Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Alexander Grupe @losso3000.bsky.social · 22h

Nur Sonntag, also trotzdem schade! 😔

Alexander Grupe @losso3000.bsky.social · 1d

Seeing the actual, physical Amiga prototype board at #Amiga40 sure was nice! If you squint hard, you can make out shadows of the Boing demo running in the wirings… 🧐

The "Lorraine" Amiga prototype on a table, with Dale Luck in the background

Close-up of the Lorraine breadboards with intricate wiring, some are labeled "Agnus 1", "Agnus 6", "Agnus 8"

A hand-written note on top of the breadboards: Notez-bien - you should never, ever, ever, ever touch any part of this hardware capriciously, incautiously or inattentively. Please ground yourself, and wash your hands, and be polite. Thanks. Ground yourself

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Alexander Grupe @losso3000.bsky.social · 14d

Obsessive Star Trek thought: If I crash into this thing now, the Edo will demand my execution

A photo taken while riding a bike towards a little greenhouse thing next to the road

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Alexander Grupe @losso3000.bsky.social · 19d

Was the prompt “chunky” or “chonker”, by the way? Maybe I misheard… 😉

#WeeklyTeletextArt

A Teletext rendition of a cartoonish chunky white cat licking its lips. Caption below: OH LAWD, HE COMIN'

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Alexander Grupe @losso3000.bsky.social · 19d

Errr… yeah, all right!

I’m in!

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Alexander Grupe @losso3000.bsky.social · 21d

Cooking up a lil’ Mate wall simulator to distract myself from other ambitious ideas for @deadline-berlin.bsky.social this weekend or just because I love writing tools? 😅

www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-nw...

A 40*16 pixel array rendered as illuminated empty bottles in crates (bottom-facing)

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Alexander Grupe @losso3000.bsky.social · Sep 14

I wish the nerds would have put a kill switch into all their inventions.

“Oh, so you hate science and want to use the internet to destroy humanity? Not with our tech! You’re free to build a bible-based smartphone for yor christian-nationalist cult, though.”

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Alexander Grupe @losso3000.bsky.social · Sep 12

Age verification check:

Learned HTML on the Commodore Amiga by looking at page sources, with a dial-up connection that went through a special Datex-J (ex-Bildschirmtext) page that acted as an internet gateway. But that was already the modern days, with a 68030 CPU at 50 MHz and 6 MB of RAM.

Ben Kutcher @benkutcher.bsky.social · Sep 12

Age verification check:

Dialed into Tristate Online, which didnt have a native telnet client, to gopher for “tools surfing net” to get an open telnet to a box where i could fire up TinyFugue to MUSH.

Let the Right Hon In @danhon.com · Sep 11

age verification check:

you were on irc with friends in d.c. and nyc while it was happening, before the second tower, when they thought it was a light plane

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Alexander Grupe @losso3000.bsky.social · Sep 9

So, the iPhone has genlock support now? Pfft… 1985 called!

#amiga #appleevent

A split image with a screenshot of a slide with the latest iPhone Pro features above (Dolby Vision, 4k120, ProRes Log, ACES, ProResRAW, Genlock) and a photo of an Amiga 2000 with a camera attached below, showing the camera image in the background of DeluxePaint

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Alexander Grupe @losso3000.bsky.social · Sep 3

Then again, that may be a bad example, because that was a case where there were *no* direct links that would have showed up as referers in the logs.

Still, I miss them! And who doesn’t love a misspelled header name that cannot ever be changed? 😅

Alexander Grupe @losso3000.bsky.social · Sep 3

To add insult to injury, I *could* see those referer links if I decided to soil my humble website with Google-controlled Javascript tracking code, which circumvents those privacy restrictions altogether. Blimey!

But I do enjoy the mystery, and when one of it gets solved: heckmeck.de/blog/lets-fe...

Let’s feel stupid, then

heckmeck.de

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Alexander Grupe @losso3000.bsky.social · Sep 3

I really miss HTTP referers… While I can understand the security and privacy reasons why the major browsers killed them off, I would really like to know, for example, where the recent spike of interest in heckmeck.de/demoscene/wo... came from in the US.

