msarnoff

12 ms·

1.
by msarnoff 6d ago
LCSI LogoWriter for 68k Macs[0] was my shit. It was my first[1] introduction to programming in elementary school and I spent hours trying to make games with it. There were 4 turtles and you could treat them like sprites; you give them custo
2.
by msarnoff 1mo ago
See also “Your DietBet Destroyed the World” https://laprade.blog/your-dietbet-destroyed-the-world One of my favourite short stories, it’s always stuck with me since it was posted to HN a few years ago.
3.
by msarnoff 1mo ago
Every time I see my article reposted, I get nostalgic for the 30” Apple Cinema Display I used in the photos. Maybe the best monitor of all time… the thing was MASSIVE and was peak Apple design perfection. I kept it until 2016-ish, and by th
4.
by msarnoff 2mo ago
You’re not wrong. They work very similar to binary arithmetic: basically the only operations they can do is increment, decrement, and shift left/right (but by 10) But multiplication is just repeated addition, and division is just repea
5.
by msarnoff 2mo ago
I didn’t actually know about the Casio 14-A until now. I almost thought the picture was AI-generated. Four functions squeezed into that compact desktop unit in 1957? Impossible with the technology of the time… The Casio 14-A was indeed the
6.
by msarnoff 4mo ago
I met Steve Bourne a while back and asked him why he chose to write sh with all those ALGOL-like macros. His answer was terse—he just wanted to use the syntax he was most familiar with.
7.
by msarnoff 4mo ago
Busybox is where I learned the multi-call technique of using argv[0] to simulate multiple commands in a single binary. It works great for Rust binaries, which can get quite large. I had to rewrite some Python utilities (software updater, Wi
8.
by msarnoff 4mo ago
This was a class assignment in the 15-213 class at Carnegie Mellon. The staff had set up a test suite and an online leaderboard to rank the speed of each student's malloc implementation. I figured out that the test cases allocated a di
9.
by msarnoff 5mo ago
I think this is me. I was diagnosed with “regular” ADHD a few years ago, but I’ve had issues with rejection sensitive dysphoria my whole life. As a kid I would have a lot of meltdowns when I couldn’t get something right on the first try or
10.
by msarnoff 6mo ago
Originally read the URL as “D-Bus Hell dot com” and was like… yup.
11.
by msarnoff 7mo ago
On early bit-paired keyboards with parallel 7-bit outputs, possibly going back to mechanical teletypes, I think holding Control literally tied the upper two bits to zero. (citation needed) Also explains why there is no difference between Ct
12.
by msarnoff 7mo ago
Retro Game Mechanics Explained has a video about how the Asteroids vector generator worked and was coded for: https://youtu.be/smStEPSRKBs?si=k_0u3NKCxCqZBc6w Battlezone and later 3D games used different circuitry that gene
13.
by msarnoff 8mo ago
The ancestor of the RCX was the "programmable brick" project out of the MIT Media Lab in the mid-1990s http://archive.pbrick.info/The%20MIT%20Programmable%20Brick%... https://web.archive.org/web&#x
14.
by msarnoff 10mo ago
I was very surprised that GCC could optimize NEON SIMD intrinsics. After spending hours trying to optimize my vector code, trying to get the spacing between register dependencies right to reduce stalls, breaking long reduction operations in
15.
by msarnoff 10mo ago
Storage tubes are amazing. I once had a Tektronix 464 scope. Unlike the ubiquitous 465, the 464 was an analog storage oscilloscope! The persistence of the storage tube let you capture pulses, visualize signal jitter, etc. And there was a
16.
by msarnoff 10mo ago
When I was last at Penn Station in the 2010s their departure board was a mosaic LCD like the article, not a split-flap display: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bd/Penn_Sta... I do miss t
17.
by msarnoff 10mo ago
I have seen these throughout the US and Europe and been fascinated by them. Penn Station has (had? been a while) a big one with more segments per character. I’ve been trying forever to find the name of this particular style of segmented dis
18.
by msarnoff 10mo ago
I've done small embedded Linux systems and it makes me so happy that there is a (mostly) compatible implementation built into busybox. svlogd's rotation and size capping makes it great when using limited-lifespan nonvolatile stora
19.
by msarnoff 11mo ago
Instruction set looks very similar to the AVR, which is one of my favorites. Very cool!
20.
by msarnoff 1y ago
I acquired a nonfunctional Diehl VSR a while back, naïvely thinking I could bring it back to life. Oh my goodness, I took the cover off and what I saw was jaw-dropping. Thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of the most densely packed metal
21.
by msarnoff 1y ago
I was there when we added it to Preview ;) I think Nils wrote the code to hook it up, because he also worked on the loupe and how it would automatically lock onto the bounding box of a line.
22.
by msarnoff 1y ago
Surprise no one's mentioned yet that the firmware is written in Rust. As someone who's struggled with getting started with embedded Rust (the landscape seems to be changing quite a lot?) it looks like a good example. Also it'
23.
by msarnoff 1y ago
Did this recently for my CoCo 2. Used a mashup of several composite mods floating around (including this one) and built it on a piece of stripboard that fit in the same footprint as the RF modulator. Sourcing the MC1372 was tricky, but NTE
24.
by msarnoff 1y ago
#SnakesOnARadar
25.
by msarnoff 1y ago
Assuming you have physical access to the inside of the machine… Most all machines from the 80s and 90s (Williams/Bally/Gottlieb) store their high scores and adjustments in an SRAM like a 5101 with a battery backup. They are stored
26.
by msarnoff 1y ago
This comment needs to be higher. Atomoxetine is also known as Strattera and is prescribed for ADHD. I tried it for less than a week and had to stop because there were VERY painful side effects _down there_. I’m also a CPAP user and I’d 100%
27.
by msarnoff 1y ago
My favorite part of Jed's article: "Part way through the run of Asteroids, we used up the world's supply of 7497s [binary rate multiplier chips] and Texas Instruments (the only manufacturer of 7497s) did not have them on thei
28.
by msarnoff 1y ago
Munching squares!
29.
by msarnoff 1y ago
Michael’s blog is one of my favorites. His “Ultimate Guide” talks are great and I rewatch them at least once a year. Ultimate Guide to the C64: https://youtu.be/ZsRRCnque2E?si=v4qQ9mCx3MafEwAq Ultimate Guide to the Game Boy
30.
by msarnoff 1y ago
The language is one thing, but the Objective-C runtime is brilliant. Read about the implementations of key-value-coding, key-value-observing, and bindings to get a sense of the bonkers things that have been done with it. And ARC (automatic

More ›