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 february 21st, 2022
with tags
mac,
openbsd, and
retrocomputing
last updated on 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
posted on july 19th, 2021
with tags
hardware and
openbsd
last updated on january 26th, 2022
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.
I've created an adapter for the
Cidco MailStation
Z80 computer which adds the ability to use WiFi for data transfer, code
uploading, and to act as a WiFi modem for my
msTERM
terminal emulator.
