https://my.fsf.org/join

😎

well, it's the end of an era.

probably switching to xfce4 forever.

since my ryzen amd workstation died in august last year, i have been scraping by on an old second generation i5 processor with 8 GB of RAM.

the hardware on this workstation was first released in 2011. its end of life with intel was 2019. i am pretty sure i got it by going out of my way at the council waste processing centre, and asking about it.

after noticing how much faster xfce4 was than MATE on my similarly old and underpowered TV media PC, i am making the switch for good.

getting better hardware will not be an option for some time. i may have to wait until a special opportunity presents itself.

having to use nothing but e-waste to do all this complex and technical work is painful. the waiting, the constant locking up, only being able to use--realisitically--one "modern" bloated program at a time...

i wonder--is anyone else having this experience? how are you meant to do anything on the internet now, with any significant mass social attention, with any money?

the hard problem is the web, and everyone here i know, knows this. no-one here is sitting around on their arse merely complaining about the modern web.

this does not make the problem any less excruciating or unimportant. too many people are doing every little computing task on their phone. when i heard about major tiktok influencers doing the bulk of their video work on their phone, i think a part of me died.

sometimes i try and make myself feel better by thinking about whether i still have a good definition of the problem:

• the modern web is currently controlled by a small number of powerful and wealthy capitalist firms.
• virtually everyone accessing the internet uses the web and phone apps these firms own.
• the web is being used as a tool for a mere single purpose. economic profit.

possible conclusions:

• create an alternative method for accessing the information, and performing the tasks people do on the internet
  • free software web browser
  • alternative web apps for major platforms

i wonder what to make of this (correct) observation that we in the hacker community are just making clones of capitalist computer products

we're all aware of this weird cultural shadow microsoft, google, apple, ..., are all casting over us but cannot seem to do anything

i think we need a deeper understanding of this paradox where we are racing to copy capitalist products, and we know it isn't changing anything, but we just keep doing it anyway.

how can we be fully aware of our behaviour, knowing it is fruitless, and yet unable to change it? what is this sort of thing?

capitalism is all about waste. ultimately the reason why is the reign of private property.

i do not see any reason why we should not treat computer resources the same as any other under capitalism.

so perhaps the observation that modern computers are still slow is due to the fact we are wasting significant amounts of their power.

this could be a good direction for the @permacomputer project.

web browsers, mandatory AI at the operating system level, computer languages with huge runtimes... all these are a target for ruthless criticism.

spent some time video recording (what i assume to be) an old pamphlet from days of the democratic socialist party here in australia.

i turned it into a video essay. it is 22 minutes long, so not for the faint of heart.

i think the pamphlet does a great job of giving a summary of marxist class analysis--the cornerstone of radical leftism's science of socialist revolution.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6qIWU-_P_c

https://spectra.video/w/4u84ToFH1WEn33nARQYf8B

i suppose this is not a problem with package managers as a concept,

but i feel like the discoverability of packages is quite bad when i apt search in debian or guix search in guix etc.

successfully finding a relevant package usually requires going onto the internet and using a search engine.

the naming scheme of packages is wildly different across distributions. when i am looking for a python dependency, is it py3- or py- ? how are the stems -utils, -doc, or -tools to be applied?

in addition to this, it seems to me that the metadata for most packages is seriously lacking--meaning that packages are only included in search results in the shell if you just happen to know the exact terms they actually include.

okay major advances made on the discrete transistor computer

turns out the DTL logic NAND i have been relying on for years is seriously flawed

ummm... i recorded videos of everything in simulation with a 500 mHz clock (nice and slow)

not sure where the best place to organise everything for releasing all this is, probably my hackaday

this discrete transistor computer project has been going for me since 2013

a lot of it came from reading digital computer electronics by an author named malvino.

computers are just switches made of an electronic component called a transistor. when i mastered this i was incensed: i have to build a discrete transistor computer.

i eventually decided in 2017/2018 to change the design to something based on this: https://hackaday.io/project/4237-mental-1-a-brainfuck-cpu

this project is in ICs, and is just small enough to be possible to solder by hand--i thought to myself: i can reproduce this in discrete transistors.

the benefit of it is that is has no registers, so it simplifies the design radically.

the big problems are that i have no idea what is in this guy's instruction ROM, and it has no stack, meaning it must 'scan'--it must unwind every loop instruction, making it horrendously slow

i have seemingly lost my soldering iron, and entire kit of breadboards, so for the time being i will content myself with learning how to design and manufacture PCBs

PS--i will try and do a writeup on how the design works, and make project logs

i need to go back to exwm

i just can't do desktop environments

slight digression but thunderbird fills me with a volcanic rage

8G of RAM should be enough for anyone, i am sick of all this bloat!

eventually i will have to purchase a better workstation

been thinking about the programming language ruby

i would use it for more if it wasn't associated with so much webshit

not sure if this is a poor reason to structure one's programming language preferences, but much of my desire to adopt a language is based on how i like its syntax.

for me, whatever features or power a language has is secondary to the beauty of its syntax

makes me think--i wonder what good purpose ruby could be put towards?

i need to remind myself that every little bit of learning i do is never wasted.

