retrac

Very interesting. My new hearing aids support Auracast and there's a complete dearth of transmitting equipment.

I remain unconvinced about Auracast. This kind of short-range broadcast is what analog baseband radio (induction loop) still excels at. (The properties of baseband tends to mimic how sound itself travels, including overlapping transmissions and fading with distance and blocked by walls.)

Auracast feels a bit like a compelled "improvement" for patent portfolio purposes. Though at the rate deployment is going, by the time it's widely deployed I guess the patents will have been expired.

In some ways there has been a significant step backwards for accessibility with tech progress. Traditional speakers function as inductive loop transmitters. Anything with a traditional coil speaker I can just put my head near it and switch my hearing aid to T-mode and I get a direct signal from the electronics with no speaker/microphone intervening.

Piezoelectric speakers (like in a cheap smartphone or TV unit) do not have this property. No coil.

How are you for task completion? For me, transferring a load of laundry from the washer to dryer is not an atomic operation. There is ample room to get derailed and wander off during the twenty seconds it should take. It can be interrupted by almost anything. Oh, I forgot to send that message. Oh, I forgot to check for the parcel. Oh, I need to go to the store today still. And I will walk away and forget to come back and finish.

I've encountered several times an argument that goes something like this: corporations and other large economic or political institutions are the "original" AI agent -- slow and human-mediated, but with the same quality of non-human intellect and potential to impact the world through its non-human decision-making. It seems to me the essence, whatever it is philosophically speaking that we seem to "concentrate" into an AI model, may have first been distilled to a limited extent, when writing was invented.

> Modern implementation of FPU emulation might be more straightforward.

Most 32-bit designs throw an exception on an invalid instruction so it can be caught and handled at runtime. Even basic ARM Cortex-M0 chips throw a catchable exception on illegal instructions.

So one option is to just issue the FPU instructions as if the FPU exists, and then catch and emulate.

This is how operating systems emulated FPUs on processors like the 68020, the 386 and early RISC machines, if they didn't have an FPU.

Focal length. In a phone camera the lens is smooshed right against the sensor. Such cameras have fisheye-type lenses, and the image is cropped in the centre and dewarped in software. But it's just not the same. That said convenience is above all. If I just need to photograph something I use my phone camera.

With photography as an art I have gone back to film. The cost in money and time and space involved with taking an impression of light gives it gravity that is lacking with a phone camera. It's a different kind of process. One thing I've noticed is that developing is like taking the photograph anew. It can be weeks before I finish a roll and get around to developing it, and I surprise myself.

Oh yes there's been some ELKS activity lately.

Does it support the 286's 16-bit protected mode at all?

286 protected mode has the 8086-style 16-bit addresses and segmentation. But with virtualization and protection.

Not very many operating systems made use of it. The x86 world skipped over it directly from 8086 real mode to 32-bit paging.

Edit: to answer my own question it seems the recent branch dropped 286 protected mode support

https://github.com/ghaerr/elks/pull/235

> So it's you to thank for porting Fuzix to Raspberry Pi Pico.

No not me it was David Given over at the link I gave (not my blog).

I have poked around Fuzix but I am not a major contributor.

> So is it possible to compile programs for Fuzix on a PC?

Most of the development is cross-devel from PC.

Yes. It has Unix style processes. The basic memory model is similar to ancient Unix on the PDP-11 without paging. A process gets a flat memory space. Processes are swapped out in the background as necessary.

How it is implemented varies by platform. On the 8-bit micros it takes advantage of bank-switching memory hardware if there is any. On the MMUless 68K a flat single address space can be used with position-independent code for the processes. On platforms with paging or relocation hardware that is used. Most of the host platforms do not have hardware memory protection, but there's room in the design to support it.

It has been ported to the Raspberry Pi Pico [1] (ARM Cortex-m0+ based) and could be ported to other microcontrollers which have enough RAM.

Toolchain is the biggest problem. It's hard to get a good cross toolchain that works. FUZIX's creator has been writing a portable C compiler but it's not done yet. The code does compile with Clang and GCC but a working toolchain is a steep knowledge cliff to climb.

I have got the kernel to build and link for a riscv32i target. Just need some real riscv32 hardware to test it on. And free time.

