crb3

For creativity, get used to running a fan nearby. If you're like me, your inbuilt pattern-matcher will autocomplete and drag up 'ghost impressions' while you're otherwise occupied. A fan is better than an electronic noise source because its air, and thus its sound, interacts with the surrounding world; instead of being a point-source, it's a better background.

For problem solving, dwell on the problem in its domain just before bedtime, and make sure it's the last thing on your mind as you settle down into sleep. Let the subconscious have sole access to your understanding of the problem overnight.

Everybody's built different, but these work for me.

> When did using "+" instead of "&" become acceptable in proper English? I understand this is a tech blog and I have no problem with "+" used in a tech context, the use in a virtue signalling piece on the rules of writing a good essay seems misplaced.

Could be that tech bias. I've been coding awhile, and '+' reads as 'ADD', for inclusion, while '&' reads as 'logical AND', for restrictive subsetting. The '&' no longer sits right. (Plus, it's a shell and HTML metacharacter, thus it's a potential potent piece of trouble in casual typing and so something to be avoided.)

IRC lacks backscroll. Even if you park a bot in your channel to act as recording secretary, there's no low-friction means of getting at that history without going out of band. This means that spam doesn't persist... but neither does consideration and consensus.

Chrome already ignores OS-level name-resolution in favor of phoning home directly to Google DNS unless you block their IP#s at your border. I see it daily in etherape. Side-effect: Chrome users on my LAN have to type in IP#s to browse local resources because their browser ignores my dnsmasq, which resolves the split horizon.

I suggest, on completion of a major task, you switch to cleaning up after the task. If possible, get up out of your chair to do this -- I find that the transition to physical movement helps this along. It's easier if it's a hardware task -- then there's shelving instruments, putting tried-and-discarded parts back into lab inventory, sweeping / vaccing up metal shavings etc -- but there's also polishing up documentation, tidying up journal / wiki entries, capping off histories, doing a grammar/detail edit pass on comments in code, snapshotting process files, etc. For me, psychologically, it's bundling up the job's result and closing off commitment to it which frees me up to face the next task.

Post the results on http://ww.gredforge.net?

Fill out the comment-header first, then; that's what I do. That informal-prose chatty summary of what the code does and why, what it takes in and what its output is, becomes in my mind the spec for the code while I'm writing it, even in casual one-shot Perl filters. It makes it easier for me to choose variable names which inform rather than mystify, because the master reference is staring me in the face as I write. It's also an attitude-anchor for specific tail-end comments to expand on the summary explanation by detailing why a line is as it is and does what it does. YMMV, but, for me, the payoff is an easier time of drawing thoughts together into code, plus, months down the road, an easier time of deciphering why I wrote the code that way.

16 isn't a good size according to the Rosenberg paper (http://www.cs.miami.edu/~burt/learning/Csc609.022/random_num...) but 15 and 17 are sizes you could program an ATtiny45 to generate if you just wanted that quality of noise. I'm going to be real interested in trying out the actual noise-generator logic in the follow-up article to see if I can hear any useful tonal difference. Maybe they were just frustrated by hardware that kept drifting into the forbidden state and brute-forced it until it couldn't; I've had that happen with PRNGs I built with series-4000 CMOS logic and xgates. Stay tuned, I guess.

> I'm not sure what exactly is different between the two

The 76477 (http://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/images/4/40/SN76477_-_Manual.pdf) has more pins and uses them to bring out more of the controls. The noise-clock in particular is controllable by anything that sinks its 'resistor' pin's current to ground, so a simple NPN sink driven by a slow sawtooth will smoothly vary the noise output from a 'tiktiktik' to a roar. The 76495 doesn't make that control available.

Did you happen to notice how many shift-register stages made up the PRNG for the white-noise output? I'm sure I've got one of the chips on hand, so (eventually) I can 'scope the output for a good guess, but it'd be good to have a more immediate eyewitness report.

In my assembler and technician days I stayed alert to visits by distributor reps: older but good databooks were likely to be found in the trashbins shortly thereafter, ready to be fished out and taken home.

These days, for a given part-number, Googling "part-number pdf" returns links to where datasheets can be downloaded. This is a distinct improvement: disk space is easier found than shelf space.

Not with your proposed marketing mechanism, but there's https://www.fictionpress.com/ -- a spinoff of https://www.fanfiction.net/.

> I always thought it should be called USRT when strictly synchronous, but indeed, everyone else called it USART, so I called it the "USART controller"

Because the chips that do synchronous serial IME also do asynchronous, hence USART. Which makes sense: asynchronous is a far more widely accepted and used protocol, so one chip-placement covers connecting to those devices as well.

Yep, it was just the fever that knocked it out.

I'm so much the other way that it's scary, because it's a vulnerability, one I didn't know about until it happened.

Musical/artistic family, multi-talented all around me. I'd keep my suburban-bicycled paper-route from getting boring by playing back in my head music I'd heard and liked. Stumbled into hardware, then software, as something I could do and do well and get paid to do it. Whatever it was I was doing -- songwriting, drawing, carving, circuitry, code -- I visualized/audialized it first, working it out on the sketchpad viewscreen of my mind before committing the work to physical fact.

