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andrehackeron In 1926, TV Was Mechanical

There is a great model kit made in England for the "Televisor". Got it years ago and it was minutes of fun. Apparently still for sale. The input is audio, got it to run from my iphone at the time (as opposed to using the supplied CD which in itself is Retro technology). I had some plans to build code a video-to-audio converter to run this (or screengrab to audio for that matter).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTSeUjvScUA

andrehackeron Mechanical computer relies on kirigami cubes, not electronics

- Make a list of the most common (spoken) words - Sort them by usage frequency (most used words on top) - Associate a unique sequence of 0 and 1 (dot and dash) - Use shorter sequences for common words, longer ones for the words below - As you don't transit letters but words the transfer rate is much higher than in "modern" telegraph systems - profit ?

andrehackeron POV-Ray – The Persistence of Vision Raytracer (2021)

Maybe he'll get to use the "that would be impressive except if they had known what they were looking for,they would have seen it written on my dorm room window" quote later today.

andrehackeron Quake in 13kb (2021)

This is cool.

I found that the first line didn't work but: curl "https://phoboslab.org/q1k3/" > index.html

did the trick...

andrehackeron Creating an autopilot in X-Plane using Python

O wow. I was not aware of the NASA plugin. I wanted to build a simple dashboard on a separate screen for a while (I run X-plane with a cheap projector which is good enough for the scenery but not for the 6 pack). Each time I explored this I end up with what seems to be windows-only solutions.

The NASA plugin supports a Mac version and it exposes a bidirectional interface to X-plane served up through UDP.... then they provide sample clients.

This worked out of the box, on the Mac I did have to run X-plane in Rosetta2 but I was able to wire this up in a Python web server (native) so now I can display flight data real time in a web browser, nice.

Thanks for getting me on track and good job on the autopilot, will check that out later.

andrehackeron The murky math of the New York Times bestsellers list

I was surprised that some author said that on the Dutch TV show "Lubach" earlier this year. He stated that the (absolute) number of copies sold to get in the top list of the Dutch market is about the same as the number of copies that gets you in a NYT list.

He explained this by saying "Americans don't read much" and you seem to imply the same. But it appears that in the US about 300,000 titles are published per year (2013 data) versus 16,000 in the Netherlands. So is this an apples-to-apples comparison ? (source https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_published_per_country_...)

andrehackeron The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat (1990)

Sure, but, the relationship was symbiotic as it didn't seem that Gordon would have been able to build "the Giant" (PC) or other substantial project without the vision, push and the acquired funding (at ANY cost) from Joe.

This too (and I know I'll get flack for this one) seemed to be the case with Jobs and Wozniak, Wozniak is an undisputed genius on both hard and software level but Silicon Valley had and has very smart engineers, it was the two of them that were needed to make the magic happen.

andrehackeron The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat (1990)

O, this show, basically the Forrest Gump story of computing in the 80's/90's: the main cast somehow is a significant part or straight out inventors of every piece of technology of that timeframe: on-line gaming, social networking, online marketplace, dot com. The acting is.. interesting: Lee Pace trying to channel Don Draper, Scoot McNairy being Scoot, Kerry Bishé just doing a bit of over-acting and Mackenzie Davis, well, she's cool.

Loved to hate that show in the first run. Then streamed it 4 more times (playing in the background, but still): the accuracy of depiction of technology, startup issues regarding funding, liaisons and other ups and downs, personalities in tech: thumbs up.

andrehackeron Reverse-Engineering the Mechanical Bendix Central Air Data Computer

Ken: big fan of your and Marc's work, would be so great if you guys could give the Ken&Marc treatment to the "Nortronics NAS-14V2 Astroinertial Navigation System", The R2-D2 unit from an SR-71. Well, here's hoping.

andrehackeron Reverse-engineering the multiplication algorithm in the Intel 8086 processor

You'll add in the 6502 but more importantly items like the Globus (fascinating!), the Apollo equipment, the DX7 and the electromechanical Central Air Data Computer and you got yourself a best-seller, I predict 10 copies at least.

andrehackeron Reverse-engineering the multiplication algorithm in the Intel 8086 processor

Ken, please tell us you have a book deal, this is just awesome stuff.

andrehackeron GPT-4

Talk about Climate Change: How is the A.I. Winter working out for y'all ?

andrehackeron Keep your AI claims in check

Note that for the banking industry various “semi regulations” have been in place spawning a cottage industry for “Model Risk Management”. Basically you have to explain how you (attempt to) keep bias out of your training, re-test often, etc. Point is here that as a bank you don’t stop providing loans to certain demographies etc.

https://www.fdic.gov/news/financial-institution-letters/2017...

https://occ.gov/publications-and-resources/publications/comp...

andrehackeron Apple I operation manual (1976) [pdf]

Now.. for those interested in this: with the KIM Uno you can actually run the Apple 1 software https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/kim-uno-apple-...

