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Excellent thread on the practical (ie: working) helmets built for Daft Punk back around… Discovery, I'm guessing? Gawping a little at the wiring, and the stress involved…
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"The LM13600 has designed by Bill Gross and myself in less than 5 minutes." Which is a humbling anecdote about a classic OTA amplifier. But, as the story goes on, it makes sense: it's just "two of something else" with a buffer, and the design brief was "make something somebody can learn to layout 16-pin DIP with". Didn't matter what the thing was, just needed to have 16 pins. And there you are.
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Open-source e-reader hardware. I particularly love the back of the circuitboard – reminded me of George and Adrian's work on the Museum In A Box pcb.
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Lovely writeup of a chonker of a matte painting – the final pullback in Die Hard 2. Love hearing about the very end of the pre-digital matte era.
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Loving Mohit Bhoite's circuit sculptures. where resistors, LEDs and brass rods take on structural elements within the circuits to beautiful effect. Just gorgeous.
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"COBOL is often a source of amusement for programmers because it is seen as old, verbose, clunky, and difficult to maintain. And it’s often the case that people making the jokes have never actually written any COBOL. We plan to give them a chance: COBOL can now be used to write code for Cloudflare’s serverless platform Workers."
Not an April Fool; instead, a deep dive for newcomers to COBOL, a platform to make it on, and some movie trivia. Great blogging all around.
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"It's cheaper than a Tag Connect and may even be smaller."
Using a SOIC-8 debug clip as a two-sided programmer. Clever!
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Cracking episode of EmbeddedFM, speaking to Amanda Wozniak. Although the topic is nominally embedded electronics, it turns into a wonderfully shrewd discussion of self-care and career-care: how to acknowledge and recognise your desires but also the things that will lead you to burnout (be it too much work, or too _intense_ work. I found so much to think on in this, highly recommended even if it's not your usual jam.
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This is handy: notably, the way to wire up 14/16-pin USB-C parts as USB 2.0 devices, which is, let's face it, what I want 99% of the time.
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Works really, really well; is nice and fast; delivers high-quality results. Impressed!
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"pid.codes is a registry of USB PID codes for open source hardware projects." Nice.
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Web-based port of Laurie Spiegel's _Music Mouse_. Instant composition; just wonderful to fiddle with. Suddenly thinking about interfaces for this.
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Using a Raspberry Pi to emulate the memory of a NES cartridge and then outputting that data through the original NES. The making-of is good too.
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Impressive, fun, immediate.
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A good list of ways to protect any MCU circuit – not just an Arduino.
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Good crunchy post on the design of the axe-recall feature in God Of War (2018); particularly interesting on how it evolved, how players perceived variance in its implementation, and the subtleties of its sound and rumble implementation. And yes, there's screenshake. It's one of the simpler functions to grok in the game, but one of its best mechanics, I think. Looking forward to more posts.
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Beautiful. Poppy Ackroyd soundtrack, too.
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Yeah, that. See also 'drawing is thinking' – drawing exposes the paragraphs I left out of paragraphs I wrote. I've been writing documentation recently and boy, that properly forces you to think about how to describe the thing you're doing.
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Janelle Shane – with some effort – trains neural networks to make knitting patterns. Then knitters from Ravelry make them. I love this: weird AI being taken at face value by people for art's sake.
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Quite like the look of Stimulus for really simple interactions without too much cruft.
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Really rather impressive port of Prince of Persia to… the BBC Micro. From the original Apple II source code which is, of course, also a 6502 chip – although not quite the same. The palette may be rough and ready, but the sound and animation is spot on. I'd dread playing this with the original micro keyboard, though.
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"You are a traffic engineer. Draw freeway interchanges. Optimize for efficency and avoid traffic jams." Lovely.
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Useful, this stuff is not nearly as easy as it should be in ES.
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Great interview with Meng Qi, with lots of lovely stuff on being both a musician and an instrument bulider. I need to return to this.
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This feels… familiar. Two things resonated a lot, though: the description of Hymns Ancient and Modern as a tradition to come from, and especially the description of 'cramming for A-levels' – my version of that was a combination of Fopp and Parrot Records at university, and the local libraries' CD sections during my teenage years.
He's a better musician then me, though, clearly.