Periodic reminder: the breakfast taco is nature's perfect food.

Every hobby starts with curiosity and ends with storage problems.

@d6 this may be relevant to your interests https://scaepe.ing/noisferatu/noisferatu.html

An agency that breaks into your parents’ house to replace worn-out pans and sharpen the knives.

Some #PenPlotter ASMR drawing tiny halftone dots with a cyan pen on top of a completed yellow layer.

(See previous post in thread for completed plot.)

#GenerativeArt #CreativeCoding #MastoArt #Art #ArtForSale #Artist #ArtForSaleByArtist #PenPlotterArt #PenPlot #NoAI

There’s a PDP-12 on eBay this morning. This is what a computer should look like. https://ebay.io/m/IWOzCg

kill kill kill reload kill reload kill kill

Mistakes were made, sweat was produced, more trips to IKEA and Lowes were had. But victory is ours and we're getting re-situated.

Tpolecat Industries has entered compact mode in preparation for some much-needed new shelving.

Some people at work have started using Claude and it’s very demoralizing. If anyone wants to hire me to fix vintage computers and build pointless weird shit please speak up.

I made this simple PCB vise a while back and I use it all the time. Here are the model files and BOM if you'd like to make one. https://github.com/tpolecat/3d-models/tree/main/Vise

I successfully resisted commenting on a discussion of optional brace syntax in Scala. Please clap.

Seven ICs on the HRG test bad, as do all the electrolytics and one of the transistors. There are 64 RAM chips on the other board that I need to test, but first I need to build a tester. This is how you run out of stack space. 8/n

It’s summer in Texas, which means gigantic thunderstorms and river camps full of kids. We got three emergency alerts last night about flash flooding, which isn’t really an issue for us personally but I’m very glad they’re being more proactive this year.

Next up is a relaxing soak for the Vector Graphics HRG, which was splattered with what I choose to believe was mud. There is almost no information available online so it may be a challenge to get it working. On the off chance anyone in #retrocomputing land has any info, please contact me. 7/n

Having spent a few evenings learning rudimentary Rust I'm finding that the language and tooling address my specific anxieties very effectively.

Combustion publishes the BLE protocol for their predictive thermometers, which seemed like a good excuse to step into the Embedded Rust firehose and see if I can remain standing. So far so good! Very fun.

And it works! BASIC is way too slow to do anything interesting but it should be nice and fast in assembler. 6/n

Minor side quest, I finally installed this card I built last year. It lets me map in RAM, ROM, or nothing for each 1k block in the upper half of the address space, so now I can make a hole for the framebuffer. 5/n

In any case I did a bunch of little repairs and now I'm seeing the kind of random junk I was expecting. A few more sanity checks and then I'll test it out on the Altair. 4/n