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I remember playing this on my father's 8086 and later 286 machines as a kid. I believe this is the first time I've thought of or seen the game in over 30 years. Nice :)

I've been building a MIDI device using PlatformIO with ESP-IDF: https://bitbucket.org/doughammond/fourays/src/master/firmwar...

I used this combination because I found USB device support in Arduino framework lacking flexibility.

You're assuming the tank switch is low voltage.

The very first thing to do is read the manual for the installation and/or parts used. Second, approach the tank setup with a high voltage multimeter and carefully and safely take measurements of what you might be dealing with.

I believe this is because the yaml is in fact the instructions for what to include in the binary. It wouldn't be feasible for the firmware to include all possible device and peripheral code and enable parts at run time.

I think you can see the esphome intermediate code generation in the file tree during compilation and see how the yaml sections map to blocks of C/C++ code being built.

To quote myself from a previous blog post of mine:

> I tried and tried and tried to get into [FreeCAD]. It promises so much, but there are two fatal flaws in my opinion. First, the UI is a nightmare. I have no idea which "workbench" I am supposed to be using, and there are so many similar choices available, each with subtly different tools and ... I gave up trying to make sense of it. Secondly, even when following tutorials to get some basic modelling done, I found lack of sensible keyboard control and having to click almost everything a real distraction. Not a good experience.

It's an absolute nightmare to use. Really the worst UX I've ever seen.

This for me, for quite a while now. I've built my own speakers, microphones and now I'm in a DIY synth module hole.

Latest at https://fourays.lon.dev

I've just got to the point where I think I know what the module is going to be, but last night found out that PCB manufacture puts additional constraints on the PCB design, so I have to go back and re-do a lot of it, including probably dropping some features to make it simpler. The learning never ends.

TIL that the Burj Khalifa is taller than Vatican City is wide.

yadm https://yadm.io/ uses git for file management, but also provides some convenience on top of that

Update from the last month's worth of work on my hobby synth project.

I know there's more to it; I'm just being overly cynical this Monday morning.

This is a fairer interpretation, thanks.

> be shown the door by Microsoft (where he worked) because he (inadvertently) wrote and released a piece of software that competed with an upcoming Windows feature

It's a shame though that the limitations in the shell integration were never worked out. This manifests itself in myself and probably countless others installing 7-zip as the first thing to install on any fresh windows installation simply because the built in zip support is sooo painfully slow.

So, the lesson here is to take something which you know to be a sub-optimal product, simultaneously sell and abandon it, and spend all the proceeds on luxury goods?

For the thankfully very short period that I ever used SVN, I remember it being massively painful if the network was down. The local processes would just hang and then your entire workspace was pretty much unusable. Couple this with a single-core 32bit machine and less than 1G RAM and you're pretty much stuffed for any sort of productivity.

I do agree - but back when Sintel was produced, I could just download all the assets as well for free and without (a rather expensive) subscription. I was just a bit surprised how that had changed, given the history of Blender with being traditionally very open and free-of-charge.

Sort of open

> You can join Blender Studio for €11.50/month and get access to all of our training & film content instantly!

I get that there's costs involved in the content development and distribution, and payment for content is going to a great cause ... but this doesn't seem as "open" as the initial film releases originally were?

I WAS WRONG: https://doug.lon.dev/blog/2024/fourays/chip-testing/

My testing was flawed, in fact all but one of the chips work. Pretty happy about that :)

I finally got around to testing them all. It turns out that of the 2 I already picked off the top of the stack, one works perfectly and the other works mostly but is slightly intermittent.

The remaining 8 are all either dead or not AY chips at all.

For sure the 50% square wave is a limitation, but sometimes such limitations feed creativity. That's also why I intend to couple the oscillators to filters, so there's another dimension to play with.

I'm not quite at that stage, perhaps in the next couple of weeks and for the next article.

I am limited in the current design for clock sources but I intend to implement pitchbend so it'll be possible to detune two voices that would otherwise be sounding in unison.

That hadn't really occurred to me actually. I'll keep it in mind as I start mixing multiple chips together.

Thank you. I definitely intend to get this together, there's a lot of satisfaction to be had using a device you designed and built yourself.

Yeah it's strange, they've clearly been relabeled and maybe only the top two I tested are real. Even if that is true I still have a couple of new toys to play with. I'll test the rest tomorrow.

Fair. To be honest I'm only half paying attention here sitting in the pub doing open mic

Again to clarify I'm also referring to the listener who uses some means to download the content locally to consume and therefore doesn't rely on any platform to use the content.

I expected this reply and it's good to debate the fairness of platforms towards artists, but I don't really want to get into that.

My point is that if you're freeloading music then the artist gets precisely 0.00 which is less even than the worst platform.

Nothing is free. If you enjoy the hard worked output of musicians then you really should contribute something back to the system which supports them and allows the delivery of their creativity to your ears.

How have I only just found out that yt premium includes yt music?

I've been subscribed to yt music for years but not yt itself. And nowadays I do watch more content on yt than listen on yt music.

So it turns out yt premium is pretty much the same price and I can keep using yt music and I now also have no ads on yt itself.

That's the easiest upgrade I've ever made.

This is really fun, there's some fun combos which output amusingly strange results.

Some of my first discoveries:

  - Meteor Pot
  - Meteor Soup
  - Meteor Shower Soup
  - Meteor Fish Soup
  - Jabba The Soup-zeus
  - Sith zeus
  - Jabba The Slimer
  - Sonic Chip
  - Cheech The Hedgehog
  - Darth Shrubber
  - Chewbuster
  - Darth Vader Fish Soup

I may have got heavily involved in combining Star Wars items :P

Fair enough, thanks for letting me know