Look on Ebay for kits, then a cheap USB-to-TTL connector and you too can run Wozniak's best from your top of the line mac/pc. The disassembler is crazy powerfull given the size of the executable.

The same KIM uno (6502 emulation from Arduino Uno) runs KIM, a contemporary of Apple 1 (with much better documentation, check archive.org) and a masterpiece of engineering: Microchess from Peter Jennings (not that one). Microchess, was at the time (and arguably still is) software that is just so unbelievably brilliant thay it must have been recovered from the Roswell crash site, just like whatever Fabrice Bellard puts out these days.

Not saying that the 6502 was the best thing in the computer industry, but then again, yeah maybe it was.

andrehackeron NASA predicts asteroid to make one of closest approaches to Earth ever recorded

This is an excellent way to do what-if scenarios https://neal.fun/asteroid-launcher/

andrehackeron Laika: The Evolution of Motion Control with Christopher Covel and Steve Switaj

Maneuvering a camera that’s roughly the size of a small refrigerator through a film set with puppets that are 1/6 human scale requires precision, expertise, and ingenuity. In the newest episode of the LAIKA Archive series, Steve Switaj (Head of Camera Engineering) and Christopher Covel (Motion Control Engineer) guide you through the nuts and bolts of motion control and their firsthand experiences of making LAIKA’s Oscar-nominated stop-motion animated features.

andrehackeron ARM1 Gate-Level Simulation

From Ken Shirriff's blog: https://www.righto.com/2015/12/reverse-engineering-arm1-ance...

When you run the simulator, it executes a short hardcoded program that performs shifts of increasing amounts. You don't need to understand the code, but if you're curious it is:

0000 E1A0100F mov r1, pc @ Some setup

0004 E3A0200C mov r2, #12

0008 E1B0F002 movs pc, r2

000C E1A00000 nop

0010 E1A00000 nop

0014 E3A02001 mov r2, #1 @ Load register r2 with 1

0018 E3A0100F mov r1, #15 @ Load r1 with value to shift

001C E59F300C ldr r3, pointer

    loop:

0020 E1A00271 ror r0, r1, r2 @ Rotate r1 by r2 bits, store in r0

0024 E2822001 add r2, r2, #1 @ Add 1 to r2

0028 E4830004 str r0, [r3], #4 @ Write result to memory

002C EAFFFFFB b loop @ Branch to loop

andrehackeron How the Apple archive ended up at Stanford

> If you want to know how the Hewlett-Packard Company Archives was saved after enduring a major spinoff, 6 CEOs in 10 years and a company split, read my 2020 article.

These Hewlett Packard archives ?

https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/business/hewlett-packa...

andrehackeron Coloring computers: non-electronic computers that work when you color them

That is very cool, a bit of Google Foo then gave me this:

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B-V14n0_048hOUR1Ymdv...

That and Google Translate will allow you to build your own.

andrehackeron The full Windows 95 launch event video is finally online

The interesting thing about that book is that there are two versions that are significantly different, the wikipedia page "The Road Ahead (Gates Book)" describes this quite well (20,000 words were added mostly regarding the internet).

The original version stated "today's Internet is not the information highway I imagine, although you can think of it as the beginning of the highway". Before publication Gates realized the internet was gaining critical mass and he redirected the company to become internet-focused. And then the new version of the book was created.

andrehackeron LÖVR – An open source framework for rapidly building immersive 3D experiences

It seems that A-Frame (built on top of three.js) would be the way to go if Javascript is your thing. https://aframe.io/

andrehackeron Papercraft Models of Computers

Ah, but the link to the model seems to be broken.

This is where waybackmachine comes in handy: https://web.archive.org/web/20160401173732/http://homecomput...

andrehackeron The “terrible” 3 cent MCU – a short survey of sub $0.10 microcontrollers

Ah, yes, there was an article here a year back about the original Furby using that same configuration. The article actually had the annotated 6502 source code.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17751599

andrehackeron John Logie Baird's Mechanical Television

There is a community around this in England: "Narrow Bandwith TV"(http://www.nbtv.wyenet.co.uk/)

Enthusiasts build working full size replicas.

A "build it yourself" kit ("Televisor") was available (basically a snap-together kit) which comes with a CD with "video" recorded as MP3, you hook up your phone (or computer) to the kit with an audio cable and you can actually see the ghostly moving images. Syncing is iffy but it does work.