https://aaron.baugher.biz/ Recent content on A Whole New Different Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Sun, 15 Oct 2023 18:50:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/pages/about/ Tue, 08 May 2018 23:23:20 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/pages/about/ A page about me. https://aaron.baugher.biz/pages/6502-assembly-language-programming/ Mon, 21 Jan 2019 07:51:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/pages/6502-assembly-language-programming/ This page is a place to collect various resources related to my video series on 6502 assembly language programming. The articles/videos will all appear under the “assembly” tag. The Commodore 128 subreddit. I check in there daily, so hit me up there if you want to discuss any of these videos or other C128 questions. Here’s an archive of many books on the Commodore 64 & 128 hardware and programming for them. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/scripting-intro-a-simple-menu/ Sun, 15 Oct 2023 18:50:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/scripting-intro-a-simple-menu/ I thought I’d ease back into programming videos with some on *nix scripting. This first one doesn’t really try to teach specifics; it’s more about the process of writing a script: deciding on the task, sketching out the process, picking a language, and hacking out the script, being flexible enough to make changes that come to you along the way. There seems to be a hum in this video that I didn’t hear when I was first editing it, so apologies for that. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/homegrown-frittata/ Sun, 24 Sep 2023 08:15:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/homegrown-frittata/ First, some housekeeping. When I went to upload this video, I discovered that it’s been over three years since I last posted a video. Tempus fugit. I started a new (better) job in 2020, and that meant learning or getting back up to speed on about half a dozen programming languages and operating systems. That took up all my digital headspace, so my Internet- and computer-related side projects had to go on the back burner for a while. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/rip-meat-loaf/ Fri, 21 Jan 2022 22:10:42 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/rip-meat-loaf/ I could probably count on one hand the number of celebrities whose death would sadden me. But Meat Loaf was one of them. I’m not old enough to have grown up with him. I was still in grade school when he was sweating through “Paradise on the Dashboard Lights” on stage as a young star. But by the time I was old enough to start buying albums, everyone, and I mean everyone, had Bat out of Hell or a cassette tape copied from a friend’s album. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/not-arguing-internet/ Fri, 13 Dec 2019 08:49:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/not-arguing-internet/ The impulse to argue online, or just to share knowledge, is a strange thing. It’s a thankless thing to do these days, when so many people are just waiting to be triggered by anything. This morning, on a forum about a completely different topic, someone brought up pit bulls. There was the usual nature/nurture argument between “it’s the owners turning them mean” and “it’s the breed.” I quickly knocked out a couple hundred words about how it’s both: the breed was designed over many generations to be an aggressive fighter, but now it draws people who want to encourage that behavior. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/staying-warm/ Thu, 12 Dec 2019 15:13:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/staying-warm/ Once I start burning wood for heat in the winter, I like to keep the fire going, because that’s easier than starting a fresh fire every day. The down side is, even a small fire in the furnace means you’re getting some heat, whether you need it or not. So these sunny, 50-something days get up to 80 in the house, and you have to start cracking windows. It’s almost nice when the weather settles into winter temperatures, so it feels good to keep it toasty all the time. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/back-to-writing/ Tue, 10 Dec 2019 07:01:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/back-to-writing/ Guy’s second annual Deer Drag has begun. He found another deer carcass, probably one the neighbors dumped behind their place, and is bringing it home piece by piece like last year. First there was a chunk of meat, then a leg, then a couple nights ago the whole spine and ribs. He hadn’t showed up for a while at night, so I went looking for him, and he was working on it in the neighbors’ front yard. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/collecting-bones/ Tue, 10 Dec 2019 07:01:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/collecting-bones/ Guy’s second annual Deer Drag has begun. He found another deer carcass, probably one the neighbors dumped behind their place, and is bringing it home piece by piece like last year. First there was a chunk of meat, then a leg, then a couple nights ago the whole spine and ribs. He hadn’t showed up for a while at night, so I went looking for him, and he was working on it in the neighbors’ front yard. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/garden-update-nov-7-2019/ Fri, 15 Nov 2019 13:56:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/garden-update-nov-7-2019/ Took me a while to get this one uploaded. It’s probably the last video of the garden for this year, unless I do one last one with snow on. There will be at least one more as a sort of wrap-up with some planning for next year. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/garden-update-oct-16-2019/ Fri, 18 Oct 2019 16:11:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/garden-update-oct-16-2019/ We got a light frost a few days after I hoped we wouldn’t in my last video. It was borderline, though, so it killed some things and just singed others. I harvested as much as possible the day before the frost, so I spliced a video of that into the center of this one. If the next frost holds off for a week or two, there should still be more beans coming along from the plants that survived. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/garden-update-oct-6-2019/ Tue, 08 Oct 2019 07:16:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/garden-update-oct-6-2019/ Winter is coming up fast all of a sudden. A couple days ago it was 90 degrees, now it’s dipping down into the 40s at night. There are a lot of green tomatoes and beans on the vine, so hopefully the frost will hold off for a couple more weeks so they can ripen. The squash are done, so they just need to sit in the sun another week to cure before they go into storage. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/garden-update-sept-21-2019/ Tue, 24 Sep 2019 18:03:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/garden-update-sept-21-2019/ Trying to keep up with the green beans and tomatoes, canning most of them. The watermelons seem to have a fungus called anthracnose, so I’m just hoping they produce some ripe melons before they die. Watermelons don’t ripen off the vine like tomatoes and some other fruits do, so there’s no picking them early. The butternut squash look great, some of the biggest I’ve ever gotten. The dry beans will need picking soon, so we could use a few dry days to get that done, but unfortunately it looks like rain. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/garden-update-sept-12-2019/ Fri, 13 Sep 2019 07:53:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/garden-update-sept-12-2019/ We’re in full-on harvest season now. The cover photo is all the stuff I picked in one day, not counting a pound of radishes I pulled and cleaned earlier that morning. Some of the tomatoes have gone to make ketchup. Thirteen pounds of tomatoes cooks down to three quarts, so that uses them up fast. Several quarts of green beans are put away in dry salt or brine, some traditional preservation methods I’m trying out. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/garden-update-august-26-2019/ Thu, 29 Aug 2019 20:35:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/garden-update-august-26-2019/ Picked over four pounds of green beans today, and there might be that much again tomorrow. Will have to start canning some this weekend, or take some to the farmer’s market. Cooler weather and regular rain lately have things looking great. The fall plantings of peas, lettuce, carrots, spinach, and kale are all up and growing. Also picking a lot of tomatoes and some Swiss chard and sweet corn. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/hen-with-chicks-2019/ Tue, 13 Aug 2019 08:58:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/hen-with-chicks-2019/ I think these chicks are about a month old, maybe a bit more. They’re the first ones I’ve had a hen hatch out successfully. She got pretty adamant about sitting on a batch of eggs, so I figured the summer was a good time to let her try. Usually they lose interest in them for the 21 days are up, and they wander off and I end up throwing away a bunch of eggs. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/garden-update-august-11-2019/ Mon, 12 Aug 2019 21:39:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/garden-update-august-11-2019/ It was getting pretty dry when I recorded this, but we got an inch of rain later in the night, just in time. I dug all the early potatoes and got about 20 pounds. Not great, but the experiment worked out okay. The fall planting is done now, and the weeds are pretty well controlled. Harvesting lots of tomatoes and green beans, and there will be sweet corn and Swiss chard any day now. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/garden-update-july-30-2019/ Tue, 30 Jul 2019 22:56:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/garden-update-july-30-2019/ Things are perking up after a half-inch of rain a couple days ago. I had to fence the chickens out of the first garden spot, because it looked like they might be snacking on cabbages and broccoli, and might have pecked at a tomato. Not harvesting much right now, but tomatoes and green beans should come on strong soon. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/garden-update-july-21-2019/ Tue, 23 Jul 2019 11:09:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/garden-update-july-21-2019/ We finally got some rain, the night before this recording. I had to break out the soaker hose last week, as plants were starting to wilt. Things are growing pretty well now, and over the next couple weeks it’ll be time to start harvesting potatoes, green beans, and tomatoes. I’ll also be planting late garden: radishes, carrots, cabbage, beets, and whatever else is sure to finish in less than two and a half months or can take some frost. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/garden-update-july-9-2019/ Sat, 13 Jul 2019 07:53:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/garden-update-july-9-2019/ It took me a few days to get this one processed and uploaded. It got cut off right before the end for some reason, but I was just about to wrap up and say, “Thanks for watching,” so: thanks for watching. We’ve gone from rainy season to desert season. I watered most things the day after taking this one, because the soil I tilled up was just powder. Hoping some rain comes through soon. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/garden-update-june-19-2019/ Fri, 21 Jun 2019 13:27:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/garden-update-june-19-2019/ Rain continues to be the story of this year’s garden. There was water standing in spots when I recorded this, and it’s pouring again as I upload it a couple days later. Things are still growing, though. Whenever there’s a break in the rain for a few days, it’ll be time to do a lot of weeding and start setting out warm-weather plants like sweet potatoes and squash and planting late garden. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/quitting-facebook-again/ Fri, 07 Jun 2019 08:15:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/quitting-facebook-again/ I just finished up my second Facebook ban, this one for seven days. So I’m out. The next one would probably be for 30 days, and there’s no point in using a communications network where you could be switched off at any time and have no way even to tell people why you aren’t responding. I had quit the site a couple years ago, and was happy with that. I started using my account again last year just to get to a private group of an organization I was part of. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/make-wooden-wheel-lawnboy-mower/ Wed, 05 Jun 2019 19:47:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/make-wooden-wheel-lawnboy-mower/ One of the drive wheels on my self-propelled mower started coming apart the other day. I tend to be hard on equipment, treating it like it was made of quality materials and can take some punishment. That’s why I like to buy older tools at auctions; they can handle heavier use than most new tools. Most of this mower is metal, but the wheels are plastic. I would hook the wheel on fence posts and let the mower pull itself around them, mowing close, and it kinda chewed up the wheel. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/garden-update-june-5-2019/ Wed, 05 Jun 2019 13:05:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/garden-update-june-5-2019/ The rain and cool spells this spring have slowed down the garden, but today is hot and sunny so new seedlings are popping up all over. Hard rains can make the surface too hard for seedlings to break through, so that hurt some of the early plantings, and I’ve been replanting some of those or adding more seeds in empty spots. The strawberries loved the cool weather, so the small patch has produced about 7 pounds so far. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/garden-update-may-20-2019/ Tue, 21 May 2019 21:26:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/garden-update-may-20-2019/ I managed to get a video in between rain showers. I got about half the garden planted before the last batch of storms came through, though, so there should be a lot of plants coming up soon. The potatoes that I was about ready to give up on are through the straw and looking good now. The early plantings of sweet corn and beans were probably too early, and seem to have failed from cold and flooding, so those will get replanted whenever it dries out again. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/kittens-spring-pictures/ Thu, 02 May 2019 14:47:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/kittens-spring-pictures/ I’ll be darned. The two older momma cats had kittens about a month ago. I normally don’t interfere in animal birthing unless there’s an obvious problem, because their instincts usually know best. One had hers in a sensible location, a shelf in the basement inside sort of a frame that kept them from falling off. The other one didn’t. She picked a small shelf over the basement stairs, so the kittens could immediately fall about 8 feet. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/getting-garden-started-2019/ Mon, 29 Apr 2019 16:51:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/getting-garden-started-2019/ This is a montage of several short videos I took from late March to today. There isn’t much growing to see yet, but it covers spreading straw over one plot, some early planting, and making bean tepees. The marshmallow plants I transplanted in the last video are greening up now, so it looks like they survived the move just fine despite some frost on them. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/dog-story-happy-ending/ Tue, 23 Apr 2019 08:14:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/dog-story-happy-ending/ Guy gave me a bit of a scare last week. He woke me up about 3am having some kind of spasms, and couldn’t settle down. It got worse over the next hour and he started panting hard too. I was looking up the symptoms to see what it might be, and the two main things seemed to be poison or a seizure. Vomiting usually went along with them, so I let him outside to see if he needed to do that. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/its-mueller-time/ Sun, 24 Mar 2019 19:45:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/its-mueller-time/ I’m not usually one to say I told you so, but it’s been two long years of being called a fool, a Pollyanna, a Q-tard, or even a Boomer in online forums for predicting what just happened. So just once: I TOLD YOU SO. Not you personally, just people. Ah, that’s better. So now that we’ve finally reached this turning point, let’s review how we got here before talking about what comes next. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/c128-assembly-33-my-programming-environment/ Thu, 21 Mar 2019 18:06:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/c128-assembly-33-my-programming-environment/ A couple people have asked me what tools I use during these programming videos, so I thought I’d go through the list. The list is below the video here too. FreeBSD i3 (x11-wm/i3 x11/i3status) Emacs (editors/emacs) org-mode for planning (.org) asm-mode for assembly files (.a) magit git (devel/git) tmux (sysutils/tmux) ACME cross assembler rlwrap (devel/rlwrap) Vice (emulators/vice) OBS (multimedia/obs-studio) DroidCam (Google Play on phone) ffmpeg (multimedia/ffmpeg) https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/c128-assembly-32-sha256-04/ Thu, 21 Mar 2019 18:04:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/c128-assembly-32-sha256-04/ Didn’t get a lot of code written in this one. I got started on the trickiest part of the algorithm, where we need to process a sliding window of pointers through a block of data, and spent a lot of time trying to figure out how best to do it. I think I have it worked out now, so it should be easier from here on out. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/c128-assembly-31-vdc-graphics/ Thu, 21 Mar 2019 18:02:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/c128-assembly-31-vdc-graphics/ More on the 80-column display. First we go through how to set attributes like color, flash, and underline for characters on the text display, then turned to the VDC’s graphics bitmap mode. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/big-guy/ Wed, 20 Mar 2019 18:38:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/big-guy/ I was sorting through some old images and ran across this one. Looks like it’s from a little over two years ago, so I’d guess he’s about two and a half now. Doesn’t he look harmless? He’s not a puppy anymore, though he’s still just as ornery. Today he was digging up mole runs. The moles must have been busy under the snow, because there are a bunch of hills and runs around. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/gardening-2019-moving-marshmallow/ Wed, 13 Mar 2019 12:33:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/gardening-2019-moving-marshmallow/ Made this a couple days ago. It’s too muddy to get in the garden for real yet, but I thought I’d move these marshmallow herb plants now that the ground was thawed. We planted them in this little flower bed a couple years ago, not realizing how big they’d get, and they kind of crowd everything out. The digging was harder than I expected, because they grew down into a pretty thick layer of rock, so I couldn’t bring them up with a nice dirtball. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/c128-assembly-30-sha256-03/ Tue, 12 Mar 2019 16:37:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/c128-assembly-30-sha256-03/ Continuing on with the SHA-256 calculator, we write more routines for copying blocks of memory in different ways, and the remaining low-level functions required by the algorithm. Next time we’ll be moving up a step or two to higher-level parts of the program. The hat is a Lewis Round Barn hat from the Old Tyme Association. If you’ve been to the Adams County Fair outside Mendon, you know what that’s about. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/springtime-chickens/ Sun, 10 Mar 2019 18:18:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/springtime-chickens/ The chickens are definitely ready for spring. They’ve been coming outside for a few weeks now, even a little in the snow, but they couldn’t have been finding much to eat in the frozen ground. Now they’re on the roam all day. They especially like the spot where firewood was stacked last year, so they couldn’t get to it until now. I don’t know why the picture quality in this video is so bad. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/c128-assembly-29-vdc80-routines/ Sun, 10 Mar 2019 17:34:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/c128-assembly-29-vdc80-routines/ Started writing routines to drive the 80-column display. I’m hoping to use these in the Farm game, but they’ll be generally useful for any program that uses the RGBi display. Next time I’ll get into the graphical bitmap, which few programs explored for that display. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/computer-artistry/ Sat, 09 Mar 2019 19:47:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/computer-artistry/ A friend linked to a thing today that’s pretty cool: the Deep Dream Generator. It’s a computer program that will take two photos and try to redraw one in the style of the other one. I gave it a picture of my mug and had it use a line drawing of a face as the style, and got the result below. They call it AI. I don’t know about that. To me, AI would be a program that is self-aware and goes beyond its programming in unpredictable ways. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/c128-assembly-28-8563vdc/ Thu, 07 Mar 2019 15:29:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/c128-assembly-28-8563vdc/ Here’s a whiteboard tutorial on programming the 80-column screen on the Commodore 128. It’s very different from the 40-column VIC display, since you have no direct access to 80-column screen memory and have to program it indirectly by reading and writing to the VDC’s registers, which requires a handshaking process through a pair of registers at $D600 and $D601 in the C128’s I/O block. There will be another video soon demonstrating how to use the little routines here to do actual work. