We Saw a Chicken …

Author: scruss

  • help for the Weston user in your life

    Talk about displacement activity: in the week or so before selling the house and upping and off to Canada, I scanned and converted the Weston Master V Exposure Meter and Invercone Instruction Book to HTML.

  • my juvenalia: 2D Star Dodge / Stardodger

    Oh dear:

    And here’s the Locomotive BASIC version, as published in Amstrad Computer User:

    10 ' ** Initialise **
20 MODE 1
30 INK 0,0
40 BORDER 0
50 INK 1,26
60 INK 3,0
70 q=5
90 LOCATE 16,1
100 PRINT"Stardodger"
110 LOCATE 1,5
120 PRINT"Avoid the killer Asterisqs, and seek the"
130 LOCATE 9,6
140 PRINT"wondrous Nextscreen Gap."
150 LOCATE 12,13
160 PRINT"Use SHIFT to climb"
170 GOSUB 700
190 MODE 1
200 DRAWR 629,0
210 DRAWR 0,170
220 MOVER 0,60
230 DRAWR 0,169
240 DRAWR -629,0
250 DRAWR 0,-399
260 DRAWR 0,2
270 DRAWR 627,0
280 DRAWR 0,168
290 MOVER 0,60
300 DRAWR 0,167
310 DRAWR -625,0
320 DRAWR 0,-399
330 MOVE 636,0
340 DRAW 636,399,3
350 MOVE 638,0
360 DRAW 638,399
370 PLOT -1,-1,1
380 TAG
390 FOR s=1 TO q
400 MOVE 50+RND*561,20+RND*361
410 PRINT"*";
420 NEXT
430 TAGOFF
440 MOVE 0,200
450 dy=4
470 DRAWR 4,dy
480 IF INKEY(21)<>-1 THEN dy=4 ELSE dy=-4
490 t=TESTR(2,dy/2)
500 IF t=1 GOTO 550  
510 IF t=3 GOTO 620
520 MOVER -2,-dy/2
530 GOTO 470
550 MODE 1
560 PRINT TAB(16);"YOU GOOFED"
570 LOCATE 5,13
580 PRINT"Number of Screens completed = "+STR$((q/5)-1)
590 GOSUB 700
600 RUN
620 MODE 1 
630 PRINT TAB(16);"WELL DONE"
640 LOCATE 10,13
650 PRINT"Stand by for Screen "+STR$((q/5)+1)
660 GOSUB 700
670 q=q+5
680 GOTO 190
700 LOCATE 8,25
710 PRINT"Press any key to continue"
720 WHILE INKEY$<>""
730 WEND
740 WHILE INKEY$=""
750 WEND
760 RETURN

    Here’s Asterisk Tracker, the original inspiration from 1984

  • still the coolest thing ever

    Got E-UAE running properly from a hard disk image last night. Tried to get the configuration close to what I had on my old 3MB A500.

    This is what it sounds like.

  • Subnormality: Understanding Nuclear Weapons

  • cold war drives to the pharmacy

  • because everyone needs their own numbers station

    transmission01

  • something went wrong

    At the automatic podcast today, something went very wrong with the announcements. Hear what I mean.

    I was playing with flite‘s new voices, and I think the command line went up the chute.

  • TTC Trip Planner

    The TTC Trip Planner seems to be live, after some digging by the Spacing folks.

    It works with a bunch of small browsers I’ve thrown at it – w3m, mobile Safari, Blackberry – so I know I can use it from a handheld. Yay!

    Only minor annoyance is that for subway journeys, it only shows the direction of travel in the summary (“YONGE-UNIVERSITY-SPADINA TOWARDS DOWNSVIEW” – and yes, in all-caps) and you have to click through to the details to find out which station you need to get off at.

    It does seem to get deeply confused at Kennedy Station; I live just south of Kennedy, and it expects me to take the 43 Kennedy north to the junction to Eglinton, then walk south. Everyone here uses Transway Crescent …

    Update: how could I have missed the prettier and much less capslockier MyTTC?

    Update 2: The official TTC site appears to have moved here http://www3.ttc.ca/Trip_planner/index.jsp?useplanner=true. Let’s see if it still works with mobile devices.

