A rendering of a 9-pin “Near Letter Quality” dot matrix font. Derived from the character ROM of an Amstrad DMP3160 printer.
somebody, somewhere, is probably still producing invoices like this
I started work on this in 2017, revisited it in late 2018, forgot about it for a few years and then finally completed it in a couple of days in July 2026. My focus is second-to-none!
ASCII, plus many European characters. Please see the sample above.
Proportional and mono-spaced versions are provided, each with a bold variant.
The DMP3160 ROM includes italics, but the coverage is not quite the same and they don’t look great. So I didn’t convert them.
I clearly added some extra characters to the bitmaps at some point, as the DMP3160 pre-dates the € sign, and yet, there it is!
The character spacings may not be the same as you’d get on a DMP3160. While the ROM does contain proportional character widths, they seem very wide. Values based on the actual widths of the bitmaps were used.
9-pin printers in text mode couldn’t kern, so neither does this.
The bold (technically, double-strike) mode used here would be impossible for a DMP3160 to reproduce. You should care less about this than I do. (I don’t, at all.)
Design Size
Nominally 12 point / 6 lines per inch.
Source
While this font is produced entirely by one Python FontForge script per variant, the code is too ugly for you to look at. The included NearlyQ.json is likely more useful: it contains all of the pin definitions keyed by character name.
This Font Software is licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence, Version 1.1. https://openfontlicense.org/
[I do not agree with SIL’s missionary work in any way, and the use of this licence isn’t an endorsement of SIL.]
Acknowledgements / References
Huge thanks to CPCWiki contributors who provided ROM dumps and notes on where to find character tables in the ROMs.
Amstrad/Schneider Printer Character Sets — CPCWiki, Internet Archive copy. The site is currently under extreme mechanized scraper traffic and is almost impossible to access.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
⑀ ⑁ ⑂ + - . / $ < > " , ¥
Lower case character glyphs are duplicates of upper case ones, although this is outside the X3.111-1986 standard.
Design Size
The 12 point design size is meant to reproduce 12 characters per inch horizontally, and six lines per inch vertically. OCR standards of 1986 suggested three lines per vertical inch, which can be achieved by double spacing.
Source
While this font is produced entirely by one Python FontForge script, the code is too ugly for you to look at. The included OCRmA.json is likely more useful: it contains all of the pin definitions keyed by character name.
My NanoLeaf NanoLight LED bulb from 2013 finally gave up the ghost: or did it …?
woo! spooky glowing undead lightbulb!
The LEDs glowed for several minutes after removing it from the socket. I suspect capacitance is afoot.
Although it was absurdly expensive ($45 [USD?]; that’s about $62 with inflation) when I got it from the original Kickstarter campaign in 2013, it has been run for several hours a day since then. I always liked the shape of the bulb, with its origami-like folds.
Modern LED bulbs are much cheaper, but this one looks classy. The magic smoke has well and truly gone, and all that’s left is a faint glow and the stench of rancid phenolic.
Seiko Epson Corporation is named as “son of EP-101”, for the world’s first compact, lightweight digital printer. I’m Scottish, and in Scots Gaelic “son of” is mac. Unfortunately, that prefix has been co-opted by an overpriced computer vendor. In Gaelic, nic means “daughter of”, so as an oblique compliment to Epson, this font is named daughter of 7 pin. It seemed like a good idea at the time …
Coverage
ASCII.
Design Size
The 12 point design size is meant to reproduce 12 characters per inch horizontally, and six lines per inch vertically.
Source
While this font is produced entirely by one Python FontForge script, the code is too ugly for you to look at. The included mx70.json is likely more useful: it contains all of the pin definitions keyed by character name.
While this font is produced entirely by one Python FontForge script, the code is too ugly to include here. The included a73.json is likely more useful: it contains all of the pin definitions keyed by character name.
ASCII, mostly. The standard did not provide definitions for these characters:
U+005F _ LOW LINE
U+0060 ` GRAVE ACCENT
U+007B { LEFT CURLY BRACKET
U+007D } RIGHT CURLY BRACKET
U+007E ~ TILDE
As this is an attempt to faithfully implement a standard, these characters were not synthesized. In a slight concession to modernity, glyphs for A–Z have been copied to a–z.