Screenshot of the Google search console for heckmeck.de, reporting a spike of search requests and page impressions for https://heckmeck.de/demoscene/worms-vbi/

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Alexander Grupe @losso3000.bsky.social · Sep 1

Love me some custom Amiga pointers!

heckmeck.de/blog/prototy... #amiga

A 6*6 array of Amiga pointers with little AmigaDOS windows, all in different styles and colors: arrows, logos, hands, a bottle, an emerald, etc.

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Alexander Grupe @losso3000.bsky.social · Aug 10

My week in A.I. (ranked by vibe)

A bar graphs with two bars of equal height: "Seeing Sam Altman" labelled with 30.8, "Seeing those graphs" labelled with 69.1

Alexander Grupe @losso3000.bsky.social · Aug 8

The collaboration I didn’t know I needed 😍

www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJW_...

DJ HUNDEFRIEDHOF & Fritzi Ernst - Tiere gucken fahrn

YouTube video by DJ HUNDEFRIEDHOF

www.youtube.com

Alexander Grupe @losso3000.bsky.social · Aug 5

“Nations are a social construct”

Preisschild "Deutsche Kartoffeln" (German potatoes), "Ursprung: Frankreich" (origin: France)

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Alexander Grupe @losso3000.bsky.social · Aug 1

Awesome! Had to check: That’s the X-Copy sound in there, right? 😉

Spectogram of this track and a recording of X-Copy's "copying finished" sound

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Alexander Grupe @losso3000.bsky.social · Jul 30

I love your technical posts! The level of detail, the explanations, and the ability to test it all right in the emulator is straight-up awesome. 🫡

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Alexander Grupe @losso3000.bsky.social · Jul 29

A new personal record in the effort per silliness ratio, in 512 bytes. Don’t know if it’s above or below 1.0 though – it’s *really* silly and niche. 😅

Erst mal einen schönen schwarzen Kaffee, heiß und lecker!

heckmeck.de/demoscene/te...

#amiga #demoscene #sinnlosimweltraum

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Alexander Grupe @losso3000.bsky.social · Jul 26

I have since learned that this is merely a *fake* Teletext display powered by a GameCube.

My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.

(Not really. Using a GameCube for THAT is cool 😄)

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Alexander Grupe @losso3000.bsky.social · Jul 26

Lovely: Teletext-based pricing display at Nordlicht 📺❤️

nordlicht.demoparty.info

An old CRT TV showing a table of beverage prices via Teletext

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Alexander Grupe @losso3000.bsky.social · Jul 23

Das Bundesamt für Bevölkerungsschutz und Katastrophenhilfe empfiehlt: Im Falle einer Katas-trophe in keinen Helikop-ter steigen!

www.bbk.bund.de/DE/Warnung-V...

Foto von Broschüren des Bundesamts für Bevölkerungsschutz und Katastrophenhilfe, in großer Schrift auf dem Titel: "Ka tas tro phen"

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Alexander Grupe @losso3000.bsky.social · Jul 17

Wait, did I just save 2 bytes in the reference m68k ZX0 decompressor?

heckmeck.de/blog/optimiz...

Optimizations in ZX0 compression

heckmeck.de

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Alexander Grupe @losso3000.bsky.social · Jul 16

I’m on sick leave, but the doctor recommended I should occupy myself with pleasant, calming things, so I tricked myself into learning about ZX0 compression. (Side quest → size quest… 😉)

After a short detour, I already found a way to save *2 bits* on average! 😅

A tool window with text areas, showing colored hex dumps and and a disassembly output; now there's a hex dump of the compressed data as well, highlighting literal (uncompressed) bytes

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Alexander Grupe @losso3000.bsky.social · Jul 12

Ran out of excuses not to write that little sizecoding tool I always wanted to write. Great fun and gains – or rather, losses! -20 bytes so far…

(It lists the most frequent bytes, words, and opcodes in the uncompressed code and data, so I can try to reuse them.)

#amiga #sizecoding

A tool window with text areas, showing a hex dump of a file, and lists of bytes, words, opcodes, and words interpreted as 12-bit RGB, all sorted by their frequency

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