I wanted to add an internal USB port to my
ThinkPad X1 Nano
which should have been a fairly easy thing to do, but it wasn't.
Of course, if I were still using my
Framework Laptop
it would be as easy as plugging in a
custom module
but I've been using my X1 Nano as my primary laptop for quite some time now.
Over the past year or so, I've been working with other
BlueSCSI
developers to add Wi-Fi functionality to their open-hardware SCSI device,
enabling Wi-Fi support for old Macs and other vintage computers going back some
36 years.
posted on wednesday, july 12th, 2023
with tags
pushover
I've been operating
Pushover's
public-facing
API
for
over a decade
now and I thought I'd pass on some advice for those creating a new API.
Pushover's API might be unusual in that it is used by a wide range of devices
(embedded IoT things, legacy servers, security cameras, etc.) and HTTP
libraries, rather than mostly being accessed from JavaScript in the latest web
browsers.
It also doesn't process sensitive financial information, so the advice given
here may not be applicable to something operating like Stripe's API.
posted on saturday, march 4th, 2023
with tags
retrocomputing
As a frequent reader of the
retrobattlestations
and
VintageApple
subreddits, I see a lot of photos of CRT screens that show significant scanlines
resulting in images like the one on the left.
With a simple post-processing tip on the iPhone (though there is probably a
similar technique for Android phones), it's easy to fix this photo after it's
been taken so it looks like the one on the right:
I recently acquired a 3M Whisper Writer 1000 communications terminal circa 1983,
and restored it to working order.
This is a short session of it dialing into my
Kludge BBS
(hosted on a Macintosh Plus circa 1986)
over its internal 300 bps modem.
In 2015, I
wrote a custom BBS server in Ruby
and had been using it to run my Kludge BBS on a small OpenBSD server in my
home office since then.
Last year after writing a lot of
C on my Macintosh Plus,
I had the itch to write a new BBS server so I could move my BBS to run on
another Mac Plus.
As with all software development projects, it took quite a bit longer than
expected, but last month I finally got far enough with the development to deploy
the new BBS on a Mac Plus.
Introducing my
Wallops
IRC client, then returning to work on the BBS adding a serial module to join the
console and telnet inputs to allow calls through a modem.
I got stuck for a while trying to figure out why writes to the serial port would
hang the machine.
posted on monday, february 21st, 2022
with tags
mac,
openbsd, and
retrocomputing
last updated on saturday, march 26th, 2022
Since recording a handful of
C Programming on System 6
videos, I've occasionally wanted to live-stream the more casual daily
programming being done on my Macintosh Plus.
After getting all of the pieces together, I now have a working self-hosted
broadcasting setup.
If I happen to be programming on my Mac right now, you can watch
here at my website.
posted on wednesday, february 16th, 2022
with tags
debugging and
openbsd
I was trying to use a V4L2
Ruby module
on my OpenBSD laptop but ran into a problem where sending the V4L2 ioctls from
this module would fail, while other V4L2 programs on OpenBSD worked fine.
Since I got a few
questions
recently about kernel development and debugging, I thought I'd write up how I
finally tracked it down and fixed it.
(Spoiler: it was not an OpenBSD problem.)