work as if you live in the early days of a better nation
A rendering of a 9-pin “Near Letter Quality” dot matrix font. Derived from the character ROM of an Amstrad DMP3160 printer. I started work on this in 2017, revisited it in late 2018, forgot about it for a few years and then finally completed it in a couple of days in July 2026. My focus […]
A rendering of a 9-pin dot matrix font intended for OCR use, specified in FIPS PUB 129 / ANSI X3.111-1986 “Optical Character Recognition (OCR) — Matrix Character Sets for OCR-MA” (github mirror: scruss/OCRmA: 9-pin dot matrix font based on FIPS PUB 129 / ANSI X3.111-1986) Coverage Extremely limited character set: Lower case character glyphs are […]
My NanoLeaf NanoLight LED bulb from 2013 finally gave up the ghost: or did it …? The LEDs glowed for several minutes after removing it from the socket. I suspect capacitance is afoot. Although it was absurdly expensive ($45 [USD?]; that’s about $62 with inflation) when I got it from the original Kickstarter campaign in […]
I have always meant to do more with the idea of Re-creating RAND’s ‘A Million Random Digits’ but it’s a lot of effort for very little return. This week, however, I had a chance to be my own random number generator. A routine medical investigation had me get a couple of shots of CardioLite®, a […]
A rendering of a 7-pin dot matrix font, as used by the Epson MX-70 reduced-cost printer from the mid-1980s. (github mirror: scruss/nic7pin: a 7-pin dot matrix font, as used by the Epson MX-70) Name Seiko Epson Corporation is named as “son of EP-101”, for the world’s first compact, lightweight digital printer. I’m Scottish, and in […]
Based on E73 from a couple of days ago, this is extended for full ASCII coverage: Design Size The 12 point design size is meant to reproduce 10 characters per inch horizontally, and six lines per inch vertically. Variants The ECMA 42 standard states (§ 4.2): The dots … are circles of 0.4 mm diameter […]
new dot matrix font, created from the 1973 ECMA-42 standard
a system update made such nonsensical noises that poetry was the only recourse I had available
I polled Mastodon people a few weeks back: Twice as many people said their home computer’s BASIC did something illogical as said it did the right thing. What gives? The de facto problem BASIC was refined over several years in the mid-1960s as part of the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (DTSS) running on a GE mainframe. […]