I've completed "Reactor" - Day 11 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com/2025/day/11

Catching up now, doing days out of order. For this one I had a slow solution (20 or 30 minutes or so), but a relatively simple optimization finally gives me the solution in ~65 ms.

I've completed "Playground" - Day 8 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com/2025/day/8

Now it's picking up a bit. Run time for my part 2 solution is around 101 ms, more than 1000x yesterday's solution.

#Ada #Adalanguage

Finally implemented some benchmarking into my #AdventOfCode runner to see how well my Ada implementations are doing.

Longest (part 2) solution this year has been day 4 with about 1850 μs. Current day 7 comes in around 85 μs. (Depending on CPU temperature...)

I've completed "Laboratories" - Day 7 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com/2025/day/7

Another one that's not computationally expensive, but really neatly to implement thanks to not having a dozen special cases to take care of.

Back around day 2 of #AdventOfCoding and before I got around to solving it myself, I saw people talking something about using regular expressions for solving this, and I don't get how? As in, seriously counting through every possible number, converting to text and test with a regex?

I've completed "Trash Compactor" - Day 6 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com/2025/day/6

All caught up now with 2 stars.

Mark your calendar! Next Vintage Computer Festival in Munich takes place from May 1st to May 3rd, 2026. Yes, its one of those rare three day VCFe, because of public holiday on May 1st. Website updates will start early 2026 as usual. #VCFe #VCFe25.0 #vintagecomputing #retrocomputing

Last week, the vintage IBM 1401 computer at the Computer History Museum started behaving strangely: it wouldn't halt. More specifically, if you had two HALT instructions in a row, it would halt for the first, but when you continued, it crashed mysteriously. Here's how we fixed it.... 1/N

Last weekend at #VCFe I once again encountered the meme that using original power supplies for your home computers of the 80s is bad because the line voltage was raised by 10% from 220 V to 240 V since then.

#electronics #retrocomputing #vintagecomputing

Surely I'm not the only one getting this vibe from the Switch 2's joycons:

i do have to give Haliey Welch some credit for comedic timing. intentional or not, she perfectly timed her rugpull to steal the spotlight from bitcoin hitting $100K, a moment coiners have been awaiting for years. masterful stuff

Over the months I've put so many hours into trying to get GHDL to work on all Debian architectures, but now I've finally cut my losses and uploaded a new version 4.1.0+dfsg-4 restricted to the architectures that actually work to unstable.

#GHDL #VHDL #FPGA #Debian