unwind

This book is mentioned a lot early in the article, and its effects on people's perception of the industry are discussed.

What math error with the building's height? Assuming it's what you quoted, 164 ft converts to 49.9872 m so "50 m" seems excellent as the value to present?

It's weird to people familiar with real German, since 'V' in German is pronounced like 'F' in English.

It's like they took a word already from German ("wiener" as in hot dog) and then broke it while trying to make it more German, or something.

Uh you're not mixing up Linuses, are you? Haven't watched anuthing from LTT in a while but it sounded suspicious. :)

More obvious problems with the code as shown:

- The macros doing arithmetic (KiB, MIN etc) don't put their arguments in parentheses, that is very dangerous.

- The code assumes that int and i32 are the same size.

- Don't cast the return value of malloc(). Please Google this.

I appreciated the use of structs by value, that's a nice design.

I agree there's a risk of overflow in the arithmetic around sizes/alignment, but with a 64-bit `usize` that should be mostly theoretical.

Meta: I think the word "Bike" in the title would be helpful, for those few not into 80s kids' things.

Fire hydrants don't exist, they're just part of that cool media-pushed picture of some mythological place where things are ... weird and different.

Big Clive (a Youtuber from Scotland) often reverse-engineers circuits, resulting in him drawong the schematic in purple sign marker, often while commenting on the virtues (or lack thereof) of the design.

I was just starting to think "doesn't Big Clive visit Edinburgh periodically?" and then OP's suggestion scrolled into view. :)

Sounds like a great video idea for him, really.

Awesome, thanks!

* [...] some bumpf [...]*

Uh, as in "excessive paperwork", like brochures/leaflets [1] about the new products? Not a native speaker, had a parse error I'm just trying to resolve ...

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/EnglishLearning/comments/1hlbxv7/co...

Do note that this very cool project does not run on the "default" MiSTer hardware. This board is $250 from AMD.

I like your idea of a wild night out!

Note to others: that tester board looks fairly passive, i.e. I don't see (mention of) a microcontroller to talk to the chip that high-powered cables must have. So I guess it's somewhat limited in the number of things it can check?

Meta: isn't it still 2026 pretty much globally? When did we switch from only labelling older articles with their year?

Meta: the loss of the word "up" from the title also does not help in its parsing.

Very cool, even though it's limited to Makita LXR at this point.

I think the home page is LLM-aided, the design looks very familiar and wording like

[...] no software to install, nothing to set up. Plug in an Arduino, flash the firmware [...]

gives me pause. I am an actual embedded software engineer, and I would not classify finding, wiring (with resistors!) and flashing a microcontroller board as "nothing to set up".

As someone without musical ear but a healthy respect for makers of instruments of all kinds, this was a great article!

I tend to think that the bar for building e.g. a small synth is like those by mitxela [1], with a tiny microcontroller running C on the metal.

Then the author here uses multi-threaded Python to schedule notes and do millisecond-length powering of 30+ solenoids and make thousands of people feel it's a proper instrument?! Wow!

[1]: https://mitxela.com/projects/silly_synth

Presumably small FPGA boards, like the $47 one in the linked article

Small boards have less I/O pins than larger boards typically, and small/cheap FPGA chips on small boards are also more limited than larger, more expensive parts.

Edit: precise price.

Cool! Couldn't see an obvious publishing date, but the Github repo and comments imply this lacks a "(2015)" tag.

Edit: syntax.

I'm firmly in camp dad joke, but since Ü is a German letter that is not part of the Swedish alphabet, may I suggest you learn how to say RÄKSMÖRGÅS and update the joke?

The patched version might even work on some Swedish-speakers if you nail the pronounciation! :)

To reiterate on another comment that would make no sense to Swedish speakers. Å is a distinct letter, with a different and unique vowel sound. It is in no way "a slightly different kind of A".

Your suggestion sounds a bit like spelling Apple like AIILE and using the circles to form a cool infinity symbol. Or something.

Wow this is really cool!

Epic to see that it has "No Man's Land" [0] and really really weird feeling to read the readme. No idea why it's listed as a "17 Bit" title though, perhaps they distributed it at some point but they certainly were not involved in creating it. Source: I wrote it. Fun times.

Edit: formatting.

[0]: https://amigafreeware.downer.tech/17bit/17bit/1423

Nah I'm still against repeating the type name all over the place, and the cast adds nothing good imnsho.

Meta: a space is missing in the title.

Since this is one of the bugs, I always recommemd writing

    game->boardPieces = swAlloc(sizeof(ThingHandle*) * row * column);

Like this instead:

    game->boardPieces = swAlloc(sizeof *game->boardPieces * row * column);

It's not 100% better, but it cuts out a few tokens which helps readability and moves the significant asterix further left where I think it's easier to spot.

Meta: confusing typo in title. Mods , please fix penciN -> penciL. Thanks.

Can you elaborate on how it detects and signals if it runs out of output buffer space? I couldn't see how the amount of available space was even communicated to `fc_enc()`.

Also there some "C icks" (to me, I'm very picky and used to know the standard awfully well from answering many SO questions) that you might want to look into. The two I remember now are the casting of `void` pointers from allocation functions, and (worse) the assumption that "all bits zero" is how a NULL pointer is represented.

Probably [1], from 2025.

[1]: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/31374/pinocchio-by-collodi-c...

Meta; typo in title, should be "learNEd".

This is fantastic, thank you for doing this. I hadn't thought of the poor Jaguar in ages! Heh.

Found a tiny typo, this sentence from quite early (page 17):

Notice how apparently wasteful this file format is: some of the triplets contain only byte.

I think the word "one" is missing before the final "byte".

Fun post! Very happy to see a 20-something year old find and fix bugs in an X11 wm from before they were born. Gives me hope.

There was some kind of editing snafu though, the loop header in the big (first) code block reads:

    for (i = 0; i < 10; i++, nuke_count++)

But the references to it in the text, and updated versions in the patches, show it as just

    for (;;)

That was confusing me a bit.

How about "R, G, B Mars" [1], then?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy