anotherlab

I shudder to think how much I spent on UDXLII tapes.

Adding page-turn buttons to the cover sounds clever.

I find it entertaining. I'm doing it for me, not to boost any metric.

I am my target audience.

I use AI-themed images for the opener to my blog. It's typically a steampunk robot image that is not related to the topic of the post.

The actual content is written by me. If there are any code samples that were AI-generated, I'll call them out as such.

I was starting as a software developer when the Amiga first came out. We used Lattice C at work on MS-DOS. I bought it for my A2000. Being able to write code on a proper multitasking OS made it easier for me to learn C. I kept updating the compiler through the SAS/C days.

I was registered in Commodore's developer program and was porting one of our statistical apps when Commodore imploded. I had a nice A3000, running pre-release versions of Amiga DOS 3.1. It was a cool platform and I enjoyed it.

I wrote a book on localization for Xamarin many years ago. I get about one email a week "inviting" me to join a book club. The well-crafted ones tend to impersonate an actual person on Goodreads.

At this point, I would happily give away my book, but Apress has the publishing rights. And since the sales are about a century away from being profitable for Apress, I don't see them letting me give away the book any time soon.

There were multiple reasons.

Simons' BASIC was still interpreted. If you wanted graphics and performance, you used Assembler.

Many/most people were using a disk speed-up cartridge like Epyx's Fast Load. You could only use one cartridge at a time. If they placed Simons' BASIC in the C64 ROM, that could have made it less compatible with existing software.

They didn't want to pay the licensing cost for an application that only a minority of C64 owners would have wanted.

I moved my blog from WordPress to Jekyll a few years ago, and it's anything but an over-engineered system. I used WordPress for years, and it was overkill for a personal blog.

I used to use em-dashes and en-dashes in my work emails and other writings, but stopped using them when they became AI markers.

I was using this before 2018. I used to write TSR applets for data collection. Knowing what interrupts were being was critical. It could mean the difference between your code working and it dying somewhere in expanded memory space.

I could see using this for a specialized use, for a game or a presentation. But day to day use, the jarring design of the letters that would have had descenders would be like a mental speed bump for me.

I grew up in the 70s and I loved cassettes. I would take my records and copy them to cassettes so I could play them on horrible and not-so-horrible boom boxes at parties. And of course making mix tapes.

But I don't miss wow and flutter, or tape hiss. Or the fragility of the tapes. For years, I had a recording of Joe Jackson in the late '70s, when he played at a local club. A local radio station simulcast the concert, and I was able to record most of it on a C-90 tape. That tape wore out long before I could digitize it into something more permanent.

As an Amiga developer and user in the same timeframe, I could see the handwriting on the wall. The consumer market had shifted to Windows 3.1 and then 95 on those awful Packard Bell computers. I like the asteroid analogy. The Wintel commodity took out the boutiques.

An Hombre-based Amiga would have been interesting, but I wouldn't have bought one.

Moby licensed every song from "Play" for commercial use. The exposure made "Play" a huge hit for him. This is just a variation of that.

This is an attempt to grab a slice of the pie before AI-generated music kills the market for session musicians. His terms of use are odd, but that's his choice.