It’s been a while since my last post but it’s been all go here: I’ve been working on a toy I’ve dubbed The FluxEngine, which is a floppy disk controller based around a $15 (sometimes $10) off-the-shelf microcontroller with no additional parts. Literally, solder on 17 pins in a row and you’re done.

Read more...

I’ve just taken my traditional Christmas holiday: each year I spend a week before Christmas somewhere really bleak and miserable, before joining family in Glasgow. This year I spent a few days in a shepherd’s hut on the island of Rùm, before moving to Inverie in Knoydart — the most remote village on the UK mainland; you have to get there by ferry.

Read more...

I’ve been working on a CP/M port to the Amstrad NC200 Z80 laptop, using my reverse engineering of the floppy disk boot sequence; it runs CP/M really well, although the screen’s pretty small.

Read more...

I’ve just released version 0.7.2 of WordGrinder, my minimal word processor for writing first drafts. This is mostly a bugfix rollup release, but there are some serious which have been fixed which could cause data loss incidents (I have one confirmed report of this). So, everybody please upgrade.

Read more...

I picked up what appears to be an internationalised IBM WheelWriter 6 for five francs at a local Zürich junk shop; originally I wanted it for the keyboard but it turns out to be in perfect working order. (Curses.) I made a video. (Now in full HD 60fps — I have a new camera!)

Read more...

I recently came into the possession of a couple of Psion 3a organisers; 8086-based handheld computers from about 1995. Really interesting devices, except one of them had a broken screen. As the working one had less memory than the broken one, I swapped motherboards (successfully!). And I did it on video.

Read more...

I made a video demonstrating live coding on a 37-year old ZX81: I write a playable but terrible game in BASIC, on a machine with 1kB of memory.

Read more...