3036e4
Joined 1 year ago
Karma
343
Submissions
174
Member since
Mar 10
Recent submissions
Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 1 year ago
There is a chapter in the Blue Book about how the GW-BASIC byte code is structured, and from what I understand it used pointers to lines, not just offsets? But I did not look too carefully (guess the answer is in the source code: https://gitlab.com/tkchia/GW-BASIC).
That book is full of interesting facts and fun low-level tricks for (GW-)BASIC programming. Available for download here: https://github.com/robhagemans/hoard-of-gwbasic
Before reading that I never considered how primitive early BASICs were. There is a lot of linear-searching for things (variables, line-numbers) that has to be considered when optimizing.
Comment · 1 year ago
I have fond memories of some z-machine interpreter on the Palm that I found easier to play with than anything on my desktop computer. There were lots of shortcut buttons and thanks to the stylus it was still easy to use those (vs a touchscreen using ony fingers where you need huge buttons to hit). You could also tap any word in the output to bring up a context menu of actions (e.g. to examine or pick up objects mentioned in room descriptions) and that list of actions was a combination of a configurable global list and a game-specific list you could add actions to. Could play through entire games and barely ever have to type anything. Had a folding keyboard, but no memory of using that for interactive fiction.
Comment · 1 year ago
Sounds like it may eventually turn into an interesting replacement for Pandoc then, but I will stick to the latter for now.
Comment · 1 year ago
Live programming music using tools like SuperCollider is/was a (very niche) thing. Someone is on stage with a laptop and, starting from a blank screen that is typically projected for everyone to see, types in code that makes sounds (and sometimes visual effects). A lot of it involves procedurally generated sounds using simple random generators. Live prompting as part of such shows would not seem entirely out of place and someone might figure out how to make that work as a performance?
Comment · 1 year ago
Is it as good for generating EPUB or HTML for instance? Or just plain text?
Comment · 1 year ago
I guess if Pandoc adds Typst output support I will consider using that, but "LaTeX replacement" sounds like something that is too low level to consider for most usecases? It was many years since I used LaTeX for anything other than at most short snippets embedded in other documents (e.g. md or org). Or would Typst replace something like Pandoc Markdown (with a long list of supported output formats and a convenient Lua filter API)?
* Submitted too fast. A quick search tells me Pandoc already added Typst input and output support (e.g. https://pandoc.org/typst-property-output.html), so guess I need to look into if I should switch to use that for generating PDFs.
Comment · 1 year ago
Teams refused to let me copy text from the real-time captions, even showing a popup to say it wasn't allowed. But after the meeting in the posted transcript I could copy the same text anyway so not sure why it was so important to prevent me from copying immediately. Very annoying since I wanted that text right then and not later.
Comment · 1 year ago
What I like about seeing a project support a long list of totally irrelevant old obscure platforms (like Free Pascal does, and probably GCC) is that it gives some hope that they will support some future obscure platform that I may care about. It shows a sign of good engineering culture. If a project supports only 64-bit arm+x86 on the three currently most popular operating systems that is a red flag for future compatibility risks.
Comment · 1 year ago
I vaguely remember GEM in MS-DOS because it was the only software I knew of (iirc) that supported the mouse we had. One of those early optical mice with a metal mousepad with a grid of tiny reflective dots. No one else I knew that had a PC had a mouse back then.
It also had graphics programs. One for bitmaps and one for vectors, iirc. Me and my friend used to play with those. I don't even remember what else GEM was for. To me it was just a way to launch those editors to draw things and I did not have access to any other graphics applications in DOS until years later.
Comment · 1 year ago
Official Android with Google Play and all the things some apps require will almost certainly refuse to run if a hypervisor is detected. Maybe someone could get it to work, but it would be a struggle to stay ahead of whatever new security checks are added to the OS and apps. The point of having one perfectly normal phone would be to not have to worry about any of that.
Comment · 1 year ago
I sometimes bring a bt keyboard to use my phone as a tiny almost-laptop, but mostly happy with something just the size and weight of a phone.
Used to have two phones ~10 years ago. A Jolla Phone was my primary phone with a sim card and ran most non-Google apps. Then I carried around a cheap Motorola Android phone that had no sim card but could run Google Play apps and when it needed wifi I shared that from the Jolla and otherwise it was fully offline and most of the time turned off.
So the phone that was closer to a small laptop was the one I actually used as a phone. Not sure if that is the setup I would go for again or if I would do it the other way around with the Google phone being the phone. If I do the latter I guess something like a very small Linux netbook would work as a second device, it such a thing exists.
"I have fond memories of some z-machine interpreter on the Palm that I found easier to play with than anything on my desktop computer. There were lots of shortcut buttons and thanks to the stylus it was still easy to use those (vs a touchscreen using ony fingers where you need huge buttons to hit). You could also tap any word in the output to bring up a context menu of actions (e.g. to examine or pick up objects mentioned in room descriptions) and that list of actions was a combination of a configurable global list and a game-specific list you could add actions to. Could play through entire games and barely ever have to type anything. Had a folding keyboard, but no memory of using that for interactive fiction."
From looking at my old hoarded palm files I think that the interpreter was PalmPilotFrotz, still available on the if-archive: https://ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archive/infocom/interpreter...