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Resurrecting a C64
This is silly. I bought an "as is" C64 from eBay (to save $20 versus a verified working one) and now I'm in another $60 on my second replacement power supply - both the one it shipped with, and the first replacement I bought on eBay, were bad. Finally now I've got a working power supply and am able to discern some some garbled checkerboard display ( Read more... ) -
Festalon
I needed an NSF player I could run from the Linux command line. As a diversion during ELS 2015, I blew the dust off a player called Festalon, which plays NES and PC Engine music and appears not to have been maintained for several years, replaced the rotted autoconf/automake definitions with a simple hand-rolled Makefile that just builds the command ( Read more... ) -
GIMP-Python script for dithering pixel art
Here's a Python script for GIMP that takes an indexed color image and replaces every other color with a checkerboard dithering of its neighbors. The intended use was to create grayscale 4 color images with this style of dithering, by first creating a hand-tuned 7 color image, then applying the script. After it runs, you can delete the in-between ( Read more... ) -
Fun with Lisp: Programming the NES
"Low-level programming is good for the programmer's soul." -John Carmack
When the complexity of modern computing gets fatiguing, I look back to the simpler machines of my childhood. I grew up surrounded by various 8-bit and 16-bit machines (most of them already a few years outdated at the time), but my favorite of the bunch is the Nintendo ( Read more... ) -
Piddling Plugins
The Shuffletron music player, in various branches, has accumulated some neat features (particularly last.fm scrobbling in Brit Butler's branch) that deserve merging, and ought to be cleanly separated from the core of the program. Leslie Polzer sent me a novel implementation early on which used generic functions for extensibility, adding/removing ( Read more... ) -
Fun with Lisp: Just Intonation and Microtonality
If you're interested in Lisp, audio/music hacking, just intonation, or microtonality, then this is the sort of thing you're interested in.
First, we'll need a way to play audio. In the past, I dumped the raw audio out to a file in /tmp and played it by shelling out to SoX. These days I can just play it out of an array in memory using my Mixalot ( Read more... ) -
Lispm archaeology: Compiler Protocols
Skimming through the Genera source just now, I enjoyed this description of the compiler structure (from sys2/compiler_protocol.lisp), which precedes a very modern-feeling definition of the interface in terms of classes (or rather Flavors) and generic functions. I wonder who wrote it.
;;; This file defines the base flavors for compiler objects and ( Read more... ) -
Emacs: Rebinding the numeric keypad.
Lately I'm trying out various emacs hacks (the awesome cycle-buffer.el, and today highlight-symbol). I'm running low on free Function keys and wanted to start binding things on the numeric keypad, which I rarely use. I was initially foiled by built-in translations which map the numeric keypad keys to their non-keypad equivalents (arrows, home, end ( Read more... ) -
Linux to Mac transition notes
Random notes taken during my transition to a MacBook Pro, away from a Thinkpad running Debian Linux (and occasionally Windows XP) as my former primary computer. I don't really have anything better to do, since I wanted to play Portal, but Steam will probably spend the next half hour downloading updates (now I remember why I stopped playing Valve's ( Read more... ) -
New MacBook Pro: Wireless Sucks
I just bought a shiny new 15" MacBook Pro. I'm not a Mac person; I dabbled in the platform when the original Mac Mini came out, but found the hardware underpowered and the software awkward and unlikely to displace Linux as my preferred desktop OS. I still think OS X is clumsy and inefficient to use, but so well executed that I find some joy in that ( Read more... )