William D. Jones
LightNews LightNews
banner
cr1901.bsky.social
William D. Jones
@cr1901.bsky.social
420 followers 85 following 930 posts
At some point, the hard disk platter became my secondary drink coaster. But I still use it :)!
Posts Replies Media Videos
cr1901.bsky.social
Dialogue box for my RSS feed reader which states: "You have already subscribed that feed with the title 'Nicole Express'".
October 3, 2025 at 6:21 PM
cr1901.bsky.social
This thread seems to have taken several turns ._. ...
Picture of this thread I'm replying to with Mona's opening post, the TERF's screed, and myrrlyn's response to said TERF.
July 14, 2025 at 9:27 PM
cr1901.bsky.social
I haven't climbed this in maybe 20 years...
Picture of the Delaware River from the NJ side, atop the Tinicum Rear Range Lighthouse. A few cargo ships, some canisters?, and houses are in the foreground. The Philadelphia skyline is visible in the distance on the other side of the river.
May 18, 2025 at 6:10 PM
cr1901.bsky.social
We need to return to the good ol' days of 320x240 or less :D.

(More seriously, I can tolerate this. Also it's an interesting time capsule.)
Screencap of an old anime called Tanjou Debut. This particular fansub seems to be from the 90s. It shows two calico cats eating food at timestamp 2:55. The resolution is 320x240.
April 25, 2025 at 5:30 PM
cr1901.bsky.social
0.1-10Ks/sec. Indeed it's slow. But accuracy is sublime if you measure the RC constant to sufficient accuracy. Unfortunately, I seem to only be able to measure to about ~2% of the actual value. Also temp variations don't help.

A curve fit produces better results (ignore the top right, see alt txt).
Image of a graph showing two curves. The x-axis is time (microseconds), and the y-axis is Voltage. There are blue and orange curves. The blue curve reflects measurements taken from an FPGA comparator- specifically how long the comparator takes to turn off when charged on its "-" terminal with a variety of voltages (the y-axis) on its "+" terminal. The orange curve represents the predicted measurements, based upon a theoretical equation. The two curves match well, except at time "0", where the comparator behavior departs from the equation and drops vertically to 0 Volts. The same graph as before, but the equation for the orange graph has been tweaked to fit the actual data in the blue graph. The two graphs match extremely well, except at t=0 and a small sliver at the top right, where the orange graph flattens out. The t=0 case is unavoidable and inherent to the comparator. However, I can probably fix the top right by fine tuning the equation, which currently doesn't account for FPGA clock domain crossing delays.
April 13, 2025 at 4:54 PM
cr1901.bsky.social
Fun Fact:

If you beat Star Fox (SNES) and spend 15 minutes on the The End screen, a flute jingle that's a remix of the level clear/credits music will play :D.

@dylancuthbert.bsky.social and @carlngraham.bsky.social, you should be proud :D! The game stands the test of time 30 years later.
February 26, 2025 at 8:07 PM
cr1901.bsky.social
Sentinel now supports the LiteX ecosystem, which makes it easy to generate SoCs for well over 50 boards (I've tried ~5 successfully).

github.com/enjoy-digita...

Give it a try on iCEBreaker:

```
python -m litex_boards.targets.icebreaker --cpu-type sentinel --build
```
Picture of a LiteX session in the Tera Term serial terminal. It shows the CPU is Sentinel running at 24MHz, with a Write/Read speed of 1.4MiB/s to RAM, and a Quad SPI Flash Sequential/Random Read speed of 362.9KiB/s and 137.3KiB/s, respectively. Once the LiteX BIOS gives control to me, I run the "ident" command, which shows "Ident: LiteX SoC on iCEBreaker 2025-02-19 15:52:14". This is decent evidence I am, in fact, running this SoC on iCEBreaker :).
February 19, 2025 at 9:10 PM
cr1901.bsky.social
Source and release now available :D!

github.com/cr1901/terat...
GIF of a sample session uploading the LiteX demo firmware via the LiteX BIOS using my Tera Term LiteX plugin. I then run the first frame of a demo that prints a 3D donut rendered using ASCII characters. Picture of a Tera Term session showing a mouse cursor highlighted over the File > Transfer > LiteX submenu Picture of the LiteX file dialog that opens when clicking the aforementioned LiteX submenu. There are text edit controls for adding a firmware file (named "File") and a boot address (named "Boot Address"). Additionally, to the right of these text edits, there is a button with ellipses and an unchecked checkbox called "Active". A Tera Term session is in the background. Picture of a Tera Term session showing the Memtest output from the LiteX BIOS. The important line displays "Memtest at 0x21010000 (64.0KiB)...".
February 17, 2025 at 8:17 PM
cr1901.bsky.social
I have implemented a plugin for Tera Term (teratermproject.github.io/index-en.html) that implements the Serial Flash Loader protocol used by LiteX firmware (github.com/enjoy-digita...).
Picture of Tera Term terminal emulator showing a LiteX SoC Builder firmware session. LiteX comes with a boot firmware that allows you to upload programs over a serial link. It normally only works with the provided litex_term program, but I got it to work and boot a demo firmware with Tera Term.
February 14, 2025 at 12:09 AM
cr1901.bsky.social
#lazyweb This music came from an old flash parody called on Newgrounds called "Windows RG". I downloaded it from here: github.com/fluffeon/Win...

