@mgleadow @delanthear We have a few neighbours who have units nearby. If we could just reach the 2m and place it on the driveway, it would be 👌

@Gammitin From memory of having an A4000, isn't 4MB the magic number to try NetBSD on it? I mean purely for interest purposes; RISC OS is what it _should_ be running.

@mgleadow Yes, we're currently seeking some sort of advice on the matter. Have a renewables engineer in the running club we usually go to for advice (though their job is actually large scale solar projects, less domestic). But that's certainly been something we've been considering.

@mgleadow Ours is 11 years old and has had enough failures that we're seeking to replace it very soon. Where it is currently mounted will, in a short number of months, be all smashed up owing to building work, and whilst we've not picked a replacement, it's occurring shortly.

@mgleadow Spot on. You're good at this 😆

@mgleadow That makes a lot of sense. This particular boiler reeks of cheap and fails near enough every six months for what seems like no reason. And it was installed apparently by a person or team who would have lost a battle of wits with a rock.

Boilers are emphatically shit, right? I mean, their usual failure mode is to piss water all over the place and then stop working. Usually in a place where that sort of leakage is not desired.

Unless I've just missed decent boilers where that doesn't happen.

@cat Spectrum Lemmings supported mice?! That's one thing I do not remember from that era.

@ball I distinctly recall the late era, when I was aware of the modem banks you could call to automate sending messages, thus avoiding the embarrassment of having to request awkward messages with operators.

And, for whatever reason, even in 1998, they were still forcibly using 1200 baud forced rates.

I explained Pagers, POCSAG and how they function to my 13 year old offspring yesterday. The faces pulled were more amusing than I expected. I explained that this was a pre-mobile phone era and just what happened. That face was even more strained when I explained that it's still in use today, though obviously drastically reduced.

YouTube is utterly shit for people who rely on subtitles.

Thanks to sensory processing irregularities, I mostly watch video of all types with subtitles. I don't have difficulty with hearing, but there's only so much bandwidth I can concurrently process.

YouTube continually:
* turns off displaying auto-generated captions
* resets subtitle display settings
* refuses to auto-generate captions if the video is too long (fair, I suppose)

Regular enough that I have to fix settings >1 time per week.

@Gammitin Gosh, the tangerine toilet seat. I had one of those in 2000! My first post-graduation laptop. I wasn't keen on OS 9, and OS X was in beta so it ran Linux until OS X matured a bit. But mostly, I ran Linux on it 😆

@pa It's not the same binary, no, but inspecting the language intrinsics in the binary you mentioned indicates it might support some similar features. I'll try it out, but the ancient 6502 file I have has some features such as automatic checksum generation that I've not seen elsewhere.

If Microtec Research were a small company of little significance, I would stop looking.

But having seen at least six years (1979-1985) between two software packages would indicate that they had capital to operate for a while, and the fact that the company was acquired in 1996 by Mentor Embedded Systems (for $130 meeeeeelion dollars) makes me wonder precisely how much software they produced, and whether it's all lost to the great tech skip of time.

https://semiengineering.com/entities/microtec-research-inc/

The binary I have (ASM65.EXE) is a 16-bit DOS binary (like all of them are, without DOS extenders), but Ghidra's decoder indicates that the binary is broken. Which is confirmed; I've tried to run the binary on every version of MS-DOS from PC-DOS 1.0 up to MS-DOS 6.22, on a variety of spicy CPU emulations to no avail. An acquaintance on t'webs even tried it on a PC-98 machine.

There appears to be no archived documentation for the assembler.

In other news, I've been obsessing over an old 6502 assembler binary I've found, which has led me down the rabbit hole of finding a vendor - Microtec Research - whose software appears to have been largely unarchived.

Internet archive has some scans and a small number of software archives: https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Microtec+Research%22

Bitsavers has two tapes in simh format: https://bitsavers.org/bits/Microtec/

#retroComputing

It's been a comfortable number of years that I've been using it now, and I feel confident in saying:

I don't like NetworkManager. I don't like the way that, by default, it treats multiple ethernet interfaces as though they're interchangeable in a connection context unless they've been pinned down by MAC address or interface name. I don't like the hazy distinction between "we manage this" and "other stuff which may depend on this manages that".

Even systemd-networkd is better.

Norman Tebbit was a stupendous arsehole and I will toast his demise this evening. Good riddance you homophobic shitwit.

Huh, only just noticed my #c64 C case badge still has the protective film on it.

@mgleadow Yup. It's that but on every. Fucking. Site. It starts appearing in mobile apps. I start getting little irritating flashing things and prompts appear in my IDE (which I am currently now in the process of ditching in favour of going back to vim as a result of). It's the everyclippy, all over the place.