Tim's blog
23 August 2020
Retrocomputing
Several months ago I published the source code for a 6502-based microcomputer emulator. The original plan was to resurrect O.S.I. Invaders
for the Ohio Scientific Challenger 1P (aka Superboard II), after finding it on an ancient audio cassette. The C1P was my grandfather's first computer, and possibly even the first personal computer in my little town (Foxton, NZ) back then. I started learning BASIC and machine code on it when I was eight or nine years old, around 1979 :)
Although the emulator's a wee way from finished, it already works pretty well, and O.S.I. Invaders
runs nicely. As well as the C1P, it can also emulate the UK101. I hope to get it emulating other simple microcomputers from that era, too.
If you wanna try it, the C source code's published under the GNU GPLv3. To see it in action, here's a demo over on YouTube.
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17 August 2020
I suppose it's worth noting that I saw a humpback whale Saturday, on the ferry from Picton to Wellington. Well okay, the whale wasn't on the ferry. It was in the water a couple of hundred metres away. And the only part I actually saw was the spray as it cleared its nostrils. But considering I didn't know I might see a whale, or even just an impressive nasal discharge, I'm not going to complain.
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10 August 2020
My previous blog entry was posted on December 29th, 2018. It was about activism, biodiversity loss, police, and broken fingers.
(Yep, my finger's made a full recovery!)
Since then we've had the mosque shootings here in Christchurch (Ōtautahi) New Zealand (Aotearoa), and the ongoing pandemic and lockdowns. Our government has handled these serious though non-existential events admirably well. (Yay for that.)
But when Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was elected in 2017, she said her term would be this generation's nuclear moment
with regard to the climate crisis. (She was referring to Aotearoa's nuclear-free position: in 1984, this country banned visits from nuclear armed and nuclear powered vessels.)
Guess what?
This government has been a total failure with regard to the climate crisis.
Sure, there's a scheme to plant a billion trees, but the vast majority will be a monoculture of exotic pines for commercial use. Bad for soil health, useless for biodiversity, and less than ideal for carbon capture.
Meanwhile, we're still expanding coal mines, we're still drilling and exploring for oil and gas, we're still pushing for more beef and dairy exports, our waterways are increasingly polluted, and we're still failing climate targets. This government, including its Covid-19 recovery plan, is all about endless growth on a finite planet. To rub it in, our state-owned news channel, TVNZ, is still proudly sponsored by Mobil.
I've been helping to make a fuss (including involvement in railway blockades, ship and oil rig occupations, hunger strikes, and so on) along with friends from Extinction Rebellion, Greenpeace, 350, School Strike 4 Climate, etc. But the level of avoidance and denial from mainstream media and politicians here, in a country that supposedly has its shit together, is terrifying.
Most people don't realise there's a 30 to 40 year lag time between CO₂ emission and its effects being felt. So we're currently experiencing disruption―wildfires, melting, unseasonal weather, more frequent and extreme hurricanes, etc.―from emissions up until around 1990. Since then, we've more than doubled the total amount we've released. We haven't felt the effects of that doubling yet, and the stuff remains in the atmosphere for thousands of years. Things won't settle down any time soon.
Our kids have increasing climatic chaos, increasingly frequent crop failures, increasing water security issues, and increasing global conflict and forced migration to look forward to. Even if we stop emissions tomorrow. If we don't slow this down and stop burning fossil fuels, our children and grandchildren are screwed.
(When I wrote a proper
article including that paragraph, I was advised to replace screwed
with face a very uncertain future
. Because, you know, so long as it's only 3rd world brown kids dying first―as they already are―they don't count as our children
so we mustn't be alarmist. Pfft.)
The conservative and politically acceptable
IPCC reports, which governments base climate policy on, depend on large-scale geoengineering. To meet Paris Agreement targets of 1.5°C and 2°C, IPCC calculations assume practical Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technologies will be developed in time, able to extract tens of gigatonnes of CO₂ from the atmosphere each year and store it underground.
It's looking less and less likely that this technology can or will be successfully developed and implemented at the required scale, in time to meet those targets.
