Viewing profile — msarnoff

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 multiplicatio…

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 wit…

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 …

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. …

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 implement…

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 meltdo…

Originally read the URL as “D-Bus Hell dot com” and was like… yup.

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…

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 …

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.a…

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 r…

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 capt…

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/…

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 foreve…

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 g…

Instruction set looks very similar to the AVR, which is one of my favorites. Very cool!

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, …

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 …

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…

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 a…

#SnakesOnARadar

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 …

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 …

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 man…

Munching squares!