Fritz @daremo@fosstodon.org

I think we are feature- and bug-complete for the first part of the #vtracker UI, which is the pattern editor. I'll get this ready for release and push master.

This makes vtracker a bit more usable, but it still needs an instrument editor and track editor before it has a complete user interface.

New post on the motivation behind my vale8x64 #homebrewcomputer project, and an overview of its technical details: http://www.mahnke.tech/blog/2019-04-09-introducing-the-vale8x64-computer.html

Thank you to everyone who's worked in the worked in the game music and demo music scenes all these years. Thanks for the countless hours of creative work and the great music.

Anyone used any of the decentralized live streaming services, like D.Tube? Any opinions on any of them? Furthermore, are there any major centralized live streaming services besides YouTube and twitch?

After Cox cable gave me potentially the worst experience of my life Thursday (and I think I'm a pretty patient customer), I made a call and CenturyLink installed my fiber service today.

This is my first fiber optic internet service at home. Looking forward to seeing how it performs.

When I think of monitoring and logging, I think of enterprise-y, resource hungry stuff like logstash, elk, grafana. Overkill for my modest home network.

Any suggestions for low resource, minimalist network and service monitoring utilities?

I'm finding myself wanting to do configuration customization and to try new tools lately, more so than in the last few years.

Are there any sites or services that frequently showcase new developer tools and system utilities, with quick introduction and maybe even screenshots? Mostly interested in terminal/CLI things, but that's just because they tend to be more minimalist, not because I dislike GUIs.

I've finished moving my laptop and a server from Arch to a modular NixOS configuration in git. I really like this so far.

Tried to start learning metaprogramming in Racket with the Beautiful Racket book today, only to find out there's a lot of stuff hidden from the student in a package that complements the book. No thanks. I'll try this again with Fear of Macros.

I wanted 2020 to be the year to learn lisp, but other things happened instead.

I've almost finished my first racket project, an email processing program. I wanted something that would move emails from my Inbox to other folders based on a rule set, but not until after I read them in the Inbox (on demand rather than on receipt). This program does that, integrating with the isync/notmuch/neomutt maildir system I've been moving toward from Thunderbird.

Now when/if NixOS supports different kernels and init systems, that'll just be grand.

Guix also looks good and I would actually prefer to try the guile configuration language and Shepherd init system, but the hard line against non-free software is a little too restrictive for all the hardware I have lying around right now.

I know I can patch Guix to support non-free software, but I don't want to maintain that at the moment. For now, I may run some Guix VMs and dabble.

I'm starting to go all in on NixOS. I've moved my laptop over. I'm now moving my matrix homeserver over from my FreeBSD machine to a new NixOS server. My desktop workstation will be last.

I've tried a few configuration management solutions over the last few years, but I guess I really wanted this at the OS level all along.

Got myself a few classics today.

Our text editors are amazing pieces of software development, but I've never
liked the extension model of building applications inside the editor. Instead,
I'd like to develop applications in isolation and add support for modal text
editing primitives with a library.

Are there libraries that specialize in adding modal text editing support without
attempting to be full text editor applications? GNU readline comes to mind.

Trying out picorv32 this morning.

Got out my ice40 UP5k board for the first time in quite awhile. An oddity of this board compared so some of the other ice boards is the FTDI bus isn't broken out to pins for RS-232. This is a feature I like to have for communication and debugging purposes.

Last time, I added a verilog uart and connected it the board to a DB9 -> USB adapter. Today, I decided to try out the board's HW SPI interface instead. Took most of the day to get it working, but works nicely now and saves a cable and LUTs!

I had a nice initial experience with the #nextpnr team today. The maintainer thanked me for reporting my issue, which would've been enough to call it a nice experience. On top of that, they gave me a working bug fix commit in just a few minutes.

Spending the afternoon doing a complete code review of the J1 CPU and cross-assembler. Interesting stuff.

I have a 7" monitor similar to this: https://www.ebay.com/itm/334032513035. I use it for temporary video on my servers and for small projects. It stopped powering on.

I measured 5v at the push buttons and at the TFT, so power supply seems ok. I might desolder and test those caps, but this thing is kinda cheap, so I haven't been motivated to do that yet. An ESR meter would be nice to have today.

My forth (well, mine in the sense that I've mostly ported Jones forth to the 68000) is now self-hosting and is complete enough that I can start using it to play around on this virtual machine I've started.

Quick demo showing stack operations and some text i/o. Address 16384 is the beginning of the 2000-byte text frame buffer, so the loop at the end just fills some video memory with font glyph 1, a smiley.

@vertigo I just ran across your 9P video on SVFIG youtube. Is ForthBox your latest hardware project?

Looking into CGA/VGA graphics, as I'm planning to implement one of these in software for the first time.

I can see VGA specs a vertical blanking interrupt, support for which varies by hardware implementation. CGA doesn't, but specs a polling mechanism. I'd like to know if games were using vblank (like consoles) or other means to time display updates.

Maybe I'll get around to reading the source code for old CGA/EGA/VGA DOS applications soon.