Bitsnap, a screenshot capture tool for Medley Interlisp — Paolo Amoroso's Journal
I wrote Bitsnap, a tool in Interlisp for capturing screenshots on the Medley environment. It can capture and optionally save to a file th...| Paolo Amoroso's Journal
I wrote Bitsnap, a tool in Interlisp for capturing screenshots on the Medley environment. It can capture and optionally save to a file th...| Paolo Amoroso's Journal
Chromebooks are mainstream but many people don’t grok Chromeboxes. Some wonder what’s the point of Chromeboxes and what to use them for,...| Paolo Amoroso's Journal
I'm writing this with a TedGen keyboard, a wireless unit with Italian layout I bought for my ASUS Chromebox 3. Here's the product which c...| Paolo Amoroso's Journal
Linux posts on Paolo Amoroso's Journal| Paolo Amoroso's Journal
ChromeOS posts on Paolo Amoroso's Journal| Paolo Amoroso's Journal
I bought a lovely little computer, a Raspberry Pi 400, and two accessories, a 64 GB Samsung Pro Endurance microSD card to hold the file s...| Paolo Amoroso's Journal
I'm exploring another corner of the Interlisp ecosystem and history: the Interlisp-10 implementation for DEC PDP-10 mainframes, a 1970s character based environment that predated the graphical Interlisp-D system. I approached this corner when I set out to learn and experiment with a tool I initially checked out only superficially, the TTY editor. This command line structure editor for Lisp code and expressions was the only one of Interlisp-10. The oldest of the Interlisp editors, it came befor...| Paolo Amoroso's Journal
It has been a year since I set up my System76 Merkaat with Linux Mint. In July of 2024 I migrated from ChromeOS and the Merkaat has been my daily driver on the desktop. A year later I have nothing major to report, which is the point. Despite the occasional unplanned reinstallation I have been enjoying the stability of Linux and just using the PC. This stability finally enabled me to burn bridges with mainstream operating systems and fully embrace Linux and open systems. I'm ready to handle th...| Paolo Amoroso's Journal
DandeGUI now does graphics and this is what it looks like. Some text and graphics output windows created with DandeGUI on Medley Interlisp. In addition to the square root table text output demo, I created the other graphics windows with the newly implemented functionality. For example, this code draws the random circles of the top window: (DEFUN RANDOM-CIRCLES (&KEY (N 200) (MAX-R 50) (WIDTH 640) (HEIGHT 480)) (LET ((RANGE-X (- WIDTH ( 2 MAX-R))) (RANGE-Y (- HEIGHT ( 2 MAX-R))) (SHADES (LIST ...| Paolo Amoroso's Journal
Printing rich text to windows is one of the planned features of DandeGUI, the GUI library for Medley Interlisp I'm developing in Common Lisp. I finally got around to this and implemented the GUI:WITH-TEXT-STYLE macro which controls the attributes of text printed to a window, such as the font family and face. GUI:WITH-TEXT-STYLE establishes a context in which text printed to the stream associated with a TEdit window is rendered in the style specified by the arguments. The call to GUI:WITH-TEXT...| Paolo Amoroso's Journal
I continued working on DandeGUI, a GUI library for Medley Interlisp I'm writing in Common Lisp. I added two new short public functions, GUI:CLEAR-WINDOW and GUI:PRINT-MESSAGE, and fixed a bug in some internal code. GUI:CLEAR-WINDOW deletes the text of the window associated with the Interlisp TEXTSTREAM passed as the argument: (DEFUN CLEAR-WINDOW (STREAM) "Delete all the text of the window associated with STREAM. Returns STREAM" (WITH-WRITE-ENABLED (STR STREAM) (IL:TEDIT.DELETE STR 1 (IL:TEDIT...| Paolo Amoroso's Journal
I'm working on DandeGUI, a Common Lisp GUI library for simple text and graphics output on Medley Interlisp. The name, pronounced "dandy guy", is a nod to the Dandelion workstation, one of the Xerox D-machines Interlisp-D ran on in the 1980s. DandeGUI allows the creation and management of windows for stream-based text and graphics output. It captures typical GUI patterns of the Medley environment such as printing text to a window instead of the standard output. The main window of this screensh...| Paolo Amoroso's Journal
I spoke too soon when I said I was enjoying the stability of Linux. I have been using Linux Mint Cinnamon on a System76 Merkaat PC with no major issues since July of 2024. But a few days ago a routine system update of Mint 22 dumped me to the text console. A fresh install of Mint 22.1, the latest release, brought the system back online. I had backups and the mishap luckily turned out as just an annoyance that consumed several hours of unplanned maintenance. It all started when the Mint Update...| Paolo Amoroso's Journal
My journey to Lisp began in the early 1990s. Over three decades later, a few days ago I rediscovered the first Lisp environment I ever used back then which contributed to my love for the language. Here it is, PC Scheme running under DOSBox-X on my Linux PC: Screenshot of the PC Scheme Lisp development environment for MS-DOS by Texas Instruments running under DOSBox-X on Linux Mint Cinnamon. Using PC Scheme again brought back lots of great memories and made me reflect on what the environment t...| Paolo Amoroso's Journal
I upgraded my Raspberry Pi 400 to 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS 2024-11-19 based on Debian Bookworm 12.9: The desktop of 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS 2024-11-19 on a Raspberry Pi 400. Since I had no files to preserve the process was surprisingly easy as I went with a full installation. And this time I finally used the Raspberry Pi Imager. When I first set up the Pi 400 my only other desktop computer was a Chromebox that couldn't run the Imager on Crostini Linux. This imposed a less convenient network inst...| Paolo Amoroso's Journal
Tech projects, hobby programming, and geeky thoughts of Paolo Amoroso| Paolo Amoroso's Journal
I'm writing this on my new desktop computer. It's a Linux system I chose after deciding to migrate from ChromeOS back to Linux: a System...| Paolo Amoroso's Journal
I'm going back to Linux after nine years of ChromeOS. In 2015 I had been using Linux for a couple of decades. Exasperated by the frequen...| Paolo Amoroso's Journal
