fitzsim

Nice, I'd like to follow this. I tried browsing there with EWW, but I'm blocked by an "Enable JavaScript" message. This seems to be a Mastodon 4.x thing; 3.5.x servers work great in EWW (read-only at least). I'm hoping there's some ?nojs=1 type workaround that I haven't found yet. I wrote a blog post about this just the other day: https://www.fitzsim.org/blog/?p=465

The Talos II is blob-free. At launch, proprietary binary-only firmware was required for the network interface, but Raptor Computing Systems offered a bounty to reverse engineer and do a Free Software re-implementation of the firmware, and that effort succeeded and the bounty was paid. See:

https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Project_Ortega

https://github.com/meklort/bcm5719-fw

Typing on the keyboard is surprisingly fun.

For larger programs you can interact with the Lisp Badge via a serial console. Here's a setup for using Emacs's built-in serial support. This makes programming the Lisp Badge very similar to working in SLIME, with an on-target REPL and the ability to evaluate code fragments onto the target:

http://forum.ulisp.com/t/emacs-for-programming/236/13

I used that mode to port Emacs's Tetris to the Lisp Badge:

http://forum.ulisp.com/t/tetris-on-the-lisp-badge/945

After (save-image) and unplugging from serial, I had a portable Lisp-hackable handheld gaming system. I made small tweaks to the game code -- like new cheat modes or modified sound effects -- with the built-in keyboard.

Sort of meta, but why does plopdown.video require JavaScript? Without JavaScript enabled it renders as a blank page. The actual post is just text and images. Why put that behind a JavaScript wall? Doing so excludes all non-JavaScript-supporting browsers from viewing the site. That's also a type of open web failure, another example of the type of problem the article does a good job of dissecting.

I recently built three of these. There's no kit, so to build one you have acquire all the parts and learn TQFP soldering. The result is a really neat little computer. I did a write-up on my blog:

https://www.fitzsim.org/blog/?p=365