The October 1967 edition of Life Magazine covered the ongoing Vietnam War but also contained a long article helping readers understand how "man's most complex machine" (the computer) worked. There's a scan available on Google Life archive here , but I've rescanned it to keep the full two and three page spreads intact. The final part of the special is entitled The eerie interface of man and machine…
XKCD 3242 is titled "The aperiodic table" and looks like this: Which is cool, but it's not aperiodic like a Penrose tiling . So, with a little (a lot) of help from Claude I created aperiodictable.com : your one true resource for the periodic table on a Penrose P3 tiling. Click and drag the canvas to place the periodic table wherever you fancy. Hit Print to print your own Aperiodic Table. It's a…
I've been working quite a bit with Claude Code and OpenCode on a project and really wanted a way to run both without having to constantly approve use of tools. That's quite possible with Claude's claude --permission-mode bypassPermissions [1] (I'd like to use claude --enable-auto-mode but it's not available on my plan level (Max) [2]). But, either way, I don't want Claude or OpenCode doing…
Back in 2012 I wrote a blog post titled just Programmer about both my job title and a company I'd just joined as a Programmer. I was very happy to be called a Programmer until quite recently. In the last few months, with the assistance of AIs like Kimi 2.5 and Claude, I've become something else. Something that uses my experience as a programmer by amplifies it massively. And, at the same time,…
Because it isn't polarized, and that can lead to a situation where something is switched "off" but there's 230V of electricity still present. Take a look at this thing: At the bottom you have a standard European Schuko socket and Plugged into the socket is the power strip on the right. Plugged into the power strip is the lightbulb on the left that I've mounted and wired so I can measure the…
So, I'm walking through a park when I see this thing lying on the ground: It's a disposable vape that someone has discarded because it's empty. Specifically, it's a "Fizzy Max III 60K Rechargeable Disposable Vape" and I was about to take it to a bin to throw away when I noticed it had USB-C. I know nothing about vapes so that was a total WTF moment. Naturally, I took it home, sanitized it, and…
There's a quirk in the iPhone Camera app that can drive a security conscious iPhone owner crazy: if you touch your finger on the Camera app icon without actually opening the app, the camera starts operating. That causes the little green dot indicator on the iPhone to turn on and then after a few seconds disappear. This can easily make a security-conscious iPhone user worry that some app is…
KNX is a European standard used in home automation. It's primarily based around a twisted pair bus transporting DC power (30V) and data at 9600 bits/second. Devices attached to this KNX bus draw power for their operation and receive and send messages called telegrams. The devices are typically things like switches, relays, dimmers, HVAC interfaces, small displays, and blind/shutter controllers. If…
After an unfortunate incident involving my passport and some alcohol-based hand gel in my bag, I decided I needed some sort of waterproof passport protection. But searching around for "passport wallets" mostly doesn't result in anything waterproof and all the wallets are large, bulky or ugly. But there is a really simple solution. A 4 mil ziploc bag of the appropriate size. What's the appropriate…
A while back I attended a Cloudflare board meeting and carried my laptop in a brown paper bag from a grocery store. This elicited a few comments about needing a real bag. But I've often carried my laptop in inconspicuous bags. For me, the ultimate laptop bag is one that looks nothing like a laptop bag; it should look like nothing special at all. Unhappily, grocery bags are not very strong, but…
I did have an X.com (username: 6a6763) account and I got bored of it so I deactivated it today.