[1] https://cowlark.com/2021-02-16-fuzix-pi-pico/index.html

No I think Alan just moved where it's hosted:

https://codeberg.org/EtchedPixels/FUZIX last updated 4 days ago

Alan's currently putting most of his energy into the compiler. It's a C compiler in C which can compile itself, and compile FUZIX, for 8080 and Z80 targets. The goal is to make it compile itself on all the platforms it can run on eventually. :)

https://codeberg.org/EtchedPixels/Fuzix-Compiler-Kit

Home distillation has been legal in New Zealand since 1996. I'm not from NZ, but from what I can tell from afar, it has not caused any significant problems. Stills are legal and can be bought in shops. There are commercially available countertop appliances which can produce half a litre of 80 proof vodka from a few litres of fermented sugar water.

North Americans probably have some cultural hangover from Prohibition about the dangers of small-scale distillation. Methanol in particular is probably overstated as a danger. Methanol poisoning seems to mostly happen from adulteration, often with what is mistakenly thought to be industrial ethanol. It is produced at very low levels by fermentation (less than 0.1%) and so at the home distillation scale there's not enough in one batch to be a significant concern. Fire, however, is a genuine risk.

I'm reminded of this recent Pew Research poll [1] about whether people believe their fellow citizens are moral.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2026/03/05/in-25-countr...

There's a poem carved into the stonework of Washington Union Station, part of the art installation The Progress of Railroading from c. 1909:

the old mechanic arts / controlling new forces / build new highways / for goods and men / override the ocean / and make the very ether / carry human thought

the desert shall rejoice / and blossom as the rose

> I'm amazed they (or others) haven't rolled their own wireless audio standard by now.

They have. Apple has AirPlay and MFi which includes their own proprietary set of codecs and protocols for media streaming over a link similar to but not actually Bluetooth. Quite a few devices support it, such as my hearing aids.

Also, while the new Bluetooth LE Audio shares the Bluetooth name, it's a completely new protocol for most intents and purposes; for example audio can be streamed one-way without pairing first, and it's surprisingly low latency (20 ms or so).

Some style guides recommend the diaeresis over doubled vowels when they are pronounced separately. The idea is I believe from French: maïs, Noël, etc.

I was taught to do it that way in public school here in Canada in the 90s; it is the textbook proper way to spell words like coördination. I was also taught that no one actually spells it that way and that co-ordination and coordination are both fine and far more common.

100 BTC might convince you otherwise.

> There's no way a sensor can tell if a signal was from its own origin?

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1978ntc.....2...18F/abstra...

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA218226.pdf

> An increasingly popular modulation scheme is Binary Pseudo Random Phase Coding (BPRPC), whereby the phase of the transmitted signal is switched between 0 and 180 under the control of a binary pseudo random sequence

this applies straightforwardly to lidar

basically: optical CDMA or DSSS

spoofing replay may still be a concern

I know this sounds insane but I've been dwelling on it. Language models are digital Ouija boards. I like the metaphor because it offers multiple conflicting interpretations. How does a Ouija board work? The words appear. Where do they come from? It can be explained in physical terms. Or in metaphysical terms. Collective summing of psychomotor activity. Conduits to a non-corporeal facet of existence. Many caution against the Ouija board as a path to self-inflicted madness, others caution against the Ouija board as a vehicle to bring poorly understood inhuman forces into the world.

The ghost of Multics walks yet the page tables awaiting recorporealization.

Everything dies in winter. And then is reborn. Everyone who lives in a cold climate knows deep in their bones that cold and winter are death.

Though if we're going to get stereotypical about national characteristics (a dangerous game) then what might be more specifically Japanese is the particularly heightened understanding of this cycle. Or at least, its expression in art, when in the west we might flinch away.

I'm currently reading Spring Snow, so probably some of Yukio Mishima is drifting into my thoughts here. (Explaining puns ruins them but there it is again: Yuki o. Snow.)

Just a month ago the American ambassador to Iceland recently made a joke that demanded formal explanation from the Icelandic state; the ambassador apologized for the "joke" and misunderstanding immediately.

Anyone taking bets who will be made persona non grata first?

I recently skimmed a grammar of Faroese [0]. Not much has been written about the language in English; only a few books, and an English-Faroese dictionary was only first published in the 1980s.

It's spoken by about 50,000 people in the Faroe Islands, which are between Iceland and Scotland. The isles were settled by Viking-era Norse about a thousand years ago and then largely forgotten by the rest of the world. But they kept speaking their version of Old Norse and it became its own language. There are many dialects and the writing system was designed to cover all of them, so it is is etymologically informed by Old Norse and it is very conservative. It's not at all indicative of how it's really pronounced. The written form is somewhat even mutually intelligible with Icelandic / Old Norse, but the spoken language is not.

Underneath those æ and ð is a language that is oddly similar to English, like parallel convergent evolution. It's a North Germanic language not a West Germanic language so the historical diversion point is about 1500 years ago.

