sponaugle

Here is a small video of it running on original IBM XT: This was right after we got the floppies read successfully. Serious Kudos to Scott for getting these floppies and the permission to release them!

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

As Scott mentioned in the blog post, we were able to get this running on one of my original IBM XTs with an original IBM monochrome display adapter and display. It was very cool to be able to switch between a running version of a small game, Turbo Pascal, and a DOS prompt with a single key press.

It is always great to have period software on period hardware!

(added: Short video of it running - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPPNbaQaumk)

I think it is a nice way to engage the community, and there are plenty of people that would invest $10,000 (me included). When I did my startup we had some community investment and it made the shareholder meetings far more interesting and engaging. And I made some great friends along the way.

"Reduces stress: Deploying new code to production can be a stressful experience, especially if it's done at the end of the week. By following a "no deployments on Fridays" policy, teams can reduce their stress levels and focus on other tasks."

It would seem more valuable to instead put efforts to make code deploys less 'stressful'. If you are regularly deploying code and causing huge stress you are doing something else wrong. This reminds me of the old corporate 'you can wear jeans on Friday'. Somehow wearing them on Friday is ok, but the rest of the time will lead to dispair?

Same for me, and auth from an iPhone fails as well. Downdetector shows a spike starting a few mins ago.

It is interesting that you referenced "God does not play dice with the universe". If you were to discuss it, I would suggest discussing what he actually said:

"Die Quantenmechanik ist sehr achtung-gebietend. Aber eine innere Stimme sagt mir, daß das doch nicht der wahre Jakob ist. Die Theorie liefert viel, aber dem Geheimnis des Alten bringt sie uns kaum näher. Jedenfalls bin ich überzeugt, daß der nicht würfelt."

There are a number of different translations, but one is:

Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the "old one." I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice.

It is relatively easy to understand both the context and meaning of what Einstein said, especially if you read his numerous other works. The objection to some of the key underpinnings of Quantum Mechanics was something he mentioned a number of times.

They key here is that you can explore and understand what Einstein was talking about without digging deep into the meaning of a god, or his view of religion. The concepts of Quantum Mechanics are complicated enough to keep any undergrad or grad student busy for a lifetime.

You said "...bicycles are worth the time and effort for insurers to launch full investigations over."

and I said:

"I would agree, yet I have seen it happen."

I was precise in answering your precise statement.

I have seen claims for less than $5000 items create significant investigative and delay-inducing efforts from an insurer. A video of the theft would have, in some of those cases, reduced that effort. Having video evidence is in almost no circumstances going to increase the time it will take to get an insurance claim paid. By you having the video evidence, you have the choice if you want to disclose it. It is just upside that you control.

If you do not want to put a camera in your garage pointing at your mountain bike, by all means do not.

"Other than perhaps using cameras as a means to deter thieves, I’m not sure that low-value (under USD 5000) items like bicycles are worth the time and effort for insurers to launch full investigations over."

I would agree, yet I have seen it happen. It is a somewhat difficult to predict path. I have seen some smaller claims (~$2000) take significantly longer and with more investigation than other very large (>$50,000) claims. I would assume there are certain metrics and algorithmic methods that effect how this plays out, so it is possible that someone who has had multiple small claims my get more attention than a single large claim.

Either way - The concept of the camera is simple in providing evidence in cases where that evidence can help you.

There is tremendous variance with what will be 'required' to complete an insurance claim. In some cases a simple statement will suffice. In others, a police report is sufficient. In some cases the insurance company will want to 'investigate'. In many cases the underwriter will have some additional requests.

However it is always good to recognize the primary goals of the insurance parties - which is to not pay. They have strong incentives in that direction, and you providing proof of theft reduces the opportunities for those incentives to slow or reduce the payment.

It is especially true in cases of undeclared specific items, like an expensive mountain bike that you do not have a dedicated policy on.

I have 30 POE IP cameras connected to BlueIris (Running on a server). It records based on activity, and is entirely local (including being on a dedicated VLAN).

The cameras are a wide variety of IP POE cameras which is helpful as I am not stuck to a single brand.

The primary use case for a camera watching something that might get stolen is to provide proof of theft for insurance. In some cases it can provide clear evidence of what exactly was stolen, and in some cases information about who stole it.

