Back in late 2019 I saw an ad on Facebook for a very interesting IoT device from a Swedish company local to me - Minut. I've been a very happy user of the four devices (named Point at the time, known as Minut M2 now) since then. This is the story of how I spent quite some time investigating what made them tick, and if I could make them tick differently. Being a few years old, this is not their…
Symptom: 2024-02-18T18:06:31Z ERR The homeserver is outdated (supported spec versions are below minimum required by bridge) bridge_requires=v1.4 server_supports=v1.2 Resolution: When I decided on a Matrix home server the choice fell on Dendrite. More modern (and IMHO secure) development environment, and seemingly a better fit for the size of the server I was shooting for. Also, Dendrite was very…
If I remember correctly, at one point my Home Assistant (H-A from now on) installation started complaining on the Bluetooth component not starting up correctly. Since I wasn't using Bluetooth (the server doesn't even have the hardware for it) I just ignored it. Until a few days ago. I wanted to start playing with ESPHome, and that integration has the Bluetooth component as a required dependency.…
“Evidence is increasing, therefore, that a rapid reorganisation of atmospheric and ocean circulation (time-scales of several decades or more) can occur during inter-glacial periods without human interference.” from IPCC TAR - Working Group I: The Scientific Basis Image licensed under CC-BY: Becker, D., Verheul, J., Zickel, M., Willmes, C. (2015): LGM paleoenvironment of Europe - Map.…
Well that headline looks weird. I mean. You click √ on your calculator. Or you type Math.sqrt() or something similar. But what if you're writing code on ancient low spec systems and there's just no way you can take the time to actually calculate the square root? And even generating a lookup table somewhere else and importing it into the system is a pain due to storage space requirements. Well…
(No, this is not about Musk supporting a racist, homophobic, bigoted authoritarian - others will write endlessly about that today) Tesla is valued as a software company, not a car company. This is an image they’ve pushed endlessly - they’re “further ahead”. Their cars will be self-driving in 2016 .. sorry, 2017. No, 2018. 2019 it is - promise! Your Tesla will robotaxi and…
What you're seeing in this picture is a screenshot from our “family chat”. It's a locally hosted Matrix server, with Element clients on all the computers, phones and tablets in the family. Fully End2End encrypted of course - why should our family discussions end up with some external party? You're also seeing “Karen”, our family AI, taking part in the discussions with some…
With Facebook’s release of LLaMa , and the subsequent work done with its models by the open community , it’s now possible to run a state of the art “GPT-3 class” LLM on regular consumer hardware. The 13B model, quantized to 4-bit, runs fine on a GPU with ~9GB free VRAM. I spent 40 minutes chatting with one yesterday, and the experience was almost flawless. So why is Troed…
Docker is a powerful tool for managing and deploying applications, but it can sometimes be frustrating to work with. In this post, I want to share my experience with a recent issue I had with rootless Docker, and what I did to resolve it. I was working on a project when I suddenly realized that a Dockerfile wouldn't build on my regular desktop user account. Any command that I ran after the FROM…
When people talk about the Atari ST range of computers, most mean the common form factor of the times where the computer and keyboard were all one unit. This was true for most of Atari’s machines - but for a few exceptions. The Mega ST, the Mega STE and the TT went for a more “business look”, which apparently meant separation of computer and keyboard. The Mega ST computer has a…
Update 2021-07-14 : Ben of The Overlanders commented on my Facebook post that there was yet another optimization possible on the depack-routine. I have edited the source listing below. This weekend yet another instance of the very popular Atari ST retro computer happening Sommarhack took place. Due to Covid-19, this year as well as last have been online-only events though. I decided to participate…
(Also includes how to seriously mess something up creating even bigger repair needs) When we bought our property we also purchased a lot of the equipment the previous owner had acquired. An integral part of that is the lawnmower tractor - total size is close to two acres and most of that is covered with grass. It’s a Hurricane HTG 98 SD, which is a model also sold under many other brands. In…
Above you see two probes that came with my DSLogic Analyzer. You also see two EZ-Hook XKM-S probes bought from Digikey at 30 SEK each. The latter are vastly higher quality - and much easier to work with since you can place them closer together due to their thinner tips. Highly recommended.
