Sijmen Mulder @sjmulder@bsd.network

"It doesn't work, I tried on two browsers"

The two browsers:

Links (2.28; Linux 6.1.0-30-amd64 x86_64; GNU C 12.2; text)

Lynx/2.9.0dev.12 libwww-FM/2.14 SSL-MM/1.4.1 GNUTLS/3.7.8

This DOS hacking is too much fun. Implemented a custom RLE-based encoding scheme yesterday with a 56% compression ratio on my test image with just a 16 byte decode loop!

https://codeberg.org/sjmulder/asm#custom-rle

#RetroComputing #DOS

Is the "eb" in NetBSD's "aarch64eb" an endianness joke? If so, well played 😄​

#NetBSD #EndianBig

Wrote a little VGA color swatch program to explore the BIOS interfaces for doing that and got sucked into a delicious bit banging puzzle:

https://codeberg.org/sjmulder/asm/src/branch/master/msdos/swatch.asm

#RetroComputing #MSDOS

ChatGPT apparently integrates with a DOS malware analysis tool that concludes my FizzBuzz implementation is malware because it 🧐📝 has a jump table and “manipulates registers”

https://www.msx.org has a music player in the sidebar. What a lovely site!

#MSX #RetroComputing

Really wanted to try writing some Z80 code. Picked the MSX as the target platform because it's popular and has built in text output routines. Here's the result: FizzBuzz without division or loops! (except the outer one)

https://codeberg.org/sjmulder/z80/src/branch/master/msx/fizzbuzz.asm

I'm a beginner to all of this so I probably did some dumb things* but overall I'm pretty happy with it.

(* in particular there must be a better way to do "ld a, b \ cp 0 \ jp z, foo" right?)

#RetroComputing #MSX #Assembler

Many a good CLI tool rework starts with an aspirational readme rewrite! Good way to think through the problem.

I played a bunch of The Lion King on SNES and Mega Drive (Genesis) and it was surprising to me how different these versions are.

Unlike Aladdin, they look and play very much alike superficially, but the details matter:

- SNES version doesn't let you flip hedgehogs by roaring, making some segments a bit harder
- Mega Drive version lets you easily climb the stage 2 elephants that you have to traverse with tail swinging on the SNES
- Ledge grabbing seems much easier in general with the Mega Drive version

There's probably more

Yesterday on my way back from work I popped my new (to me) Mario Kart 8 Deluxe cartridge into my Switch and... it prompted me to install a mandatory update over the internet. I couldn't play the game I own.

So much for physical games 😠 what happens when the Switch store shuts down?

"Scrum Main" sounds a lot less impressive now, does it

Of course I'm sure this has been discussed to death so I'm open to any good literature suggestions 🙏

To me it seems that user-level threads (like async in C#) and system-level threads are mostly an implementation distinction, a distinction that shouldn't permeate the language as it tends to do.

Isn't his whole 'blocking vs async' duality is ridiculous if you think about it? In both cases, you wait for something to happen. For a high-level language, by what mechanism that waiting happens can be a runtime concern and exposed through common abstractions (e.g. for futures).

#programming #asyncio

Bicep deployment errors: "script failed with exit code: 1". Helpful.

Go to the output and find "ERROR: " followed by a big single-line JSON dump containing, as a string, another JSON dump containing another string of the stack trace.

jq to the rescue!

jq -r .error.details[0].message |
jq -r .properties.comment

(the error was file-in-use)

#dotnet

I'd like to help a blind friend get on Mastodon. Anyone have experience using VoiceOver with any of the iPhone apps?

#Mastodon #VoiceOver #blind

Very happy new year everyone, with many fun projects and few node_modules!