  • embedded Old Man Luedecke

    Old Man Luedecke plays The Rear Guard in Toronto a couple of nights ago:

    So if that didn’t work, here’s the YouTube video:

    I took this with my little PowerShot SD790 balanced on a sugar bowl. Cropped and recoded in Avidemux2, it’s not bad. To get the embedded video above, I used ffmpeg2theora (thanks, Daring Fireball!).

    Whatever you do, don’t – on your first try of recording live video – try using a setting you’ve never investigated. For the second set, I used CHDK‘s default video. It looks like an attack of mosaic tiles. Oh well.

  • old computer

    I got my Amiga A500 twenty years ago …

  • Dook of the Beatniks is in the house!!!

    Whee! New album from everyone’s favourite musical genius/loony! More details at the Piety Street Studios Blog.

    Delightful cover letter too:

  • Bill Rickard has a blog!

    Bill has a blog now: Bill Rickard Banjos.

  • implicit markup: easy to read, hard to parse

    I don’t usually ponder about other people’s blog postings, but Jeff Atwood’s Responsible Open Source Code Parenting reminded me of some of the old wars that the used to be when I was a markup head. Jeff writes about his frustration that John Gruber’s Markdown text-to-html filter:

    1. hasn’t been updated for some time
    2. doesn’t quite do exactly what Jeff’s users at Stack Overflow want
    3. appears to have any changes in its behaviour from v1.0.1 strenuously vetoed by Gruber himself.

    Markdown is nice in that you can write screeds of text, and it does almost exactly what you’d expect. The markup doesn’t get in the way, usually. The difficulty arises when implicit markup (indented lines for quoted text, bulleted lists, highlights) has to give way to explicit (cross-references, code samples). Explicit markup is ugly, but sometimes, you’ve got to do it. Complex intent requires complex modes of communication, and sometimes plain text just hasn’t the bandwidth. [As an aside, there was a hilarious lengthy recurring episode on John Mark Ockerbloom‘s late bookpeople mailing list where a user (mercilessly skewered here)  insisted that they could write a general Gutenberg plain-text converter that would re-create typeset quality in an e-book reader with no explicit markup, and that XML was completely unnecessary and ill-conceived. The un-markup language, called zen markup language (said user had an aversion to the shift key) lives on only in a single website: the home of z.m.l. As for XML, its executive assistant had no comment on the matter.] Looking at Markdown, it looks like Gruber’s moved on from it. He made a 1.0.1 which did what he wanted. The code’s there to change if anyone needs it. I understand his frustration at people wanting to make changes and still call it Markdown; I’d be annoyed if I had text which I thought was in one format suddenly not be accepted, or do something unexpected. Seriously, that’s almost as bad as ‘deprecated‘. [At least Gruber didn’t go on a deletion rampage, like (admittedly smaller-time) erstwhile CHDK stalwart Barney Fife did when he was slighted in a forum. Looks like almost everything he contributed to CHDK has been removed, including some very useful control scripts and explanations.] Personally, when I need to make text to web conversions, I still use txt2html and a bunch of shell and Perl glue to feed to tidy. It’s on its third maintainer, doesn’t do much, but does it simply. And I’m pretty simple that way.

    Update: see also On my increasing exasperation with Markdown.

  • oh dear …

    At the meeting Van Zyl agreed to turn off the tower with immediate effect to assess whether the health problems described by some of the residents subsided. What Craigavon residents were unaware of is that the tower had already been switched off in early October – six weeks before the November meeting where residents confirmed the continued ailments they experienced.

    via Massive revelation in iBurst tower battle.

  • image rollover in wordpress, no plugins required

    I’m seeing quite a bit of traffic to this post. I suppose I should explain that this was a quick hack to see if I could get image rollover to work on a friend’s wordpress.com hosted blog (and no, I couldn’t). This little example doesn’t do preloading, either, and I really don’t have any intention to develop this further. Sorry …

    <img title="this" onmouseover="this.src='http://scruss.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/that.png';" onmouseout="this.src='http://scruss.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/this.png';" src="http://scruss.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/this.png" alt="" width="192" height="116" />

    This does not work on wordpress.com hosted blogs; it gets stripped out.

