4 gregs! @glindsey@mastodon.social

Also remember: Mastodon is NEW(ish). It's not a behemoth like Twitter. It's probably gonna have occasional issues/bugs. Have patience towards the amazing folks putting their effort into making a true competitor to what is essentially a monopoly.

Helpful FAQ for newbies (such as myself):

https://github.com/tootsuite/documentation/blob/master/Using-Mastodon/FAQ.md

Oh hey, Twitter just announced a bunch of awful new “features”, so here’s me reminding myself (AGAIN) that this much better alternative exists!

This is my periodic post to confirm that I have not abandoned Mastodon by any means. But I do need to start posting here more often rather than on Twitter. Mastodon is... happier.

henlo mister don

I'm still here; just haven't had any hobby stuff to write about. I've been busy playing a very heavily modded game of Minecraft with my daughter, no time for anything else. :)

I am not dead! Converted #Rosewater from avr-gcc to an Atmel Studio 7 project, and solved a power-on bug I accidentally reintroduced. Also found that some of my original plans aren’t gonna work - simply not enough cycles to do the necessary calculations.

Love this new economy where Amazon has 24 identical products each with different company names like "GOOFLORB", "SNUFFBLAT", "THRKSHPT", "PLEXFLONK", et cetera

And I just realized that pic is upside down. Fitting, since the latch is mounted on the board upside down so the pinout was easier to work with! (Normally that’s a no-no. Chips should always be oriented with pin 1 in the upper-left if vertical or lower-left if horizontal, to minimize potential confusion. At least that’s how I was taught!)

Today’s work on #Rosewater — not much, but I wired up a quick and dirty bar graph display to use for debugging. Subsequent segments illuminate from top to bottom as the VDU boots up, except for the bottom red one which denotes an unhandled interrupt. Right now the system seems to get “stuck” at palette or VRAM init randomly; a few presses of the reset button fixes it. No clue why this happens, maybe some logic line that doesn’t clear and causes bus contention.

No work on #Rosewater today; had too much else to do. Got a *little* done yesterday, but it was mostly unglamorous restructuring of existing code to support future tile-based rendering modes.

Oops, forgot to add a picture. This is a tartan pattern showing all 256 current colors available with the makeshift DAC I constructed. https://mastodon.social/media/Hu22TFNsPccxL2fM-E8

Today on #Rosewater: threw together a simple 3/3/2-bit set of R-2R ladder DACs for the red, green, and blue channels respectively. They will do nicely until the actual 8-bit DACs arrive. Started some work on default tile and character sets, but there’s a lot of rendering code to write before I can display them!

Also, my power supply that I thought was broken? It’s fine; the *probe* I was using to measure it was faulty.

Yay, it's done!

Crap, that means I have to keep working!

I have the feeling this restore is going to fail somewhere around the 80 to 90 percent complete mark due to some stupid technicality... again. Already happened once before. I'm doing this so I can replicate a client site locally to figure out why a bug is happening there but can't be reproduced on my dev instance no matter what I do. It's really, really annoying.

Anyways, right now Mastodon is going to be my "I'm seriously bored waiting for this database restore to complete so I'm just going to ramble on" site of choice.

I watched an old documentary on the making of the DS9 episode "Trials and Tribbleations" last night, and learned something new: the Klingon belt buckles on the original series were just large bubble wrap bubbles spray-painted silver. What an amazing piece of costuming sleight-of-hand!

I am still trying to post on Mastodon when I can, but there's still that network effect problem. Too many folks I know are on Twitter vs Mastodon. But hey, I guess that's how any new social site start out...

Project Rosewater progress is slow. Had two different reboot loops today that I tracked down to data lines being driven simultaneously by two chips; the second of these two revealed a flaw in my design. Now that I’ve worked that out I can return to wiring up address and data lines.

For now, I can display this nice screen of white scan lines. So at least NTSC timing and video signal gating is working properly... https://mastodon.social/media/LZYoRfZNv5iwXg7pPwA https://mastodon.social/media/NW9ngjydCG3GT2htQAY

At Chicago TARDIS with my daughter this weekend. I’m reading, she’s drawing. Very nice and chill.

Props for the latest update to Amaroq! It’s rapidly becoming the client of choice for Mastodon.

One thing I think would be *awesome* to add to Mastodon would be a distributed trust system:
- You mark an account you follow as trusted/untrusted, and/or with opinions (e.g. funny, creative, racist, spam, etc.).
- When you check a profile, the system processes the opinions of the people you trust/distrust (and those THEY trust, etc.)
- This gives you an overall impression of what those you trust think of that account.
It's something I've thought of for some time as a possible "Twitter killer".