tunetardis

Ah thank you! I will have a look at those.

Are there any apps that support scaled? I've tried a few and no luck so far. I like the scaled view.

Well that's the way it should be. If they're selling your data, they should compensate you for that in some way. Then it becomes a personal decision as to how much it matters to you.

Ah that makes sense.

I think another thing that might be uniquely Canadian is when you're paying at a drivethru and you see the machine emerge from the pickup window taped to the end of a hockey stick. That was a big thing during the pandemic for social distancing. I guess more recently, they've been moving to less improvised solutions, which is a shame. I really liked the hockey stick!

The cash I have on hand comes exclusively from playing pub gigs in a band. That is still very much a cash-driven economy where I am. When I accumulate enough, I usually wind up spending it on music gear, so I don't think this hobby of mine is major wealth-builder. But while many businesses are moving away from cash, it seems music stores are used to people like me and still allow fairly hefty cash transactions.

The other day I was settling my tab at the pub and the guy hands me a machine. I say, I'll pay by cash thanks. He says really?!? Dude, you literally just handed me cash for the gig tonight. Oh yeah…

Canada has universal tap to pay also, but what surprised me about the UK—at least in the London area—was how quick it was? The payment processing was near-instantaneous. In Canada, I think the machines make a phone call behind the scenes to a bank or something? There's a significant delay before it goes through.

I can't say too much about it but we're in the mining sector.

And yeah, if I had to do it all over again from scratch, I'd definitely be looking at a real-time OS. There just weren't many options back in the day besides coding it all yourself. Even now, I'd have to benchmark the OS to see what its latency is actually like? We had it down in the microseconds range with our custom OS but if it's more like milliseconds with an off-the-shelf OS, for example, that would change the whole ball game.

Well we built some instrumentation around it at work back in the 90s and still use it today. It was ahead of its time. It had hardware loops, a hardware call stack, hardware circular buffer addressing, and a DMA controller. In one instruction, you could do 2 FPU operations and a memory move with a DMA transfer going on in the background. It was an insane architecture. And it could handle 3 separate memory spaces, so even though it's a 32-bit chip, you could access well over 4 GB of RAM.

The best thing about chips of that era though is you could tell ahead of time exactly how long your code will take to execute. Like you just type numbers into a spreadsheet and add up the instruction cycle counts. That kind of analysis is hopeless these days, but it informed the design of the instrument. More recently, we've been looking at RISC-V for a newer generation, but it's harder to predict ahead of time how it will perform?

Oh interesting. I tried turning off sound and now ctl-g flashes the terminal instead. (Fwiw I'm using the built-in terminal on a Mac.)

I like the bell one. It's useful to print a few of those at the end of what you expect will be a long program run to get your attention when it's done.

Would they survive being shipped by snail mail?

Noticed you haven't been getting any feedback on this. That's probably a good thing right? ;)