A GP gets hold of a ZX80 kit, then a ZX81. He meets a statistician at a computer fair. The rest is history. www.ianlogan.co.uk/sinclair/sto...
The great vintage page of kio for a vintage micro. Almost nothing to add ! Have a look at zxdocs.htm e.g. k1.spdns.de/Vintage/Sinc...
Sinclair ZX81 - Technical Specifications
k1.spdns.de
How did a geomagnetic storm pull 38 new Starlink satellites back down? FUN FACT: In February 2022, it puffed up Earth's upper atmosphere. Extra drag stopped them climbing to safety. orbitalradar.com/events/sta… #SpaceWeather #Starlink #SpaceFunFact
Starlink Geomagnetic Storm Loss (2022) — 40 Satellites Destroyed by Space Weather | Orbital Radar
A geomagnetic storm destroyed up to 40 freshly launched Starlink satellites in February 2022 — a $50M+ loss demonstrating the power of space weather over LEO operations.
orbitalradar.com
Magnetosphere Ribbons What if you could SEE the shield that protects a planet from the Sun? 🌌🛡 #novalab4k #magnetosphere #aurora #spacewalk #space
What music comes spontaneously to you when you think of your first microcomputer? - New Gold Dream, Simple Minds
Poor Physics students using ChatGPT. The figure *seems* correct (I'm not a physicist), but look at drawing number 2 (top view, yellow=photon, blue=massive body, center=Sun). #aihallucination
Taking a VP position or "remaining" a hands-on developer ? The enlightening dilemma of Matt Wrock (and probably many others). www.hurryupandwait.io/blog/
Hurry Up and Wait!
Matt Wrock's blog on software development topics related to devops, cloud, automation, .net, powershell, and more.
hurryupandwait.io
- On the ZX81, both plain and alternate Z80 register sets are freely available to user machine code (with the exception of af,af'). - On the ZX Spectrum, both register sets are available (except af,af' once again) but only in a critical section between di and ei. #z80
ex (sp),hl is a wonderful Z80 instruction. It lets you end a routine with: ex (sp),hl inc hl ex (sp),hl ret so you can stuff a parameter right after the call without having to clobber a register. I had a eureka moment reinventing the wheel. 🙂 #z80
You always need some math from time to time. Thanks to the excellent hacker Kerm Martian, we have the TI-84 oriented Cemetech at our disposal. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-84_Plus_series means ... Z80/eZ80 :-) learn.cemetech.net/index.php/Z8...
z80:Math Routines - Learn @ Cemetech
learn.cemetech.net
Having the ZX81 keyboard image in perfect SVG format was a bit of a Grail to me. I found it ! It is the work Andrivet and you can get it here : github.com/andrivet ZX81-Debugger html/images/zx81_kbd.svg Note: I didn't put an easy link on purpose. It would be too easy to grab without crediting him.
andrivet - Overview
I do stuff with hardware and software. andrivet has 50 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub.
github.com
"The ULA will hold the CLK line high when it needs to access the video memory at the same time the Z80 does" www.breakintoprogram.co.uk/hardware/com... Does it mean that the ULA "senses" /MREQ since it is interconnected with the Z80 ? Freeze ! I need video RAM access, not you. Bug off ! 😉
whereweretheynow.blogspot.com A blog about tracking down the offices of old UK software houses.
Where Were They Now?
Seeking out Britain's pioneering video games houses.
whereweretheynow.blogspot.com
A very good use of a dual 6809 8-bit CPU that were powering up the Fairlight CMI IIx sampling synthesizer. (+ an excuse to suggest a great tune from a great composer for a great TV series 🤫 ) www.youtube.com/watch?v=eihm...
Rum Cay
YouTube video by Jan Hammer - Topic
youtube.com
Great loading screen$ (Wizball - 1987 - Ocean). No obvious colour clash.
The best version of JB's theme is of course the 1977 one, the apogee of disco. youtu.be/PGvk2DXxIGE
Bond 77
YouTube video by Marvin Hamlisch - Topic
youtu.be
Someone able to do such a demo of Atari VCS quality is a guru for me : Simon Owen tells the making of his Pac-Man. simonowen.com/blog/2012/01... youtu.be/69J3D-XGdlg #Pac-Man #SamCoupe #z80 #sprite
Pac-Man for Sinclair Spectrum (colour)
YouTube video by Simon Owen
youtu.be
On the appropriate and good use of #AI, here is an article of superstar Andrew Tridgell (you know, rsync and Samba) relating his experience with #claude . I think that @benjedwards.com will be interested. medium.com/@tridge60/rsync-and-outrage-d9849599e5a0
rsync and outrage
I gave up blogging a long time ago (apart from an occasional thing about ArduPilot), I tend to just write code and hope people find it…
medium.com
If you play four times and win only once in Ant Attack. PS It isn't a Spectrum, I know, but you got the idea.
17 years ago, spinning HDs were still a thing. Brendan Gregg was (and still is) a Sun Solaris guru and was monitoring disk latency with his invention DTrace, the ancestor of BPF/eBPF. One day, he was in the DC and ... youtube.com/watch?v=tDac...
Shouting in the Datacenter
YouTube video by Bryan Cantrill
youtube.com
My own small contribution to Z80 coding. Clean, hand-crafted HTML (download and rename to .html) pastebin.com/EwjgNDaM
Z80 instructions - Pastebin.com
Pastebin.com is the number one paste tool since 2002. Pastebin is a website where you can store text online for a set period of time.
pastebin.com
Let's hope that AI won't steer too many people away from IT. We need them to manage AI rigorously and validate what comes from it. www.bbc.com/news/article...
AI could put people off tech jobs and hurt the economy, warns Raspberry Pi boss
Eben Upton warns against claims that Artificial Intelligence will destroy vast numbers of computing roles over the coming years.
bbc.com
Do you remember n:=(75*(n+1)) mod 65537-1 print n/65536 ? Explanation here www.worldofspectrum.net/ZX81BasicPro...
Chapter 5: Functions
worldofspectrum.net
Please accept my apologies for a post yesterday about the weakening Gulf Stream. I didn't verify the consequences enough. The *extreme* temperatures will get significantly lower. I was too alarming. A lesson for me. I won't post something on that topic for a long time.
Who remembers this strategy game ... without resorting to an image search? I never managed to win a campaign. Wehrmacht reinforcements keep pouring in and surround you.