I bought a DSLogic Basic USB Logic Analyzer a few years back. It has worked perfectly fine for my use cases. Recently I’ve begun using a Ubuntu desktop more than my Macbook laptops in the workshop, and when it came to installing the DSView software I stumbled upon the weird fact that DreamSourceLab seem to consider their old products unsupported, and they cannot use any newer version than…
Love the Tesla Model 3. When I got it I thought the clever way to route a charger cable up from the front USB ports was nice, but after a while I got real tired of having to poke the phone onto the plug whenever I got in the car. The Tesla M3 subreddit had a thread about adding Qi wireless phone charging to the front compartment, and there seemed to be no real competition to the product from…
Even the retro world is moving away from the regular DIP packaging sometimes. The Atari Falcon, and third party ROM boards from Exxos, use the 27C4096 PROM in PLCC packaging to hold TOS (the operating system). The TL866 with its DIP40 socket cannot obviously handle these, but a quick search shows us that there exists many adapter packages available to purchase that will sort out various types of…
I own a TL866CS IC programmer . Wonderful device - I truly recommend it (and I assume its successor is even better). It's been known for many years that the company who made them had one hardware revision, and limited the CS revision compared to the A revision purely in firmware. That limitation has of course been hacked for almost as long as the device has existed. Someone going by the name…
[this post has been updated, see additional edits being made at the bottom] April 2018 I saw a Facebook ad for a pair of headphones that sounded like the perfect match for my needs. I’m a severe insomniac, and a frequent flier. I’ve had the same pair of Sony MDR-NC32NX in-ear noise canceling headphones for a decade, and I was looking for something new. Yesterday they arrived. Now, this…
update 21/7: I'll make regular builds of this, and hope to have it completely automated soon. They can be found here (link might change in the future): original post: 12 hours ago SDL2 support was merged into the popular retro graphics program GrafX2. Here's a fully distributable macOS x86_64 binary (only tested on macOS High Sierra) built from that. Thanks to evil/DHS for letting me know of the…
När jag fyllde år fick jag en ljusbox från Jysk av familjen. Barnen tycker den är helfestlig eftersom man kan skriva egna saker med hjälp av de medföljande bokstäverna, och den passade alldeles utmärkt på nattduksbordet. Den är, precis, stark nog att kunna fungera som sänglampa - än har inte åldern kommit ifatt min förmåga att kunna läsa böcker i dämpat ljus. Däremot drivs den enbart av batteri…
I've added yet a new little description to Projects - a circuit and modification to “nudge” wakestates on Atari STs without needing to power cycle.
