Remember a few days ago I'd been fiddling around with various languages to generate 1D cellular automata? The timing I got for this was surprising:

1 hr 8 minutes -- the old CoCo computer
5 minutes -- the CoCo emulator running as fast as my computer allowed
12 minutes -- using python

And now....

0.08 second -- awk creating an image fileNot bad ( Read more... )

I've been falling down a very deep rabbithole ( Read more... )

Damn facebook has sucked so much time I don't do much blogging anymore. I have an account on Dreamwidth, which is the same as LiveJournal, but without ads, however I haven't been updating it much either ( Read more... )

Today I helped Mum and Dad make their postal vote in the QLD election. I was horrified that of the 6 candidates, 3 are anti-science morons and one is a right-wing liar who is probably also anti-science. And the way Labor have been acting lately I'm a little suspicious of the Labor candidate. This is what we get when absolutely no qualifications are ( Read more... )

Well, last night was definitely NOT fun, though it certainly was interesting. I spent almost 6 hours trying to resurrect my computer. The kind of Linux I use is Puppy Linux, which has a number of aspects that I like over other kinds of Linux. One being that it can be run from external media (CD, USB, etc.), or can be installed on the internal hard ( Read more... )

It's 3:30am and my mind keeps ticking over the same annoying thing. I keep trying to think of some way to see gravity as curved space without it collapsing into contradictions. I can see the attraction of the idea. It almost looks like you can eliminate gravity as a force and just see it as geometry. Also, I'm very aware of the fact that a lot of ( Read more... )

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I've been writing my latest novel, Breathe, for too many years. I got the idea for it back in 2015, while I was writing my short novel, Shirlocke, but it really took me a year or more to get started. The story seemed fairly straightforward, but it turned out to require a lot more research than I expected... so, combined with my usual distracted and ( Read more... )

Woo hoo!!!! I just enjoyed a lovely bit of Linux magic. My favorite Linux is a bit old, but I have it working just how I like, with a lot of programs installed and a lot of things I've set up exactly how it suits me.

Unfortunately time moves on, and I was given some h265 (hevc) encoded videos recently. My favorite video player, mplayer, doesn't have ( Read more... )

We've recently been slapped in the face by reality a couple of times, but seem unable to collectively realise the obvious message ( Read more... )