, please write all our protocols and standards.
Google: Oh yeah, btw, we don’t think you should be able to protect yourself from being tracked on our browser.
Google to break uBlock Origin on Chromium.
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=896897&desc=2#c23
After replacing some bad RAM (and upgrading to 4MB in the process) and replacing a faulty floppy drive, the Mac Plus I picked up a couple of weeks ago is working great!
Paradroyd
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Since I was recently included in a toot as someone to be followed (for which I'm flattered), I figured I'd link to some of my music that I have up on #SoundCloud. All except for one (which is a WIP) are under a CC license. Feel free to check them out.
Logging in to an FPGA-based 486 running Procomm Plus in host mode on MSDOS 6.22 from my Apple IIe over a TCP connection.
There's something very weird about seeing that MSDOS prompt on the IIe. #retrocomputing
Paradroyd
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New here? Remember that Twitter is optimized to make you into passive consumers, by en(r/g)aging you with content that you don't choose yourself.
Here, that doesn't happen. But it also means you're responsible to find people to follow.
It will take some work.
If you're willing to put that in, you'll find a wide variety of friendly people that will be happy to have meaningful conversions and laugh and cry together with you.
Start by searching and looking at who other people follow.
For more info about the Raspberry Pi 3's built-in hardware watchdog timer, and how to activate/use it, I got a lot of info from here:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=147501&p=972709
One of the coolest and most useful features of Raspberry Pis that I almost never hear anyone else talk about is the hardware watchdog timer(s). They can be a bit tricky to use, but definitely worth the time to learn and use if you have to use Pis at any kind of scale.
I have just over 60 Raspberry Pi 3B+ running as library catalog/kiosks inside cabinets at branches, and I have not had to open any of the cabinets to reset one manually in over 6 months of them being in the field in use.
Paradroyd
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I think we can call unix50.org #retrocomputing ... but if you want retro-retro then try Multics at
https://ban.ai/multics/
Paradroyd
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Very cool little offering from the folks at SDF@mastodon.sdf.org which I only just learned about, thanks to @mrguilt - historical versions of UNIX installed on VMs, accessible from your browser! https://unix50.org. Yes, it's Javascript, but it's for a good cause so pinch your nose and check it out.
Picked up an Atari Mega ST 2 at Gateway Electronics earlier this week. To my surprise, it was almost completely clean inside, in great shape, and works great!
I'm going to declare Christmas 2018 my "Year of the arcade machines".
#retrogaming
Meanwhile, in another corner of the livingroom...
An annotated peek into my first apartment in the late 1980s...
I'm into #retrocomputing and #retrogaming, including emulation, lots of real hardware, & #FPGA. I also dabble in electronics, #microcontrollers, and coding.
Joined Oct 2018
