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? (December edition)
I am currently doing some investigating. I had heard about Slack, but I didn’t know exactly what it did. Seems it’s fairly similar to Teams. I’m also utilising YouTube to learn the purpose of Gitlab, Notion, Zendesk and Figma. So far I’ve learned Gitlab is a one stop shop for DevOps, used to coordinate project information. I’m fairly sure Figma is a tool used for wireframes. Zendesk is a type of CRM software. It looks like they are all cloud based and can be integrated with each other, good for remote roles. I imagine if you’ve used one version of these applications then it will be fairly straightforward to learn to use others.
Before I forget: last weekend I went to a retrocomputing gathering, and had many good conversations and caught up with people I hadn’t seen for a while, or even had only seen on video calls. Playing around with some code we have which runs on Raspberry Pi, I saw some anomalous behaviour which might prove to be something interesting - we’re pushing the Pi pretty hard and maybe hitting something marginal.
I was running a Turing Machine pattern in a Conway’s Life program, running on a simulated 6502 on the Pi, which displays by way of my BBC Micro onto a genuine green-screen monitor. Here’s what it should look like:
And here’s what I came back to after wandering off for a chat:
You can see this pattern (and read a great deal more about Conway’s Life) and even run it in your browser here:
I just received 120 megabytes of nostalgia - an image of the hard drive of my Amiga 1200, a computer I bought 30 years ago and sold at the retro event a couple of weeks back. Rather than try to mount this drive with an Amiga emulator, I just decided to dig through it directly, using ‘less’ and searching for likely strings, like my name. And I found a dozen or two interesting things - interesting to me - including various programs to solve little puzzles, and a resumé of my employment history, and even a photo of @Al_B!
Here’s a short entertaining and just possibly inspiring video:
(Mobile robot solves Tower of Hanoi)
