People whose cars are set to sound the horn when they lock the doors. What's the matter with them? Were they born like that? Is it something that happens in their childhood? I mean, how can someone get to the point in their life when they can drive a car and yet have failed to notice at any point during the years leading up to it that other people exist? They must have seriously damaged brains. I can't imagine how they manage to function.

Not sure what I'm more excited about: having a job offer in my hand or the new Boards of Canada material.

Some random historical blasting from the past. 10MB. *Mega*. Ten of them! On one drive.

If I owned a folding phone I think it'd be like living with the Sword of Damocles. Every open or close might be the one that slices the display in half. Even if you told me it could withstand 500,000 folds I'd still feel like that. Irrational, I know.

In principle I could probably retire now. But if I retired I'd end up still spending some time writing code to play with whatever interests me in the computing and adjacent world. So I may as well get paid for it.

But due diligence, I started looking at retirement. It seems more complicated than investments. You need to find an optimal strategy to withdraw from 401(k)s and other investments. A good way to optimise is in fact the very method I used to plan balloon trajectories years ago, solve the HJB equation.

And that's more or less why retirement would be a challenge at the moment. I'd be too busy solving equations...

Can't get excited about this mission. It feels like a step towards Starship Troopers not Star Trek.

Now I have some time I can do some of those things I've been meaning to look at for a while, like reverse engineering the ROM on this thing which I think is even more of a marvel than the better known Sinclair. It's programmable and yet the ROM is 1.5K in size.

But it's hard - the instruction set is bizarre. For example ADX is a 4 bit add which behaves differently in the special case of adding 6. It's like someone printed out a program for a calculator in C, cut it up into random pieces, and made each piece a machine instruction whatever lines of code just happened to get grouped together. So someone saw an add followed by a comparison with 6 and thought "let's call that ADX".

https://www.seanriddle.com/nationalcopsi.pdf

I finally got around to fixing my blog which was suffering due to Google deprecating their charts API several years ago. The fix was pretty easy - a little rewriting in the template to convert those links to MathJAX links. I would have done it years ago but I'm not an HTML person and I didn't realise how little work was involved :) There are probably bugs still...

http://blog.sigfpe.com