Unless the camera has lasers, it isn't very good at stopping said theft. ;)

I was an engineer at Intel in the 90s and worked on a PCI card for audio codec support. I remember going into one of the PCI test labs the first time and seeing this fantastic hardware setup where all of the PCI signals were mapped into a logic analyzer that could do full rate recording. The processor on the board was also mapped into a LA so you can see CPU side transactions. No doubt in the 90s this equipment was well in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Like any good setup of the time the development machine had a VGA monitor on a Mach 64 as well as a monochrome monitor for SoftICE. It was running in Windows NT 3.51. Ah such good times for a young engineer!

Perhaps best of all, if I had a question the people who designed PCI were on the floor above us.

I have some old NASA push button switches that have two bulbs in them. When the switch is off both lights are off, when you click the switch the yellow bulb comes on and lights up the switch, and when the device you turned on actually turns on a green light turns on ( and the yellow turns off ). The idea is you push the button and the yellow state is the confirmation that you toggled the switch, but the green is the confirmation that the action you wanted occurred. Kind of an interesting 'state feedback' mechanism.

Well, a flicker preventer is a double on-line UPS, so the market has a device, albeit an expensive one. You could purchase a double on-line UPS that has small batteries and that would serve as a 'flicker preventer' while providing only a small bit of runtime.

It would be possible to build this kind of on-line conversion with a very very small battery that could only provide power for a few seconds, and that kind of device would serve the goal you mentioned. I suspect the cost for this device would quickly approach a UPS in cost, so it might not be the 'cheap' solution.

Indeed, power in the NW US, which is significantly hydro-power, is relatively inexpensive. 6kw over a month is about $500/month(~4.3MWh), and my solar system generates about 2MWh/month.

That is correct - double on-line conversion UPSs are usually in the 92-94% efficiency. Mine is almost always at 94% at 60% load. However that is the cost of on-line conversion and is well worth it.

I mentioned this below in a reply to a similar suggestion - It is critical to remember that most of the 'battery house backup solutions' do not have fast enough switch time to switch without rebooting some computers.

Most of the battery systems (like EcoFlow, Bluetti) has switching times that are between 30 and 100ms. The larger Enphase ones are ~100ms, and the Tesla battery system is around 25ms.

Online conversion UPSs have 0ms, and switching ones are usually in the 4-8ms range. Some systems can handle 30ms, most can't handle 100ms.

I have this in my house, but it does not provide what a UPS does. I have 42kwh of Enphase batteries as well as 53 solar panels (20kw) with enphase microinverters, and the battery system is inline with the incoming power. If we lose power the batteries kick in, however the time for them to kick is in >100ms. Computers will reboot with that timeframe of power drop.

In my case I use a 16kw APC Symmetry UPS (which is datacenter UPS) for the interconnetion to my dataroom. The UPS provides double on-line conversion as well as battery backup. However the batteries in the UPS are only large enough to provide for about 30 mins of runtime at my current sustained power rate (~6kw)

My goal with the UPS is to have both the inline conversion protection as well as the protection from power drops.

As the author mentioned, UPSes do suck, and the Symmetra I have does as well. I have replaced 3 power modules (which are about $1k each), one network module, and all of the batteries. And it has an alarm right now about one of the battery banks being bad. ;)

(For those interested, there is a bit more detail about my power system in a garage build thread: https://www.garagejournal.com/forum/threads/jeffs-mountain-s...)

Yes, that Barns without the e is a mistype, which is funny given it was the Oregonian.

You can see a copy of TekTimes:

https://vintagetek.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/TekTalk_Se...

They reference the building on 9450 Barnes Rd.. and indeed that building is still there today.

In terms of complete house power - Batteries are fantastic for a small size use case, but economically difficult in large size. I have 42kwh of battery storage (Enphase), plus 20kw of Solar generation, but that combined is not enough to cover a complete power outage longer than 24-36 hours in stormy weather. The cost of that system is well more than 10 times the cost to get a generator that can do the entire house (22kw Generac for example).

Exactly. It is important to remember that the rural somewhat-backwater state that both Linus and I live in, Oregon, is slightly larger than United Kingdom. Population of about 4.3 million (compared to 67 million in the same area in the UK).

The reality of the power distribution network is a continuous threat from trees, of which there are a lot. Oregon has about 10 billion trees (compared to 3 billion in the UK).

As kardianos mentioned - The trees are tall and the power lines are in the fall zone - which is a recipe for problems in ice/winds storms that don't happen often. Just keeping the trees trimmed near the power lines themselves is a huge undertaking of continuous work.

The grid could be much more resilient - But not for $0.12/kwh.

Nationalizing our power grid management would not solve these problems. Keep in mind the US power grid is more than 10 times the size of all of Canada in terms of production, and of course far far larger than in terms of distribution endpoints. The investment needed to do things like bury power lines would be hundreds of billions of dollar. The dollars could be spent without nationalizing the grid, but the problem is the money will not get spent. If we did nationalize, it would add another level of government spending and waste that would still not have the funds needed to actual fix anything.

Perhaps if we did less of the world's policing we could spend some of that money on infrastructure.

I live in Portland and power to my house has been out since Saturday at 7am. As of Monday morning there were still >50k households without power.

Much of the power infrastructure here is above ground lines with significant tree coverage. There were over 3000 separate power outages , each that needs repair.

This is not an unexpected outcome, and it does favor the prepared. I have a 42kwh battery system plus 20kw of Solar as well as a generator so I have not been significantly affected. Comcast internet also went down , but I have a Starlink backup link.

If your power comes above ground and you live in a forest, you are going to lose power during a storm… and your house is not going to stay warm when it is 10 degrees F outside.

I agree.. I was surprised that it made a difference, but on a large screen it makes the text feel more anchored to an actual page, not just sliding on the screen. It may be less effective on a small phone screen where the screen is less of your total view.

There is a smaller scale version of this on the CU campus:

https://www.colorado.edu/fiske/colorado-scale-model-solar-sy...

It is 1:10 Billion, so about a half-mile from the Sun top Pluto.

Indeed KiCad is much improved in many different areas, and the devs deserve accolades for making those things happen. The self-destruction of EagleCad was certainly a good source of motivation to focus efforts on making something open-source better.

For a number of years I have been using DipTrace for personal projects and it is quite easy to use. It is one of the easiest and fastest tools for doing PCBs for the non-PCB engineer. I have recommended it to a number of non-engineers and they were quickly successful in getting a design up and running.

"we don’t actually want them to operate like startups (for instance we expect them to prioritize longevity over risk-taking: we expect them to preserve capital, etc)".

I'm not sure you need bureaucracy to do this? It is just the easiest and laziest way to do it. Adding processes that are by design wasteful as an attempt to slow down change is perhaps the most inefficient way of getting to that goal. It would be much more efficient to just have far far far less people with far more responsibility and work to do. That combination would be equally slow at less cost.

Bureaucracy is very very difficult to fight if you are not in charge, and conversely wasteful bureaucracy is almost entirely in the domain of fault of the person in charge ( the CEO, the President, etc of a company).

If you are in charge, you can stop it. I do it all the time, and I rather enjoy when someone tells me I need to fill out a useless outdated form to do something, and I say 'So, if I don't, do I get fired?'. The answer is either 'yes, you will', or 'no... um.. I guess this might not really be needed.'

The message to eliminated wasted time and wasted process has to come from the very top, with such authority and clarity that it leaves no room for 'that is how we have always done it'.

As far as this particular post from Sam, who cares? Judge something by that something, not by who said it. If it is advice that is good, it is good. It isn't good because it comes from someone you like. It is good because it is good. Content is what matters, not the credentials of the author. Lots of people with great credentials say stupid things... and smart things...

I would align with this philosophy as it relates to learning. Complexity is a likely a necessity of technological advancement, but a hinderance to 'from-scratch' learning. Abstractions hide many details that may not be needed to operate, but are needed to understand.

The entire retro-computing field is interesting and a bit surprising in it's strength. I would not have guessed that in 2023 an IMSAI 8080 would be selling for ~$3-5k, and that there would be such an active community of people doing things in CP/M. Nor would I guess that I would be working on either of these!

One of the most enjoyable personal projects that I have worked on was the creation and implementation of a CPU, starting with the concept ISA and building the microarchitecture, making lots of cool mistakes that require rework, and eventually having a booting CPU running code in an assembly language of my own. While the performance of a CPU like this is closer to the computational power of my coffee maker, it is still an excellent experience.

I ordered my copy of your book and am looking forward to reading it!