Wouter's Blog – Page 6 – Straight Jackets are on the left, Meds are on the right and Keep your hands off of my Crayons.

John Prine

It’s been three years.

From the comments:

Will Cayemberg
One of my coolest musical experiences involved this song. Long horrible divorce that very nearly ended me I ashamed to say. I began running at night in the dark on lonely country roads “trying to change the shape I was in” both physically and mentally. This song was in my ear buds most nights. Then I got a chance to see John in a tiny Manitowoc, Wi. theater and after a few songs I yelled out “Clay Pigeons” and he looked right at me and said “Yeah, I know that one.” The whole place cracked up. The next song he started Clay Pigeons and looked right at me and I yelled “Thank You.” I was thanking him for more than just a song request I think he helped me keep my sh#t together.

Spencer Mason
Rest In Peace, John. Music won’t be the same without you.

2023-04-07 by wrm 2020 0

Spaghetti and Cabbage. Strange combination.

So I looked in the fridge. We had carrots, cabbage, sandwich ham, and cream. Yea, with the kids out the house we have what they refer to as a “sauce fridge”.

And I felt like pasta.

Google to the rescue.

Boil some† spaghetti. Water, salt, ‘cmon you don’t need instructions for that.

Fry onions and cabbage (recipe calls for a head of cabbage, I have no idea how big a Napa cabbage is, I used about a third of a Cape Town cabbage). This takes longer than you might think. Pasta was al dente and I was still frying cabbage.

Add ham and more seasoning than the recipe calls for. Add the cream. Add the spaghetti. Add some reserved spaghetti water to make a sauce.

I didn’t have parmesan but I did have mozarella in the freezer. I left the carrots for another day.

† Technical Term

2023-04-06 by wrm Foooooood 0

Hey! I know these people!

Back in 1998, I worked my arse off to get the yellow Rand-Lover ready for the 50th Anniversary Tour. Made it, mostly. Some bits got bolted on later.

I recently found the video they put together, was planning to rip it to digital, turns out I don’t need to, Alan did it for us.

2023-03-28 by wrm Cars 0

Silicon mumbo-jumbo

So this thing crossed my path.

I suppose that’s as much of a disclaimer as you’re going to get.

Because it’s pure snake oil.

Of course I took it apart and reverse-engineered it.

The battery was a bit dodge so I disconnected it.

Someone else had been here before.

The schematic is very similar to the one on the cs.cmu.edu web page. The power supply is… interesting. Unless there’s an external transformer that I don’t have?

US Patent 3,290,589 issued Dec. 6th, 1966
Here’s a long but interesting history of the e-meter: https://scientologymoneyproject.com/2020/06/03/a-brief-history-of-how-scientologys-e-meter-came-into-existence-parts-1-10/

2023-02-22 by wrm Electronics Geek 0

Year of the Rabbit

2023-01-22 by wrm Farting around 0

End of an Era

Said goodbye to my 1959 Series II that I completely rebuilt back in the late nineties. And then we did many interesting, unforgettable trips and met fabulous people.

But I moved on and couldn’t provide the TLC required. Ended up not driving her (at all) for over five years — when I drained the fuel that had gone vrot in the tank, it was still red…

So she went to live with someone else via the guys over at Pon Steyn.

2023-01-13 by wrm Uncategorized 1

Jingle Bells

2022-12-24 by wrm Uncategorized 0

I lol’ed

Note to Groom: This is where you GTF away. Seriously. Most people don’t get this good a Hint. You won’t get another one this clear.

2022-12-09 by wrm Farting around 0

Welcome Distopia

Sol stopped pedaling and the whine died away to a moan, then vanished. He disconnected the wires from the electrical generator that was geared to the rear axle of the bike, and carefully coiled them up next to the four black automobile storage batteries that were racked on top of the refrigerator.

— Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room! a.k.a. Soylent Green

The novel was set in 1999, the movie in 2022. Reality is lagging a tiny little bit behind.

2022-12-07 by wrm Geek 0

IBM PC (x86) emulator

If you’re looking for a small, simple, light-weight x86 emulator, 8086tiny might be a good call.

The main problem with it is that it was written by a dude who writes code for the Obfuscated C Contest (as a matter of fact, the obfuscated version of 8086tiny won in 2013*) — and it shows. The “documented, commented, maintainable version” (his words) is written in a way… let’s just say that if you were a programme manager and one of the team members wrote code like this you would be a very worried person. Like DJ Bernstein’s daemontools or qmail, it’s clearly written by someone who Has Clue, but should not be approached by someone who doesn’t.

For example, the code comes with a BIOS. The BIOS also includes the instruction lookup table, which is obviously a critical part of the code, and has nothing to do with the BIOS…

Anyway, I managed to import the BIOS for the NEC APC into the memory space (the standard BIOS lives at 0xF0100 (F000:0100) – 0xF1Ef2 while the NEC BIOS lives at 0xFE000 (FE00:0000) – 0xFFFFF). There are clashes, the 8086tiny BIOS actually writes its own reset vectors to what would normally be part of the BIOS EPROM at 0xFFFF0, overwriting the NEC vectors, and it puts the stack at 0xFF000 (F000:F000) which is in the middle of the NEC BIOS — but I can fire up the emulator and use debug to look at the NEC BIOS so I guess it’s a matter of time before I maybe modify this thing to emulate the APC and not a PC XT.

Or not. Round ‘tuits are scare sometimes.

* Look, I’ll give him a lot of points for style, but I feel making the BIOS blob a critical part of your code and then not counting its size is kind of… cheating. But hey. It _is_ beautiful to look at.

2022-11-30 by wrm Computers 0