The standard also defines the following extended characters:
U+00A4 ¤ CURRENCY SIGN
U+00A3 £ POUND SIGN
U+00C6 Æ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER AE
U+00C5 Å LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH RING ABOVE
U+00C4 Ä LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH DIAERESIS
U+00A7 § SECTION SIGN
U+0132 IJ LATIN CAPITAL LIGATURE IJ
U+00D6 Ö LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O WITH DIAERESIS
U+00D8 Ø LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O WITH STROKE
U+00DC Ü LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS
Design Size
The 12 point design size is meant to reproduce 10 characters per inch horizontally, and six lines per inch vertically. This is a requirement of the standard to match OCR fonts of the day.
Variants
None. This is an attempt to reproduce the character forms exactly according to the standard document.
Source
While this font is produced entirely by one Python FontForge script, the code is too ugly to include here. The included ecma42.json is likely more useful: it contains all of the pin definitions keyed by character name.
`project.license` as a TOML table is deprecated!! `project.license` as a TOML table is deprecated!! `project.license` as a TOML table is deprecated!!
Do not make me care about your problems, little computer. - Something used to work; - I upgraded; - Now it doesn't.
you need to update your project and remove deprecated calls or your builds will no longer be supported.
This is not my project, little computer. It's something I use for enjoyment, to make my day better. But you make your problems my problems, and the world becomes an unkinder place.
ERROR: Failed to build 'Pillow' when getting requirements to build wheel
Are you tired, little computer? Your antics certainly wear me out. You can't build a wheel with a pillow: even I know that.
that red is much more orange in daylight. Note 1964 copyright year …
Found in a thrift store, the 1960s Selchow & Righter SCRABBLE® variant that nobody loved. It has no board, but 180 tiles, slightly different from the SCRABBLE® ones (dang, I love that I can type ®, can’t you tell?)
that Q, tho …
The stencilling/printing isn’t perfectly even in position, but I do have to remember these are at least 60 years old:
some variation in same letter placement
The instructions from inside the box (which were murder to scan btw: appreciate me!) are dated 1962, unlike the box. There’s a PDF linked under this image for those who enjoy legibility:
Included in the box, possibly original, is an instruction sheet typed in the naffest font known to man:
say you were typed on an early 1960s Smith-Corona Galaxie without saying, etc. …
Should you have no taste at all and want this excuse for type in your own documents, go here: zai Smith-Corona Galaxie Typewriter Font. May your documents smell of stale cigarette smoke forever. At least no-one will be able to OCR them.
The typed rules seem to disagree with the box rules a little. Pick the one you dislike less.
The 180 tiles have a slightly odd distribution for English: A×14, B×4, C×4, D×8, E×22, F×4, G×6, H×4, I×18, J×2, K×2, L×8, M×4, N×10, O×14, P×4, Q×2, R×12, S×8, T×10, U×8, V×2, W×2, X×2, Y×4, Z×2. You’re not going to make this up with any number of SCRABBLE® tile sets.
You can’t even make up a full 144 tile Bananagrams set with these. Even if you remove the excess tiles (A, B, C, D×2, E×4, F, G×2, H, I×6, L×3, M, N×2, O×3, P, R×3, S×2, T, U×2, Y), you’d still be short by a V and a W. A bug, perhaps?
Here are the rules from the box lid in full:
OFFICIAL SCRABBLE® BRAND ANAGRAMS
HOW TO PLAY ANAGRAMS
Of the many varieties of word games, Anagrams is one of the oldest and best known. The word Anagram means a word formed by rearranging the letters of a different word so as to completely change it. For example, the three letters of A, P, T can be combined to spell APT, TAP and PAT. These words are anagrams of one another. The game of Anagrams is a contest in forming words by combining letters drawn at random or by rearranging letters of words already formed.
This anagram set consists of 180 letters assorted in proportion to their frequency of use in forming words in the English language as computed by experts in analysis of word formations.