But it has undergone an extensive vowel shift (but in a different pattern). And also like English, it has also undergone extensive affrication (turned into ch/j) of the stop consonants and reduction of final stops and intervocalic stops. It has the same kind of stress - vowel reduction interaction that English has. That further heightens the uncanny effect.

I came away with the impression that it is English's closest sibling language, aside from Dutch. Some vocabulary:

broðir "broh-wer" (brother), heyggjur "hoy-cher" (hill/height), brúgv "brukf" (bridge), sjógvar/sjós "shekvar/shos" (sea), skyggj "skooch" (sky/cloud), djópur "cho-pur" (deep), veðirinn "ve-vir-uhn" (weather). Rough pronunciations given between quotes; all examples are cognate with English!

There's an extended story reading by a native speaker here [1] if you want an example of what it sounds like. No idea what they're saying. The intonation reminds me a bit of the northern British isles which also had a Norse influence.

[0] https://annas-archive.org/md5/4d2ce4cd5e828bbfc7b29b3d03349b...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSXu2fuJOTQ

Repost of an earlier comment of mine.

NASA launches and operates Earth-observing satellites for measuring the weather and climate.

The wage gap between black and white Americans is nearly the same today as in 1970.

Bandwidth between Los Angeles and New York, very approximately:

1915: 1 kHz - telegraph lines

1925: 10 kHz - a handful of voice channels

1935: 100 kHz - several frequency multiplexed carrier lines across the desert

1945: 200 kHz - a few more lines - war time expansion restrictions

1955: 5 MHz - coaxial cable and microwave links

1965: 20 MHz - coast to coast simultaneous television and tens of thousands of voice channels

1975: 100 MHz - scaling up

1985: 10 GHz - analog to digital phase change - fibre optic and satellite

I still remember the first time I spoke to a person so far away the sun had set and risen in between.

Opinion poll Dec 2025 Canada-wide: "How do you think the Canadian government should approach the following countries?"

https://thehub.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/c9Enf-how-do-yo...

Some is just shock and overreaction I think. But it is an enormous shift.

It's a pile of rocks in the same way an apartment building is a pile of concrete blocks. It is a building. It could crumble in on itself. The interior rooms could be destroyed.

It's a tomb. The Pharoah was buried in the very middle of it. There's an ascending gallery [1] and a burial chamber, along with access shafts. The burial chamber [2] is a large structure in the approximate middle. [3]

It hasn't settled or shifted enough to deviate or crush this significantly. But such shifting was a recurring problem in early Pyramids though. The foundation work must have been an incredible undertaking.

> [The King's Chamber] is faced entirely with granite and measures 20 cubits (10.5 m; 34.4 ft) east-west by 10 cubits (5.2 m; 17.2 ft) north-south. Its flat ceiling is about 11 cubits and 5 digits (5.8 m;19.0 ft) above the floor, formed by nine slabs of stone weighing in total about 400 tons. All the roof beams show cracks due to the chamber having settled 2.5–5 cm (0.98–1.97 in).

One day it'll give way and it'll just be a pile of stones. But for now it is still an engineered structure working as designed.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/Grande-g...

[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Kheops-c...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_shaft#/media/File:Great_P...

Sometimes what is on the page is ambiguous. Imagine a scan where the dot over the i is missing in a word like "this". What's on the page is "thls" but to transcribe it that way would be an error outside of forensic contexts.

I am reminded it's basically impossible to read cursive writing in a language you don't know even if it's the same alphabet.

I can't help but wonder if it's a bit of self-aware humour about "scientific looksmaxing". Symmetry is involved in attractiveness but symmetry alone can only carry you so far.

The new RP 2350 has an enhanced PIO that relaxes some of the constraints the author ran into here.

Also the new HSTX (high-speed serial transmit) unit is really well suited for rapid line coding.

Here's a different project that generates a high resolution high depth VGA signal from the RP 2350: https://www.breatharian.eu/hw/disphstx/index_en.html

And here's NTSC composite using just the original PIO: https://github.com/obstruse/pico-composite8

On 24 January 1926, the British ship SS Antinoe was damaged by a hurricane and was at risk of sinking. The American ship SS President Roosevelt assisted in rescue and docked in Plymouth, England. A photograph of the rescue was published in both London and New York the next day. The quickness with which this photo reached New York apparently caused such a sensation that Science and Invention magazine published the linked infographic on how it was accomplished; briefly: the image was sent as a digital bitmap by transatlantic telegraph cable.