"no mistakes, only happy accidents".

remember that, remember that.

don't forget, don't forget.

this feeling i am wasting my time on pointless nonsense belongs to someone else.

i want this learning. i want this for myself.

the permacomputer project has more followers than i do

there was a lot of activity on the profile last night

i got some scathing criticisms of the permacomputer off-fedi the day that really affected me. i think i am far too sensitive for my own good.

the attention the permacomputer idea is getting makes me feel a little bittersweet about the hobby project--i feel good about the huge amount of support it is getting, but i wonder whether the whole project is misguided and impractical.

should it be focused on a speculative, and as yet imaginary societal collapse, or should the project instead change to instead promote ecological and sustainable computing?

i think the project needs to change focus.

things i wanna do:

• fully update the @permacomputer project social media, which means:
  • updating the hackaday profile;
  • updating the master project page;
  • releasing a new statement on the mastodon profile.
  • (i think that covers it)

• build the first MC6847 video display 'warmup' computer.

  • i have found three projects based on 6502 which make use of the MC6847 and have published their schematics. so far so good. when the parts arrive i have to trust my breadboards and little wires are of a sufficient quality as not to bounce and ring, we're dealing with sub-1 MHz TTL-level digital signals so.... maybe my dodgy tools and components will be good enough.

• build the first permacomputer prototype

  • the next step after i have honed my practicals skills on a simpler task is this: construct a custom video display for the permacomputer, based on the information contained in don lancaster's cheap video cookbook or here if you wanna support the internet archive?
  • the reason for using custom logic for the display is the limited number of columns the MC6847--it is my hope to have 40 columns, not a mere 32. i wish i could say more, but the short story is this: using EEPROMs in place of discrete logic is the ticket to having a simple design.

• it is still my plan to get lisp running on the permacomputer (much thanks @50htz 🙏 🙏)
  • to this end see this disassembly of Acornsoft LISP for the BBC Micro. the beeb is a 6502 machine. it is my hope it can be easily ported to the permacomputer and enable a suitable operating system environment.
  • the problem is, this will make the permacomputer more like the beeb. it may not be a simple matter of reproducing the memory map of the beeb--it could require reproducing large parts of the beeb data pathways inside the permacomputer. watch this space.
  • i do not want to get too involved in writing a lisp for the permacomputer, so i am postponing this possibility until the very last moment. if i have to do everything myself, sigh, i will.

the ultimate goal of the project is to construct computers which will last a really long time, and still stay operational.

i largely regard this project to be a piece of art. if someone finds some practical use for what i am building, however, that would also make me overjoyed.

it is my pipe-dream to end up manufacturing permacomputer units at a kind of cottage-industry level, perhaps something for my worker's co-operative to do--friendly computers. i want to make these babies really, really cheap--if it's not cheap, it's not accessible to the poor.

it should be taken as given that 80s micros are one of the last generations of computers that people could have a hope of comprehending and mastering every element of its specification, from hardware to the top of the software stack.

@alcinnz do you have anything more i could read?

i might dabble in this area for a bit, personally i dislike HTML's syntax

@alcinnz this is really, really cool!

i completely agree with what you're recommending!

@alcinnz could you elaborate a little further, if you have time?

what would you remove?

i am discovering all the time that i am re-inventing the wheel 😅😂

neocities is really one of the best things on the web, embodying so much of the spirit of what it means to use hypertext

makes me think if the solution to leaving web is to 'do a gemini' but for HTML--deliberately designing a protocol that is incompatible with the worst parts of HTML.

it's not altogether that difficult--just look at the simplicity of the gemini RFC

just wondering about it--from memory, most of the coding back during the geocities/myspace era was probably just copying and pasting little snippets here and there

i suppose the methodical way would be to step through the HTML5 standard and removing every element that contradicts our requirements

anyway, food for thought...

alright the 6502 thingo is going ahead.

i purchased the following

• 2 x MC6847 video display generators (keeping a spare on hand)
• 1 x T48 (TL866 compatible??) EEPROM programmer
• large amount of 74LS00 NANDs

i already have:

• 2 x 61256 32K SRAMs
• 1 x AT28C256 32K EEPROM
• 1 x ACIA
• 1 x VIA

-*-

links:

https://pmig96.wordpress.com/2020/07/15/mc6847-test-circuit/

https://github.com/adumont/hb6502?tab=readme-ov-file#memory-map

-*-

memory map:

-*-

honourable mention:

https://awsh.org/homebrew-6502-computer-part-1/

i think i might not release the BASIC zine as a zine after all, or at least not at first. i will make a website and some videos first.

it will be the "how it is made" genre of media