@brouhaha@mastodon.social
@brouhaha@mastodon.social avatar

brouhaha

@brouhaha@mastodon.social

#microcontroller #firmware #FPGA #SDR (SW Defined Radio)
#retrocomputing
#nonpareil HP calculator simulation at microcode level
Maker (with John Doran) of Nixie tube RPN calculators
CHM PDP-1 Restoration Team
Damned dirty ape
Call sign N2ES
he/him
cis male
Not a tame programmer
in #Colorado, not far from #Denver

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chjara, to random

ooo a slide rule

brouhaha,
@brouhaha@mastodon.social avatar

@chjara Love that bomb!
https://youtu.be/I3gJ2XUZQ4o

root42, to random
@root42@chaos.social avatar

Uhh. Python doesn’t have a simple flatten function…?

brouhaha,
@brouhaha@mastodon.social avatar

@root42 If you're wanting to flatten a list, there are several simple one-liners:
https://www.tutorialsteacher.com/articles/how-to-flatten-list-in-python

RL_Dane, (edited ) to random
@RL_Dane@fosstodon.org avatar

Ok...

More monospace/terminal/programming fonts REALLY need to have connected underscores. :/

____ shouldn't look anything like _ _ _ _

:'_(

Is there a unicode symbol that displays a completely connected underscore on most fonts? I haven't been able to find one. I'm using JetBrains Mono NerdFont

P.S. I found that " ͟" seems to work well. It's U+035F "Combining Double Macron Below"
https://unicodeplus.com/U+035F

brouhaha,
@brouhaha@mastodon.social avatar

@RL_Dane I prefer them disconnected, because sometimes it matters exactly how many there are, and I like to be able to easily count them.

rmi, to random

STOP USING FLOATS

brouhaha,
@brouhaha@mastodon.social avatar

@rmi But floating point is so useful! IEEE single-prevision needs only 32 bits of storage to exactly represent 0% of the real numbers. By using 64 bits, an IEEE double can exactly represent over four billion times as many, which is 0%!

brouhaha, to random
@brouhaha@mastodon.social avatar

One of the TVs in this restaurant is apparently tuned to the SMPTE Bars channel. It's not very exciting, but I actually like it, perhaps because it doesn't insult my intelligence nearly as much as the other channels. I wonder how much I'd have to pay to subscribe.

thevowel, to random

I wish all the wonderful #RetroGaming and #RetroComputing content out there existed as the written word and not as video.

season 13 GIF

brouhaha,
@brouhaha@mastodon.social avatar

@thevowel A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a few well-written paragraphs are worth 50,000 frames of video.

brouhaha,
@brouhaha@mastodon.social avatar

@0x56 @thevowel I can't speak for the the original poster, but my reason for the opinion is that I can read a few paragraphs of explanation of what I want to know in less than a minute, while a video often contains twenty minutes of worthless drivel. Even if the answer I'm looking for is buried in a long web page, I can almost always skim to that information very quickly.
Certainly it's possible to present material in a video with useful organization, but it is almost never done.

brouhaha,
@brouhaha@mastodon.social avatar

@0x56 @thevowel So I suppose it's accurate to say that it's an accessibility issue, even though I generally don't have any special accessibility requirements.

brouhaha,
@brouhaha@mastodon.social avatar

@0x56 @thevowel There are certainly cases where video is useful, especially showing details of assembly or disassembly of complex items, but even then, I'd like to have a written transcript of the narration.

jpm, to random
@jpm@aus.social avatar

SAML21 Datasheet: hey we have a user-selectable buck converter for core voltage! Lower power use!

Me: oh neat, I’ll give it a shot

SAML21 Silicon Errata: lolno

brouhaha,
@brouhaha@mastodon.social avatar

@jpm The data sheet giveth and the errata taketh away.

brouhaha, to random
@brouhaha@mastodon.social avatar

I've written some C++ code that is using the qpdf library to create a PDF file containing some vector graphics and text. I want the text to be horizontally centered around specific points on the page. This looks to be a nightmare, because PDF doesn't directly support that. I have to calculate the left origin of the text such that it ends up centered, which means I have to deal with the font metrics.
Don't even get me started about kerning.

brouhaha,
@brouhaha@mastodon.social avatar

@resuna @HunterZ @scruss If I write it in Postscript, I should be able to use Ghostscript to execute it and emit PDF.

brouhaha,
@brouhaha@mastodon.social avatar

@resuna @HunterZ @scruss I didn't realize that was possible. But after the geniuses at Adobe added script execution to PDF, nothing else they've added to it since will surprise me.

brouhaha, to random
@brouhaha@mastodon.social avatar

When people say, "God save the king," my question is "from what?"