    Update: You probably want to install the plugin Ultimate TinyMCE, which does the job rather well.

  • Recoverfab – for all your memory card recovery needs

    NB to readers: I am not the Recoverfab guy. I can’t help you recover images.

    A friend has baby pictures on an SD card, which said baby later found and used as an inappropriate teething aid. Yeah, yeah, I know …

    He asked me to try to get the pictures back. I couldn’t read the card. It even fried one of my card readers. I tried RescuePRO, PhotoRec and PhotoRescue: no dice. Downtown Camera returned it as unreadable (and declined to charge me anything).

    So I asked metafilter, and someone suggested Recoverfab in Germany. I sent the card off last week, and waited …

    Got an e-mail at 06:30 this morning that they’d received the card, with a latest completion date of a week. Before 09:00, received a second e-mail with a link to picture samples and payment options. Have paid (not cheap – €89, but they got results) and am awaiting the FTP link.

    Many thanks to Leopold Hiersche for his excellent results.

  • mirrored along eglinton avenue i suppose it would look like an elevation of a hershey’s kiss

    Ward 35 is a weird shape:
    Map shape files are from toronto.ca | Open.

  • OpenEI – Organizing the World’s Energy Information

    This looks like fun, especially when you see the sponsors: OpenEI – Organizing the World’s Energy Information.

  • perhaps a slightly easier way to make SD cards bootable for CHDK under OS X

    Now that CHDK has a working beta in the source tree for my Canon PowerShot SD790is, I actually have to prepare SD cards for it. The Bootable SD card – OS X instructions seem a bit contrived, so I took a look at the linux instructions, and modified them accordingly. These instructions should work for FAT16-formatted SD cards of 2GB capacity and under. It will not work for SDHC cards, which are generally formatted to FAT32.

    This is all command-line only for here on in. It seems to work. Please note that you will be modifying raw file systems with root permissions here; there is no safety net. If you b0rk your main hard drive, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

    Firstly, you’re going to have to find out where the SD card in mounted. Do this with:
    df
    I got:

    Filesystem    512-blocks      Used Available Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2   487463200 318749896 168201304    66%    /
devfs                222       222         0   100%    /dev
map -hosts             0         0         0   100%    /net
map auto_home          0         0         0   100%    /home
/dev/disk2s1     3969280      3328   3965952     1%    /Volumes/CANON_DC

    There are three important concepts to note when looking at the mounted card:

    1. The mount point (or volume) – in this case /Volumes/CANON_DC. This is the location that you see in Finder when moving files around.
    2. The filesystem – here /dev/disk2s1. This is the partition on the disk, arranged according to a certain formatting scheme like MS-DOS FAT16.
    3. The disk device – which for me is /dev/disk2. This is the disk device itself, and it may contain several filesystems.

    Your locations for these three could well be different, so please substitute your values.

    You’ll need to unmount the device, as writing to a raw filesystem while the OS thinks it has control often results in hilariously unexpected results. I used the OS X-specific command

    diskutil unmount /Volumes/CANON_DC

    You should get a message like Volume CANON_DC on disk2s1 unmounted. Now you need to write the boot instruction:

    echo -n BOOTDISK | sudo dd bs=1 count=8 seek=64 of=/dev/disk2s1

    This will prompt you for your password.

    If you need to, you can remount the filesystems on the card with

    diskutil mountDisk /dev/disk2

    (Note that we used the disk name here, not the filesystem. If there were several partitions on the disk, this command would mount all of them that it could. It’s also kinda handy for remounting USB devices that you’ve accidentally ejected from Finder.)

    Update: Knowing a difficulty getting the firmware update method of getting CHDK to work on a Mac? Running a Leopard or newer machine? Then you need to learn all about Apple’s quarantine attribute and how to remove it with xattr: FAQ/Mac – Still having trouble?.

  • no ironic dying from dysentery, either

    Oregon Trail

    … and here’s me never played it before, too. You can play it too, at Virtual Apple ][.