Veggies are starting to do well in the new raised bed. Mange-tout, shallots, carrots and beetroot. #Gardening
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Tim Holyoake
@psychotimmy@oldbytes.space
mastodon 4.7.2+glitch#RetroComputing. Liberal Democrat. Caterham 7 Owner. In remission from Mantle Cell Lymphoma.
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383 Following
28 Posts
Joined January 27, 2025
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Ottery St Mary morning #Caterham #Gardening (yes, really - this is the car park at Otter Garden Centre!)
Ottery St Mary afternoon #Countryside #Nature
Ottery St Mary afternoon. #Nature #Countryside
New from me: Building a Pico RomWBW
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Getting the case on was the hardest part of the build for me. But (with a little bit of encouragement and glue) it's done. A lovely little project to spend a very cold Devon day putting together. Thank you @ExtKits @Extelec #RetroComputing #PicoWBW
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Very encouraging! Time to put it in its case and figure out how to use RomWBW!
#RetroComputing #PicoWBW
Message when logging into Lloyds Bank this afternoon. It's bad enough that they're removing a feature I've happily used for many years, but far worse was the conversation with their customer support rep who continually denied the evidence and said that renaming accounts would always remain possible online!!
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@amoroso The company I worked for in the 80s/90s took the decision to move development of our software (CAD and engineering software) from Fortran to Ada around 1988ish. It was a disaster. The lack of good compilers (and inexpensive ones - Ada ones were around 10x more expensive than C or Fortran, a big issue when you're supporting 15+ different machine platforms and operating systems), particularly for non-UNIX computers, their general inefficiency and the way that everything operating system or graphics display dependent was thrown at non-standard pragma interfaces meant we spent more time porting software to our target hardware and debugging the vagaries of each machine than developing it or adding new functionality! (It used to take one of my engineers a couple of weeks to port and fully test our Fortran based code to new platforms - in some cases we spent months trying to get stuff to work reliably under Ada and failed completely in Microsoft PC environments). Needless to say our lunch was eaten by competitors including Autodesk and PTC, who had no such issues as they didn't adopt Ada! I think I detest the language because of that horrible experience more than I dislike Rust today, and that's saying something! My somewhat controversial view borne of experience is that the big problems in code were/are nearly always due to logic errors and differences between environments/language standards rather than the 'memory safety' bandwagon Ada and Rust adherents point to.
Easter is a movable feast. But how is the date of Easter Sunday calculated? #RetroComputing #BASIC #PicoMZ
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That seems ok. Time to flash the pico and see if it works before I put it in its wooden case. #RetroComputing #PicoWBW
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@vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net Maybe it's my age or where I live, but I remember playing many different CD-ROM based games and used other CD-ROM software, but I've never heard of Myst until today!
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@amoroso I honestly think that's the one huge advantage the DOGS CAD system had over AutoCAD! Our parametric language was far easier to learn and implement than AutoLisp for the typical drawing office. However, guess what ... we threw that advantage away when we implemented the Ada versions of the software with a revised parametric language that was unfathomable to most!
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@piko @blinry You can see my scruffy handwritten notes on an approach here https://z80.timholyoake.uk/advent-of-code-2025-in-fortran-77-mostly/ along with a link to my repository with my final version in it. It's written in fixed width Fortran, but uses recursion, so is a bit of a hybrid between legacy and modern Fortran! It should be relatively readable though as the final code includes comments.
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@linker3000 I don't know - I will try it! I already have Turbo Pascal running with some of my stuff on it.
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@ExtKits will do. It seems to be working fine for me. Lovely little kit to spend a very cold Devon day building. Thank you!
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@linker3000 ... as does my tp implementation of Conway's life. (As a student in the 80s I saw him talk at a guest lecture at Warwick Uni. I still remember some of what he talked about today).
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I had a tape of the album I kept in my Skoda back in the day. I think I wore it out - it's probably the album of his I like the best, though there are some excellent tracks on Trust, Get Happy, Momofuku and The Delivery Man to name just four other albums!
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@tangerine_sedge @amoroso Oh, that's absolutely the case. It still doesn't make me feel less sour about Ada though because of all of the wasted months and opportunities we spent fighting the limitations of the language for the purposes that we tried to put it too. The road to hell is paved with good intentions I guess.
@patcharcana@furry.engineer Sandford's Red Zero is great too, but a medium rather than a dry cider.