Andy Alderwick @alderwick@merveilles.town

✅ Time for a handy pinned toot for common answers to questions friendly Merveillesians have been asking me 🧐

1️⃣ No
2️⃣ Yes, twice!
3️⃣ The value of your investments may go up as well as down

Managed to push an update to #uxn #varvara (a.k.a. uxnemu on SDL) that I wanted to incorporate for ages! I got close, but didn't quite make it 🤔

The Screen device now writes to an image that has an indexed palette in SDL rather than raw RGBA values. It's more efficient than maintaining two RGBA layers and blending with alpha, and it makes Varvara noticeably faster on my Pi 4 🎉

Big thanks to @foura for giving me a pointer to the essential docs I couldn't find last time! 😊 #theWorkshop

I've taken up @solene 's challenge - https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2021-07-07-old-computer-challenge.html

Adding GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="mem=512M nr_cpus=1" to /etc/default/grub on Debian gets it working for me. My laptop is already 15 years old so going from 2GB to 512MB of RAM is no great shakes. Still compiles #uxn like a charm :-)

No Firefox for me, now using w3m and tooting with brutaldon. I use Vim all the time and now I'm composing toots with it: this is amazing!

Little word-wrapping, font-loading example I worked on with #uxn today 😊 #theWorkshop

Mini-update to #uxn today: standard input support on the SDL and cli emulators!

Writing to Uxn's standard input calls Console/vector, and Console/char can be read to find the next character being sent over.

@neauoire started using standard output to send MIDI commands from Orca/Uxn without needing PortMidi, and now we have the support for receiving these commands with the piano or drum rack ROMs 🎶

Yes! I've created the schematic symbol for the orca-rack Teensy/Pico in KiCad, and it does exactly what I wanted it to do in the PCB editor!

All the lines between the footprint pads I had on paper are replicated in the PCB editor, all from just plonking the circuit symbol down, I didn't need to draw any wires on the schematic at all.

This is the most complex footprint I've designed in KiCad so I'm so happy it works so well!

#uxn #theWorkshop

Here's the humble beginnings of getting that footprint created in KiCad 😅 #uxn #theWorkshop

What's super nice about KiCad sometimes is that all its data is written to disk as plain text: once I can see the formatting of each line to define a pad, I can write little programs to save me having to click, duplicate, move and edit each one. There's 167 pads in this footprint so that adds up to a lot of time!

Success! The kettle has finally boiled, teapot now is full and has tea cosy on.

I almost missed it because of all the smoke coming from the oven.

Currently hovering my finger over the pause button on the hob and watching our electricity meter like a hawk. The solar panels can only power the oven or the kettle, not both at the same time, and oven has a mind of its own 😂