I own two computers that I use regularly. The first is my main machine, a rather old Apple MacBook Pro , the other is a Panasonic Toughbook FZ-40. They are polar opposites. Where the Mac is designed with tightly coupled software and hardware and is all smooth curves and delicate design, the Toughbook is designed to be used wearing gloves, outside and in rough situations that would damage the Mac.…
Close to three years ago I wrote about using Oddly Specific Objects' alternate "motherboard" to modify a classic Casio F-91W watch: Pimping my Casio with Oddly Specific Objects' alternate motherboard and firmware. That blog post goes into the detail of swapping out the guts of the Casio and building and uploading the firmware. Happily, Oddly Specific Objects is back with a "Pro" version of their…
Early in the morning in a European city, I awoke and wondered for a moment where I was. The room was totally black apart from a small glow from the face of my Casio Lineage watch lying on the bedside table. The luminous dial had absorbed sunlight during the day and was now giving off gentle light in the night; enough brightness to read the time. Infrastructureless #1: sunlight + chemistry = glow…
Somehow I forgot to blog my site: https://lowbackgroundsteel.ai/ . I created it back in March 2023 as a clearinghouse for online resources that hadn't been contaminated with AI-generated content. Low-background Steel (and lead) is a type of metal uncontaminated by radioactive isotopes from nuclear testing. That steel and lead is usually recovered from ships that sunk before the Trinity Test in…
One of my Minitels (the one that I modified a few years ago to run new firmware ) started having power supply problems: the LED was on but nothing else was working. I suspected that the main power/CRT board needed new capacitors and so I recapped it: Alas, despite some of the older capacitors measuring poorly compared to their specs, that wasn't the problem and so I need to go deeper. The only…
I'm not much of a collector of things. Long ago I decided that on the retro-computing front I would not collect any machines that weren't very significant to me. So, my "collection" consists of a KIM-1 , Sharp MZ-80K , Research Machines 380Z and 480Z, BBC Micro Model B , an IBM ThinkPad 701C , and a Minitel (well, two ). But calculators are where I come closest to not being able to resist.…
Portugal has an incredibly well executed and efficient system for collecting road tolls called Via Verde . A small transponder in the car either collects a toll at an automated toll booth or, on some motorways, every few kilometres without slowing down at all. Via Verde can also be used to pay for parking in many locations. When entering a car park where Via Verde is an option there are two ways…
There isn't a lot to this story beyond the fact that in around 1990 I helped debug someone's Lotus 1-2-3 set up via fax. But it's a good reminder of how important the Zeroth Law of Debugging is (see below). Without some sort of online connection with these folks, and with transatlantic phone calls being very, very expensive (I was in the UK, they were in the US) fax was the obvious answer. I was…
Unless they are widely, widely known they make communication worse. And they have a tendency to make the writer seem pompous, or a member of some special clique, while making a reader who doesn't know the acronym feel foolish. They are the opposite of clear communication, and are often accompanied by unclear, complex language. The writer's goal (whether of a book, an email, or whatever the hell we…
From time to time I do some project involving old hardware that requires connecting it to a modern computer. For example, Getting the KIM-1 to talk to my Mac Resurrecting a Dataman S4 PROM programmer Ripping old mini DV video tapes on a Mac And I've come to the conclusion that archiving the related hardware is important. For example, I got this Dataman S4 talking to my Mac using a few different…
I've written before about my 1976 KIM-1 and code I wrote for a similar one long ago. But I hadn't done much with the KIM-1 and strongly believe that old hardware need to be living machines not still lives. But using the KIM-1 directly (via its keypad and little hexadecimal display) is painful. I wanted to be able to use it with a terminal. Luckily, the KIM-1 was designed to interface to a…
Twenty years ago, on February 3, 2005, I released v1.0.0 of a project I called "GNU Make Standard Library" (GMSL). That first release can still be found in its original location on SourceForge. I moved the project from SourceForge to GitHub and newer releases are there. The latest release is v1.2.2 on March 30, 2024. The project has its own homepage at https://gmsl.jgc.org/ . The page describes…
Richard Brautigan's poem " All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace " is somewhat well known in tech. circles but I couldn't find a complete PDF of the original 1967 publication of it (and other poems) online. The copyright notice in Brautigan's collection reads: © Copyright 1967 by Richard Brautigan Permission is granted to reprint any of these poems in magazines, books and newspapers if they…
I made another silly Tumblr (to go along with Movie Code and Low Background Steel ). This times it's a Tumblr for all those font disasters and other typographical amusements. Welcome to the wonderful world of badkeming.com : Submissions gladly accepted.