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/do-not-want/ Wed, 06 Mar 2019 16:06:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/do-not-want/ Interesting article here on America’s continued rejection of the metric system. I didn’t know it was pushed by the French Revolution, but I’m not surprised. The same people are still pushing it today. One of my earliest school memories is of watching a filmstrip about the metric system. It had a scene where a driver got a speeding ticket because he saw a sign that said 95 kilometers per hour and assumed it meant 95 miles per hour. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/c128-assembly-27-sha256-02/ Tue, 05 Mar 2019 18:37:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/c128-assembly-27-sha256-02/ Continuing on with the sha256 hash calculator, we create some of the intermediate functions that use the boolean and bit-shifting routines we wrote in the last session. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/c128-assembly-26-farmgame-00/ Mon, 04 Mar 2019 19:33:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/c128-assembly-26-farmgame-00/ No coding in this one, just introducing a new project: a game in the spirit of Stardew Valley. I say “in the spirit of” because it would be impossible to duplicate the game on an 8-bit system, even if copyright weren’t an issue. But I think it’ll be a good challenge to see how much of it can be done, with expectations scaled back drastically in terms of graphics and sound. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/feeling-spring-fever/ Fri, 01 Mar 2019 16:25:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/feeling-spring-fever/ This always seems to me like the time of year when you’re just trying to get through. The sun is getting higher in the sky and the days are longer, so it feels like you should be outside doing things. But it’s 26 degrees. That’s not brutal or anything, but it means the ground is still frozen. Too soon to start working the soil, or digging up plants to move, or anything like that. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/c128-assembly-25-sha256-01/ Wed, 27 Feb 2019 14:30:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/c128-assembly-25-sha256-01/ Started programming on the sha256 program. So far, the easy parts have been fairly easy, creating routines to do boolean operations and bit-shifts on 32-bit values. I think it’ll get tougher as we start putting those pieces together to form the various formulas, but it should keep coming together piece by piece. I realized as I was watching it to check the recording quality that I could simplify the first couple routines a lot and lose the INX/DEX stuff, so that’ll be first on the agenda for next time. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/c128-assembly-24-sha256-00/ Wed, 27 Feb 2019 14:22:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/c128-assembly-24-sha256-00/ Now that the Worm program is finished, I’m starting two new projects to work on in parallel. The other one will be a game, once I work out some details. This one should be easier. It’s a 6502 implementation of a SHA-256 hash calculator. I thought it’d be interesting to see how well an 8-bit system could handle calculations that were designed for 32-bit (or more) processors, and how difficult it would be to implement. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/c128-assembly-23-banking/ Fri, 22 Feb 2019 19:24:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/c128-assembly-23-banking/ Memory management (banking) in the C128 is unlike the C64 or other 8-bit Commodores, since it uses the MMU to switch blocks of ROM and RAM in and out of service. This can seem kind of complicated at first, but it’s essential to taking full advantage of the resources that the C128 provides, so I thought I’d do a whiteboard tutorial on how banking works and how to do it in assembly. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/c128-assembly-22-worm-06/ Thu, 21 Feb 2019 21:25:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/c128-assembly-22-worm-06/ The Worm game is finished! It works pretty much how the BSD version does, which was the goal. It could be prettied up further than that with multiple colors and sounds or other new features, so if anyone wants to fork the source from the repository and do that, or use it in any other way, feel free. I’m ready to move on to something else, probably a more complex game with bitmap graphics, sprites, and sound. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/shazam-never-mind/ Wed, 20 Feb 2019 16:48:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/shazam-never-mind/ [Setting: A Hollywood conference room.] Suit #1: “Gentlemen, we have a problem. Our new movie is setting up to be a disaster. Test audiences hate it. They’re saying it makes no sense and that the lead actress has two modes, boring and bitchface. The editors say there isn’t enough good there to salvage. We’ve been promoting it hard, and now word is leaking out that it’s bad. How can we save our asses? https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/loving-perl-appreciating-python/ Tue, 19 Feb 2019 15:17:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/loving-perl-appreciating-python/ So I learned Python the other day. Actually, that’s a joke. You can’t learn a programming language in a day. But if you already know several others, you can learn the basics: the syntax, looping constructs, how variables work, things like that. Enough to write simple scripts while checking the documentation for specifics on particular functions. Python has become ubiquitous enough that I figured I need to be familiar with it, if not expert, so I plowed through a tutorial. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/c128-assembly-21-worm-05/ Mon, 18 Feb 2019 14:25:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/c128-assembly-21-worm-05/ In this session, we change the color scheme and show how to fill color RAM to set the foreground color for text characters. We add a delay between moves and change the keyboard routine so a key can be held down without repeating too fast, and also to put a time limit on moves. Next time we’ll be adding a final score display and a “play again” question, as well as a graceful exit back to BASIC. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/c128-assembly-20-stack/ Wed, 13 Feb 2019 18:33:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/c128-assembly-20-stack/ There may be some stack pointer manipulation coming up in the next Worm video, so I thought I’d do a mid-week video explaining the 6502 stack in detail. This one goes over how to use it and demonstrates what happens under the hood, instruction by instruction, then how to manipulate the pointer manually if you need to. It also touches on the pitfalls in using the stack and what to watch out for. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/c128-assembly-19-worm-4/ Sun, 10 Feb 2019 17:17:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/c128-assembly-19-worm-4/ It’s customary when making videos about 1980’s technology to wear a funny or ironic retro t-shirt. I have only one of those, so instead, enjoy one of my collection of local farmer hats. In this one we add code to keep the tail pointer-to-pointer (TAILP) updated, to handle collisions with digits on the screen, and to keep the worm at the proper length, growing it when it “eats” digits. All the worm functionality is finished now, so next time we’ll work on the end-game score display, and a better keyboard-entry routine. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/fixing-monitor-identity-crisis/ Fri, 08 Feb 2019 15:55:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/fixing-monitor-identity-crisis/ After today, I’m about ready for an old-man rant about the evils of modern technology. Instead I’ll write up the problem and solution I had today in case others come looking for it. I happened to brush against my computer today and the static caused it to freeze up. Okay, that’s annoying, but not the end of the world. Reboot and start things back up. But monitor #2 came back up in a weird resolution. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/6502-assembly-18-indirect-addressing/ Wed, 06 Feb 2019 16:01:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/6502-assembly-18-indirect-addressing/ I covered these addressing modes in video #14 on the addressing modes in general, but I’ve had a couple of questions about the indirect modes specifically. I thought it might help to draw out examples on the whiteboard, since they are more complicated than the other modes. Hopefully watching this along with the examples in #14 will make it clearer. Indirect addressing, especially the Y-indirect (indirect indexed), is a powerful mode that lets you setup pointers into memory that can be adjusted on the fly, as we do with HEADP and TAILP in the worm program. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/6502-assembly-17-pointers-pointers/ Mon, 04 Feb 2019 18:17:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/6502-assembly-17-pointers-pointers/ While working on the Worm program in #16, I realized we need to use pointers to pointers, which is kind of a complicated concept. I didn’t think my impromptu explanation there was very clear, so I thought it’d work better to draw it out visually and walk through what happens. This method will allow us to keep track of the parts that make up the worm, in order from head to tail, so we can drop the tail characters as the worm moves along. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/commodore-128-assembly-16-worm-3/ Sun, 03 Feb 2019 19:20:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/commodore-128-assembly-16-worm-3/ Continuing with the Worm game. I thought I had worked out how to make the tail end of the worm go away, and then once I started to describe it I realized it wouldn’t be that simple. We have to keep track of each “body part” of the worm in order from front to back, so we always know which one is the next to drop off as the worm “moves. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/seed-inventory-2019/ Sun, 03 Feb 2019 19:08:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/seed-inventory-2019/ It’s time to start getting organized for this year’s garden. First step was to inventory the seeds on hand, both saved from last year’s crops and leftover. Guy tried to help. Then I typed it up into a list, and went through and figured out what there isn’t enough of. The next step will be to go through the seed catalog and make up an order for everything I’d like to get, then total it up and swear at the total, then cross off things until it looks reasonable. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/hunkering-down-colder-cold/ Mon, 28 Jan 2019 15:02:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/hunkering-down-colder-cold/ My 6502 video series might be taking off. I had been getting a new YouTube subscriber every couple weeks, but last week there was about one per day, and then suddenly there were 11 on Sunday. Comments are increasing too. Don’t know yet if it’s a fluke or if it’ll keep climbing, but it’s cool either way. I was going to keep doing the series in any case, but it’s nice to know someone’s getting some use from it. