/dev/stu

Posted by stu at February 18th, 2008

My dad found this old advert for the Osbourne I… at only £1250 + Vat (and with a free 12 Inch amber for a limited time), this is The One To pickup… or not as they were never popular. Weighing in at “below 24lb” (10 Kilos!) this was a proper computer running CPM the anscestor from which DOS was cloned. It’s interesting as this was before the 8 bit wars had really kicked off in the U.K. with well known computers from Spectrum and Commodore, Amstrad and Acorn.

[EDIT - Add Flickr link]

Flickr

retrocomputing

Posted by stu at February 12th, 2008

As our washing machine broke, I was in the Laundrette where I saw this on the wall -

The writing on the bottom says

£1000 Reward!

Will be given to any person who can prove that this soap manufactured by Lever Bros.
Port Sunlight on Mersey
Contains any form of adulteration whatsoever or contains any injurious chemicale

In Victorian times adulteration of products was widespread and it’s interesting to think that some of the big brands we have today came out of this – Cadburys being the famous one, their unadulterated cocoa essence leading to the Adulteration of Foods Acts.

Posted by stu at February 9th, 2008

While trying to find some good freeware to use the flash on my phone as a torch, I stumbled across a couple of nice apps

Obex Commander for sending files to your phone over bluetooth.

YBrowser a Series 60 file manager (you can do useful things like send multiple files over bluetooth in one go)

So far haven’t found a decent torch app, though so will have to keep looking on that front.

Posted by stu at February 9th, 2008

This is very cool – lock and unlock your computer depending on your phone being in bluetooth range.

blueproximity.sourceforge.net

Next time I’m in linux I’ll definately have to play with it. Something I’ve been wanting to do is automatically rotate the songs on the memory card of the phone when in bluetooth range, so I’ll have to see if it’s possible to hook up the connection event to a script.

[edit] fixed link

Posted by stu at January 17th, 2008

While browsing on the train today, I hit my data limit of 2gb, so now I can’t check my email or browse until the 24th!

Maybe it’s time to check in the internet addiction for a couple of hours a day read some books?

Posted by stu at January 10th, 2008

Came out pretty random

Look at the rest and make your own.

Posted by stu at November 19th, 2007

Reached a small milestone in my bat and ball game (BallBreaker), the fonts are implemented as bitmap fonts, meaning that everything on the rendered on the game screen is original material.

The current font system is based on tiles, so it should be easy to implement animation and cool stuff next, it definately feels like the project is about 1/2 way to releasable.

Switching to Cairo is starting to seem attractive, especially when making bitmapped versions of the fonts.

For the moment I won’t switch to Cairo as I’m very curious to see what happens to performance when pygame 1.8 comes out.

Another reason I haven’t switched yet is a bit of lazyness – the pycairo msi doesn’t install the cairo dll… and of course the learning that goes with the new API

Posted by admin at October 22nd, 2007

More MSys troubles, it turns out that sh.exe stackdumps were somehow caused by my Logitech Quickcam.

To stop the segfaults, just kill the lvprcsrv.exe process and things start working again.

Found here

Posted by stu at October 21st, 2007

I was getting an error ‘Cannot create executable’ when setting up MSYS, it turns out that the solution is to add

/mingw/libexec/gcc/mingw32/3.4.5

to your /etc/profile.

Cheers to the mailing list at nabble.

Posted by stu at October 8th, 2007

I’ve just finished the initial version of the font that’ll go into my game ball breaker (“Ball Breaker Caps”)… Some of the characters need more work, but it has the retro-future look I’m going for.

This means that I can feel happy about putting in the high score table and scrolling messages and they’ll have the look I’m going for.