Matrix service compromised and messages read by EU law enforcement. I didn't read in complete detail, but thought others here would be interested.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/encrypted-chat-service-seized-2m-messages-read

when i was a kid, you could build a simple game or application by dragging and dropping a few UI controls, and gluing them together with a few dozen lines of BASIC or Pascal or HyperTalk. it might take 15 minutes, at most, to get your little character walking around on the screen. this is how we ended up with a lot of hilariously good and cheap shareware you could share on BBSes in the 90s.

for the past year i've been quietly working on building a software thingie that doesn't exist anymore. i've been building a software toolkit that's kinda like Visual Basic and HyperCard and Borland Delphi, designed for making tile-based 2d games.

i've been using it to build my own little goofy games, and improving on the drag'n'drop IDE as i figuring things out. it's not done yet, and has a long ways to go before it's ready for other people to start making their own little applications and games. think PICO-8 or ZZT if they had grown up on a steady diet of Windows 3.1 and GeoWorks Ensemble instead.

i'm really, really bad about polishing turds to infinity and never releasing them. to break that habit, i've built a mini-website for the IDE/Shareware Creation Kit. it's called Exigy, named like a bad 80s metal hair band or richard garriott game.

https://exigy.org

i'll be posting weekly blog/devlog updates there, so i don't irritate anyone with them on this account. there is an rss feed button at the top right if you hate my demonic php and css.

#shareware #ultima #php #blog #smolweb #zzt #indiedev #hypercard #vintageApple #exigy

#adventofcode #adventofcode2024 Day 4 in #CommonLisp

#LispWorks on the new Mac mini

What's great in MacOS that make you using it? (if you use it)

I know multiple people (linux users) who have to deal with MacOS daily at work, and from their perspective, it's a huge pain to work with.

So i'm curious to know the opinions from genuine MacOS users who certainly enjoy it? (I hope so at least )

#mac #macos

Libreboot T480 coming to Minifree very soon. Also, Libreboot 20241205 is compiling.

Ghouls 'n Ghosts

🏢 Capcom
📅 1988
🖥 Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Arcade, Atari ST, Commodore 64, Master System, Mega Drive, PC Engine SuperGrafx, Sharp X68000, Wii...

#videogames

Person with over 1,000 followers: I don’t want to go to Bluesky but I don’t know if I’ll find enough people to engage with here.

Dude, what do you want, meaningful conversations or a fan club?

(I was as perfectly happy when I had a literal handful of people I was engaging with here eight years ago as I am now. Remember the Dunbar number, people. Remember quality over quantity. Small is beautiful and all that.)

How Insurance Works

(reposting because I can't find the original post.)

I'm experimenting with hand-drawn traces. I'm trying to find that classic pre-CAD PCB look with digital tools. The process isn't too onerous. I exported some layers from KiCad in SVG format and loaded them in Inkscape. From there, you can just draw another layer of hand-drawn copper, save that, then reimport it into KiCad as a graphic on the copper layer. You can even DRC check it!

I just freehanded some lines and simplified them, then adjusted manually. But stylistically, it still looks a lot like I drew some lines in Inkscape. You can see down on the connection between R6 and D5 I drew the teardrops. Even with janky teardrops that small variation in trace width looks a lot more legit. Would be nice to find some way of automating that, but I'm probably way outside the normal use case on both KiCad and Inkscape.

It's interesting how what started as semantic markup to occasionally write stuff and share it with the world on the internet now evolved to a prominent means of money-making, and for a good lot of us, what we are spending most of our time on each day.

Enough 1:6 scale models of old computers I want a 6:1 scale Packard Bell

whoa I finally got Debian powerpc64 installed and working on my POWER720

trick: install Debian 11 from CD, manually update /etc/apt/sources.list to sid, apt upgrade the world

granted I had to temporarily disable gpg checks for apt because installing from *just* the CD didn't install the proper keyrings

but hey the system is up!

It occurred to me yesterday, as I waited the usual three or four minutes for Word to open my document, that the basic tasks most people use PCs for (browsing file systems, opening documents and working on them, email) have barely improved or changed since the early 2000s. And have not sped up or become in any way more productive

Surprising that more dynamic programming languages don't have Common Lisp's (and also Python's IIRC?) thing of just automatically promoting integers to larger machine sizes and then to bignums rather than forcing them to be a fixed size and then raising an exception or letting them overflow. I guess they instead insist on taking from Javascript and just using floats for everything so instead you get really hard-to-debug float precision issues when reaching large enough integers instead.

I made U-Boot purple.

New Libreboot release soon!

Alper Nebi Yasak gave me the idea. Just hardcode that memset; see video_fill() call in the terminal window in expo_render(). Just hardcode the RGB value #280b22 in that call.

A bit hacky but it works.

Again, #Microsoft's continued stance on #Windows 11 means there's going to be LOTS of e-waste coming in about 10-20 months from now as still perfectly good computers are going to be unnecessarily discarded for no good reason.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-tough-hardware-requirements-for-windows-11-are-non-negotiable

I know smart people are going to use some variation of #Linux, but most of these people are just going to discard them and get a Copilot+ PC which is going to be sad as hell.

Dragon Warrior

🏢 Chunsoft, Bird Studio, Armor Project
📅 1986
🖥 Game Boy Color, MSX, MSX2, NES

#videogames