Global energy growth is outpacing decarbonization. Greenhouse gas emissions are increasing, not decreasing. The amount of CO₂ going into the atmosphere between 2015 and 2019 grew by 20 percent compared to the previous five years. Countries claiming reduced emissions are simply outsourcing manufacturing, etc., to countries with increasing emissions.
Too few people are aware of these and many other serious, related, problems. It's government's duty to make sure people understand this stuff, but they're not even discussing it openly.
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29 December 2018
Hullo, town!
I hope you're okay :)
I've spent the past couple of days and nights doing my very best to sleep through the flu. Feeling a lot better today. Still a bit hot and fuzzy, but it's nice to be able to sort-of-think again.
I have had other adventures. Twelve days ago I had my left little finger broken by a silly policeman during a protest. I don't collect baseball cards, soap, or erasers, but I do seem to attract silly policemen―so I've started an undeserved injury
collection entitled On the dangers of… doing nothing
.
As for why I'm protesting…
Here are some numbers I looked up a few days ago:
Around 80% of plant species (incl. ~75% of our main food crops) are pollinated by insects and other animals.
There's been a ~75% decline in insect numbers over the past 30 years, and a 60% decline in average vertebrate population sizes over the past 50 years.
If you look at the total biomass of mammals, 96% is humans plus livestock; mammals in the wild now represent only 4%.
It's mostly down to habitat loss―and climate change is going to exacerbate that.
Shouldn't this be top-front news in mainstream media?
(By the way, this is a depressing topic. The best way I've found to deal with that is to get involved with local environmental groups―doing things with other people really helps.)
References:
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21 November 2018
Maybe it's time for a blog post.
ASMR
ASMR―it's like waking up blindfolded in a rest-home at breakfast time.
Case in point.
Finite World Problems
A couple of days ago I went with family to a restaurant and, as usual, they'd picked one without a decent vegetarian option. That is to say, there was a token vegetarian option, but it was insultingly bad. I made up my mind to get a coffee instead, and to make myself something edible once I got home. No problem. But this was not to be allowed.
Concerned relatives insisted that I order food. They called the staff over to make sure I wasn't forgotten about. (Of course, I wanted to be forgotten about, because I'm not interested in financially supporting places that don't cater reasonably well to vegetarians and vegans.) Eventually I said (silently to myself), Oh, fuck this, everyone's getting agitated and I don't want a scene
, picked something at random, and said Okay, I'll have whatever this is, just have the chef exclude the meat
.
The waitress consulted the chef, and returned with the good news: it could be done without breaking the universe. This cheered everyone-who-wasn't-me up no end. I'd've been happier with a coffee, followed by something yummy later at home.
Then the conversation turned to holidays and travel.
Everyone talked about their international travel plans over Christmas, and how exciting it all is.
My cousin must have noticed my expression, because he asked what I was thinking about. I thought it would be kindest not to tell him, so I said Oh, just thinking about plans
.
What I was thinking about is the fact that I've given up my life's plans because I can't justify the environmental damage.
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04 November 2018
Elves
I was thinking about the way tilde.town is just like home, only with elves in it. This led to wondering whether I might possibly have spent too much time alone with my computer. Impossible, I realised.
TL;DR: Tilde.town is just like home, only with elves in it.
Boxes
I have a FreedomBox!
Sort of, pretty much. As of two days ago.
It's running on a RaspberryPi. The sort of, pretty much
part is that the FreedomBox image for the Pi 3 model B didn't want to boot on my B+. Which was a minus (which is not a complaint). So I installed Raspbian, and freedombox-setup from there. And it seems to run fine. I'm typing this on it. It's actually pretty awesome. Things like FreedomBox and tilde.town give me a bit of hope.
Things that don't give me any hope at all are asparagus, capitalism (he says, after caving in and buying a RaspberryPi to bash capitalism with), and the heat-death of the universe.
To end on a bright note, the sun's not due to asplode for ages.
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Ducks
Raven McRavenous is not a real duck. He is an ASCII duck. But he is better than nothing. Wait, I'll go further. He is at least five and a half times better than nothing.
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28 October 2018
Yesterday my ex-cat, the excellent Ma (Martishka Pavlovna), went to sleep.
Ex-cat, not because she's dead―I'd never dream of making a joke like that, obviously―but because she had to move out a few years ago when my ex-partner moved in.