To Start:
Place all letters face down on a table. Shuffle them and arrange in approximately equal groups at the corners or sides of the table. (Or place them in a box or bowl from which they can be drawn conveniently one-by-one without being seen in advance.) Leave room in the center of the table for a dozen or more letters and clear a space in front of each player for the words that he will form.
Each player (2 to 6 make the best game) then draws one letter and places it face up in the center of the table. The player drawing the letter nearest the beginning of the alphabet wins first turn. Others follow him clockwise around the table. (In case of a tie for first turn, the tied players draw again until the tie is broken.)
If fewer than 10 letters have been turned up in the center of the table the player who has won first turn draws enough additional letters to make a total of 10 exposed letters on the table. For the remainder of the game the stock of exposed letters in the center of the table is replenished only by discards.
Word Formation:
The person who is taking his turn begins by drawing one concealed letter from any place on the table. This is his key letter. He tries to play it in one of the following three ways:
He may combine his key letter with 3 or more of the exposed letters from the center of the table to form a word of 4 or more letters. (For beginners use 3 or more letters.) If he can do so he places the word on the table in front of him and facing the center so that it is legible to all other players. (Note: He may not use letters from the center of the table to form a word which does not include his key letter.)
He may add his key letter (and one or more letters from the center of the table if possible) to enlarge or change one of his own words. For example, if his key letter is S and one of his own words is CARE, he may play the key letter to form CARES, RACES or SCARE; or he might play it and a T from the center of the table to form CARETS, CASTER, CRATES or TRACES.
He may steal a word previously formed by another player by adding his key letter (with one or more letters from the center of the table if possible) to form a new word in which the letters of the stolen word are rearranged. In the example used above he might steal the word CARE from another player by changing it to RACES, CASTER, CRATES or TRACES; he could not steal it to form CARES, CARETS or SCARE because the letters of the original word have not been rearranged.
Each player continues to draw and play key letters as long as he can use them in one of these three ways. If he draws a key letter that can not be played he discards it face up in the center of the table and his turn ends. The next player to the left then draws and begins his turn.
Challenging:
Before the game begins the players must agree on the types of words that will be used. Common practice is to use only words found in the alphabetical section of a standard dictionary excluding abbreviations, prefixes, suffixes, capitalized words and those requiring hyphens or apostrophes. These or other classes of words (such as geographical names) may be included by agreement. The important thing is to have a clear understanding before the game begins.
When a word is formed, changed or stolen during the game any other player or players may challenge it for spelling or other requirements that have been agreed upon. The word then must be found in the dictionary and verified. If it is correct the player retains the word and continues his turn; any player who has challenged a correct word loses his next turn. If the word can not be verified the letters are returned to the center of the board, to the original word or to the player from whom they were stolen, as the case may be; the person who attempted to form the word ends his turn at once and discards his key letter even though there might be other ways in which he could have used it.
A word may be challenged only at the time that it is played.
Penalty:
If a player, when drawing his key letter or at any other time after the play begins, exposes any concealed letter other than the key letter to which he is entitled, all letters so exposed are placed face up in the center of the table and the player loses the remainder of his turn or his next turn, as the case may be.
Scoring:
The game ends when one player has accumulated ten words or when the last concealed letter has been drawn, whichever occurs first. Scores then are counted by crediting each player with one point for each four-letter word and one additional point for each letter over four in any word.
COPYRIGHT 1962 BY SELCHOW & RIGHTER COMPANY, BAY SHORE, NEW YORK
Makers of PARCHEESI®, A Backgammon Game of India
Made in U.S.A.
The game is listed as Scrabble Scoring Anagrams on Board Game Geek and given a much later date (1972) than this one.
It’s years late and many millions over budget, but — at last — the TTC Line 5 Eglinton Crosstown is open today! I am slightly happy for them, as finally they’ll have to stop making excuses about why it’s closed.
I rode a little bit of it today (it was free) and this little bit of dust graffiti sums up how I feel
I rode the surface section from Kennedy to Aga Khan Park this afternoon, and my overall impression was: wow, this is really slow.
Map of Eglinton Avenue East, showing Crosstown stations from Aga Khan Park & Museum to Ionview
I was only able to track the train from Ionview, as my phone GPS is useless underground.