Anybody know what the piece of music actually is?
February 11, 2025 at 3:13 AM
cr1901.bsky.social
@carlngraham.bsky.social Before and After Cache
Picture of a terminal session showing a memory test that ran at 1.4MiB/s, and an SPI flash read test that ran at 332.1KiB/s sequential, and 4.5KiB/s random. This was before I added a small cache. Picture of a terminal session showing a memory test that ran at 7.0 and 7.6MiB/s, and an SPI flash read test that ran at 2.4MiB/s sequential, and 13.7KiB/s random. This was after I added a small cache.
February 9, 2025 at 9:09 PM
cr1901.bsky.social
And I JUST finished putting this back together, damnit!

(Answer to what's wrong is in the alt text.)
Picture of a off-brand North American Super Nintendo controller. It is missing the Super Nintendo text and logo, but has an empty carve out for the "Nintendo" logo found on some official controllers. I put the controller back together incorrectly; the "A" and "B" buttons are supposed to be purple, and the "X" and "Y" buttons are supposed to be lavender. Instead, I have an lavender "A" button and purple "Y" button.
January 24, 2025 at 3:33 PM
cr1901.bsky.social
3.6 star review average?
Hours: Open now?

Oh boy!! Let's plan a field trip!

(Got removed from the Superfund list 2 months ago: www.nj.com/gloucester-c...)
Google review for Lipari Landfill, with a 3.6 star rating, hours indicating it is open now, an address of "Mullica Hill Rd, Mullica Hill, NJ", and the first sentence from the Wikipedia article. Lipari Landfill was once considered the worst Superfund site in the nation. It got removed from the Superfund list this year in October.
November 29, 2024 at 5:04 PM
cr1901.bsky.social
TIL about the "nose boot", introduced by the Xerox Alto. Ya know CTRL+ALT+DEL/three finger salute? What if you needed all 10 fingers plus your nose to (re)boot the computer?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_A...
Each key on the Alto keyboard is represented as a separate bit in a set of memory locations. As a result, it is possible to read multiple key presses concurrently. This trait can be used to alter from where on the disk the Alto boots. The keyboard value is used as the sector address on the disk to boot from, and by holding specific keys down while pressing the boot button, different microcode and operating systems can be loaded. This gave rise to the expression "nose boot" where the keys needed to boot for a test OS release requires more fingers than the user can articulate. Nose boots were obsoleted by the move2keys program that shifts files on the disk so that a specified key sequence can be used.
November 25, 2024 at 3:32 AM
cr1901.bsky.social
It's 5pm at the Lobster House in Cape May, NJ. That's right! It's @steveklabnik.com Blog Post Reading Time :D!

steveklabnik.com/writing/when...
Picture of fried shrimp, French fries, applesauce, a glass of water, and artisan bread in the background.
November 20, 2024 at 10:22 PM
cr1901.bsky.social
Friends who chatted with me on hellsite and Fedi should recognize this landmark from my avatar :D.

Here's an alternate view without me :)!
Photo of Cape May Lighthouse showing its entire length behind trees of the nearby parking lot.
November 20, 2024 at 9:54 PM
cr1901.bsky.social
End of the line.
Photo of Sunset Beach, NJ, showing the wreck of the USS Atlantis and the Delaware Bay/Atlantic Ocean in the background.
November 20, 2024 at 7:45 PM
cr1901.bsky.social
Cool, image support. I didn't even need to write a line of decoding :P.

(Real talk, should prob learn JPEG, but every time I try to grok DCT I fail... is it like DFT, 'cept Oops All Cosines?)
Picture of my Nightfall Express (Gopher-like) browser called Ballast. I am demonstrating the ability to view images and go forward and backward between pages. The GUI is 640x480, and there is a heavily compressed JPEG of a riverbank and mountain in the background.
October 25, 2024 at 1:09 AM
cr1901.bsky.social
Bluesky now has over 10 million users, and I was #46,746!

