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!)

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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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