who needs pwgen when you have tr -dC a-zA-Z0-9 </dev/random | dd status=none bs=1 count=$len; echo?

in other news, in a ~stunning~ case of misappropriation, i finally labeled my PiDP-8.

apologies to @inversephase. i promise, the rest of the sticker will go on an 8-bitter. :)

Quietly working on the #c64 assembler, I integrated some small utilities, notably HEXDUMP. Which by complete coincidence yielded this most #cyberpunk of (literal) screenshots.

I'll post source code at some point, but for now you'll have to log onto an actual #BBS to get it. (!)

One of the bedroom programmers.

Screen shows a simplistic "assembler" I made out of plain BASIC. It does little more than translating mnemonics into opcodes, but it does that!

Fun fact: The computer table is my 1992 original. :)

#c64 #assembly #programming

(Never owned a C64 as a kid, so this is all new to me! :D)

Hey nerds 😎

I'm fundraising for my incredibly cool femme/queer electronics camp that's holding on by bloodied teeth this year. Find it in my bio.

BUT ALSO we take supplies. Specific stuff. We need:

-Wire cutters (not nippers!). We clean rust

-Nice-ish Raspberry Pis, mini computers, larger external hard drives and accessories. We teach about Kiwix, cyberdecks and more

-Meshtastic hardware

-Art PCBs (best by femmes/queers) for our pop-up museum

-Lockpick gun and practice padlocks

DM me.

some nice progress. i've made it into the instruction tables. they are full of quirky stuff, just look at those little devils...

took a bit to set up the macros for things, but after that it got pretty nice to work with. now of course i have about 12 pages more of this to type, and they have some new weirdness in them... *sigh*

#troff #typesetting #c64 #assembly

yup. i guess we're (i am) doing this. at least until i run out of steam.

my aim for the moment is this chapter, which has ~120 pages and a bunch of uniform tables/data. i guess i've made it 10% of the way already. :v

right now i'm working in a tic-toc fashion: rough out some pages in an ad-hoc way to find out what i need, then clean things up introducing macros etc., then repeat.

#troff #typesetting #commodore #c64 #assembly #neoretrocomputing

i can't stop. send help?

#troff #typesetting #c64 #retrocomputing

huh, chromium (googled and ungoogled) has stopped working for me with yesterday's #openbsd snapshot. it says ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED no matter what i do. it was working fine with a previous snapshot (14 days old). i have unwind(8) running on localhost, ipv4 and ipv6, both working fine. firefox works without issue. what gives?

from the PiDP-8 mailing list: "This is the story of how a surplus PDP‑8/I became the digital heart of MIT’s weather radar lab — and how a 19‑year‑old student ended up modifying the CPU and writing its timesharing system."

https://retrocomputingforum.com/t/timesharing-on-the-mit-weather-radar-pdp-8-ix/5569

#pdp8 #retrocomputing #mit

This game (still) rocks.

I binge-completed the first four chapters some time in 2014, did the next four in 2016, and then sadly let the project of finishing "Software Foundations" sit idle for almost ten years. :(

Well, any time is infinitely better than never, so here I go with the significantly expanded 2025 edition!

https://softwarefoundations.cis.upenn.edu/

Image warning: Screenshot spoils the solution to one exercise.

#coq #rocq

oh my god gothub's ssh-based signup bot is adorable! :flan_stars:​

https://gothub.org/signup.html

#gameoftrees #runbsd

And we have a clock. Never mind the ringing, it'll be fine!

Aside from the wonderful jank wiring job, this took me learning how to program the CH32V003. It was a bit of a struggle because I wanted to do it in minimal plain assembly. I had to glean a lot from disassembled C code from ch32fun (which is already a boiled-down environment for it). The official datasheet and reference manual, while not terrible, are lacking in parts and not always written in clear English. I also learned to write a linker script because I wasn't going to use any of that bloated C rubbish. As for the programming software (minichlink), I just opted for now to use a Linux host via ssh for writing to the chip.

Code to follow. ;)

#commodore #c64 #riscv #assembly

Neue Möglichkeiten zur Herstellung von Papierartefakten.
New possibilities for the production of paper artefacts.

Review my paper.

#dotmatrix #printing #commodore

For the record. My first Plan 9 installation since what must have been the year 2000. :)

New #troff project: a character sheet for the #Lancer #RPG because I think the official one is not quite up to scratch. Aimed to mix the original "clean technofuturist" style with the monochrome paperwork aesthetics of #Traveller that I like so much. Tell me what you think.

BTW, font used is TeX Gyre Heros, a very exact stand-in for the original's Helvetica.

Alright, let's learn some programming!

#dec #pdp8 #retrocomputing

Woah! New belated shell discovery:
Press Esc . (period) to insert the last word of the last command.

$ vi foo.c
$ git add <Esc .> foo.c

It boots, I was indeed able to fix my stuff! ;D

Gotta say, I am proud: Got brand-new laptop yesterday, kernel panics on boot. Investigated ACPI with no prior knowledge, patched driver. Laptop works.

Thanks @stsp and @brynet for the tips. :)

#openbsd #framework

#framework laptop 13 arrived. :D
#openbsd kernel panics on boot. :(

Could not convert 1 to 5
panic: aml_die aml_convert:2094

The problem is that the bytecode in some ACPI table seems to want to compare or concatenate a FIELD_UNIT with an INTEGER and the openbsd kernel does not know how to convert between the two.

Any experts in the room? I have found the relevant code (in dsdt.c), and I think it should populate the vfield member of an aml_value. I just don't know what needs to go in there.