eschaton

eschaton, 7 days ago to random

How the hell does one actually get the latest Thunderbird beta if you don’t already have it installed? God, what a fucking joke.

eschaton, 7 days ago to random

Whoa. The new Coffeezilla covers how the company behind the “Rabbit R1” was originally an NFT scam promising to let you use your brain to enter the metaverse. #RabbitR1

eschaton, 1 month ago to random

There were a bunch of different systems in DEC’s PDP line, many mutually-incompatible (e.g. the PDP-1, 6, and 10 were somewhat compatible, the PDP-8 and PDP-11 were each their own complete universe, and then there were the 5, 9, 12, and 15, etc.) but they were all very well-designed.

My friend @fvzappa has a listing up on eBay for a PDP-8/m, which is a complete PDP-8/m minicomputer: https://www.ebay.com/itm/116163448173 This is an excellent turnkey system for joining the 12-bit world!

eschaton, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to random

Jason Scott is stirring up some drama on the eve of #VCFEast because he donated some stuff to #VCF but doesn’t actually understand how “donation” and “archiving” work. He’s also taking at face value that someone was “driven out” of the organization when they actually ragequit rather than work within proper governance.

VCFed is a decent organization, especially now, and the VCF events are great. This drama is a tempest in a teapot, and absolutely not a reason not to participate or attend.

eschaton, 2 months ago to random

Ugh, iTerm2 doesn't have sufficiently good VT200+ emulation to use with VMS full-screen applications, and Terminal only supports VT100. Is there another native macOS terminal emulator that has good support for, say, VT240 or VT340?

eschaton, 2 months ago to random

If it surprises anyone that “the Marquess of Chumley” has stolen Chinese antiques in her home, you should really look into the contents of the UK’s museums.

eschaton, 2 months ago to retrocomputing

Are there any straightforward guides to setting up an SSH “jump server” for an old system? Let’s say I have a VAX VMS system I want to provide access to. People would ssh to cmhvax@mysite with a password I share, and each would produce a telnet connection to the VAX that they’d then have to log into with their real login and password. The past couple times I’ve looked into it, I got pretty lost in a forest of documentation… #retrocomputing #openvms

eschaton, 2 months ago to retrocomputing

Has anyone created a Digital Command Language (DCL) parser/highlighter for BBEdit? #retrocomputing

eschaton, 3 months ago to embedded

Does anyone have a straightforward containerized toolchain that includes at least gcc, binutils, and gdb, targeting 68000 ELF? I’ll be running it under podman on my MacBook, for the embedded stuff I’m doing for fun, so I don’t have to do everything in an SSH session to Linux. #m68k #embedded #retrocomputing

eschaton, 3 months ago to ai

To the people who believe that ChatGPT is actually intelligent and not just fancy autocorrect:

How good is it at chess? Go? Scrabble? Checkers? Tic-tac-toe?

#ai #ChatGPT

eschaton, 3 months ago to retrocomputing

I’ve been playing around with creating a new ROM from scratch for an existing 68K system and I’m excited to see MAME has a “gdbstub” debugger. I don’t have space in the ROM for debug symbols, and it’s a raw binary anyway (produced by a linker script). How do I tell gdb how to map the .o files with symbols to the ROM image so I get source level symbolic debugging? #mamedev #retrocomputing #gdb #embedded

eschaton, 3 months ago to random

If a rental property is vacant for more than six months, and doesn’t have permits for (confirmed) renovations scheduled beyond that time, rental decisions should revert to the city: The landlord should be required to submit paperwork detailing the fixed and projected maintenance costs, and the city can run a “rental auction” where the highest bidder above that rate gets to rent the property for the next five to ten years—with sublet rights at up to 15% profit margin.

eschaton, 3 months ago to random

Why isn’t everyone even remotely involved with illegal settlements in the West Bank on the sanctions list?

eschaton, 3 months ago to random

@siracusa @atpfm QuickDraw 3D was contemporaneous with the Game Sprockets APIs but it wasn’t actually a game API. It was a retained-mode scene graph API like SGI Inventor, NeXT 3DKit, or SceneKit. It sat atop a low level immediate-mode API like OpenGL called RAVE that supported hardware acceleration, and that was what games targeted.

We got MechWarrior 2 working really well on RAVE, which was sad because that version was only available as a pack-in with some 3D accelerators (but worked on all).

eschaton, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to random

I often find myself wishing the far right’s paranoid delusions about Soviet-supported Communist infiltration of American academia (referred to as “the Frankfurt school” in those circles) were true.

If our economics departments and business schools actually dealt seriously with issues like labor theory of value and the purpose of economies instead of tautological Ayn Rand bullshit, they wouldn’t have failed humanity as utterly as they have.

eschaton, 3 months ago to random

Modifying the look and feel of HTML form elements is something that never should have been supported.

eschaton, 4 months ago to random

Is there anything like git-fossil so I don’t have to learn yet another DVCS and can just use git for read access to a Fossil repository? #git #fossil

eschaton, 4 months ago to random

Why the fuck does Patreon reload while scrolling as I hit the bottom on a creator’s feed? Even if it’s a web page pretending to be a real application, how many things they’ve posted and their approximate size should be a single fucking query away! Give me a real goddamn scroll bar!

eschaton, 4 months ago to retrocomputing

So I had a realization: The QuickTime movie format would make a good format for archival and preservation of streaming tape data. https://eschatologist.net/blog/?p=409 #retrocomputing #simh

eschaton, 4 months ago to random

Because I was a band nerd and clarinet fingerings got hardwired into my hands in 5th & 6th grades, I have Yamaha WX-7 and WX-5 wind controllers as well as the Yamaha VL-70m woodwind simulating tone generator and MIDI adapter. I went to play the WX-7 tonight and the VL-70m doesn’t recognize it, which turns out to be a symptom of something familiar: Fucking 47µF SMT electrolytic capacitors in need of replacement!

eschaton, 4 months ago to random

I think I’m going to start referring to SUVs as minivans from now on. If they’re not a bed-on-frame design, they’re not a Utility Vehicle.

eschaton, 4 months ago to random

@vkoskiv Say, I just found MacNTP while looking for an NTP solution for my Mac IIx running System 6! Thanks! I haven’t been able to build it yet, have you considered committing DeRezzed versions of the projects too? (That should be able to round-trip a THINK C 5 project with objects removed.)

eschaton, 4 months ago to random

“The United States is so big and geographically diverse that—“ shut up. China is sufficiently similar to the US in terms of size, geography, and population distribution that all the bullshit arguments about how what worked in Europe won’t work here are fully disproven as the auto-industry propaganda they always have been.

eschaton, 4 months ago to random

I wish Ghidra had just slightly better 68000 support—as in, support for the 68000/68010 specifically, rather than just the family. The Compu/Think Eagle-32 firmware I’m looking at freely mixes 0xff into the high byte of addresses, so I need to clone all the address spaces and it’s annoying.

eschaton, 5 months ago to random

Are there any tools that’ll mount a “just raw blocks” disk image on System 7.5, whether read-only or otherwise? I can always convert such images to other formats, but I’d of course be happy to just have a tool as well.