Westbound
I got on a westbound train a little after 15:30
Station
Distance / km
Arrive
Depart
Time
Speed / km/h
Ionview
15:37:20
Birchmount
0.552
15:39:05
15:39:40
1′ 45″
18.9
Golden Mile
1.244
15:42:37
15:42:39
2′ 57″
25.3
Hakimi Lebovic
0.455
15:44:29
15:44:30
1′ 50″
14.9
Pharmacy
0.592
15:47:55
15:48:30
3′ 25″
10.4
O’Connor
0.584
15:50:00
15:51:55
1′ 30″
23.3
Sloane
1.225
15:53:25
15:54:03
1′ 30″
49.0
Wynford
1.600
15:56:45
15:57:17
2′ 42″
35.5
Aga Khan Park & Museum
0.718
15:58:25
1′ 08″
38.0
Total
6.969
21′ 05″
19.8
Despite getting up to almost 50 km/h between O’Connor and Sloane, we still didn’t exceed an average of 20 km/h over the whole 7 km trip. So many stops for lights. Traffic on Eglinton was moving faster than us.
Eastbound
Two Alstom TTC/Metrolinx Crosstown light rail trains sit at the rather snowy Aga Khan Park station
I had to wait for 10 minutes at Aga Khan Park station for the return train. It was just a little brisk out. When it finally arrived, it was so busy that I ended up smushed against a door for most of the ride.
Station
Distance / km
Arrive
Depart
Time
Speed / km/h
Aga Khan Park & Museum
16:08:55
Wynford
0.718
16:10:10
16:11:00
1′ 15″
34.4
Sloane
1.600
16:14:00
16:14:45
3′ 00″
32.0
O’Connor
1.225
16:17:35
16:19:15
2′ 50″
25.9
Pharmacy
0.584
16:20:35
16:21:15
1′ 20″
26.3
Hakimi Lebovic
0.592
16:23:10
16:23:30
1′ 55″
18.5
Golden Mile
0.455
16:25:52
16:25:54
2′ 22″
11.5
Birchmount
1.244
16:29:50
16:30:25
3′ 56″
19.0
Ionview
0.552
16:31:35
1′ 10″
28.4
Total
6.969
22′ 40″
18.4
Even slower coming back.
It’s okay, TTC/Metrolinx: we’ve got used to waiting.
teleprinter tape glued to index card, 15 × 10 cm, paper/card/highlighter pencils (2025)
This is the only surviving fragment of The Epic of Mitorzp. It was transmitted by an unknown intelligence, but discarded by human operators as mere line noise.
HE F=RIDZT GOT T BAZU N LH EENGER COULDDARA= LSEEWTARM. = LISON =ASWHJDOO ZAS ZETH MI=TI ZEAC OS B=PN LLHERE T-R=RS =WE=Z=PNS=E M HIZI VALD R G M M ANT =ART=H MITORZP PBTHAT L EEUEB XTAZ=ECL EELING F OMB= ICKSAWN=LTO HIS ENZ=
Who was Mitorzp? A hero? An outcast? We will never know. This tiny remnant can only hint at the colossal magnitude of the lost epic.
this image is supposed to be made almost entirely of sextant blocks, the Unicode characters around U+1FB00 – U+1FB1E made out of two columns of three blocks. They’re originally from broadcast teletext, and were made to build low-resolution images on a text screen
Making the pixel to character map is quite tricky. The Sextant character block isn’t contiguous, and it’s not in the order we need. It’s also missing four characters: empty block, full block, left half block and right half block. These have to be pulled in from other Unicode blocks.
This is the map I came up with, from 0–63 with LSB at bottom right and MSB at top left:
If you have a Wemos/LOLIN S3 MINI PRO board, you might find that firmware images don’t flash so well. That’s because the ESP32-S3FH4R2 has 4 MB of flash storage, and most ESP32-S3 boards have 8 MB.
This trims down a standard MicroPython ESP32-S3 firmware from a 4 MB filesystem partition down to 2 MB, and sets the overall flash size to 4 MB. Upload that to your board, and all will be well.