Back in the day, those of us who did advanced video tricks on the Atari (opening borders, hardware scrolling on hw without hardware scroll) knew that there were differences between systems, and sometimes on the same system. After some trial and error you built in some compensation which made things work “always” on all systems. Today we know that a lot of this comes from the fact that…
I've done an extended writeup of a little project I've been working on and off on for the last few months. Extending the video modes of an old Atari ST in new and interesting ways. Going from 4 colors to 16 might not sound much with today's tech, but for us oldies this is pretty fascinating ;)
update: See the very bottom of the post for more on where this is going. A while ago there was a discussion on Atari-Forum about what’s known as the “Stefan Nitschke 16MHz mod” . A document from 1996 describing how one can, sort of simply, overclock a regular Atari ST bus from 8MHz to 16MHz, while still keeping video modes backward compatible. It’s done by taking the 32MHz…
update 20-07-20: Since a few weeks back I no longer use any macOS systems, being Linux only nowadays. Because of that I feel that I can no longer keep this service running, due to not being able to verify that things are working or being able to quickly correct them when they're not. Hopefully the Hatari project can in time setup automatic CI pipelines for macOS too. For a few years now I've…
The Atari ST, like other computers at the time, had Dual Density disk drives with 720KB of storage. DD for short. Since High Density (1.44MB) appeared shortly after, Atari used such drives in the more top of the lines models Mega STE and TT. Additionally, us enthusiasts and hardware hackers added HD capability to the regular ST and STE range since it was neat to store twice the amount of data on…
Today it's exactly two months since I started on my "Elysium Basis" regime . Since quite a few of my friends have asked me to write an update on my thoughts about it - here it is. I'm still of the opinion that I have more energy. I'm also confident in the "smoother skin" effect, although I'm unsure as to whether it's because it actually is or if I just, for some reason, experience it to be. Just…
“it’s better to burn out than to fade away” (From Neil Young’s My My, Hey Hey - and known for being quoted by Kurt Cobain in his suicide note) I remember my teenage years well. I also remember voicing the opinion above, along with other things along the lines of “life ends at 30” . I’m 42, almost to the day. I have no intention whatsoever of fading away. I…
A few weeks ago I acquired a computer I never had the chance to play around with when it was new, an Atari Mega STE. It's the culmination of Atari's 16 bit line of computers, very compatible with the ST(E) range yet much more expandable, usually coming with a SCSI adapter and HD (1.44MB) floppy support. Besides the expandability, it can run at 16Mhz, with cache, compared to 8MHz for the rest of…
The Atari Mega STE might be the best machine of the 16 bit era. It’s very compatible with the regular ST(E) range, but in addition it can be run at a higher clock speed (16MHz, with cache) as well as a very nice case where it’s easy to access things like memory, the built in SCSI hard drive etc. Most of the Mega STEs came with 1.44 HD floppy support as well (mine didn’t,…
This weekend is a long weekend in Sweden - and of course I'm away from home, hacking away at the infrastructure I'm far away from. During that hacking I needed to change a mapped port in my router, and suddenly realized I couldn't. I use the latest Airport Extreme (it really has the best performance, throughput as well as wireless stability) and the only machines I remote into are Linux (Ubuntu…
This last weekend me and many others were participating at the third incarnation of the STNICCC Atari ST conference . The first and original one was held in 1990 - where sadly I didn’t attend - and the second one was held as a reunion in the year 2000. Back then they joked about meeting up again in the far far away future of 2015. … and that happened. Me and two others from my old demo…
update 2018-02-09: VLC 3.0 has just been released. Here's a compatible version of the plugin (same source revision as before). update 2017-03-18: Link updated with fresh build (VLC 2.x). A few weeks ago I spent some time with the excellent sc68 software written by Benjamin Gérard (Ben/Overlanders). It's a suite of software that can faithfully reproduce the workings of the YM2149 sound chip in the…
It’s somewhat easy finding modern software able to read ancient data formats (note, "somewhat"). It’s often more difficult finding the opposite - conversion from modern formats to older ones. When I’ve wanted to edit graphics using modern software (GIMP) and convert it to Atari ST I’ve so far used the excellent Netpbm package. The steps have involved converting my image in…
-You're getting a 3D printer? Why - what will you use it for? -Oh you know, it's handy to have around when stuff around the house breaks down. Making spare parts, repairs, stuff like that. I've seen it lots of times. I've said it more than a few times leading up to when I purchased my own 3D printer. And finally it came true. Well, almost. Apparently when me and my sister, with families, visited…
