robinsonb5

The Gowin chips are quite interesting - they have RAM built in to the FPGA itself. It's SDRAM in the case of the Tang Nano 20k. It's a 32-bit wide RAM, but unfortunately only 8 megabytes, which is a bit limiting. The FPGA's clocking is a bit limited, too. (For that reason, there's an extra clock generator on the Tang Nano 20k.)

The only downside of those is that the SDRAM chip is wired with its DQM pins tied low, which means you can't do byte writes to SDRAM - you have to write a full word at a time. That makes it much harder to port existing cores to the ColorLight boards.

Somewhat similar, yes - but the vidor had a smaller FPGA, a smaller RAM chip, and the board contained a small supporting microcontroller as well as the FPGA.

Another similar board (perhaps even more similar than the ULX3S) is the IceSugarPro - it's sub-$100 for the module and breakout board.

[I enjoy reading your blog by the way - just last week I picked up a Pano Logic G1 on EBay!]

Selling them nice and cheap is great if you're going to do one batch as a project and then move on to other things.

If you're still going to be selling them next year and the year after that, you don't want it to become a burden or a chore - it has to feel like it's worth your while to be psychologically sustainable.

IceSugarPro (with its breakout board) is quite a nice board if you want something pre-assembled. Same FPGA as this new board (so also supported by the Open Source toolchain), same size SDRAM, HDMI out but PMODs for everything else.

I really like the look of this new board, though - I definitely want to get my hands on one. (I also have a Tang Nano 20K but don't like it all that much.)

I'm actually not wringing my hands over people choosing to use LLMs - I'm wringing my hands over the irresponsibility of the tech world in introducing and making available a technology whose existence will be responsible for a big chunk of the expected doubling of datacentre energy use over the next decade.

But the environmental aspects aren't even my main concern: my main concern is where that energy is coming from - and how the idea of Three Mile Island being restarted solely for Microsoft's benefit marks a huge shift (that no-one seems to have noticed) towards infrastructure that was previously at least nominally for public use being reserved for the use of a private corporation.

I'm also annoyed by the kleptocratic attitude towards training data, but I'll happily accept that reasonable minds may differ on that subject.

So while I don't use LLMs myself for ethical reasons, I don't have a problem with other people choosing to use them.

Ultimately we're trying to persuade people to reduce their quality of life in order to reduce their energy footprint. That's already a difficult sell. It becomes an impossible sell when any reductions that might be achieved are immediately offset by a new energy-hungry technology coming online - especially when the long-term effect (goal, even) is to reduce yet further the quality of life of everyday people.

"No raindrop considers itself responsible for the flood."

A "few" more would be fine - but the sheer scale of the malicious AI training bot crawling that's happening now is enough to cause real availability problems (and expense) for numerous sites.

One web forum I regularly read went through a patch a few months ago where it was unavailable for about 90% of the time due to being hammered by crawlers. It's only up again now because the owner managed to find a way to block them that hasn't yet been circumvented.

So it's easy to see why people would allow googlebot and little else.

Intersting - here in Norfolk I'd say I see it between half a dozen and a dozen times a year.

Not directly - you'd need level shifters to handle the 5V signals in the C64. (The RP2040 isn't "officially" 5V tolerant - there are certain circumstances where you can get away with wiring some its inputs directly to 5V logic, but those circumstances exclude bidirectional IO.)

To me the biggest problem is the buy-to-let market, which means anything affordable is snapped up in seconds by people with money to invest, rather than people who just want a home to live in.

I think it's mainly a symptom of the unusualy low interest rates over the last 20 years: people have invested in residential property not because they particularly want to be landlords, but because it's perceived as the easiest way to get a better return on your money than a savings account that pays near zero interest.

I know of more than one person who's now looking to sell their rental property because they found out the hard way that "landlord" is actually a job title, not just the name of their savings account, that properties need to be maintained and that letting agents will find a way to swallow the vast majority of any profits.

I also know more than one person living in rented accommodation with appalling maintenance lapses. One had a shoddy roof repair last year which left the gutter missing. When the next rainstorm caused water to cascade down the outside wall and flow in above the back door, the letting agent had the nerve to shrug and say "old properties do that".

