My personal corner of the web
There's this fun little cat and mouse game going on in our modern cyberpunk dystopia. Generative AI is a gold rush 1 , and the gold is every piece of information in the world. There's a new breed of website scraping bot, and they are aggressive . Acting without regard for their prey, they are kno...
Welcome to my Apricot page! What's an Apricot? Apricot is a line of computers made by Applied Computer Techniques starting in 1983. It has a number of novel features, like a high resolution monochrome display, 3.5" floppy drives, and a keyboard with reprogrammable soft keys. Its main misfeatu...
I noticed one night that the spindle motor on the floppy drive in my Apricot never turns off. I went to investigate it. The drive schematic says pin 1 is the motor enable (active low as it usually is on floppy interfaces). Then I look at the Apricot schematic, and it says pin 1 is grounded. Okay,...
For VCFMW 2025 I made some stickers to hand out. These are the SVG sources I gave to Sticker Mule. I didn't do anything special; they just handled the color conversion. I was very happy with their work. These images are licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0 . Apricot Xi (with cut line): Apricot Xi (wi...
At the beginning of April, I started Aprilcot and continued my exploration of the 8089 IOP. I had written a lot of code for asm89 , my 8089 assembler, but I hadn't done a lot of testing. It was time to change that. Getting Oriented The Intel 8089 IO Processor is configured through a series of "...
asm89 is a compiler for the Intel 8089 Input/Output Processor . It produces OMF files that can be linked with contemporary 80s tooling like Microsoft LINK or Borland Turbo Link. The goal is to provide an straightforward way to generate 8089 code that is linked into MS-DOS executables for the ACT ...
So what's so interesting about the Apricot? Let's start with the physical design. The case has a sliding front cover and a handle. The keyboard clips into the bottom. And the monitor has a handle, too. It's luggable! I wouldn't call it light, but you can definitely carry it. (Failing to carry it...
APSG is a command-line DOS program for playing VGM files containing SN76489 on the Apricot PC/Xi computers. You can find the source over on Github . You can download the latest version here: APSG.EXE.xz - MS-DOS Executable, XZ compressed, 10K apsg.img.xz - 720K disk image with executable and t...
For Aprilcot 2025, I continued my exploration of the graphics and sound capabilities of the Apricot. At the same time, CanDev and the Internet Archive were doing the DiscMaster Jam , a game jam where you have to use assets from the DiscMaster , a search engine for assets found on old CD-ROMs. I t...
Here We Go Again So here we are, just on the other side of the end of support for Windows 10. And I'm sitting, USB stick in hand, ready to install Linux on my laptop 1 . And unlike many of you, I'm not really excited by the prospect. You see, I've been here before. Way back in the late 90s I do...
Hi! Welcome. You might be here because of recent policy changes at Meta, wherein Mark Zuckerberg told us in no uncertain terms he likes the taste of fascist boots. You might be here because the Facebook feed has been useless for years now. You might be here because Twitter has finally gotten bad ...
Back in late 2010/early 2011, I made a microblogging website and database project called Blërg! . It was both an exploration in database design and a jab at Twitter – a kind of technical satire. The subject of ridicule was Twitter's engineering. At the time they were still running on Ruby on Rai...
So I just got done watching Freya Holmer's video on generative AI . It's a kind of dark comedy at the start, watching Freya slowly lose her goddamn mind wading through the first page of results for a simple technical query on Google, DuckDuckGo, and Bing; only to find that 80% of it was AI genera...
Software Complexity, Permacomputing, and Security Recently I've come to understand the permacomputing movement . It takes the philosophy behind permaculture and adapts them into our technological world, so that computing itself can be sustainable and feasible into eternity. Which is kind of a we...
How many words is 1666 words ? What is the measure of a man? George walked through the terminal towards his flight. A bad sandwich roiled in his gut. If that cabbie couldn't figure out how to get on the highway, there was no fucking way he was getting a tip. A man walked up to him, "Hi, could y...
Modem Memories While putting this whole thing together I did some digging for an old BBS I used to frequent - FBN. As I recall, it was based in Champaign, IL and was one of the larger and more general BBSes in the area. But searching for it today finds practically nothing. Even TEXTFILES.COM's B...
I'm sorry. It looks like ByteX64.NET has crashed. Oh boy. This is a real mess. Um. This is going to take a few minutes to put back together. In the mean time, there are a few sectors that haven't been totally trashed. There's an older interface you could try. A few recovered things are over in ...
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