Saturday, October 03
Daily News Stuff 2 October 2020
A Wild Long Weekend Appeared
A Wild Long Weekend Appeared
Tech News
- Need bitmapped fonts in odd sizes, such as 10x10? Dwarf Fortress. (Dwarf Fortress Wiki)
It's not clear what the licensing situation is on these, though some are based on open-source fonts or are otherwise explicitly open source.
I could also use a 20x20 font for standard-resolution text mode, given that I am using an HP-style analogue antialiasing trick.
- HP has a new Spectre x360 range out including that dumb configuration we saw before. (Tom's Hardware)
The 14 looks nice, with a Tiger Lake CPU, 13.5" 3000x2000 display, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, 32GB of Optane for some reason,
The 13 has a 4k OLED touchscreen, and only 8GB of RAM. Why? Who is this for?
Apart from some dumb configuration decisions, the systems all have the Four Essential Keys in the One True Arrangement.
- Talking with Chris Sawyer about Transport Tycoon. (Life and Times of Games)
With a brief digression on the subject of the Memotech MTX 500, which could have been the inspiration for the Imagine if I hadn't already been inspired by the Fujitsu FM-7.
The MTX 500 / 512 is a little-known but remarkably capable British home computer from the early 80s. It came out in 1983 and though it shipped with a fairly normal 64k of RAM (and 24k of ROM) it was expandable to 768k.
- A leaked benchmark of the Ryzen 5900X put it at 25% faster than the current 3900X unless it's all fake. (WCCFTech)
That's a single-threaded score and would be a combination of IPC and clock speed gains, and it's on the high end of plausibility.
The multi-threaded score showed only a 15% gain, which is curious. Not impossible, but curious.
Disclaimer: So are they all, all on the high end of plausibility.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
02:28 AM
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I've been slowly building towards my inchoate goal of building a fully custom keyboard. Some of the planned features involve an OLED screen and flash storage, so I got a couple of different-sized Arduino-style boards (different AVR and ARM microcontrollers), some OLED screens, and a serial flash chip (I got several of those in case I break one.) Had some problems getting started talking to the flash, but eventually figured out what i was doing wrong. Today I got my test program to the point where I can write to the flash, read the status registers, read a section of data, do a block erase, wait for the chip to be finished, and then read it again to verify the erase worked. Next up is to draw some bitmaps that will be stored in the flash so I can do an animation. This is my first real goal, and it's driven by the tiny amount of memory on the atmega32u4, both flash and ram. A 128x64 monochrome OLED has 1K of onboard display buffer, but the device is write-only, so to keep track of what you're drawing, you need to use 1K of the micro's ram...and it's only got 2.5K of that! A possible later goal is to add something like a 64Kb serial sram to act as a cache for the buffer, and possibly rewrite the OLED library so it doesn't need the full buffer.
Excelsior!
Excelsior!
Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, October 03 2020 02:37 PM (eqaFC)
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Good luck! Sounds like a great project, and one that is genuinely and immediately useful.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, October 03 2020 10:37 PM (PiXy!)
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