And then I found out how easily the whole thing could be shut down. Stressed-out bowstring-taut -- pending divorce, single-parenting, work stresses -- and it was enough to let staph take hold, in my elbow of all places -- and suddenly the ibuprofen didn't keep the fevers down and my visualization got fevered and dissolved away and I couldn't code, couldn't create, because I couldn't visualize, until the antibiotics finished killing off the infection.

Anybody else gone through this?

> Use the Bible. That's something a third of the world agrees on, and the whole west is founded upon it.

http://www.haaretz.com/grounds-for-disbelief-1.10757

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus. Sorry, that authority is impeached.

> makes it impossible to just plug in some perfboard with headers on it and make your own shields

Not so. You just have to drill ten holes, using another piece of tenth-inch perfboard as a drilling guide. I've done it; it works.

> Unfortunately, I don't know any good english books on the subject

Absent a better recommendation from someone else, I'll suggest "Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit" by Adelle Davis. I regard it as a databook on the components in your body.

> With InkWell we’ve tried to explore writerly creativity in a creative way—by letting the program emerge from a haze of half-known ideas

The half-known ideas (templates) presented were not the author's own, instead they were borrowed from other writers. This isn't writing, it's sampling.

As does having a machine-level visual debugger for at least one of those architectures. Being able to switch to the CPU pane and see how C-function call and return were handled at the register level in Borland's Turbo Debugger was profoundly enlightening for both my C and assembly coding.

Maybe they got an NSL.

> Surely the reproduction of an ancient hardware drum sequencer in today's software should be perfect.

CD-quality is 44.1KHz sample-rate 16-bit stereo. That's 22us per sample. That's a lot of perceptible quantization error when, it turns out, our pitch, timbre and spacial-placement sensory gear is sensitive down to the microsecond level (google "microsecond phase sensitivity" on that). A drum synthesizer done on a PC is limited to the soundcard's samplerate at output, so it's always going to be perceptibly less real than continuous analog.

It can and did happen, as the afflicted chip was the SMPS controller.

At last, a use for all those write-protect stickers we collected for floppies...

> Worse, people who still pay any attention to paper mail are likely to send you back a reply on paper or call you. Now you need a mail room, a data entry operation, and a call center.

I'm not all that happy about paper spam either, but this makes sense depending on your target demographic. If you're selling to seniors, for instance...

One bit/pin can be more than enough if you can code some state behind it. On one embedded MCU job, I ended up with just one port pin free. I tied it to a piezo-oscillator and played short Morse strings through it; that was my printf. (It helps that I'm a ham, so I could head-copy those messages.)

Once I turned it over to production use, the techs found the difference in overall sound between "OK" and an error message useful enough that they kept it jumper-enabled. They did put tape over the oscillator's opening to cut down the amplitude, though.

IIRC 7-bit refresh. Good for 4116's; 4164's needed extra logic.

Like I said, it's a visualization technique, and it works better if you have some experience with pushing your mental energies around. Practice in Wiccan grounding, centering and shielding helps (Google that or start with http://www.witchvox.com and start probing, I guess; I don't know of any instruction materials currently in print or online). This is my experience, so I describe it here in first-person...

When I close my eyes, almost immediately my visual memory lights up with a "day review" which is like a daydream but for being something which I can direct, using pretty much the same visualization mechanism I use for data/code/schematic structures when I'm designing, coding or debugging. I can feel that forebrain activity as a slight heat just behind my forehead. It's great for overview and casual entertainment when I can afford the time, but not when I need a quick nap and it's keeping me conscious.

I will the main weight of my awareness to recede from that frontal visualization viewplane, moving toward the back of my skull, deliberately dissociating from the visual activity, to where things feel like they're quieter and move slower. If, for motorcycling, where a less tightly-focused, more panoramic viewpoint is best for situational awareness, I take a half-step back, for quick napping I take several steps back.

You can forcefully imagine the footsteps if it helps establish the change of center; after awhile, that mental positioning becomes familiar enough to dispense with the imagined physical/aural sound-effects.

Sorry if it sounds all too Crafty or New-Age, but that's how I live.

That's not universal. I've read that infants / small children tend to like sleeping while wrapped / confined. This adult: not so much. (Part of that is probably the Minuteman attitude I've adopted since becoming a single parent a couple of decades back. Anything which interfered with my ability to quickly respond to / protect my kids had to go.)

I do think it's the warmth. Part of our maintaining constant muscular tension is maintaining body heat. While we do seem to want to chill down slightly for sleep -- my observation, based on how often I'd nap on the bus and awaken sweaty, and I seem to recall reading something about that -- IME that tension does noticeably interfere with quickly getting to sleep.

How do you drink your coffee? If you sugar it, you're not dealing with just the caffeine.

Two techniques from my experience:

- 'walk back' in your mind to center yourself away from forebrain activity and visual activity (this is a visualization technique)

- cover your back with something insulated and/or warm. The less your back is staying tensed against chill air, the more physically relaxed you can be. I have a Thinsulate-filled sleeping bag that I use like a throw for this as it reflects body heat better than a comforter. Sleeping on a sofa, up against the back cushions, and noticing how it was good for naps, was what alerted me to this one.