Viewing profile — markb139

Way back in time (1980s) I worked in the broadcast tv industry. We used to used digital still stores. A single frame of PAL took up 1MB of RAM. The machines had 2MB fitted. The boa…

Nokia had touch screen built into symbianOS from the start. All the API’s were there as was the UI handling. The Psion 5 was based on an earlier version of the same code and it was…

My best is 980W - for 1 second

I’m a leftie and I don’t think I learnt it. My mother said as a very young child she noticed I’d mainly used my left hand to take things - probably food :) These days the only real…

I’m a leftie from a 50% leftie family. Apparently I showed my left handedness as a baby when grasping for things and hardly used my right hand. My mother was also a leftie, but in …

I think this was also a “look what we can do at short notice” kind of exercise. Just in case a country was thinking of maybe trying to take over another set of islands in the south…

Why use any high level language at all if AI is writing the software. The high level languages seem mostly about humans not being able to handle complexity. Not an issue for an aut…

I’ve recently built a disassembler and emulator using Claude to help reverse engineer a 90’s ECU based on an Intel embedded cpu. It was quite impressive to watch when Claude starte…

It seems to be perfectly happy to run on virtual box with a Debian install. The host pc is running a local model. I’m quite impressed with what it’s capable of.

I’ve got the solar version. It runs a long time between charges. Maybe I haven’t done enough tracked exercise recently

I used to think photography was an expensive hobby until my wife got back into the horse world.

Im definitely going to build some small tools when I need them. One tool I use occasionally, but not so often I want to subscribe is Insomnia.

I retired from paid sw dev work in 2020 when COVID arrived. I’ve worked on my small projects since with all development by hand. I’d followed the rise of AI, but not used it. Late …

“ The process of getting a binary onto the board is just dragging a file, and on linux at least you can script it with picotool” Even easier if you setup debugging using another pi…

I briefly worked in a team that implemented a JVM on a mobile OS (before the iPhone) and one of the senior devs said Jazelle was in effect very inefficient because of all the conte…

I’ve tried 2 AI tools recently. Neither could produce the correct code to calculate the CPU temperature on a Raspberry Pi RP2040. The code worked, looked ok and even produced reaso…

I just checked. The code it gave me, though syntactically correct, was wrong functionally. The rp2040 temp reading increases and the ADC value decreases. ChatGPT didn’t invert the …

Ha. I asked it to write some code for the Raspberry Pi RP2350. It told me there might be some confusion as there is no official product release of the RP2350. If it doesn’t know th…

37 is young. Trust me, in a few weeks I’ll be 60. My whole life I’ve known I was an engineer. However, for a great chunk of the early years I couldn’t express that and did really b…

It's doable, but it took me closer to 20 years. I got to zero net assets in July 2001. Retired from paid work (mainly sw eng contracting) at the start of covid in April 2020. I sho…

I’ve now retired from professional programming and I’m now in hobby mode. I learn nothing from reading AI generated code. I might as well read the stack overflow questions myself a…

The code looked fine. And I don’t think my finger is colder than the chip - I’m not the iceman. The error is the analog value read by the ADC gets lower as the temperature rises.

I tried code gen for the first time recently. The generated code look great, was commented and ran perfectly. The results were completely wrong. The code was to calculate the cpu t…

30 odd years ago, part of my role was to colour balance cameras in a studio environment. We didn’t need computers - but at most there were only 5 cameras :)