It’s retro computing time again! As part of my quite extensive rebuild of one of my Atari STE machines I want to have both an HxC SD floppy emulator as well as the original floppy disk drive mounted internally in the machine at the same time. While that in itself is just a question of making a cable that supports both, another problem quickly arises. In most cases you would want the machine…
I just did a writeup on how to replace the original PSU in an Atari ST/E with a modern picoPSU . I'm quite satisfied with how it came out - click the link for some pretty pictures ;)
One of the first components to show symptoms of age in an old computer is the power supply unit. This might show up as unstable video output, frequent crashes, problems reading disks or even worse - other components giving up. One option is to take care of existing PSUs - exxos has an excellent guide as to what components might need replacing after 25 years - another is to get rid of the internal…
Why my Mac Mini from 2008 (model 2,1) went from Snow Leopard to Lion to Mavericks in the last 24 hours. I like my Mac Mini. It's the first Mac I ever bought, on a whim, and it's served me well both as a workstation and lately more of a combined NAS, Minecraft and darknet server. I populated it with 4 (3.3 usable) GB RAM from the outset, and a few years ago I switched out its 5,400 rpm hard drive…
The L2311c monitor is a "desktop hot-swappable" monitor to which you connect USB devices and ethernet, where you’re supposed to only then have to connect it to your computer via a single USB cable to access all of its functionality. On Windows. Out of the box, the integrated webcam as well as USB keyboards and mice connected to its port work fine. The USB Ethernet (LAN7500) as well as USB…
This page describes how a still produced little piece of hardware can add real time clock (RTC) functionality to our old favourite computer systems. In this case it's an Atari STE, but any ST with ROM sockets will work. Why? I can't speak for everyone, but personally I've become quite accustomed to being able to look at file creation dates to see when I worked on what. It's not something that…
Seasonal Affective Disorder - SAD. wikipedia also known as winter depression, winter blues […] or seasonal depression, was considered a mood disorder in which people who have normal mental health throughout most of the year experience depressive symptoms in the winter […] I’ve known for years the difference in how happy I am during the warm nice summer, short as it is in Sweden,…
All software contain bugs. All complex software contain numerous bugs. Some of those bugs are security holes. When you hear that a software vendor has found and fixed a security problem that means that somehow that specific bug came up on someone's radar. People who find these holes for a living, and there are quite a few, sell them to others who then exploit them to create massive botnets,…
Bitcoin press has gone through the roof in the last few weeks. So has the exchange rate between traditional currencies and bitcoins - a fact that has seen as many different explanations as I’ve seen people wrapping their heads around the Bitcoin concept and writing about it. One of the explanations is that there’s a cap on the number of bitcoins that will ever be produced - 21 million…
As I'm writing this, I have 20 tabs open in my web browser. Of those, the five latest are newly opened and temporary part of things I'm currently researching. 15 tabs are fixed, they're always the same. Those tabs contain the websites I visit everyday, my most important windows into the Internet. Controlling one of those tabs means you control 1/15th of the information flow I receive every day - I…
A report from the World Bank is making rounds in media today. While portraying catastrophic scenarios, it contains no new actual research and is simply extrapolating statistical possibilities. Unfortunately the media headlines aren’t really reflecting the content - not unusual regardless of the topic. However, it does give me an opportunity to post about some actual research that has taken…
An availability cascade is a self-sustaining chain of events, which may start from media reports of a relatively minor event and lead up to public panic and large-scale government action. On some occasions, a media story about a risk catches the attention of a segment of the public, which becomes aroused and worried. This emotional reaction becomes a story in itself, prompting additional coverage…
In the spring of 2008 I sat in the audience at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, watching Clay Shirky on stage. His talk about the cognitive heat sink, on how television had disrupted humanity from spending large parts of our time on being creative, on producing things we wanted to produce, to being simple receivers of information pre-packaged by someone else made a huge impact. Shirky compared the…
Följande text skrev jag den 5e september 2003 för eventuell publikation i en svensk tidning. Såvitt jag kommer ihåg skedde aldrig det, och eftersom jag nyligen oväntat stötte på den på en gammal del av hårddisken återpublicerar jag den här nu. Man kan tycka att den är väldigt aktuell med tanke på att straffskatten på inspelningsbar media - hårddiskar m.m - höjs igen den 1e april I veckan som gick…
Swedish news papers are launching digital versions on Apple’s iPad - and seem to be somewhat surprised that they’re now going to have to comply with a set of rules that are very different from what they’re usually operating under. Spotify’s music library reflects a specific set of values , morality and legal system no matter where the listeners are and what they expect.…