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sehuggon Open Source IDE for FPGAs as QtCreator Learns Verilog

That's still the case, but open-source tools are useful for simulation, and there are synthesis tools for the Lattice iCE40 family: http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/

sehuggon Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

Also there were things like the "Clean Up Britannia" event, where players were encouraged to cull their item collection in exchange for neon hair dye and other goodies: http://www.uoguide.com/Clean_Up_Britannia_(1999)

sehuggon Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

Economies are hard, as are game economies: https://www.raphkoster.com/games/snippets/the-evolution-of-u...

sehuggon FPGA meets 6502

I would guess that even on the most inexpensive FPGA (iCE40 for example) you could run a 6502 at at least 20 MHz, and fit some display logic on there as well.

sehuggon MiSTer: Run Amiga, SNES, NES and Genesis on an FPGA

The IceStorm tools are open source, based on the reverse-engineered Lattice iCE40 FPGA architecture: http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/

I found it very easy to get started, although first you have to buy a compatible FPGA (iCEstick etc.) and make an adapter for your preferred output device. The advantage of the MISTer is that you have all the connectors, FPGA cores for popular platforms and a couple of ARMs for when things get complicated.

Raspberry PI is fine, but not great for latency, assuming you need that extra 1/60 second. (HDMI monitors add so much latency though!) Some folks have had success connecting PIs to old CRTs though.

sehuggon Reasons Python Sucks

I would post "these are very reasonable gripes" but I can't decide whether to make my string a unicode object or a UTF8-encoded bytes object...

sehuggon Soulja Boy Is Selling Cheap Emulators as His Own Consoles

Could just link to the original IGN article: https://www.ign.com/articles/2018/12/05/souljaboy-is-selling...

sehuggon The dry history of liquid computers

Logic Gates Under (Air) Pressure: https://hackaday.com/2017/08/19/logic-gates-under-air-pressu...

sehuggon Controlling the Spice, Part 3: Westwood’s Dune

"Walk without rhythm, and it won't attract the worm" -- possibly the only Dune reference in a Top 40 hit (Fatboy Slim)

sehuggon State of web browsers in 2018

Depends on your definition of "complete" -- ChromeOS now has Android and Linux container support, so you've got options for command-line apps. Ironically, you have to run Electron apps (based on Chromium) in a Linux VM.

sehuggon Facebook ends platform policy banning apps that copy its features

Good idea, they'll get even more data on emerging competitors than they used to get from their traffic-sniffing VPN app before Apple pulled it from the App Store a few months ago: https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/12/facebook-starts-pushing-it...

sehuggon TypeScript in 5 minutes

I use tsc -w with a simple Python web server and use <script> tags to include all of my modules. Yeah, I'm a monster. And watch out for the browser cache.

sehuggon A funny rap song about the pains of pair programming

You need a GoPro for a music video? What, are you going waterskiing or something :)

I'm no expert, but I'd say just use mobile phone cameras. Go to different places, have someone (or a tripod) film you lip-syncing the entire song there. Import all of the clips into a video editor, place your backing audio track and wiggle around the video clips until they sync up. Cut scenes between the best bits of each video track. Of course, you need a friend or two to cast as the other half of the pair programming pair :)

sehuggon Electromechanical Lunar Lander

Project LOLA, there's a Gizmodo article about it: https://gizmodo.com/project-lola-is-a-bizarre-snapshot-from-...

sehuggon Are Pop Lyrics Getting More Repetitive? (2017)

The lyrics to secular Renaissance music wouldn't be too out-of-place today, for example this example from http://www3.cpdl.org/wiki/index.php/Jacques_Arcadelt:

How crazy is this thought, my lady: although you are craving for my death, if you do not help me by looking at me with that scornful countenance that gives me life, and which I miss so much: then, since who has no life cannot die and he who has life must die, then—if you give me life, you'll have my death, and I, through death, will gain my life.

sehuggon The Second Half of Watergate Was Bigger, Worse, and Forgotten by the Public

Pretty sure that scandal would last no more than a half-day in the current news firehose.

sehuggon Tiny Emus: 8-Bit emulators

There's still no way to emulate 32-bit iOS apps.

sehuggon The Coming Crisis in Home Computers (1983)

Yes the TI-99/4A was 16 bit, but it only had 256 bytes of (static) RAM connected to the CPU bus! The other 16k of DRAM was behind the video processor, so the CPU had to read/write it sequentially one byte at a time. There was't even a stack for the CPU.

sehuggon Show HN: Gmail Classic – CSS for Reverting Gmail's New Look

Nothing special, just a few tabs and Termux open. 30 ms ping time to gmail.com.

sehuggon Show HN: Gmail Classic – CSS for Reverting Gmail's New Look

Thanks, that does load a whole lot faster. I feel like I'm using old Yahoo! mail again :P

sehuggon Show HN: Gmail Classic – CSS for Reverting Gmail's New Look

I can handle the new design, but on my (albeit underpowered) Chromebook, new Gmail takes ~30 seconds from initial page load to starting a reply to a thread. This is not progress.

sehuggon What the Lion Air Pilots May Have Needed to Do to Avoid a Crash

Reminds me of the Air France Flight 447 crash, where a unexpected manual mode leads to confusion and cognitive overload with no time to recover.

sehuggon C Portability Lessons from Weird Machines

If unaligned access traps are weird, then so is ARM: https://medium.com/@iLevex/the-curious-case-of-unaligned-acc...

sehuggon The US military is testing stratospheric balloons that never have to come down

Maybe the balloon could condense water in its environment and electrolyze it to refill itself with the produced hydrogen. (Though I'm pretty sure you also need salt.)

sehuggon C Portability Lessons from Weird Machines

It'd be nice if compilers were smarter about using the stack (looking at you, cc65) -- you could have "big" stack frames and little stack frames, pass variables in registers, push values as 8-bit instead of upcast to 16-bit, convert locals to static, etc.

I'm going to take a look at yet another alternative 6502 language called C02 now: https://github.com/RevCurtisP/C02

sehuggon The Vacuum Tube’s Many Modern-Day Uses

In 2002, you could buy a PC motherboard with a sound section amplified by a dual-triode vacuum tube. You can still find them on eBay: http://ixbtlabs.com/articles2/aopentube/

sehuggon Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis

Is there an actual crisis, outside the media narrative?

This article ends with Facebook's COO testifying before Congress, so I'm going to say yes, there was a crisis.

sehuggon Chrome OS: Ready for Web Development [video]

I've got a cheap (now $149) Samsung Chromebook 3 that I use daily for its long battery life and matte display (seriously, laptop makers! do more matte displays!)

My stable channel just got Crostini support, but I found that it takes up 25% of my storage space and it's been flaky to install. Instead, I use Termux.

I still have to visit my Mac/Linux boxen often for graphics editing, a proper editor/IDE like Atom, and certain other apps like pandoc. But as a daily browser and command-line runner, it's great. (Okay, some web sites are still really slow due to the underpowered CPU on this cheap model.)

sehuggon How to self-publish a book: A handy list of resources

Kindle can be a bit arbitrary on what they accept and what they reject for print.

For e-books, too. One of my books was mysteriously blocked without justification, and after several months and attempts at escalation was just as mysteriously re-instated.

sehuggon Reasons to Fear Another ‘Great War’

The U.S. and Russia have been signaling to each other recently that they would be willing to deploy low-yield nukes in a limited regional engagement.

Anyway, MAD has very nearly failed on several occasions -- Cuban Missile Crisis, false alarms, etc.