Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 13, 2023

• The Blank Box

  I do enjoy the process of writing. I fire up my text editor of choice, Typora and away I go. Most of the time I have a topic in my grey matter that I want to write about, and if I don’t, something usually comes to me pretty quickly. Which topics to cover aren’t something I usually dwell on.

  Today I feel like writing, but I have nothing to write about. I’ve been staring at Typora’s abyssal blank screen for a little while now, but my grey matter remains as abyssal as the screen I’m staring at.

• mail2code lets you program via email

  The aptly named “mail2code” project is based around an Arduino Uno Rev3 board, which has been connected to a wide variety of peripherals to help students and hobbyists alike learn different hardware. The setup includes a DC motor attached to a central gear and a faster gear for exploring motors and interrupts, an array of eight LEDs that can act as a binary counter, a die face to explore random numbers, and a stepper motor with an accompanying Hall effect sensor that is used to learn analog signals in response to rotation.

• Second-Class References

  This post is about the idea of doing away with lifetimes in Rust, what that would bring to the table and how much it would cost.

• Use Excel to load Commodore 64 software [Ed: No Microsoft, please? Use ODF and Free software.]

  Loading software on a vintage computer, such as a Commodore 64, is a pain. Early eight-bit computers almost never contained any onboard persistent storage, so users had to load software from external media like cassette tapes.

• Latent Semantic Analysis in Perl

  I’m currently a little into quantitative text analysis. Not big time, but a little. A nice end goal, that I have no intention of reaching, would be a script that can suggest if a cluster of articles on this site seem similar but don’t share a tag, or if there’s a tag that might as well not exist because it’s applied to a very broad range of articles. This would help me maintain the tags that are currently assigned completely manually and, as the observant reader has noticed, rather arbitrarily.