Alternatively, v1.26 supports “4MiB and larger” flash chips. I have confirmed that ESP32_GENERIC_S3-20250724-v1.26.0-preview.bin works as expected:
$ mpremote a1 run boardstats.py Board : Generic ESP32S3 module with ESP32S3 Frequency : 160 MHz Free Memory : 2061232 File storage: 2036 / 2048 K
Martin Raynsford / Solarbotics Solar Marble Machine loving glare off deep snow
Still going strong after more than a decade in the front window, the Solar Marble Machine has been running flat out all day because of the glare from the deep snow outside. It might normally do one click a day, if any at all.
also known as “Monster BASICS Sound reactive RGB+IC Color Flow LED strip”. It’s $5 or so at Dollarama, and includes a USB cable for power and a remote control. It’s two metres long and includes 60 RGB LEDs. Are these really super-cheap NeoPixel clones?
I’m going to keep the USB power so I can power it from a power bank, but otherwise convert it to a string of smart LEDs. We lose the remote control capability.
Pull back the heatshrink at the USB end:
… and there are our connectors. We want to disconnect the blue Din (Data In) line from the built in controller, and solder new wires to Din and GND to run from a microcontroller board.
Maybe not the best solder job, but there are new wires feeding through the heatshrink and soldered onto the strip.
Here’s the heatshrink pushed back, and everything secured with a cable tie.
Now to feed it from standard MicroPython NeoPixel code, suitably jazzed up for 60 pixels.
Stewart Russell – scruss.com — 2024-03-26, at age 19999 days …
Summary
One’s thousand day(s) celebration occurs every thousand days of a person’s life. They are meant to be a recognition of getting this far, and are celebrated at the person’s own discretion.
Who is this for?
Maybe your birthday’s on a day associated with an unpleasant event. Your thousand day will never coincide with your birthday.
Maybe your birthday’s in the middle of winter, or in another part of the year that you’re not keen on. Your thousand day is every 2 years and 3 seasons, so it shifts back by a season every time it happens.
Quantities and scale
1000 days is approximately:
2.738 years
2 years 269 days
2 years 8.85 months
2 years, 3 seasons.
4000 days is just shy of 11 years.
Disadvantages
Compared to regular birthdays, thousand days:
must be calculated; they’re not intuitive when they’re going to happen. But we have computers and calendar reminders for that …
can be used to work out your actual date of birth, if someone knows that you’re going to be x000 days old on a particular day. It’s possible to know someone’s birthday, but not know their age.
There are no trademarks, patents, official websites, social media or official anythings attached to this concept. Please take the idea and do good with it.
So why aren’t you implementing this further?
I’ve had this idea kicking around my head for at least the last 20 years. For $REASONS, it turns out I’m not very good at implementing stuff. I’d far rather someone else took this idea and ran with it than let it sit undeveloped.
This is a mini celebratory post to say that I’ve fixed the database encoding problems on this blog. It looks like I will have to go through the posts manually to correct the errors still, but at least I can enter, store and display UTF-8 characters as expected.
“? µ ° × — – ½ ¾ £ é?êè”, he said with some relief.
Postmortem: For reasons I cannot explain or remember, the database on this blog flipped to an archaic character set: latin1, aka ISO/IEC 8859-1. A partial fix was effected by downloading the entire site’s database backup, and changing all the following references in the SQL:
For additional annoyance, the entire SQL dump was too big to load back into phpmyadmin, so I had to split it by table. Thank goodness for awk!
#!/usr/bin/awk -f
BEGIN {
outfile = "nothing.sql";
}
/^# Table: / {
# very special comment in WP backup that introduces a new table
# last field is table_name,
# which we use to create table_name.sql
t = $NF
gsub(/`/, "", t);
outfile = t ".sql";
}
{
print > outfile;
}
The data still appears to be confused. For example, in the post Compose yourself, Raspberry Pi!, what should appear as “That little key marked “Compose”” appears as “That little key marked “Composeâ€Â”. This isn’t a straight conversion of one character set to another. It appears to have been double-encoded, and wrongly too.
