I write about the past, present, and future of technology across three sites. imapenguin.com explores retro computing and programming fundamentals, milkcrunch.com covers modern software development and engineering culture, and evadot.com examines commercial spaceflight and the new space movement.
Posts
- My Dad was a mainframe guy from 1974-2007. He was cleaning out a drawer and says “hey, do you want this?” Why yes, yes I do.
- Modern PCB manufacturing has become so easy and convenient. It's basically the same price to get 50 as it is to get 5 boards made. So that means I have 49 spares...
- We have about 12 inches of dead space above our kitchen cabinets. My better half suggested that a train might work up there. There isn’t really room to turn one around so something that can run equally well in either direction seemed appropriate. Now to design a bridge to go over the window… I’m not into celebrities, but if pressed I don’t have to think hard to come up with my favorite. Any guesses?
- It's a random lunchtime side quest, working to generate a circle with 41 of character 81 on a Commodore 64. Each iteration has been getting smoother. If you have a better way, let me know.
- The first two games I have any memory of playing. They both still stand up today. I didn’t intentionally start alphabetically, but it worked out that way.
- Walmart beats DHL by miles
- This is why I always remove the RF shields.
- What’s the best way to get this stick-on heat sink and the adhesive off of this VIC-II?
- Snowed/iced in this evening. Might as well hook up the 6502 cluster to a VIC-20 and get it calculating things at blazing speeds :) Been using the EEPROM emulator since early last year to really speed up my ROM development cycles. Oh, here’s another 100% AI free zone.
- I’ve been saving the Kawari for when I have a VIC-II fail which is silly. They are 40 years old, why would I think they’d fail this year?
- These are books 1 and 3 in this series and they are some of my favorite computer books of all time. I’m on the prowl for books 2 and 4. Happy Thursday!
- I’m the one who put this “working” label on this power supply but I have never, ever plugged it in without verifying. It’s actually my only working 2 prong. I have three with bad transformers.
- Checking for AI free zones. Found one.
- Porting Wozmon to my 6502 cluster nodes and I spent several hours chasing a “bug” in my code. Turns out I had this box unchecked in my terminal emulator. Was working all along. Doh.
- This week’s side quest: going to interface my Flipper Zero to a 6502 SBC. Should be fun.
- Grover > Elmo
- Machine Language: Count Faster on 6502 · imapenguin
- Emulator vs real
- This is the first time my 2020 Intel Mac has been too old for something. Too soon.
- Rust isn't an excellent language for scripting, but I've been playing with it in JupyterLab just for fun.