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Ex-partner, not because she had to move out, and not because she's dead―she isn't, I saw her just yesterday and I think I would have noticed anything radically antisocial―but because a year or so ago we broke up, completely unrelated to the cat business.
To clarify, we never actually considered money-making schemes specifically involving a cat business. Granted, as an ex-illustrator―and I am not going down that rabbit-hole again―I have drawn a fair number of cats and kittens for money to help support capitalism, a system incompatible with multicellular life (including, but not limited to, cats and kittens) on a finite planet.
As you can imagine, it was a complicated break up for me and my cat, when my ex-partner (who was my current partner at the time, although I'm actually single) moved in. With memory corruption and unresolved symbols all around.
And now she's gone to sleep with the fishes and the corals and I think that makes her an ex-ex-cat, but I shouldn't say so out loud, especially because it starts getting ambiguous and difficult to explain to people in passing (pun absolutely not intended, I swear, I'm not that kind of person). It is already difficult enough without adding to the confusion.
Yesterday I got a text message saying to come and have a last visit.
But I couldn't go, because I'd be letting other people down if I changed plans at the last minute.
Which is all to say, I'm sorry I wasn't there, puss. I will always miss you.
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20 October 2018
Noticed someone in tilde.town chat mention FreedomBox a few days ago, but I was too sleepy to get involved in the conversation. I'm really interested in that project. So I'd love to be in touch with other towners using it. Haven't started yet, but I'm just about to! Please get in touch―maybe we could form a Special Interest Group or somethin' :)
Edit: I'm curious about running it on retired phones and tablets, too―that could be an environmentally decent way to keep them useful. If only manufacturers weren't opposed to a good sloppy root. Seriously, considering the state of the planet, it should be mandatory for manufacturers to allow old hardware to be re-purposed.
Raven McRavenous has eaten five planets plus crumbs (most likely Alderaan) since we last spoke.
My first seedling has hatched!
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I have added this to my .bashrc file to help me edit existing blog posts in an OCD-type fashion without screwing up the timestamps for ttbp. So far, so good.
fedit ()
{
# --- experimental, unsure if potentially problematic ---
local TTBP=$HOME/.ttbp/entries
local BLOG=$HOME/src/blog
if [ "$1" = "-h" -o "$1" = "--help" ]; then
echo -e "\nUsage: fedit [$TTBP/ENTRY.txt]\n\n" \
" Edit an existing feels entry, preserving its timestamp.\n" \
" If no entry specified, assumes the most recent.\n"
return
fi
entry=$1
[ -z "$entry" ] && entry=$(ls "$TTBP"/* | sort -r | head --lines 1)
[ -f "$entry" ] || return
timestamp=$(stat --format '%y' "$entry")
${EDITOR:-nano} "$entry" && \
touch --date "$timestamp" "$entry" && cd "$BLOG" && ./build.sh && cd -
}
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15 October 2018
So I've claimed a bit of land and built a wee house. Actually, it's more than a bit―it's an entire two-hundred and eighty-eight bytes on the outskirts of town. Built from reclaimed ones and zeroes straight from the garbage collector, and totally off-grid and sustainable. Sustainable aside from the ravenous duck. I think I will have to name him Raven. Raven McRavenous the Duck. Eater of Worlds.
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A couple of days ago I realized that my sick and twisted experiments with the feels engine had caused two of my posts to stay near the top of the town feels list longer than they had any right to be there. As soon as I noticed, I used touch to correct the timestamps. I apologise if I annoyed anyone.
I want to say a big thank you to ~endorphant, not just for the feels engine, but also for putting together an excellent set of Community Crisis Response Guidelines. Because it's really hard to know what to do sometimes.
On that topic, I'm sending positive thoughts to anyone reading this who's not doing okay...
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11 October 2018
Y'know, if our universe is a simulation (I don't believe that, but…), then someone or something chose a random number seed that'd inevitably lead to the Teletubbies and related merchandise. That's actually really disturbing.
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08 October 2018
ASCII Flying Car (Prototype)
The future is now. Time for a flying car.
Fig A.
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Fig B.
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Fig C.
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07 October 2018
Hey, I'm trm, short for Tim. And this is my first tilde.town blog post.
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