Seth "Twylo" Morabito @twylo@mastodon.sdf.org

I have achieved Voice over IP with this Rolm phone and a Cisco SPA112 analog telephone adapter. I am now unstoppable. I will become a l33t phr34k and hack the planet.

I have wanted this record since college. Now, I have it.

Yes. Agree.

I've been using Ubuntu as my desktop Linux for so long now, I've forgotten the olden days. The early days. The fighting-with-XFree86-Configs days. The recompile-your-kernel-to-add-a-driver days. The window-manager-setup days. The printer battles. The audio battles.

We've come a long way. Not just Ubuntu, either, I mean any desktop distro.

(Also, I feel kind of bad for Josef Prusa because he doesn't use the Czech spelling in his logo and marketing, so nobody knows it's properly pronounced Průša!)

It is the year of our lord 2019 and I'm finally getting my first 3D printer. EXCITE.

I'm not even kidding, I've filled up three moving boxes with stuff.

Thank goodness it's all going away.

So I'm preparing to take a load of stuff to the electronics recycling center on Saturday morning before VCF, and now I'm trying to remember:

- Why did I need so many narrow SCSI cables?
- Why did I have two bins of IEC power cables?
- How many PCI video cards does one man need?
- Why did I have so many dead hard drives? They don't even spin up.
- What on earth was I going to do with this many mono RCA cables?
- Was it a good idea, at the time, to hoard printer cables?

Listening to this album always makes me think of my college roommate, Hank. He's basically single handedly responsible for my musical taste.

Today I spent a long time dealing with Windows on Allen's PC. I don't like Windows.

Oh hello, world! It's my first toot from Emacs using mastodon.el. You know what? This is pretty good. It's honestly a FAR better client than 'twittering-mode' ever was on the bird site.

Anyway, t his is really just a test. Let's see how it works!

I want to write a Usenet-style text based reader for the fediverse. I think that would be cool.

I try very very hard to write comments that I would want to read if I had to dive into someone else's code and understand what the hell it was doing and why.

So I gave up. Instead of writing a content manager as a web application, I’ve developed an export backend for “org-publish” in Emacs, so I can scan a directory with some org-mode metadata in a file and spit out nicely formatted static HTML pages with links to the content. This feels right.

Plus, hey, Lisp! (Well, Emacs Lisp, anyway)

I’ve spent the last few days exploring web application dev to build a very simple content manager, and I have come to the conclusion that they are all terrible.

- PHP: What is there even to say.
- Ruby on Rails: Once a lean and simple powerhouse, now a complex behemoth. Not deployment friendly.
- NodeJS: TypeScript makes it usable, but more frameworks than you can shake a stick at and they break every third day.
- Bespoke Go/Rust/Etc.: Great for APIs, not great for a whole user-facing app.

Here's the DECtalk PC Card in action. Forgive me... I posted it to the bird site first, so I namedrop it.

I got a fun toy in the mail today! It's a DECtalk PC Card, the same speech synthesis system used by Stephen Hawking. Video to follow...

For the last couple of weeks I've been working on adding Ethernet support to the AT&T 3B2 emulator. It has been a frustrating process, but I think I finally cracked the problem. https://loomcom.com/blog/0118_understanding_the_ni_card.html