I own two computers that I use regularly. The first is my main machine, a rather old Apple MacBook Pro, the other is a Panasonic Toughbook FZ-40. They are polar opposites. Where the Mac is designed with tightly coupled software and hardware and is all smooth curves and delicate design, the Toughbook is designed to be used wearing gloves, outside and in rough situations that would damage the Mac. | John Graham-Cumming's blog
Early in the morning in a European city, I awoke and wondered for a moment where I was. The room was totally black apart from a small glow from the face of my Casio Lineage watch lying on the bedside table. The luminous dial had absorbed sunlight during the day and was now giving off gentle light in the night; enough brightness to read the time.| John Graham-Cumming's blog
Somehow I forgot to blog my site: https://lowbackgroundsteel.ai/. I created it back in March 2023 as a clearinghouse for online resources that hadn't been contaminated with AI-generated content. | John Graham-Cumming's blog
One of my Minitels (the one that I modified a few years ago to run new firmware) started having power supply problems: the LED was on but nothing else was working. I suspected that the main power/CRT board needed new capacitors and so I recapped it:| John Graham-Cumming's blog
I'm not much of a collector of things. Long ago I decided that on the retro-computing front I would not collect any machines that weren't very significant to me. So, my "collection" consists of a KIM-1, Sharp MZ-80K, Research Machines 380Z and 480Z, BBC Micro Model B, an IBM ThinkPad 701C, and a Minitel (well, two).| John Graham-Cumming's blog
Portugal has an incredibly well executed and efficient system for collecting road tolls called Via Verde. A small transponder in the car either collects a toll at an automated toll booth or, on some motorways, every few kilometres without slowing down at all.| John Graham-Cumming's blog
There isn't a lot to this story beyond the fact that in around 1990 I helped debug someone's Lotus 1-2-3 set up via fax. But it's a good reminder of how important the Zeroth Law of Debugging is (see below).| John Graham-Cumming's blog
Unless they are widely, widely known they make communication worse. And they have a tendency to make the writer seem pompous, or a member of some special clique, while making a reader who doesn't know the acronym feel foolish. | John Graham-Cumming's blog
From time to time I do some project involving old hardware that requires connecting it to a modern computer. For example,| John Graham-Cumming's blog
I've written before about my 1976 KIM-1 and code I wrote for a similar one long ago. But I hadn't done much with the KIM-1 and strongly believe that old hardware need to be living machines not still lives. But using the KIM-1 directly (via its keypad and little hexadecimal display) is painful. I wanted to be able to use it with a terminal.| John Graham-Cumming's blog
Twenty years ago, on February 3, 2005, I released v1.0.0 of a project I called "GNU Make Standard Library" (GMSL). That first release can still be found in its original location on SourceForge. I moved the project from SourceForge to GitHub and newer releases are there. The latest release is v1.2.2 on March 30, 2024.| John Graham-Cumming's blog
Richard Brautigan's poem "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" is somewhat well known in tech. circles but I couldn't find a complete PDF of the original 1967 publication of it (and other poems) online. | John Graham-Cumming's blog
I made another silly Tumblr (to go along with Movie Code and Low Background Steel). This times it's a Tumblr for all those font disasters and other typographical amusements. Welcome to the wonderful world of badkeming.com:| John Graham-Cumming's blog
As I've mentioned before my talk at the 2004 MIT Spam Conference was about using one machine learning system to beat another. In that case a spammer using machine learning to beat a machine learning spam filter.| John Graham-Cumming's blog
If you're old enough to have ever used, seen or overheard the once ubiquitous AOL software you'll have heard the voice of Elwood Edwards. His voice was known to millions for saying "You've got mail!", "Welcome", "File's done" and "Goodbye" when using the AOL software. He died last week which reminded me of the time I paid him to record a customized greeting for me.| John Graham-Cumming's blog
Look, here's the thing, I don't like mysteries that involve technology. I think I hate them because I know that some other human created the thing I'm staring at and, dammit, I should be able to understand it. | John Graham-Cumming's blog
With separate plastic, metal, paper, and glass recycling, composting, and pick up of all the rest, knowing which days to put out which bins can be complicated. Some have turned to high-tech solutions like Darren Tarbard's wonderful "bindicator".| John Graham-Cumming's blog
It's not often that you find yourself staring at code that few people have ever seen, code that was an important part in bringing down the apartheid system in South Africa, and code that was used for secure communication using one-time pads smuggled into South Africa by a flight attendant on floppy disks. But I found myself doing that one morning recently after having helped decrypt a 30 year old PKZIP file whose password had long been forgotten.| John Graham-Cumming's blog
I needed to log when a light switched on and off during the night as part of debugging an oddly behaving movement sensor. To do that I built a really simple light sensor logger using an Arduino Leonardo, a large LED and a resistor or three. Here it is:| John Graham-Cumming's blog
I unearthed a catalogue that I'd picked up in around 1983 of Acorn Computer Systems. This catalogue overlaps the BBC Micro era (which was released in 1981) as it goes up to the final Acorn System 5 (released in 1983).| John Graham-Cumming's blog
Look, I don't recommend you do this with your phone because bad things may happen, but the front and back cameras on my iPhone 13 Pro stopped working (in the camera app the image was black) and I "fixed" them myself using only a household appliance. | John Graham-Cumming's blog
Many large concerts feature wristbands that light up on command. They are used to produce varied visual effects across a stadium. One company that makes these is PixMob. Their controllable, illuminated wristbands are currently being used as part of Taylor Swift's Eras Tour. A short Wired article here gives some details and here's a video from the Wall Street Journal:| John Graham-Cumming's blog
Turning to the back page of a recent copy of The Economist to read the obituary of Paul Alexander the eye is assaulted by The Economist's new, ugly, hard-to-read typeface (which came about because: "In early 2023, as our font licence was coming up for renewal, we decided that we wanted to create something unique to The Economist.") | John Graham-Cumming's blog
Close to three years ago I wrote about using Oddly Specific Objects' alternate "motherboard" to modify a classic Casio F-91W watch: Pimping my Casio with Oddly Specific Objects' alternate motherboard and firmware. That blog post goes into the detail of swapping out the guts of the Casio and building and uploading the firmware. | blog.jgc.org
Close to three years ago I wrote about using Oddly Specific Objects' alternate "motherboard" to modify a classic Casio F-91W watch: Pimping...| blog.jgc.org
In this short video Steve Ballmer talks about a puzzle question he would ask candidates interviewing at Microsoft. Solving it is based on b...| blog.jgc.org