I just discovered a curious bug in both Firefox and Webkit/Safari on MacOS (didn't check blink/Chrome): if you write (in JS) an innerHTML-string of length > 67,238, the engine throws a line break into the textContent. – ??? – 1/3

So while playing around with my disk image inspector, I found that there's quite a number of old PET disk images (e.g., at Bo Zimmerman's site) with files starting at $400 and a trailing extra byte of $24 after the actual end of program – all the hallmarks of files written by the BASIC 1 ROM. 1/3

Having fun with my new D64 disk image composer. (I think, I may do a "single release" on a "Commodore disk utilities" page, together with the disk image inspector [A side and B side! 😀], both currently tools inside the upcoming version of the PET 2001 emulator.)

PET 2001 emulator: some improvements on disk images (yay, a disk inspector), coming soon to the public version. Workbench video (strictly no AI involved):

Oh my, what's gone wrong here? 😀

Update on PET 2001 disk loading procedures and FILE NOT FOUND As we've already established, a ?FILE NOT FOND ERROR isn't a thing with the BASIC 2.0 ROM and IEEE-488 devices like disk drives. Having studied the 2.0 ROMs, the PET only checks the timeout state *after* it has written the first byte.

A Tale of "AI" Recently, I assisted my elderly father on a way to the bank. From home, we took a taxi, of course called via an AI phone system. This worked fine. When it was time to go home again, after a few more ways done, my father became tired, so, time for yet another taxi. As no taxi was 1/4

Statement on "AI" It takes us human beings about 10 years to come up with a world model, to find out how this relates to us and to others, how language relates to this, and how our position on and in this relates to others and vice versa. 1/3

Preliminary report on the PET 2001 + BASIC 2.0 + FDD "FILE NOT FOUND" mystery: So, the BASIC 2.0 ROM has the identical routines for fetching a byte from the IEEE bus than the BASIC 4.0 ROM, including how it sets and checks the timeout. (Fun fact, the only IEEE signal coming from the device,… 1/6

PET 2001 disk emu regression update: This should't be possible, but I lost FILE NOT FOUND, for ROM 2.0 that is. This is ridiculous. I'm convinced, I had this working, but now I've lost it. ROM 4.0 is easy: just time out on the first data read. But ROM 2.0? It keeps asking… No EOI or similar helps.

Idea: We're living in the true Dark Ages. With so many AI-generated fake facts out there (fantasy historical facts, entirely wrong concepts of how things are or how they have become), there will be no other option than eventually wiping any documents produced since 2024. Nothing will be left.

Fun detail of Commodore disk drives: Any block on a drive starts with a link to the next track, by track and sector in the first two bytes. If there is no next track (and this is the end of the chain), this is set to track 0 and the sector is set to the last valid byte in the block. (continues)

PET 2001 progress update: I played around with the disk image utility, so there will be things like a BAM view, and a tool to compose D64 images. Now, I've just to connect those things (e.g., come up with a disk wizard). Also, I've still to implement the command/error channel (#15) for the FDD.

A woodcut showing a rain of frogs in Scandanavia. From 'Prodigiorum ac Ostentorum Chronicon,' one of the first modern books about strange phenomenon, published in 1557. #WyrdWednesday

With the power of Unicode, we can save the planet and maybe society! All, we need is an emoji with meaning "says something very intelligent and well-informed, in a beautiful and effective manner". There's probably not much what the use of "AI" can achieve in communications that this emoji doesn't.

Major achievement: I have been wrestling with implementing the IEEE-488 / GPIB protocol for the PET 2001 emulator. While the book (archive.org/details/PET_...) suggests that this is a state transition model, "CATALOG" of BASIC 4.0 is practically impossible to get working with this. But…

So, according to the news, Washington is breaking under the heat wave of 102°F, which is 38°C. Interestingly, when Europeans were moaning under 45°C (113°F) it was only for the lack of blanket coverage by AC, as we were taught by a well-meaning US. What may now be the reason for heat being hot? 😉

Image loading is *really* slow on Bluesky today. Is it just for me?

I really love this: "Little Egypt" by Trici Venola, late 1980s, Color MacPaint / Studio 8. Source and related info: www.tricivenola.com/about-the-di...

Can we vibe-NFT? Is there a multi-trillion dollar valuation IPO in this? (If you are a venture capitalist, a national welfare trusts, or a digital investment bank, contact me! 😉)

First they came for the books, then they came for the very lives…

MIT Technology Review@technologyreview.com · last mo.

People in Nigeria and India are strapping iPhones onto their heads and recording themselves doing chores.

This, my friends, is what home computers were really for. 😀 (Oh, all those intro screens to never written programs!)

Brandon T. Snider@brandontsnider.bsky.social · last mo.

Back on my bullsh

A recent (and notable!) PDP-1 project by Michael Gardi: hackaday.io/project/2057... See also the write-up on his Lunar Lander game: hackaday.io/project/2046...

RIP OFF for the PDP-1

Back in the early 80s I was at the University of Waterloo. The Campus Center (now called the Student Life Center) had a pub called the BOMBSHELTER, which in turn had a stand up arcade version of RIP O...

hackaday.io

So Net Neutrality has fallen under the onslaught of "AI". E.g., cpuworld.com blocks me because I'm supposedly in a data center range, while I'm connected via Vienna's prevalent cable provider. (They are blocking an entire capital city because of some actor.) Something has do be done about this.

There's an interesting aspect to the directory entries as composed by the Commodore disk drives: There's a variable indentation to the 7th print position. It must be variable, because block-sizes come at varying character lengths.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to make my way through the IEEE-488 / GBIP protocol, esp. the sequence for OPEN with regard to Commodore BASIC, for the umpteen time. I've read this a few times and every time I'm ready to implement it, I already forgot some details… archive.org/details/PET_...

PET and the IEEE 488 Bus (GPIB) : Fisher, E. R. (Eugene Ralph), 1940- : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

PET and the IEEE488 Bus

archive.org

So, YouTube defaults to a lot of settings, you don't want, like Stable Volume for sound distortion, Ambient Mode for eating into your battery life, Closed Captions to mess with the image, auto-play for the annoying next suggestion, etc.

To be very clear about this: I don't want any lightsabers™ in my UI. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

9to5Mac@9to5mac.com · last mo.

Apple and Disney had conversations about merging, says Bob Iger

There may be temptation to block A.I. related scrapers via IP addresses. (They are really a mess and produce lots of traffic, consuming available bandwidth to the detriment of the scraped sites.) AKA, "deny [IP-address]" in the host configuration. Please, don't do this, it doesn't work that way!

That's kind of funny: Louis Rossmann reacts to a Swiss Newspaper (Watson) reacting to him reacting to a blue-screening SSB display. And it gets a bit nasty regarding "technical ignorance", and how an exe may blue-screen on Windows over a memory leak, particularly applications in kiosk mode.