Another had a rotten wooden lintel above a street door scraped out, filled with expanding foam and painted over.

I remember back in the day the apps most likely to have completely custom UIs tended to be scanner drivers. I'm not sure why!

For me its biggest issue (apart from the imposition of hamburger menus) is the awful keyboard handling in the file dialog.

> People simply complain about the inability to customize Gnome as a reflection of how powerless they are to do anything about those decisions.

But also that the Gnome philosophy "leaks" into the wider ecosystem, thanks to the dominance of Gtk.

(I use GtkWave as a waveform viewer. I have it installed systemwide, and it has proper menus. If I activate the oss-cad-suite environment [which is superb - this isn't a dig at that project] I have to remember to specify its full path when running it, otherwise I get a newer build shipped with oss-cad-suite, which has hamburger menus.)

The irony is that back in the day it was the heavyweight option - now it's super-lightweight compared to the dominant desktop environments.

There's a monthly Norwich Amiga Group meeting not too far from where I live - there's usually around 20 people there with various machines, and occasional 2- or 4-player game tournaments!

Excessive use of colour can certainly be vulgar - but restrained use is a valuable tool for clarity. As I type this, Firefox shows no hint at all that it has input focus, other than the tab's background being very slightly lighter and the tab's title text being very slightly darker. It's not so very long ago that colour would have been used to communicate this information clearly and unambiguously.

And Windows 11 is significantly less colourful again. Also, you're missing out the most colourful version of all - Windows XP!

(The first thing I did with WinXP was revert it to the Win2K look - restricting the use of colour to where it's useful: namely showing me which bloody window is active.)

Yes, absolutely - I can't disagree with that.

Perhaps because nowhere else has one package for every 2,972 humans on planet Earth?

In my world (VHDL/Verilog and some C/C++) there's a difference between the "fetch" and "build" steps. It's perfectly reasonable for the fetch step to require network access; the build step should not.

The real problem is that some language ecosystems conflate those two steps.

You're right that it's not realistic for most people to grow enough food to be self-sufficient - but it doesn't take a lot of effort to grow enough food to make a difference.

I usually grow runner beans (8 or 9 plants, and maybe some climbing French beans too) and courgettes (2 or three plants, ideally different varieties) - both of which are high-yield for a relatively small amount of space, and both of which freeze successfully. I really don't have to spend much time on doing that - basically just a case of making sure they have enough water.

I'm now on my last bag of runner beans from last season, and I might actually buy some in about a month's time.

Pumpkins or other winter squash will keep for several months after harvesting provided they reached full maturity before picking, and provided you treat them carefully.

Am I self-sufficient? No, nowhere near it. Have I made a noticeable difference to my food bill? Most definitely.

I find this problem much easier to talk about face-to-face - my catchphrase on th subject involves gestures: "All we've done is trade this kind of complexity <holds hands about two feet apart, vertically> for this kind of complexity <holds hand about four feet apart horizontally>.

Sorry, missed this at the time. But I did say I can't speak for other scripting languages. All I can say is that it was much easier than I was expecting!

Ernest Hemingway: Good pictures, what camera do you use?

Irving Penn: What typewriter do you use?

Ah yes, often found within a Fisher Price user interface, wherein standard UI controls are thrown out in favour of a custom "artistic" and often unintentionally infantile interface. Good thing that never happens in today's world...

Back in the ball-mouse days I had this vague notion of including some kind of togglable magnetic resistance on the mouse rollers, to make physical tactile ridges and divisions in the user interface. Probably completely impractical, but it would open up some interesting possibilities.

Tcl scripting gets more interesting when you want to talk to a design running in an FPGA over JTAG. I have a toy CPU project which I've so far tested on Altera/Intel, Xilinx and Lattice FPGAs, and a debug interface where a C-based ncurses debugger connects over TCP/IP to a Tcl bridge which talks to the appropriate JTAG interface for the particular type of chip.

I'm also a big fan of the full-fat Tk-capable Tcl in Altera's SignalTap / Virtual JTAG - I used it recently to plot histograms on-demand for profiling RAM / Cache accesses.