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.

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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.

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After living in Zürich for four years, I’ve finally — finally — gotten around to going and seeing the glacier which I can see every day on the southern horizon (when it’s not cloudy).

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I’ve just been sent on a business trip to Japan to walk along the Kumano Kodo pilgrimage path! Well, okay, they thought they were sending me to a conference on calendaring interoperability standards, but that wasn’t really the important bit.

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So a week or so ago I wrote a toy Mandelbrot generator for the BBC Micro, capable of using 2.6-bit fixed point arithmetic to draw a pretty terrible vaguely-Mandelbroid image in twelve seconds. That program is now obsolete: the very poorly named Bogomandel is capable of drawing pretty good actual Mandelbrot and Julia images, at higher precision, faster. Here it is.

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I’ve just got back from a walking holiday in Crete; it’s beautiful, with rocky, craggy mountains, fragrant green forests, blue seas and amazing food.

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So… it’s a complete stunt. The algorithm will only render the above picture, it can’t pan or zoom, it can’t show conventional colour contours, there are bounding problems, etc, etc. But it’s pretty fun.

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