Viewing profile — tbensky

== The problem == I’ve never been able to text properly on a phone. I’ve tried with two thumbs, one thumb, and every other way I can think of. Nothing works for me. I can only seem…

https://www.youhere.org : "Want to know who showed up?" is the tag line. It's an app-based attendance service for teachers/coaches/band directors/conference organizers, etc. I'm a …

Hi! Thanks for trying it. The "slow sway" is part of the plan! It's so the oversized first row of a qwerty keyboard can show all possible letters on the top row. If it feels too mu…

I have a lot of trouble texting, independent of the issues here. I'm just clumsy and can't seem to do it in any productive way. I'm working on this keyboard substitute with larger …

One of my favorite retro projects in this real-time TRS-80 (Model I assembler and emulator that assembles and runs Z80, literally with each key press. Mind boggling how today's CPU…

Uni. prof here/shameless plug: I developed a general education class for college students about the 'history of navigation' which includes the science behind navigation and why clo…

I work on neural nets back in the mid 1980s, so I was somewhat familiar with their structure, backpropagation, squashing functions, etc. I wanted to get back into them, so I starte…

Take a look at the Finch robot: https://www.birdbraintechnologies.com/products/finch-robot-2... . Version 2.0 has really evolved and is quite nice.

Back during the pandemic, hardware-based contract tracers were an idea. I built one using the ESP32; see https://github.com/tbensky/npct . In a nutshell, everyone generates a (non-…

Back in the early days of Linux (~1993) or so, I was trying to convince my workgroup in grad. school that Linux was a nice alternative for running our numerical simulations (in C).…

XRF=x-ray fluorescence. You shoot X-rays into a metal, typically the gamma rays from an Am-241 source. This causes atoms in the metal to fluoresce their own gamma rays that are a (…

Hello and thanks for our interested. There's a paperback version here: https://www.amazon.com/Longitude-Time-Navigation-Tom-Bensky/... (same ed. as the Kindle version).

Happy to see this post on HN. As a college prof, I've spend many years studying the history of 1700s navigation and taking student groups to Greenwich to see and study H1 (H2, H3 a…

I remember using Turbo Lightning. It was incredible. You type a word in some DOS program, and when you hit the spacebar, a beep would sound if the word was spelled wrong. Back then…

Hi everyone. I see a lot of neat web-based IDEs on HN for simple coding, like EndBasic, EasyLang, etc. I always like trying these out, but feel like they all lack a reason to use t…

I like the clpfd approach too: :- use_module(library(clpfd)). go(L) :- L = [Vixen, Rudolph, Prancer, Dasher, Comet, Dancer, Donder, Blitzen, Cupid], L ins 1..9, % Vixen should be b…

I also would like to echo the thank you to Markus. His Power of Prolog videos have taught me so much about Prolog. His recent one on DCGs is incredibly eye-opening.

Fun exercise in Prolog too: https://www.codebymath.com/index.php/welcome/lesson/prolog-d... .

In the book "The lost art of finding our way" the author claims a big boost to not getting lost is to (simply) pay more attention to an outing as it evolves. It is indeed difficult…

I've been using Prolog on and off for 20+ years (I actually bought and used Turbo Prolog by Borland under MS-DOS). I have to confess though, I've never quite understood Prolog or w…

The Tau Prolog ( http://tau-prolog.org ) system (written in JS) is used here https://www.codebymath.com/index.php/welcome/lesson_menu#pro... to use Prolog as a way of teaching math…

Yes, multi-threads of it...that would be scary!