Today, I invite you to the crazy place that is the XMPP Railway Yard!

This #Jabber / #XMPP channel has a wide variety of people from all over the world, from #train geeks to #FuckCars fanatics to everyday folks who just think trains are cool.

https://xmpp.link/#trains@conference.jabjab.de?join

(Warning - brain damage!)

As before, if you're new to XMPP, this guide has everything you need to get started.
https://contrapunctus.codeberg.page/the-quick-and-easy-guide-to-xmpp.html

#BoostsAppreciated #choochoo #railfan #trains #railways

Just a reminder: LLMs aren't A.I.

MIDI cover of a tune from RoboCop 3 on the Mega Drive. Not sure if it has a name - it's just the in-game music. #YMF715 #MIDI #RetroGaming

Edit: Pitch corrected

Like I said.

New Libreboot release coming soon!

"Server died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure." ― Camus as an instance admin

Human-read Marxist audiobook and discussion of Karl Marx's Das Kapital, Volume 1: Chapter 1 (from the first English edition, 1887) by Socialism for All

https://youtu.be/52Bu42pM3eY

Using Godot I made a pixel perfect scaling viewport plus a high res scaling BG to avoid black borders.
Image is a Control object that anchors, BG is the 1st wallpaper size image I could find lol. Really wasn't sure if this was possible until now #gamedev #Godot

It has been a little more than two weeks since I moved over from Mastodon to #GoToSocial and I figured I would check in.

So far it has been 100% stable. Not a single hiccup on the server. It uses 1/4 the memory that Mastodon was using and my CPU load averages on my VPS are in .0X range.

I do not regret it for a moment, if you're considering moving your personal instance to GtS go for it. 0.18 is going to be even better

New Libreboot release very, very soon.

Just polishing up the last few little bits. Here's a timeout feature I implemented for U-Boot's bootflow menu last night; with it, you get an auto-boot timeout, so you don't have to press enter to boot your installed OS. U-Boot didn't support this so I implemented it.

Lots of little things like this are happening. Release probably tomorrow.

By the way here's the patch I wrote that does what you see in the video:

https://browse.libreboot.org/lbmk.git/commit/?id=c038b653ac1fed329c8577df3b19bad8d594c98a

Very, very soon.

I wonder if it's possible to write a Nokia 3310 custom firmware that's just Bad Apple

Today we are releasing Cwtch 1.15.4!

Cwtch is a privacy-only p2p messenger based on @torproject v3 onion services.

This release is a small quality of life update, with a bugfix to allow Cwtch to work on older Android devices, improved custom themes support, improved performance, the introduction of more restricted defaults for new contacts, and more.

Changelog/Download: https://docs.cwtch.im/

Please consider donating to @openprivacy so we can continue our mission to build better systems.

at first I thought getting a Star Trek Space Ship with a Floppy Drive was the height of all my fangirlish dreams!

but then the U.S.S. Shugart dropped out of warp 1.44 light years to Ceti Alpha V with a big "INSERT DISK 2" message on the main viewscreen

The permacomputer project is anxious to build a machine that is able to be immediately comprehended by those uninitiated to electronic computation. Outside the context of mass industrial society, after, say, a massive ecological and societal collapse, electronic computers may become an arcane and forgotten knowledge.

The meanings embedded within the human practice of using computers is arguably more important than the computers themselves. What good are computers if society does not consider them a virtue? To this end, the permacomputer project asserts that it is possible to build a computer that will not only be durable and long-lasting, but also personally engaging and culturally enriching.

The concept of the "human-computer interface" encompasses this criteria. In the context of the people's permacomputer, we are merely discussing the computer's video output.

The first phase of the project found that it was desirable to include some form of visual output in the permacomputer. It was decided not to include any display into the design of the permacomputer itself, and instead require the user to provide their own television. Reasons for reaching this decision are that (a) it is expected that televisions will be possible to salvage in a hypothetical societal collapse; (b) given that the video standard chosen by the project is analogue composite video, this simple form of signal should have some hope of being able to reverse engineered should cultural knowledge around computing significantly degenerate.

The second phase builds on the results of the first. The work done in the second phase concluded that it was prohibitively expensive and cognitively overwhelming to expect the visual display capabilities of the permacomputer to conform to video designs contemporary with the 1970s and 1980s.

The project found a solution to composite video output in small
microcontrollers. The idea is not to directly integrate video into the 8 bit computer design, but use a cheap microcontroller as a video terminal, and have the computer use its ACIA chip to communicate with it via serial.

Using microcontrollers does not contradict the spirit of
permacomputing. It radically reduces the chip count of the design, allowing the project to proceed faster towards a
proof-of-concept. Using microcontrollers removes the need to sacrifice system memory for VRAM. it also makes the permacomputer modular--if one part of the system fails, you can still use the other half.

% Previous Microcontroller Video Terminal Projects

# the 'geoff graham'

## hardware

MCU: PIC32MX250F128B
Resolution: 18 lines x 48 characters
MCU Price:
- ebay: prohibitive
- aliexpress: AUD8.25

## references

https://geoffg.net/terminal.html

http://retro.hansotten.nl/other-retro-articles/ascii-video-terminal/

https://hackaday.io/project/173216-ascii-video-terminal

https://www.pcbway.com/project/shareproject/ASCII_Video_Terminal_2.html

https://github.com/dhansel/TerminalUSB

# the 'tellymate'

## hardware

MCU: ATMega8
Resolution: 25 lines x 38 characters
MCU Price: AUD3.51

## references

http://www.batsocks.co.uk/products/Other/TellyMate%20Tiny.htm

# the 'videoblaster'

## hardware

MCU: Atmega 1284P
Resolution: 25 lines x 40 chars
MCU Price: AUD2.85

## references

https://www.hackster.io/janost/avr-videoblaster-8026fd

# the 'octapentaveega'

## hardware

MCU: Attiny85
Resolution: 16 lines x 32 chars
MCU Price: AUD4.91

## references

https://github.com/rakettitiede/octapentaveega

# the 'simple video adaptor'

## hardware

MCU: Mega8, Mega16, Mega32, Mega8535, etc.
Resolution: 20 lines x 38 chars
MCU Price: see below ATMega 8

## references

https://www.serasidis.gr/circuits/AVR_VGA/avr_vga.htm

# the 'small tv terminal'

## hardware

MCU: ATMega8
Resolution: 25 lines x 40 chars
MCU Price: AUD3.51

## references

https://www.serasidis.gr/circuits/TV_terminal/Small_TV_terminal.htm

# the 'circuit cellar'

## hardware

MCU: TM4C1233H6PM
Resolution: 20 lines x 75 chars
MCU Price: prohibitive

## references

https://circuitcellar.com/research-design-hub/build-a-composite-video-text-terminal/

# the 'grant searle'

## hardware

MCU: ATmega88 + ATmega328
Resolution: 25 lines x 80 chars
MCU Price: AUD1.53 + AUD2.63

## references

https://web.archive.org/web/20190907195213/http://searle.hostei.com/grant/MonitorKeyboard/index.html

part of me is like "what if i make my VM run on DOS for #dosember" but also im not sure that'd be all that cool since it's just 32-bit C that i could compile with djgpp and also it's not really *doing* anything yet >_>