Notices by David JONES (drj@typo.social)

@tb gonna add this to my corporate training, Get everyone on board and keep em on track.

Universities and other academic institutions should run their own source code repository service. A replacement for github if you will (i'm politically neutral on whether it should be gitlab, gitea, forgejo, or SSH, or whatever). They have a civic and academic duty to preserve the research artefacts of their workers; which unquestionably includes code. It is unacceptable that for the entirety of the 21st century almost every single part of the Academy has punted this service onto entities outside of their control, funding, and jurisdiction—latterly github. Yes, tarballs of code on departmental ftp servers (the 1990s practice) was literally better than this.

I'm re-reading parts of the ZX81 BASIC Programming Manual (because of side-side-sidequest), which is the book that came with the ZX81. I had this when i was 10, and i'm time and time again gobsmacked by the amount of educational effort that went into this pack-in provided with the cheapest micro of all time. It's more or less how i learnt trigonometry, but i wanna talk about Chapter 15, which is about software engineering lifecycle management, or, as they put it, "Making your programs work".

It comes with a flowchart (for humans): two absolutely key parts of this chart, still overlooked in many orgs: 1 "Write program with as few bugs as possible"; 2 "fix them introducing as few new ones as possible".

_As few bugs as possible_

#ZX81 #SoftwareEngineering

#AdventOfType will resume tomorrow; today I have been trying some elements for Xmas card designs. #LegoPress

Visicalc is a single 28KB binary; with a 180 page manual. We have strayed so far from the light.

An adaption of 10PRINT to the ZX81. Video captured with the sz81 emulator.

#10print #ZX81 #Retrocomputing

Announcing Clive, a new font inspired by Clive Sinclair's ZX81.

https://drj11.itch.io/clive-font

(please boost)

#Font #ZX81 #semigraphics

My second article on Pica this year, this article is about the (big) numbers found in the Pica fonts on typewriters. Featuring my meticulous research[*] and an Italian beauty. Typewriter nerds and font nerds are gonna love it:

https://home.octetfont.com/blog/pica-number.html

[*] a few days and several books and websites.

#Typewriters #numbers #FontDesign #Pica

I made an explanatory graphic for my 1x15 pixel font. https://gitlab.com/drj11/font-fifteenel
Notes?

(sorry if it seems blurry, Mastodon converted it from SVG to pixels, i think; go to the gitlab page to see the SVG)

@RamenCatholic linocutting (and relief prints in general). There are a couple of widely available starter kits and they are fine for getting started. Cutting different materials can be fun, i used a bit of bathroom lino (it's vinyl, not really lino) https://typo.social/@drj/113606134183001135

For a really basic start, you can use found wood (vegetable crates) and box-cutters.

There are surprisingly few fonts based on, or used by, actual typewriters. In the interests of finding out the right answers by posting wrong ones:

Prestige Elite, Typewriter Elite (balls and fillets), Courier (no balls, slab serifs), LTC Remington Typewriter (wavy seven).

A2 Typewriter, 1403 Vintage Mono, and Orator feature in the next post.

Please boost (to increase the rage replies).

(samples from identifont)

1/

#TypewriterFont #font #Typewriter #Monospace

@catsalad why does Final Fantasy Adventure never appear in these "top 17 Final Fantasy Games" listicles?

My most recent @FontsInUse post is a couple of notes about the cover of a 6809 assembler manual.

#mc6809

https://fontsinuse.com/uses/56920/6809-mnemonic-assembler-manual

Do you like Pixel Art and Classic Macs and Exploded Technical Drawings?

Check out this exploded view of the Mac SE/30 from the HyperCard Service Manual of the time.

#PixelArt #MacSE30

Welcome to #MOVember, one asm MOV instruction each day.

The Motorola MC68000 has a BEAST of a MOV instruction.
Official assembler mnemonic: MOVE. Refreshingly clear!

You could move to and from registers and/or memory. 8-, 16-, 32- data sizes. Post increment, predecrement. Including memory-to-memory moves (*Ferris Bueller soundtrack voice*: Oh Yeah).

`*d++ = *s++` is a single instruction in 68000.

Officially destination on the right: MOVE A7,D0 copies the A7 register to D0

Please 🔁

#68k

In Python, the list syntax is [1, 2, 3]; in Oxford Python, the list syntax is [1, 2, and 3];

#Python