I've continued enhancing the static site generator for my junkdrawer (github gist / pastebin replacement). The source code for the static site generator lives right in the same repo. One thing I missed was some kind of ability to preview PDFs that I have uploaded to the junkdrawer, such as this m6800 reference card that disappeared earlier this year from its original site. Initially, I tried to…
I added machinery to my junkdrawer repo so that it also builds a static website that's served by grebedoc . The code to do it is in the junkdrawer's "site" directory and it functions just great using the free codeberg-tiny runner for CI.
In Python 3.13+ with pyrepl, my rpn calculator can show the result of evaluating some code while the user is entering it at the prompt. Most code is trivial (e.g., 3 4 5 * * to multiply some numbers together) but complex code including recursion is possible. This can give code that runs for quite a long time! It's one thing if this happens when you hit enter, but another when there's the…
Colorized, multiline input in Python 3.14 Starting with Python 3.13, a new internal module called _pyrepl has been added to Python. It is used for the regular interactive prompt, and allows multiline editing. Python 3.14 adds syntax highlighting. I thought these features would be great to use in my own program, an rpn calculator modeled after the classic unix dc . Since _pyrepl is an internal…
Correction Update, 2026-05-24 : It was an emulator bug. My friend tested on his hardware and the original comparison code works correctly. Original post I've been playing with Tom Pittman's Tiny BASIC for 6800 computers. It's a very simple, small, and early BASIC implementation. It is also almost as old as me, being announced by February 1976 . In this BASIC, all numbers are 16-bit signed integers…
I hear a lot about so-called vibe coding, in which you prompt an LLM to produce a bunch of code with little regard to the quality, so that you can get something that sort of works quickly. While I'm not interested in that, I did decide to break with my recent practice and write some software with a lot less regard to trappings of quality. I did NOT: Make a pyproject.toml file Carefully install…
I was inspired to design an original(?) text encoding for tiny embedded computers. It is, however, similar to DEC RADIX 50 from 1965. (That's 50₈=40₁₀). Since 40³<65536, it is possible to store 3 symbols in each 16 bit word. In radix 40 you get the 26 basic alphabetic characters, 10 digits, and 4 additional symbols. I chose: End of string Space (ASCII 32) Exclamation point (ASCII 33) Double quote…
On the socials, someone asked whether anyone knew where the source for a tool called "interlz5" lived; they had found a binary but not the original (presumably C or C++) source. (Update: S. V. Nickolas's source code was right in front of us this whole time, a nested zip inside apple_ii_inform_demo_files.zip and now attached here as well) This tool is described in An Apple II Build Chain for Inform…