Huh, at least wrt social media, I'm "leading edge". What a concept :o...
Picture of a rectangle that says: Celebrating 10M users #46,746 Certified Bluesky Elder, First 1%.
September 16, 2024 at 11:05 PM
cr1901.bsky.social
I have made a release of the monitor switcher application. It should work on ARM/x64 Apple, x64 Linux, and x64 Windows (though I've only tested the last one). An installer is provided for Windows. Give it a try, and hope you save seconds of your life :D.

github.com/cr1901/swmon...
Picture of swmon GUI window, showing two comboboxes on the left to choose a monitor and monitor input type to switch to. The mouse hovers over the "HDMI 2" selection to the input combobox. A "Switch!" button is on the right, which actually performs the monitor switch. Information on the current selected monitor is provided in a small bottom panel.
May 27, 2024 at 4:54 AM
cr1901.bsky.social
Happy 5.25" #FloppyDisk Day, everyone :D!

I should install Xenix at some point on my 286...
Picture of a 5.25" floppy disk contained within a protective sleeve. The label on the part of the floppy sticking out has the logo of CNet (a company that made Ethernet cards, AFAICT), and the text "CN100E XENIX Drivers, Diskette Version 1.00". On the sleeve, the CNet logo is repeated at the bottom with thin blue stripes. There are also thicker blue stripes on a diagonal on the side. The center of the sleeve has text that reads: "Reliable, Always Was, Always Will Be, The Total Network Solution Company". Seems optimistic to me...
May 25, 2024 at 11:44 PM
cr1901.bsky.social
The tradition continues unabated on my IBM 5150 (monochrome monitor) :'D!

Thankfully, my IBM PC AT (color monitor) doesn't seem to celebrate...
Picture of the same IBM 5150 amber monochrome monitor. The display shows a diagnostic report (via CHECKIT) for RAM. The memory report states that there was an ERROR at Address 05DF60h, and the bad bit(s) were the Parity (error detection) bit. It remains to be seen whether the parity circuit or the RAM storage for the parity bit is failing. Picture of the screen _before_ the report showing bars of memory representing the progress of the memory test. "Test Program Buffers" (the memory check routine has to live in RAM, after all :D) has passed, but "Test Base Memory" has failed. The progress bar has 18 checkmarks and two "X"s in the middle; each 2 checkmarks represents 65536 bytes of RAM successfully tested. The two "X"s mean that that particular 65536 byte chunk of RAM had an error. Picture of my IBM PC AT's EGA monitor. The display shows bars of memory representing the progress of a memory test via CHECKIT. All relevant progress bars ("Base Memory", "Extended") show that the memory test has passed (all checkmarks). Consequently, CHECKIT doesn't produce a report, hence no image of the report! Picture of the same IBM PC AT EGA monitor showing CHECKIT's Hard Disk Test completed without errors. There is a 5.25" hard drive made of box-drawing characters as art in the top-left corner. The top right corner gives some stats on the drive: Drive 0 (C:), 614 cylinders, 4 heads, 17 sectors/track, and 21,377,024 bytes. The bottom right corner lists errors. The errors listed are expected errors; they consist of bad cylinders and heads (cylinders 83, 334, and 565, heads 3, 2, and 1, respectively) that I told the hard disk controller about when I initially formatted the drive. Hence, these are treated as normal and acceptable errors. Since all the tests passed, there is no report screen, like for the 5150.
December 31, 2023 at 5:53 PM
cr1901.bsky.social
It's starting to be a New Year's Eve tradition for me to test my vintage machines and discover a wonderful new world of errors (also, there's a bad DRAM chip somewhere according to the full memory test)...

Ahh well, I willingly celebrated the tradition this time.
Picture of the amber monochrome monitor of my IBM 5150. The display shows a diagnostic report (via CHECKIT) for the attached hard drive. There are several errors of "MINOR" severity on cylinders 10, 16, 19, 20, 25, 31, 47, 48, 52, 53, 60, 64, 68, 70, and 77, _all_ on head 0. The notes for all of them say "Soft Error. Corrected by ECC." If I push the "Page Down" key, as suggested by the bottom of the report, I assure you there are even more cylinders with soft errors (~80 in all) not listed here! In other words, this hard drive, at least without a low-level format, probably does not have long for this world.
December 31, 2023 at 4:46 PM
cr1901.bsky.social
It's a Lobster House night. Time to read a @steveklabnik.com blog post!
Picture of crabmeat cocktail, with crabmeat and lettuce in the right third, cocktail sauce in the lower left third, and a lemon in the upper right third, all surrounded by ice and some forks at the top.
November 16, 2023 at 10:37 PM
cr1901.bsky.social
Reskeet with something you own that most people don't.

I believe this is a Microscience HH-1050. I don't remember the exact model number.

I didn't want to open it, but IIRC the head was stuck to the platter and couldn't move. The drive (mostly) works last I checked after some PCB trace repair.
An old 5.25" hard drive with the cover removed. The platters are a rusty orange-brown color, normal for the era. The actuator arm moves in a straight vertical line to the center instead of sweeping a circular arc over the platter surface.
August 29, 2023 at 4:02 PM