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Quorten Blog 1

First blog for all Quorten's blog-like writings

The end of hginit.com, and updates on Joel Spolspky

quorten

2020-02-21

Categories: misc  
Tags: misc  

hginit.com? Alas, going to the website, it’s broken!

broken/http://hginit.com/

I remember back in the day when reading the Joel on Software blog, I saw the website advertised as a good introduction to Mercurial. Why was Joel Spolsky and friends using Mercurial? Back in the day, Windows computers used to be quite common in corporate offices, and between Mercurial and Git both being good distributed version control systems, Mercurial was slightly more Windows friendly, so a lot of people went with that one pretty much for that sole reason. And Mercurial was quite alive and well for many years, until the entire world changed. After several blunders in a row on the side of Microsoft, the rise of Android smartphones, the influence of university computer science education teaching Unix, the general fading away of the old world “cottage industry” of software development… and consequentially, all of these combined, the popular preference of software developers for Mac computers, and the fact that by now, most corporate IT departments officially supported Mac computers just as well as they supported Windows computers…

ALL of this together meant that the old world environmental assumptions behind Joel Spolsky on Mercurial and Windows together were rendered obsolete. Thus, I can understand why Joel Spolsky has stopped renewing the domain name.

Read on →

Larry Tesler cut and paste

quorten

2020-02-21

Categories: mac-classic  
Tags: mac-classic  

Oh, interesting. Larry Tesler was mentioned quite a number of times in relation to cut & paste back in the earlier days of the Macintosh. Unusually, through my light experience in classic Macintosh programming, I have not seen his name mentioned in the documentation I was reading, though others have back in the heyday.

20200221/https://www.cultofmac.com/685669/larry-tesler-the-apple-employee-who-invented-cut-copy-paste-dies-at-74/

Noisy fan inside computer electronics? Try cleaning it.

quorten

2020-02-21

Categories: raspberry-pi  
Tags: raspberry-pi  

Just a quick note here. I’ve had a USB mouse with an “air flow fan” to get air conditioning to your hand when it is on it, but I was having trouble that the fan was being noisy. As part of a repair for fixing its frayed USB cable due to my fault of bending it too sharply at the mouse-side, I opened up the mouse and found out that the sticker on the fan came loose. Well, no wonder why the fan was noisy! That sticker dangling around could make quite a bit of noise I’d bet. Also, there was quite a bit of dust around the fan, that’s another opportunity for cleaning.

Things the rich do once they have over $1000 in ther bank account, and power law pricing

quorten

2020-02-18

Categories: twitter   personal-finance  
Tags: twitter   personal-finance  

What do the rich do with their money once they’ve got more than $1000 in the bank? This is an interesting insight into some things you could do.

20200216/https://www.thepennyhoarder.com/bank-accounts/1000-checking-account-make-4-moves/

Robinhood? That stock system being mentioned again? Okay, okay, well I guess maybe it’s onto something if it’s getting mentioned here, but the name? Oh it doesn’t sound like something you’d be sticking with 10 years from now.

20200216/https://robinhood.com/us/en/
20200216/https://careers.robinhood.com/

What does Robinhood do that the others don’t?

With their newfound experience in the world of finance, they realized that big Wall Street firms pay effectively nothing to trade stocks, while most Americans are charged up to $10 for every trade.

So that’s what the whole thing about commission-free trading is.

Read on →

All the Music, public domain melodies

quorten

2020-02-17

Categories: legal   license  
Tags: legal   license  

I’ve suspected this all along, and although I’ve written about it before and advocated for this viewpoint, my message didn’t seem to travel far. Until now.

Now, there is a TED talk precisely about it. Automatically generating and fixing all melodies in a tangible medium, thereby providing proof of copyright. For many decades, copyright lawsuits over melody identity or similarity has been a serious problem in the music industry. The idea that you are taking a blank slate and putting something onto it from nothing? No, that’s not the way it works with melodies. With melodies, there are so few choices to choose from at the base level, a choice of one of 8 piano keys up to a maximum sequence of 12 notes, that melodies on their own can hardly be considered copyrightable. Rather, it is like we are picking from the finite set of melodies that have existed for all of time. If we’re lucky, we pick one that hasn’t been picked by anyone else before. If we’re unlucky, we pick one that has been already used, and then we get sued.

But, this project, All the Music, levels the playing field because it has picked all the melodies, fixed tehm in a tangible medium, and declared them to be released into public domain, thereby eliminating the risk of copyright infringement on any future melody composed. Matter of fact, it means no future melody can be claimed copyright protection.

Read on →

Year 1920 problem on classic Macintoshes, multisync monitor signals, paint removal, soldering

quorten

2020-02-16

Categories: mac-classic   raspberry-pi  
Tags: mac-classic   raspberry-pi  

I’ve taken a look at 68kMLA, and of course I’ve found some useful information worth saving.

This is an interesting article about some versions of the Macintosh system software showing the year 1920 instead of the proper year 2020. Noteworthy is that a control panel extension named SetDate can be used to work around setting the correct date even in the face of this problem.

20200215/https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/58616-the-2020-experience/

This is a very interesting thread about using a video expansion card that gives color graphics! Micron Xceed is the name of the game. It also covers some very useful information about sync signals. One good thing to note. A typical multisync CRT monitor will accept and process sync-on-green signals just as well as it can process separate sync signals. Yeah, that’s right. If you’ve got a robust and flexible monitor, all you need to do is send composite video + sync signal to the monitor down the right pins, no software processing or signal reconditioning required. For this sake, there are adapters where you simply set the right DIP switches to adapt between an Apple DB-15 connector to a VGA connector.

Also note, if you have a really good multisync LCD monitor, you can use that just the same as you’d use a multisync CRT monitor.

Read on →

Lessons learned on repairing my digital wristwatch

quorten

2020-02-16

Categories: raspberry-pi  
Tags: raspberry-pi  

Near the end of last year, my digital wristwatch stopped working. The display no longer had any digits on it, like the battery ran out. Well, I’ve been using it for quite a while, over 10 years since I’ve last changed the battery, so maybe now is the time for a new battery change? Not quite.

But in any case, first I tried buying a new battery and replacing the battery. No dice. But, here’s the interesting thing. With the new battery in and playing around pushing the buttons to see if I need to enter some magic reset code to switch the watch on, I found out that pressing the LED backlight illumination button causes not only the display to light up, but the watch to also start ticking like normal. Hmm, interesting. Then, looking around and playing around with my watch a little more, I noticed that rotating and shaking it around causes the watch to intermittently work for a short period of time without backlight illumination, before freezing like it lost power. Interestingly, after pushing the backlight illumination button, the watch would continue from where it left off, like it preserved memory but did not advance the oscillator ticking.

Okay, okay, so thinking about this, it sounds like the problem is a loose solder joint. You rotate it around, and then the watch works because the loose joint makes contact. But then you rotate it again, and the loose joint looses contact, causing the watch to no longer work.

Read on →

Run DeepRacer Locally

quorten

2020-02-16

Categories: twitter   random-software  
Tags: twitter   random-software  

Okay, so I found this interesting article on running DeepRacer locally, but I don’t know quite what that is. Some very primitive racing simulator and an AI to drive it based off of simulated sensory inputs?

20200215/https://medium.com/@autonomousracecarclub/how-to-run-deepracer-locally-to-save-your-wallet-13ccc878687