Still, at least I can now write again and have whatever new things I make turn up the way I like. Editing 20 years of blog posts awaits … zzz
After remarkable success with the SYN-6988 TTS module, then somewhat less success with the SYN-6658 and other modules, I didn’t hold out much hope for the YuTone SYN-6288, which – while boasting a load of background tunes that could play over speech – can only convert Chinese text to speech
The wiring is similar to the SYN-6988: a serial UART connection at 9600 baud, plus a Busy (BY) line to signal when the chip is busy. The serial protocol is slightly more complicated, as the SYN-6288 requires a checksum byte at the end.
As I’m not interested in the text-to-speech output itself, here’s a MicroPython script to play all of the sounds:
# very crude MicroPython demo of SYN6288 TTS chip
# scruss, 2023-07
import machine
import time
### setup device
ser = machine.UART(
0, baudrate=9600, bits=8, parity=None, stop=1
) # tx=Pin(0), rx=Pin(1)
busyPin = machine.Pin(2, machine.Pin.IN, machine.Pin.PULL_UP)
def sendspeak(u2, data, busy):
# modified from https://github.com/TPYBoard/TPYBoard_lib/
# u2 = UART(uart, baud)
eec = 0
buf = [0xFD, 0x00, 0, 0x01, 0x01]
# buf = [0xFD, 0x00, 0, 0x01, 0x79] # plays with bg music 15
buf[2] = len(data) + 3
buf += list(bytearray(data, "utf-8"))
for i in range(len(buf)):
eec ^= int(buf[i])
buf.append(eec)
u2.write(bytearray(buf))
while busy.value() != True:
# wait for busy line to go high
time.sleep_ms(5)
while busy.value() == True:
# wait for it to finish
time.sleep_ms(5)
for s in "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxy":
playstr = "[v10][x1]sound" + s
print(playstr)
sendspeak(ser, playstr, busyPin)
time.sleep(2)
for s in "abcdefgh":
playstr = "[v10][x1]msg" + s
print(playstr)
sendspeak(ser, playstr, busyPin)
time.sleep(2)
for s in "abcdefghijklmno":
playstr = "[v10][x1]ring" + s
print(playstr)
sendspeak(ser, playstr, busyPin)
time.sleep(2)
Each sound starts and stops with a very loud click, and the sound quality is not great. I couldn’t get a good recording of the sounds (some of which of which are over a minute long) as the only way I could get reliable audio output was through tiny headphones. Any recording came out hopelessly distorted:
I’m not too disappointed that this didn’t work well. I now know that the SYN-6988 is the good one to get. It also looks like I may never get to try the XFS5152CE speech synthesizer board: AliExpress has cancelled my shipment for no reason. It’s supposed to have some English TTS function, even if quite limited.
Here’s the auto-translated SYN-6288 manual, if you do end up finding a use for the thing
I have a bunch of other boards on order to see if the other chips (SYN6288, SYN6658, XF5152) work in the same way. I really wonder which I’ll end up receiving!
Update (2023-07-09): Got the SYN6658. It does not support English TTS and thus is not recommended. It does have some cool sounds, though.
Embedded Text Command Sound Table
The github repo references Embedded text commands, but all of the sound references were too difficult to paste into a table there. So here are all of the ones that the SYN-6988 knows about:
Name is the string you use to play the sound, eg: [x1]sound101
Alias is an alternative name by which you can call some of the sounds. This is for better compatibility with the SYN6288 apparently. So [x1]sound101 is exactly the same as specifying [x1]sounda
Type is the sound description from the manual. Many of these are blank
Link is a playable link for a recording of the sound.
![image of text: Hey, do you like dot matrix printers? You do? Well, I have quite the treat for you: NearlyQ, the “Near Letter Quality” 9pin printer simulating font! Derived directly from the character ROM from an Amstrad DMP3160 printer, it has *all* of the characters: [character table removed] There’s also NearlyQMono for the fixed-width text in your life. Both fonts come with »»»BOLD««« variants, too! Much ? to the CPCWiki contributors for the ROM dumps (C) 2026, Stewart Russell – scruss.com - OFL](https://scruss.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/NearlyQ_sample.png)