Sheril, to books
@Sheril@mastodon.social avatar

Looking to get lost in a great story?

I’m currently #reading these two wonderful #books & highly recommend both.

brouhaha,
@brouhaha@mastodon.social avatar

@Sheril The Children of Time series is excellent! I'm currently reading book three of Tchaikovsky's "Architects" series, which is also great.

matthew_d_green, to random

How do you leak an OEM private key for a trusted boot system. What kind of incompetence leads to that key ever being in a place where it can leak. And if that key can leak, what secret keys aren’t going to leak?

brouhaha,
@brouhaha@mastodon.social avatar

@Rairii @matthew_d_green It would be great if it was only half, but I'm very doubtful that's the case.

foone, to random
@foone@digipres.club avatar

SyntaxError: Octal escape sequences are not allowed in strict mode

FINALLY SOMEONE IS TALKING SOME SENSE AND FIGHTING BACK AGAINST THE TYRANNY OF THE PDP-10

brouhaha,
@brouhaha@mastodon.social avatar

@foone Although the PDP-10 used octal, the origin of the octal escapes was perhaps more directly influenced by the PDP-11, and perhaps the earlier PDP-7.
I found the use of octal on the PDP-11 very annoying, since it's a 16-bit machine.

brouhaha,
@brouhaha@mastodon.social avatar

@recursive @foone All DEC "PDP" machines other than the PDP-11 and PDP-16 had word sizes that were multiples of 6 bits, so octal certainly made sense on those.

brouhaha, to random
@brouhaha@mastodon.social avatar

John and I worked on the Nixie display board on Saturday, and found two problems.

  1. John designed it using Altium CircuitMaker, and somehow the link between schematic design and PCB design was not working, so DRC did not report problems. The /SRCLR and /RCLR inputs of the 74AHCT594 shift registers are tied high on the schematic, but tied low on the PCB. That results in having to drill out 16 vias on each board and add 16 jumpers.
    1/
brouhaha,
@brouhaha@mastodon.social avatar
  1. The Nixies work with SN74141 drivers, of which John has a few, but not with Soviet K155ID1, of which he has many. They drive all the digits simultaneously, and pull down the supply rail.
    Long story short: The Burroughs B5991 Nixie tubes data and application notes suggest 170V drive as a minimum. Using a higher voltage (with suitable current limiting resistor) should result in better current matching between tubes. The board was designed with a 180V power supply.
    2/
brouhaha,
@brouhaha@mastodon.social avatar

This apparently results in breakdown of the NPN drive transistors in the K155ID1 driver chips, and perhaps is over the 60V output rating of the SN74141.
Reducing the supply to 170V makes the K155ID1 driver chips work correctly. The particular installed parts were not destroyed, thanks to the current limiting, but they may have reduced reliability due to having been overstressed.
3/

brouhaha,
@brouhaha@mastodon.social avatar

Here's a video of one Nixie counting. The count sequence includes 10, to check that the driver chip does blanking of non-BCD values. (SN74141 does, SN7441 does not, Soviet drivers vary.)
4/

Burroughs B5991 Nixie tube counting

mattblaze, to random
@mattblaze@federate.social avatar

Watching the delivery driver on the app as they get lost in my neighborhood is like playing pac-man with the controller disconnected.

brouhaha,
@brouhaha@mastodon.social avatar

@mattblaze Hopefully the driver doesn't get killed by a ghost until after your delivery.

azonenberg, to random
@azonenberg@ioc.exchange avatar

High on the list of things I love: non-square pixels.

The only thing I like more is two image datasets covering the same sample, with the same X axis pixel size, but one 2% taller than the other in Y.

brouhaha,
@brouhaha@mastodon.social avatar

@azonenberg When the ATSC standards for US broadcast HDTV were being developed, I was astounded to learn that non-square pixels were given seriously consideration. Fortunately sanity prevailed.

cks, to random
@cks@mastodon.social avatar

So Fedora 38 has chosen to break fgrep and egrep, to the fun of everyone who has them in scripts, especially scripts in crontab entries.

$ fgrep fred /dev/null
fgrep: warning: fgrep is obsolescent; using grep -F

Adding output to standard error is an incompatible change. And this is happening only because the GNU Grep people are <redacted because I cannot think of quite the right phrase>.

brouhaha,
@brouhaha@mastodon.social avatar

@SteveBellovin @cks @danmcd @enoclue

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