Video: C Programming on System 6 - VCF Midwest 17, Wikipedia Reader, and Subterm
I attended the Vintage Computer Festival Midwest 17 and wrote two new programs.
Writing and Running a BBS on a Macintosh Plus
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.
Video: C Programming on System 6 - Wallops & Talking to the Modem
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.
Live Streaming a Macintosh Plus (or Any Compact Mac)
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.
Debugging an ioctl Problem on 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.)
Video: Q&A
I tweeted asking if anyone would be interested in a Q&A, and to my surprise, I got many Qs to A.
Video: C Programming on System 6 - A New On-Disk Database Format
It's a new year and my old computer is still old.
A bug in Amend caused it to crash during a commit, which corrupted the repo beyond repair. I quickly came to realize that using resource files as a database for Amend and my new BBS was a bad idea. I NIH'd the problem and created my own file format that will be a bit more resilient to crashes and partial writes.
Video: C Programming on System 6 - Implementing Multi-User Chat
Let's have a chat. Continuing feature development of my BBS software.
Video: C Programming on System 6 - User Authentication and Telnet Negotiation
I review some recent commits covering user authentication and telnet negotiation, then write some ANSI output code and a broken function for returning a number's ordinal suffix.
Video: C Programming on System 6 - A Cooperative Threading Implementation
I'm starting on a new project and I needed a cooperative threading mechanism which didn't exist in System 6, so I created one.
A Short Review of Selling on Tindie
I started using the Tindie platform in April to sell my WiFiStation kits. I've now sold out all of my initial inventory and am not planning on making any more, so I thought I'd offer my opinions of Tindie as a platform for selling things.
Video: C Programming on System 6 - Amend Revision Control System
It's been almost a year since my last
confessional video.
A few weeks ago I started working on a small revision control system to handle
my C projects developed on my Mac and it's now at the point where I can at least
manage commits to the tool itself.
OpenBSD on the Huawei MateBook X (2020)
My old 2017 Huawei MateBook X has been my most reliable laptop and continued to be my daily-use workstation despite trying half a dozen others (and a desktop or two) in the past four years. Every time I'd try a new laptop, certain components wouldn't work properly, or the keyboard would feel strange, or the screen quality would be poor, or a constantly-running fan or some coil-whine noise would drive me nuts. And every time, I'd return to my trusty MateBook X and everything would just work silently.
I finally have a newer model of the MateBook X and I'm happy to say it lives up to its predecessor and has replaced my 2017 model.
OpenBSD on the Framework Laptop (11th Gen Intel)
Framework is a new company offering a laptop that is designed to be repairable and upgradeable, both in terms of internal components like the screen and motherboard, and in pluggable expansion cards.
My Fanless OpenBSD Desktop
After the disappointment of my X1 Nano and learning that all future Intel "Evo"-branded laptops would lack S3 suspend, I started thinking about returning to my M1 MacBook full-time or building an OpenBSD desktop. I chose the latter, building my first desktop machine in many years.
