Marking token boundaries in TI-BASIC with Unicode magic
Managing Google Photos duplicates with Python
Monitoring (and preventing) excessive hard drive head parking on Linux
Cross-compiling CMake projects for Windows
Windows MIME type detection pitfalls
I’ve been doing some Django development lately, and was mystified why it seemed the debug toolbar on my local development instance wasn’t showing up, though it had been in the past. It turns out to have been a surprising interaction between browsers sometimes enforcing that resources be served with correct MIME types and the way Windows provides system-wide MIME type configuration (which seems to have major flaws)!
tihle: a unique TI calculator emulator
Today I’m publishing tihle, a new emulator targeting TI graphing calculators (currently only the 83+, but maybe others later). There’s rather a lot to say about it, but here I will discuss the motivation for a new emulator and the state of the art followed by technical notes on the design and initial development process.
Read on for that discussion, or jump straight to the project homepage on GitLab which has a live demo that runs in your web browser and other resources including source code.
fb-hitler Updated
I updated fb-hitler a few years ago and never wrote about it; today I spent some time to describe the new version, which is implemented more robustly: now it’s a bootable image that runs in real mode, not a Linux application.
A Wayback Machine Bookmarklet
Fomu: a beginner's guide
FPGAs are pretty cool pieces of hardware for tinkering with, and have become remarkably easy to approach as a hobbyist in recent years. Boards like the TinyFPGA BX don’t require any special hardware to use and can provide a simple platform for modestly-scoped projects or just for learning.
While historically the software tools for programming FPGAs are proprietary and provided by the hardware manufacturer, Symbiflow (enabled and probably inspired by earlier work like Project IceStorm) provides completely free and open-source tooling and documentation for programming some FPGAs, significantly lowering the cost of entry (most vendors provide some free version of their design software but limited to lower-end devices; a license for the non-free version of the software is well into the realm of “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it”) and appearing to yield better results in many cases.1
As somebody who finds it fun to learn new things and experiment with new kinds of creations, FPGAs are quite interesting to me- they’re quite complex devices that enable very powerful creations, with excellent depth for mastery. While I did some course lab work with Altera FPGAs in university (and a little bit of chip design/layout later), I’d call those mostly canned tasks with easily-understood requirements and problem-solving approaches; it was sufficient to familiarize myself with the systems, but not enough to be particularly useful.
The announcement of Fomu caught my interest because I was aware of the earlier Tomu but wasn’t sufficiently interested to try to acquire any hardware. With Fomu however, I’m rather more interested because it enables interesting capabilities for playing with hardware- others have already demonstrated small RISC-V CPUs running in that FPGA (despite its modest logic capacity), for instance.
Even more conveniently for being able to play with Fomu, I’ve been in contact with Mithro who is approximately half of the team behind Fomu and gotten access to a stockpile of “hacker edition” boards that have been hand-assembled but not programmed at all. With slightly early access to hardware, I’ve been able to do some exploration and re-familiarize myself with the world of digital logic design and figure out the hardware.