What have you found, or learnt, or watched, or heard? What are you building or breaking or repairing or investigating?
Let’s hear about your technical adventures, however large or small.
Previously: Monthly thread - what’s new with you? (October edition)
I had a feel-good moment the other day, when I saw this:
and immediately recognised it as a not-quite-Mandlebrot which comes from a particular bug in some widely shared Basic code. So I could recommend the two-line fix, and the result was posted shortly after, with the caption
Thank you. Yes, changing the ZR2 to ZT so it doesn’t clash with ZREAL worked just right. Looked great before, but so much better now
I had a bit of fun running a new-old operating system on a Raspberry Pi Pico - that’s the small Pi which is cheap and presently available, and not really a Pi at all because it doesn’t have an SD Card and doesn’t run any familiar operating system.
But there’s a port of Fuzix to the Pico, and that’s a bit like a 1979-era version of Unix, and it has a Forth interpreter, so I was able to factorise a few integers. That’s my kind of fun!
I found a write-up with a photo but note that the project no longer needs any breadboard or other hardware - just the USB cable.
No so much a @what’s new with me@ as much as an @if anyone wants some decent free Data Science/ML courses for the next few days, DataCamp has a free access event on at the moment (Ends on Nov 13):
I only spotted it today - not sure if I’ll find time to go through any courses, but see link above in case it’s of use to anyone.
Managed to do a little coding yesterday - my plans for an hour of code several times a week remain unfulfilled - in the area of trying to use integer arithmetic instead of floating point in the hope of speeding up a fractal calculation. And it worked! Naturally, this is 8-bit interpreted Basic and fewer than a thousand pixels, because that’s where I live. And naturally, in the quest for performance, the code became unreadable.
Last day of the month, and also a techshed Wednesday video call day.
What’s new with our household this week is that we managed, unintentionally, to get our ISP to cancel our internet connection, and will now have to use mobile data for a few weeks until it gets reconnected.
