Filed under: Modern Computing, Retro computing

So, I had a lot of 8 bit computers growing up. I got them from garage sales at a time when people were upgrading to PCs and selling their old machines for for almost nothing. I did have a favorite, though. My Atari 800XL. I had a Commodore 64 and a CP/M running Altos 580, but the Atari's design just made so much sense to me (and it looked cooler, sorry breadbin C64).

Life happens and I had to get rid of that machine in a move in the 90s. A few years ago, though, I came across one with a 1050 drive for a reasonable price at a retro gaming convention and grabbed it. Since then I've turned it into the maximally upgraded example of an 800XL. Rapidus 65816 upgrade with 16mb of SDRAM, Ultimate 1mb upgrade card, VBXL video upgrade, FujiNet and SIDE3 (kinda wish I had gone with SIDE2 or an AVG cart, but it works).

That wasnt enough though. I had a very powerful 8/16 bit machine now, but it sat o my bench unused most of the time. It annoyed me and so I decided I would find some way to put the machine to daily use. As a keyboard. Now, put the pitchforks down, I would never harm my beloved 800XL by gutting it. Instead I came up with a weird plan.

The 800XL has a FastBasic program running on it that captures keystrokes out of the Pokey registers, adds the state of the right hand buttons and control/shift, and sends that as two bytes to my PC. On the PC is a python script that takes the bytes in, uses a cofiguration file to decode them into PC keycodes and injects them into the Linux uinput stack as keypresses. This is all enabled by the FujiNet, which lets me open a TCP socket to my PC over wifi. Currently the protocol itself has no encryption, but it is wrapped in the WPA2 encryption of the wifi connection.

This setup is great, honestly, and I've been using it for months. There are a few catches, though. Firstly, the Pokey only shows one keypress (and two modifiers) at a time. No rollover. This makes the software unuseable for gaming. Sorry die hard FPS players. Secondly, if you run a keyboard-heavy setup, you might find the lack of modifiers limiting. I use sway for a compositor and I've taken to using the right hand buttons as additional modifiers. Third, some things dont seem to play nicely with uinput. Particularly old games emulated in wine seem to have some kind of issue processing keystrokes this way. Sorry Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War fans (myself included).

I've mentioned this setup to a few people in the local retrocomputing community and have gotten some interest, so I'll be publishing the code in the next day or two (when I figure out where to host it) for others to use.

Filed under: Solar, Modern Computing

For the past couple of years I've been powering my desk, bench and stereo from 4 100 watt solar panels. This project started off with just a 60 watt panel and grew from there to include 2 charge controllers charging two separate banks of batteries. One bank responsible for the router and server, one for my desk and bench. In North Texas there have only been a few weeks where its been cloudy for so long that I've run out of power and overall I'd call it successful.

Doing this has definitely changed how I approach computing. Starting out I had a laptop, a couple of older monitors and several ARM Linux boards acting as servers for various locally hosted services. Now I use three Android devices as my computers, and the servers have been reduced down to one and all of the locally hosted services are gone with the exception of Home Assistant.

A big eye opener was when I spun up a locally hosted Pleroma instance and tried to run it from solar power. One cloudy day was all it took for my 1.2 KWH of battery to be almost completely empty. While I understand the push on the privacy side to move to self hosted web applications, I feel like its not practical from an energy perspective. Beyond that there are discussions about security and abelism that aren't happening as much as they need to.

I've moved to as much of a "mesh" infrastructure as I can as an alternative. My git repositories are hosted on a folder that gets synced to my devices using syncthing, negating the need for a service like Gitea to be running. I likewise use DecSync to sync my contacts and calendars to other devices. While fine in those applications I know from experience that messaging/microblogging isn't really feasible in a mesh architecture. Even if we had reliable and well established protocols to handle the data, we would still have to find some way to deal with the energy requirements of each node processing all of that data.

Looking back its been interesting to see how I've adapted to use as little energy as possible in ways I wouldn't have considered before. I feel like practical experience is an overlooked way of solving engineering problems. It will be interesting to see how I need to adapt when I move to a less sunny climate.

Filed under: Yuri

So, the cover didn't really catch my eye but I'm running Kobo out of new yuri manga so I decided to grab it. Vampires aren't really my cup of coffee, anything focused on them tends to be repetitive of a handful of themes. Immortality, redeemable-bad-boy-syndrome, pointless mysticism and the like. This is to say that going in I was biased against the work at the outset, but I've already read "I can believe I slept with you" twice and thought I should read something else before I go for round three.

It only took about 10 pages to win me over. First off, the cover does not do the art justice. Where I went in expecting a predictable and cookie cutter style, I found the characters to be well defined and possessing a wide range of expression. The vampiric tropes aren't present for the most part, no bursting into flames in the sun, no garlic issues, and not supernatural. They don't even like being called vampires. Aria, the vampire love interest, isn't dark or brooding. She is revealed to be in the range of a hundred or more years old and seemed to have some kind of relationship with the protagonist, Ichika's, grandmother.

What really won me over was the depiction of Ichika's interest in Aria. A lot of otherwise good Yuri manga can't seem to grapple with wanting to portray a lesbian relationship positively while also acknowledging that this isn't currently seen as normal by a lot of people. Some just don't ever depict any kind of pushback whatsoever which leads to a story that seems too much a fantasy. Some spend the whole story overcoming that pushback to then come to a screeching halt before any actual relationship develops. Vampeerz does not do this, Ichika recognizes that there will be pushback but decides her new love for Aria is too strong and she just leans in to it.

Another unexpected highlight is Sakuya, Aria's mother. Anyone who knows me will know that I love characters that are unabashedly open about their desires, and Sakuya is just that. She winds up as the school nurse, and in a hilarious scene that has Ichika and Aria going to the nurse Aria has to stop Ichika from seeing into the room because her mother has her legs spread, feet on the desk, drunk and looking at her laptop. I'm positive the implication was that she got caught masturbating and I genuinely laughed out loud.

I want more, the story is just getting started by the end of the second volume and I feel like its set up a great cast and premise. Depressingly I noted that the second volume was published in December of 2022 so I'm hoping this series doesn't just fade away.