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/6502-assembly-15-worm-c128-2/ Sun, 27 Jan 2019 11:02:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/6502-assembly-15-worm-c128-2/ In this video we continue working on the Worm game started in #13, adding collision detection and the random placement of a digit on the screen for the player to guide the worm to. Next time, we’ll start by debugging why the digit is always 5 instead of randomly 1-8 and always appears in the third quadrant of the screen. This series is undergoing a slight re-branding. When I started it, I was focused only on the 6502 microprocessor, which is found in many different computers and products from the 1980s (Commodore computers, Nintendo Entertainment System, Atari consoles, etc. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/learn-to-code/ Fri, 25 Jan 2019 20:16:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/learn-to-code/ It looks like I might need to ramp up production of my programming videos, to handle an influx of new student viewers. Fun times on the interwebs this week. The backstory: when blue-collar workers have lost jobs and seen their communities waste away in recent years, the response from the white-collar establishment has been some version of, “Learn to code.” In other words, just go learn a completely new trade and find a job somewhere in the tech industry, probably moving your family to do it. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/garden-wrap-up-2018/ Thu, 24 Jan 2019 16:25:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/garden-wrap-up-2018/ It’s about time to start planning for this year’s garden and getting a seed order together, so I thought I’d do a wrap-up of 2018 to refresh my memory. First, the harvest list I kept is at the bottom because it’s pretty long. It’s not really complete, because I forgot to add things to it several times. It’s probably about 75% there, though. Also, I was pretty conservative on the price of things, using the base price in the store. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/morning-wood-splitting/ Wed, 23 Jan 2019 15:55:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/morning-wood-splitting/ I was splitting wood this morning, and realized that has to be in the top ten of things that are completely unrealistic in movies and on TV. When you see someone splitting wood on screen, it usually looks like the beginning of this scene from Star Trek Generations: nice small, straight pieces of wood that split easy, a sturdy flat stump to set them on so they’re at the perfect angle, and no brush or snow or ice around your feet to trip on. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/6502-assembly-language-14-addressing-modes/ Tue, 22 Jan 2019 21:23:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/6502-assembly-language-14-addressing-modes/ This is sort of a bonus video in the middle of the week, to cover something I should have done near the beginning of the series. Someone on an assembly forum asked about 6502 addressing modes, and someone else said they seemed awfully complicated, so I wished I had a video I could point them to that explains them. So here it is. The sun went down while I was recording, so the webcam got darker than I realized. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/6502-assembly-language-13-worm-1/ Mon, 21 Jan 2019 13:25:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/6502-assembly-language-13-worm-1/ Starting a new project on the Commodore 128: the game Worm, an old game for text-based terminals. In this first part, we lay out the screen border and write the code to move the head of the worm around. The next part should cover detecting collisions with the border and making the body of the worm work. I’ve created a top-level page on my blog that will link to this series of videos and related resources here: 6502 Assembly Language Programming https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/consummatum-est/ Wed, 16 Jan 2019 18:20:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/consummatum-est/ Translation: It is finished. Aaaaand there’s one piece missing, on the bottom edge there. Usually I throw away puzzles if they’re missing pieces, but I hate to do that with this one, since it’s my only 3000-piecer. So I took it apart into sections and put it back in the box ready to re-assemble. Maybe I’ll find the missing piece under some furniture or somewhere. I wouldn’t mind gluing this one to a board, if it were whole. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/til-about-trees-power-lines/ Mon, 14 Jan 2019 17:32:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/til-about-trees-power-lines/ Today I learned that if you’re an Adams Electric customer, and you need to drop a tree on your property that might get into power lines, they’ll come out and cut it down for you. I knew they’d do that for the power lines along the road, but it turns out they’ll do it for the lines coming in as far as your meter too. Good to know, so you can let them take care of it in the first place, instead of starting to drop it yourself and then having to call them anyway because you need more manpower to pull the tree over in the right direction. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/6502-assembly-language-12-10print/ Mon, 14 Jan 2019 10:52:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/6502-assembly-language-12-10print/ With the Game of Life working at the end of the last session, I thought we’d do something a little different this time, converting a famous one-line BASIC program into assembly. In the process, we had to write code to scroll the screen as new lines appear at the bottom. Enjoy several minutes in the middle of me rubbing my furrowed brow as I struggle to figure out why it’s broken at one point. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/let-it-snow/ Sat, 12 Jan 2019 20:46:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/let-it-snow/ Looks like I jinxed us, talking about sunny weather and garden planning a couple days ago. I took an “after” picture to go with Thursday’s “before” picture, after most of the snow today. As snowstorms go, it wasn’t bad. Lots of snow, but it came down easy, and we can use the added groundwater. Might get a little more overnight. Maybe tomorrow I’ll see if I can fashion a sled out of something and give the hill a try. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/birds-blue-skies/ Thu, 10 Jan 2019 12:30:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/birds-blue-skies/ A bald eagle flew overhead this morning while Guy and I were on patrol. By the time I got my gloves off, phone out, and camera on, it was nearly past, but I managed to get this one shot of it. They’ve been hanging around here a bit this last week. Shape-wise they look just like a turkey vulture, so that’s what I figured they were at first, but when they get close enough you can see the white head and tail. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/6502-assembly-language-11-game-life-4/ Mon, 07 Jan 2019 18:57:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/6502-assembly-language-11-game-life-4/ In this session we added a “press a key to continue” feature to the program, and then worked out the bug that was keeping certain cells from updating properly. Then I talked a bit about the possibility of refactoring the algorithm for walking through the cells and determining their neighbors to make it faster, and whether to do that next time or move on to another project. Comments and suggestions are welcome. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/playcasting-stardew-valley-jan-3/ Fri, 04 Jan 2019 16:02:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/playcasting-stardew-valley-jan-3/ This one is of Summer 5-8, Year 1. Not much interesting happened in this one; just grinding for money for the next one. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/6502-assembly-language-10-game-life-3/ Wed, 02 Jan 2019 17:12:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/6502-assembly-language-10-game-life-3/ I realized after recording the last video that my method of converting the work area into the game board was overly complicated, so the first order of business this time was to simplify that. That also got rid of the buggy behavior we ended with last time. Then we do some self-modifying code to save bytes, which is cool but also shows how easily that can result in bugs. Got that working, but there still seem to be a few cells that don’t work right. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/going-puzzling/ Sun, 30 Dec 2018 20:29:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/going-puzzling/ When I was done wrapping Christmas presents, the kitchen table was completely clear for the first time in a long time, so I decided to start a puzzle that needs a lot of space. This is the biggest one I have, at 3000 pieces, so it should take a while. As it turns out, I also got a new puzzle for Christmas (1000 pieces with chickens on it, very cool), so now I have to finish this one so I can do that one. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/playcasting-stardew-linux-administration-talk/ Wed, 26 Dec 2018 07:59:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/playcasting-stardew-linux-administration-talk/ I spent most of this one talking about the apparent lack of Unix/Linux skills out there, the causes of the shortage, and what might be done about it. While playing through days 1-4 of Summer, year 1. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/merry-christmas-miscellaneous/ Mon, 24 Dec 2018 19:20:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/merry-christmas-miscellaneous/ Some thoughts I’ve jotted down over the last few days before Christmas: I bought eggs this weekend for the first time this winter. It sucks to do that when you have chickens, but that’s how it goes. For those who don’t know: chickens usually stop laying for a month or two in the winter while they molt (gradually shed their feathers and grow a new set). Young ones don’t always do it their first winter, but after that they generally do. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/6502-assembly-language-9-game-life-2/ Tue, 18 Dec 2018 11:28:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/6502-assembly-language-9-game-life-2/ Continuing with our Game of Life, we work out the code to calculate the number of neighbors for each cell and then rebuild the cell grid for each turn. Also improved the randomness of the initial grid layout. There’s a bug somewhere that’s throwing off the rebuild, so debugging that will be the first task for next time. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/more-stardew-playcasts/ Mon, 17 Dec 2018 17:01:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/more-stardew-playcasts/ I’ve uploaded a couple new Stardew Valley podcasts. I’m trying out “playcasting” as a word for them. Not sure I like it yet, but it’s shorter than “playing and podcasting.” Still looking for a better title. These are both more playing than podcasting, but the second one does have some talk about spam and chicken dressing and other topics. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/concatenating-videos-ffmpeg/ Mon, 17 Dec 2018 17:00:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/concatenating-videos-ffmpeg/ I capture screencasts with OBS and then process them with ffmpeg before uploading. Surprisingly, OBS doesn’t have a pause button, so if I have to stop for anything, I stop it and restart when I come back, and then I have to concatenate multiple videos into a single one later. The ffmpeg docs say you can concatenate like this: ffmpeg -i "concat:video1.mp4|video2.mp4|video3.mp4" [other arguments] That doesn’t always work, though. I don’t know exactly why, but it has something to do with mismatched aspects of the files. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/6502-assembly-language-8-game-life-1/ Sun, 16 Dec 2018 18:43:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/6502-assembly-language-8-game-life-1/ I started coding Conway’s Game of Life in 6502 assembly. This video covers the initial setup, laying out the game grid, filling in random (“random”?) cells, and thinking about how to process neighboring cells. I expect the full game to take a few more videos, as I have some ideas to add after getting the basic game working. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/playing-podcasting-start/ Thu, 13 Dec 2018 17:59:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/playing-podcasting-start/ I’m going to start podcasting while playing games. Basically like everyone is doing with streaming, except I’ll record them and upload later since I don’t have the bandwidth for streaming live. I plan to do at least three a week, to try to kickstart podcasting again. So here are the first two from earlier this week, playing Stardew Valley in the new FreeBSD-native install. The first one is pretty dull, since I couldn’t think of much to talk about except the game itself, so I don’t recommend it unless you need help getting to sleep. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/6502-assembly-language-7-debugging/ Wed, 12 Dec 2018 07:52:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/6502-assembly-language-7-debugging/ I finally finished the next entry in my 6502 Assembly Language series yesterday, and it took overnight to process and publish. In this one I debug the print-a-number code from #6, and then talk a bit about what to do next. I think I’m going to write a version of Conway’s Game of Life, as a way to develop an operating system kernel along the way. A game will need basic functions like “print a character at coordinates x,y”, so I think that’ll be an interesting way to do it. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/more-snow-stardew-snookered/ Thu, 06 Dec 2018 16:18:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/more-snow-stardew-snookered/ It’s snowing again this morning. The last snow just melted off a few days ago, and now things are white again. Seems like we’ve already had more snowy days than the last couple years. Don’t know if this one will be enough to sled on. There’s a pretty good long hill out back, but I didn’t get around to trying it last time. A Dollar General just sprouted in Payson. That’s how it seems, anyway. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/guys-prize/ Tue, 04 Dec 2018 14:51:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/guys-prize/ Guy found a prize a few days ago. Someone must have dressed out a deer not far away, so he showed up with part of a leg and a lot of dirt on his nose. Now every time we go outside, he has to go check on it and chase away any cats. A few nights ago, he tried to bring it inside. When I told him no, he stayed out on the porch guarding it for a couple hours until he got cold enough to come in without it. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/6502-assembly-language-printing-number/ Thu, 29 Nov 2018 20:38:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/6502-assembly-language-printing-number/ Continuing on from the last video, we start working on code to print a number on the screen, one digit at a time. Debugging to come in the next installment. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/last-garden-video-2018/ Tue, 27 Nov 2018 19:01:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/last-garden-video-2018/ For something different, I thought I’d do this garden update in the snow. We got about three inches from the “blizzard” the other night, and it looks like it’ll melt in a couple days, but it looks nice for now. There are a few cauliflower heads, one small branch of broccoli, and maybe a couple cabbages waiting under the snow to be harvested as soon as they thaw enough to cut with a knife. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/auction-haul/ Thu, 22 Nov 2018 09:58:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/auction-haul/ I went to an auction last weekend. The two main things I went for were a garden push plow (pictured below) and a chainsaw. I got both, plus about $20 in “choice boxes,” so it was a good day. Choice box is when they’re selling a bunch of stuff in boxes, usually on a wagon, and they don’t want to go box by box because that would take all day and some wouldn’t get bids. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/more-old-blog-posts-latin-mass/ Sat, 17 Nov 2018 08:33:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/more-old-blog-posts-latin-mass/ Here are some more posts copied from my old blog, all on the Latin Mass. These are almost exactly ten years old, from when it was just getting started at St. Rose. So this is sort of an anniversary post. They are unedited, except for taking out broken links to images. If I start editing them, I’ll end up completely rewriting them, because I’d nitpick over my writing, and I’d probably think some of the opinions naive, since I was just starting to learn about the Mass then. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/6502-assembly-language-5-monitor/ Fri, 16 Nov 2018 15:03:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/6502-assembly-language-5-monitor/ Continuing with the code we wrote in #4, we compare the code the assembler understands, with comments and labels, to the machine code it produces, using the machine language monitor in the Commodore 128 to disassemble it. We also convert the binary division routine from #4 to handle 16-bit dividends, and then 32-bit. Also discussed the issue of where to store working values in memory. A side note: I was puzzled during the video why my perl command was printing a 1 after the expected value of “b27”. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/seed-catalogs-smart-phones/ Tue, 13 Nov 2018 16:55:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/seed-catalogs-smart-phones/ The first seed catalog arrived today, from Pinetree. I like them a lot, and will be buying from them again next year. But this is really too soon to get seed catalogs. Next year’s garden is still next year. They used to start showing up around New Year’s. That works well because January is a good time to plan and think about warmer things. Right now, when we’re still harvesting things like cabbage and cauliflower, it just seems early. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/low-carb-ice-cream/ Sun, 11 Nov 2018 09:10:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/low-carb-ice-cream/ Good low-carb ice cream isn’t easy to make. Ice cream fluffs up and stays soft because it’s an emulsification of the fat in the cream with the sugar, so if you use a different sweetener that doesn’t have the structure of sugar, it doesn’t emulsify, and you end up with a bunch of ice freezing to the sides of the container. Sugar alcohols can work, but they seem kind of hit-and-miss as to whether people lose weight with them, plus they have a laxative effect. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/goodbye-little-one/ Wed, 07 Nov 2018 16:42:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/goodbye-little-one/ Sad news today. Little One, the black cat who was in my last garden video, passed away. Ironic, since I said then that he was healthy and even fat after almost starving as a kitten. I noticed him seeming out of sorts the other day, but couldn’t find anything wrong with him. Then he didn’t show up for food, and later I found him already gone. He might have gotten hit on the road; I don’t really know what else it could have been. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/one-out-of-two-aint-bad/ Wed, 07 Nov 2018 07:25:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/one-out-of-two-aint-bad/ Well, I almost nailed the Senate, but I wasn’t close on the House. Guess I should have made a prediction on governors to use as the tiebreaker. It looks like my main mistake was underestimating the importance of Republicans losing 40+ House incumbents who retired early for various reasons. I assumed that since Republicans held those seats before, they were likely Republican-leaning districts, but that wasn’t the case. That’s one disadvantage of trying to maintain a 10,000-foot view instead of digging into individual races. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/can-i-beat-the-experts/ Mon, 05 Nov 2018 17:57:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/can-i-beat-the-experts/ Senate 56, House 225. I figured I’d do a prediction for the midterms. What’s the point of having elections if we don’t all go out on a limb guessing what will happen? The following are some thoughts I jotted down over the last few days to explain why I think Republicans will hold the House and gain seats in the Senate, interspersed with some interesting screencaps. The first thing is that early voting looks very good. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/halloween-2018-garden-update/ Wed, 31 Oct 2018 18:08:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/halloween-2018-garden-update/ Since the couple frosts we’ve had, all the summer crops are dead now, and it’s just down to the hardy ones. It looks like there will be quite a few cabbages and cauliflower, not so much on the broccoli. Lots of carrots, which I’ll leave in the ground as long as possible. If you cover them with some straw, they can stay there through the winter until needed. The cat in the video is Little One. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/latin-book-incoming/ Tue, 30 Oct 2018 22:14:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/latin-book-incoming/ New return address labels came from the insurance company today. They send so many free ones that I find myself wondering if I could use them for some kind of craft. Like maybe I could use them as wallpaper to redecorate a room. Trick-or-treaters usually don’t come out here in the country, but I did pick up one bag of peanut-butter cups, just in case. I probably should have gotten a candy I don’t like, because now I won’t be sad when no one comes and I have to eat them myself. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/helvetii-turnaround/ Fri, 26 Oct 2018 17:56:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/helvetii-turnaround/ Here’s a history lesson that isn’t taught in schools anymore. At least it wasn’t in mine, and judging by the way people talk about how very impossible it is to stop invaders, it isn’t now either. Short highlight version: The Helvetii were a Celtic tribe that lived in part of where Switzerland is now. They were getting pressured by Germanic tribes moving down from the north, so they decided, along with a few neighboring tribes, to migrate to live with some cousins on the west side of Gaul (France). https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/fertilizing/ Thu, 25 Oct 2018 20:01:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/fertilizing/ It looks like they’re getting ready to inject manure in the fields around here today. For those who don’t know how it works, this might be interesting. They unroll about a mile of this big hose that Guy is inspecting in the picture below, stretching from the dairy down the road to the far side of the field. Then they start pumping liquid manure (enough water is added to make it a slurry) through the hose, which is attached to a plow with injectors that’s pulled by a tractor. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/bombs-away/ Wed, 24 Oct 2018 17:13:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/bombs-away/ I’m going to start posting my political stuff separately from my personal stuff. I don’t actually know who is reading this blog, if anyone, but I figure people who are interested in my garden/programming/etc. might not be interested in politics and vice versa, and if you are they’ll still both be here. But now if you see the “politics” tag at the top (like this one), you’ll know it’s political all the way down, and otherwise it’s not. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/i-nationalist/ Tue, 23 Oct 2018 18:09:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/i-nationalist/ Like President Trump, I am a nationalist. Not a white nationalist (“white” is not a nationality and can’t be), or a national socialist, but a nationalist. This should be obvious and uncontroversial. A nationalist is someone who loves his nation, takes pride in her, and puts her interests above those of other nations, though he respects that the people of those nations will do the same. A nationalist wants his nation to be open to temporary alliances and trade deals with other nations when they are clearly in the national interest, but to avoid foreign entanglements in general, as George Washington recommended in his Farewell Address. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/twitter-tomfoolery-npcs/ Thu, 18 Oct 2018 18:25:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/twitter-tomfoolery-npcs/ The big social media companies are increasingly being exposed for their anti-competitive and fraudulent practices. Twitter was the latest this week as a bit of a joke campaign turned up an interesting reaction from supposed “users” on Twitter and then from the service itself. I thought I’d do a quick rundown as a screencast/podcast, talking over some posts from the jokesters. Audio only here: Twitter Tomfoolery MP3 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/cat-scratch-fever/ Thu, 18 Oct 2018 07:48:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/cat-scratch-fever/ I was trying to give away four cats last night. By the time we were done, one cat was transferred successfully, three had escaped into the night, the back porch was trashed, and I had blood dripping from one hand. I’m going to need a better strategy than just “grab them and hand them to strangers.” I used to wonder how items shipped from China on Ebay could be so cheap. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/frosty-morning/ Tue, 16 Oct 2018 19:18:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/frosty-morning/ Just a note to say that if you want to be notified whenever I post to this blog, click this link for my RSS feed. Your browser or app or whatever should know what to do with it. I try to share the more interesting ones on Facebook for my friends there, but I forget sometimes since I don’t use it anymore. The RSS feed will have them all. Oof. I think the non-hardy garden season came to an abrupt end last night. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/fun-chromosomes-math/ Mon, 15 Oct 2018 14:46:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/fun-chromosomes-math/ Let’s talk about chromosomes and heritage, and see how much I can remember from biology class a couple years ago. Humans have 46 chromosomes, which are in 23 pairs, normally numbered from 1 to 23. When you were conceived, you got 23 from your father and 23 from your mother. Which ones you get is random, but you get one from each pair from each parent. So you end up with two #1 chromosomes making up your #1 chromosome pair, and so on down to #23. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/sentinel-c64-longplay-555-564/ Mon, 15 Oct 2018 09:03:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/sentinel-c64-longplay-555-564/ This is just what it says, a longplay video of Sentinel on the C64 (emulated) playing through 10 levels. I thought I might make a podcast sort of thing out of it, but I was too tired to think of much to say, so there’s some rambling. Posting it because why not. People watching other people play games seems to be a thing today, so maybe someone out there will want to watch it. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/kanye-goes-to-washington/ Thu, 11 Oct 2018 19:25:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/kanye-goes-to-washington/ (I don’t suppose I’m the first to use that clever title.) So Kanye West had a meeting with President Trump today, and the media had a collective spaz attack. It’s kind of amazing to see the same people who would normally scold you for any negative comments about a racial minority, slinging around terms like “house negro” and saying that a black man must be off his meds because he disagrees with them and doesn’t talk educated like they do. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/free-corn/ Thu, 11 Oct 2018 14:24:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/free-corn/ A few years ago I picked up several buckets of ears of corn in the field after they finished combining it. (Actually, I sat inside and drank and watched videos while kids picked them up, but it’s the thought that counts.) They don’t have the field fenced, so they can’t run cattle or hogs to clean it up, so any downed ears will just lie there and sprout in the spring until they’re killed by Roundup. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/lindsey-bad-mutha-shut-yo-mouth/ Mon, 08 Oct 2018 17:33:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/lindsey-bad-mutha-shut-yo-mouth/ Be the captain of a youth basketball team. You get stuck with Ralphie, an unathletic boy who can’t play. His parents made him sign up because they think he needs exercise and new friends, but he doesn’t want to be there, doesn’t want to try and screw up and be embarrassed. You know if you give him the ball, he’s more likely to give it away to the other team than do anything good with it. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/if-only-you-knew/ Fri, 05 Oct 2018 19:01:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/if-only-you-knew/ I picked up my first reading glasses the other day. I’m not used to having them yet, so I keep forgetting to grab them and catch myself squinting instead. The computer monitor is too far away for them, but I need them for anything closer, so that’s convenient. I tried peering over them at the screen, but that doesn’t work at all. At least I can read a book comfortably again. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/morning-rundown-2018-10-05/ Fri, 05 Oct 2018 07:18:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/morning-rundown-2018-10-05/ Another morning rundown, to keep track of all this for future reference. Lots of little things going on, not sure which will become important when. Yesterday’s DoJ press conference was about the arrest of nine Russian spies. Probably should be bigger news, but it can’t compete. More important was the news that they’ve identified a Clinton/DNC lawyer who was involved with the FBI/Fusion in the FISA wiretapping case. As I said yesterday, we’ve known the basic shape about that for a while, but now they’re filling in the details. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/morning-rundown-2018-10-04/ Thu, 04 Oct 2018 08:00:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/morning-rundown-2018-10-04/ Yesterday was interesting, with Republicans continuing to signal that they’re sitting on a nut straight. The amount of spine in these guys all of a sudden is shocking. On the other side, Feinstein refuses to turn the polygraph documentation over to the Senate Judiciary, saying they will give it to the FBI if interviewed. But the FBI has no jurisdiction to subpoena it, and that would lead into more delays that are the Democrats’ whole goal in the first place. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/assembly-04-binary-division-6502/ Wed, 03 Oct 2018 17:25:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/assembly-04-binary-division-6502/ We walk through an assembly language routine to divide one 8-bit value by another on the 6502. It was a little darker in there than I realized, so I hope it’s watchable, since I don’t want to do it all over. As usual, questions and comments are welcome. The next chapter will incorporate this routine into a larger bit of code. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/comfy-briar-patch/ Wed, 03 Oct 2018 08:06:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/comfy-briar-patch/ To add to yesterday’s article: it came out overnight that a couple of the people involved in Ford’s polygraph testimony are former FBI. The woman she coached on how to take a polygraph – which she lied and said she’s never done – left the FBI when Trump took office, after working close to some people involved in the illegal FISA warrant. Ford’s brother is also connected to Fusion GPS, the Russian-founded company that helped fake the warrants and tried to get informants inside the Trump campaign. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/peak-leftardism/ Tue, 02 Oct 2018 19:50:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/peak-leftardism/ I’d like to say we’ve reached peak leftist insanity, now that people are sending ricin to Republicans in the mail. But we haven’t. The leaders of the globalist left have pushed their followers to within an inch of their emotional limits, and there’s no handy off switch. If you follow many of them on social media or forums, you’ve seen them send public streams of profanity at politicians – sometimes politicians they liked in the past. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/october-2nd-day-that-shall-happen/ Tue, 02 Oct 2018 07:09:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/october-2nd-day-that-shall-happen/ I have a good feeling about today. Which probably means nothing will happen until tomorrow. But it feels like several different events in motion are coming to a point at the same time. It feels like happenings which seemed imminent in January and then stalled are now back in the mix. LARPs that don’t quite feel like LARPs. Deadlines for seemingly disconnected events that are lining up on the same short stretch of days. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/still-got-it/ Mon, 01 Oct 2018 11:45:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/still-got-it/ It feels good when you’re pushing 50 and you’re hefting boars up for the knife and a healthy 16-year-old boy has to run the chalk marker because he can’t handle your job. Although I have to admit my shoulders were sore the next day. And the day after that. But it felt good at the time. Sun tea is a scam, right? I mean, it works. If you put tea bags in water and sit it in the sun, it makes tea. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/letter-onions-1/ Thu, 27 Sep 2018 19:30:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/letter-onions-1/ I had to screencap that because it made me laugh. The context was a discussion of a potential urban-versus-rural civil war, and the left-wing fantasy that they will use the military and police to quickly dominate the rural areas, confiscate all the guns, and lock up or shoot the hicks. Yes, they really believe this. They speculate about it constantly; you just won’t see it in the mainstream media. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/pol-is-always-right-again/ Tue, 25 Sep 2018 19:48:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/pol-is-always-right-again/ Guy didn’t eat anything for the first week after his accident, except a few bits of chicken I gave him with pills. Then the second week he seemed to eat pretty much normal. Now he’s eating like a horse, and drinking water like one too, so I’m filling his bowl a couple times a day instead of a couple times a week. I guess that means he’s all healed up and putting weight back on. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/test-results-and-more/ Mon, 24 Sep 2018 15:17:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/test-results-and-more/ I’ve only been streaming for a few days, but some results are in. On the days I streamed a couple hours, I used 5GB/day. About 1GB or so of that was probably other traffic. Maybe more, since I’ve been doing some IPFS stuff and other moving data around. But the numbers show that the bulk of it was streaming. So if it takes 2GB/hour, I definitely can’t do it a couple hours every night and stay under my 50GB/month limit. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/garden-update-sept-21-2018/ Fri, 21 Sep 2018 20:03:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/garden-update-sept-21-2018/ I’m just harvesting at this point, not trying to keep weeds pulled anymore. It’s too late in the season for that. As soon as the crops are done, I’ll mow the rest off and leave it as cover for winter. I’d like to bring in about a foot of mulch to cover all the plots with, but don’t know if I’ll get that done. So right now I’m just trying to stay ahead of picking what’s ripe, especially snap beans, also beets, Swiss chard, carrots, broccoli, and dry beans. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/ready-for-fall/ Wed, 19 Sep 2018 18:28:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/ready-for-fall/ Cripes, 93 degrees. No wonder it seemed hot today. It was. Be glad when it breaks for good and fall is here. It turns out you can cut beets into pieces small enough to fit in a steamer and cook them that way. It also turns out you really shouldn’t, though, because they still lose a lot of juice and flavor. Oh well. The other option for cooking that big thing was the roaster, which seemed like overkill. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/memory-hole/ Tue, 18 Sep 2018 14:29:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/memory-hole/ Huh. I just noticed yesterday that my video on the 6502 assembly instruction set has nearly 1000 views, more than 4 times as many as any other video I’ve made, even though it’s one of the newer ones. Someone must have linked to it from somewhere a lot more popular than my own site. Cool! I guess that means I should get on with more in that series. The beets didn’t come up very well this year because the seed was old, but the ones that germinated did well, and this one went crazy. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/ill-try-streaming/ Mon, 17 Sep 2018 19:00:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/ill-try-streaming/ (Title shamelessly stolen from MauLer, a British guy who reviews games and movies.) I’d like to try using Twitch for some live online classes, but I thought before I dive into anything real, I should test it for a while first. So I’m going to be streaming games when I get a chance, starting with bridge. I figure I need to do a dozen or so sessions, and then I can analyze how much of my precious bandwidth it uses, how reliable it is over my connection, and things like that. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/take-my-files-please/ Mon, 17 Sep 2018 08:28:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/take-my-files-please/ With a distributed file system like IPFS, you don’t upload your files to the network; you put them on your node and let others download them. So what if your files are useless to anyone but yourself? How can you make them valuable to others, so they will spread across the network and be reliably available out there? I demonstrate here one method that’s kinda silly, but might be a useful thought experiment toward more practical ideas. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/office-linebacker/ Fri, 14 Sep 2018 18:22:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/office-linebacker/ Looks like I won’t be watching football again this year. I’m not protesting the protesters exactly, at least not primarily. I’ve just been watching less in recent years as it became more and more obvious that the NFL doesn’t want me as a viewer, and I keep finding better things to do on a Sunday afternoon. The anthem thing is just a part of that, which I’ll write more on another time. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/country-view-vet-service/ Thu, 13 Sep 2018 20:06:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/country-view-vet-service/ I want to give a plug to Country View Veterinary Service in Barry and Payson in Illinois. Short version: they were very nice with Guy, and the price was right, so I highly recommend them. If you’re in Quincy, Payson is only 15 minutes away, so it’s worth the short drive. Now the long version. When I decided to take Guy to the vet to make sure he was okay, I wasn’t sure where to go. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/better-news-on-guy/ Tue, 11 Sep 2018 19:05:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/better-news-on-guy/ Well, it looks like Guy’s going to make it. The nice lady vet says he doesn’t seem to have any major breaks or spinal injury, so he’s probably just really sore. Of course, he let her probe and pull at him without any of the whining or growling he was giving me. Now he’s relaxing under the influence of painkillers. I should probably relax with some potato-based liquid painkiller myself. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/nursing-hurt-dog/ Mon, 10 Sep 2018 18:42:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/nursing-hurt-dog/ Blogging might be light this week. Guy got hit on the road Saturday, so I’m nursing him. At least I think that must be what happened. I saw him go across the road, and then a couple minutes later he showed up limping with scratches on a few extremities. He doesn’t seem to have anything broken, but he’s clearly in some pain, so I think he got bounced around. I think he’s just spooked, too, because he hasn’t drank any water since, but I just got him to drink some chicken broth. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/someone-elses-computer/ Fri, 07 Sep 2018 17:58:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/someone-elses-computer/ A conversation at Vox’s about trusting the cloud today reminded me I’ve been wanting to write about that. “The Cloud” is mainly a marketing term that’s been misused in some confusing ways, so let’s define some terms. Up until a decade or so ago, if you wanted to have a computer at some remote location – usually to provide it with a high-speed, redundant Internet connection – you had a couple of choices. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/sacrificing-everything/ Thu, 06 Sep 2018 16:38:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/sacrificing-everything/ So Nike hired Colin Kaepernick to head up their new ad campaign, featuring his face under the slogan “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.” Oooookay, let’s unpack that a little. Some on sports radio are debating whether this will sell more products for Nike, whether the gain in woke Kaepernick fans will outdo the loss to anthem supporters. It won’t, because SJWs mostly don’t play sports. But that’s not what this is about for Nike anyway, not directly. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/maybe-try-something-else/ Wed, 05 Sep 2018 16:40:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/maybe-try-something-else/ A few telemarketers have found a way to spoof their phone number as if they’re calling from your own local exchange. I get a call that starts with 217-617, so it looks like it could be from a neighbor or something, but it’s not. I don’t know how they do that – or why they aren’t all doing it – but it makes spam blockers like Mr. Number worthless, since the number usually belongs to an ordinary person in the area. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/sincerity-1/ Wed, 05 Sep 2018 09:24:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/sincerity-1/ I didn’t decide in advance whether to blog over the weekends or not. Turns out the answer was no. Too much to do, and it’s good to get away from the keyboard. Anyway, I realized titling these things the same with the date every day was stupid since they’re already dated, so I’m going to start titling them with the main topic(s). I’ve been reading and thinking lately about sincerity, or the lack of it in this era. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/daily-musings-august-29/ Mon, 03 Sep 2018 08:33:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/daily-musings-august-29/ I want to do a plug for Selby Implement in Quincy, specifically their parts department. The first thing I bought from them was a kitchen stove about 20 years ago, when they still carried appliances along with their main lines of farm machinery and power equipment. I called the other day to get a carburetor for my new-to-me lawnmower, and the guy said their supplier had it marked as discontinued. So I started looking around online to see if I could find it still in stock somewhere, or a used one. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/daily-musings-august-31/ Fri, 31 Aug 2018 19:18:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/daily-musings-august-31/ I like this new blogging method so far. It’s working so well that I’m now writing this from yesterday, to give me an idea for tomorrow (er…). Slapping down thoughts 100-200 words at a time works better for me than long-form articles or short tweet-style grunts. I don’t know whether the results are any good, but at least it got me writing. I’ll worry about quality later. Good grief. I was just updating the St. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/daily-musings-august-30/ Thu, 30 Aug 2018 16:22:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/daily-musings-august-30/ I started using Quora a while back when it notified me that a couple of friends had started following me on there. I’d created an account years ago, but hadn’t used it. The idea was that it would be good for getting freelance business. If you’re not familiar with Quora, it’s a site where people ask questions and anyone can answer them, and then answers are voted up or down. You’re allowed (encouraged) to advertise yourself through it, so it’s a chance to show off your expertise. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/daily-musings-august-28/ Tue, 28 Aug 2018 15:51:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/daily-musings-august-28/ One somewhat longer one today, then a fun one. I think I’ll keep wrapping up with a fun item each day, for balance. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kevincollier/tech-companies-are-gathering-for-a-secret-meeting-to It’s Buzzfeed, so you have to read between the lines, but this is the kind of thing I was alluding to yesterday in my video on fixing the Internet. The Big Social companies got a rude awakening in 2016. They found out if they allowed everyone to use their platforms freely – which was a big part of how they became popular in the first place – smart people on the other side of the political aisle could use those platforms to beat them in elections. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/fixing-the-internet/ Mon, 27 Aug 2018 20:55:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/fixing-the-internet/ I’ve been experimenting lately with IPFS, the InterPlanetary File System, and learning more about distributed information systems like it. I think I mentioned this kind of thing in passing in a podcast a year or so ago, so I thought I’d do more of an explanation of it. First I demonstrate the client-server model which most Internet applications use, and why it’s increasingly fragile now that a handful of corporations control so much of our access to and ability to share information. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/daily-musings-august-27/ Mon, 27 Aug 2018 20:40:37 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/daily-musings-august-27/ I’m going to try something new for the blog. By “new” I mean something I’ve done before, but I’m trying it again a little differently. I do some blog commenting and forum posting here and there, but it’s always seemed like there should be a better way. A response isn’t always worth writing a full blog post of my own. But often the thought I have is kinda long for a comment, or it goes off-topic, so it’s not really appropriate for a comment. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/august-21st-2018-garden-update/ Tue, 21 Aug 2018 12:51:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/august-21st-2018-garden-update/ The image with this video is a double rainbow we had last night after a surprise quick rain shower. My phone camera doesn’t really do it justice. There have been a few rains in the last couple weeks, so now that the drought is over, everything’s growing like crazy, including the weeds. I hope this will serve as a “before picture,” so my next video can show the garden with most or all of these weeds removed. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/200/ Tue, 14 Aug 2018 08:11:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/200/ Forty-five down, twenty to go. For those unfamiliar, that’s what the title means: starting weight, current weight, goal weight. I lost the first 35 pretty steadily over 2017, then stalled for most of the first half of this year, and now the scale is moving again. Stalls happen; the main thing is not to start gaining it back. My goal of 200 is based on calculations using wrist size to determine lean mass (bone and muscle). https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/intro-6502-assembly-instruction-set/ Thu, 09 Aug 2018 22:34:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/intro-6502-assembly-instruction-set/ This video introduces the 56 op-codes in the 6502 assembly language instruction set, and gives examples of the commonly used ones, using a Commodore 128 monitor. Here’s the list of op-codes divided up by function. This is the third video in my ongoing 6502 assembly language series. If you’re not familiar with the 6502 hardware, or with binary math and bitwise operations, check out the two previous videos in the series for info on those. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/bit-grammar-pedantry/ Tue, 07 Aug 2018 16:17:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/bit-grammar-pedantry/ There are some grammar mistakes that I see at least daily these days, more often than you’d think possible. I thought I’d use a few for blog fodder, and maybe it can be a resource. Buckle up for hardcore grammar nerdery. The reason….is….because…. For instance, “The reason I won the blue ribbon is because my cabbage was the biggest.” This is always wrong. It’s hard to explain why if you don’t know how to diagram sentences; but basically, you need a noun clause to be the thing the reason is, and noun clauses don’t start with “because. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/dna-is-code/ Fri, 03 Aug 2018 13:48:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/dna-is-code/ I studied biology a couple years ago. I guess I mostly slept through it in high school, because I sure didn’t remember much. When we got to the section on DNA, I was like, “Holy shit, it’s a computer program!” DNA isn’t just roughly analogous to programming; it’s basically the same thing. When a living cell needs to produce something, the nucleus cuts-and-pastes a string of instructions out of DNA, picking the right short chunk out of a string billions long. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/intro-binary-hexadecimal/ Wed, 01 Aug 2018 07:00:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/intro-binary-hexadecimal/ I’ll be doing videos to demonstrate the 6502 instructions soon, and you can’t understand several of them without a basic understanding of binary math. It’s not hard, but it’s something that isn’t taught in math classes anymore, or is touched on as a concept but not really absorbed. This video demonstrates how to write binary numbers and translate them to decimal, how to add them, and how to convert to hexadecimal (base 16). https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/july-25-garden-update/ Wed, 25 Jul 2018 22:20:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/july-25-garden-update/ Still watering quite a bit, though there was one small rain a week ago. Harvesting snap beans, Swiss chard, and a few potatoes. There will be scalloped summer squash and cucumbers along very soon. Got most of the late garden planted, with turnips, radishes, beets, carrots, and a few other things. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/time-for-the-fair/ Tue, 24 Jul 2018 09:16:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/time-for-the-fair/ Almost time for the Adams County Fair! It doesn’t look like I’ll be exhibiting anything, since the only thing in the garden that looks good right now is the Swiss chard, and there’s no Swiss chard category. It would wilt before it could be judged anyway. But I’ll be there for dairy judging on Saturday morning, at least. That’s always a good time, watching cows drag kids around the ring. I saw the heifers they were trimming up and getting ready to go, and they looked great, not that I’m much of a dairy judge. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/intro-6502-assembly-language-programming/ Thu, 19 Jul 2018 20:36:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/intro-6502-assembly-language-programming/ I plan to do some demonstrations of assembly language programming, so I thought I’d do a short intro. This is about the 6502 family of microprocessors, which were used in many computers of the 1980s, and are still produced by the millions for embedded hardware and hobby projects. The 6502 is a pretty easy CPU to program, because it has a fairly small set of instructions, and yet it’s powerful enough to do interesting things. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/same-deal-every-time/ Mon, 16 Jul 2018 14:38:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/same-deal-every-time/ I was telling someone the other day that every computer I’ve bought has cost about $700-800, even though they keep getting more powerful. You can spend a lot more than that, of course. But it seems like each time I put together a system with current proven hardware that’s plenty powerful for my needs, the price ends up in that range, going back to my first computer in 1988. Then I got to wondering whether that’s really true. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/hats-for-bats/ Mon, 16 Jul 2018 10:54:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/hats-for-bats/ If I wear a hat doing work out in the yard, I usually wear a baseball cap style hat, as is common around here. But the other day a few of my hats fell apart in the laundry, they were getting so worn. So while I was at Farm & Home getting feed, I thought I’d look at hats. The first one – just an ordinary baseball cap – was $30. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/c-programming-tic-tac-toe-simulator-part-4/ Sun, 15 Jul 2018 20:23:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/c-programming-tic-tac-toe-simulator-part-4/ The fourth and final video in the series. I add the ability to ask for a number of games on the command line, do some final cleanup of the code and testing, and push it all to my gitlab repository. I intend to do more programming videos, so if you have suggestions or questions, please send them to aaron@baugher.biz. I may try some live streaming so it would be possible to interact in more of a classroom manner, if these generate any interest in that. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/july-12th-garden-update/ Fri, 13 Jul 2018 21:20:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/july-12th-garden-update/ We got a half-inch or so of rain last week, but still need more. Things were curling up again within a few days. Currently harvesting sweet corn and Swiss chard, hoping the snap beans kick in soon. So far, thanks to the heat, there’s nothing that will win any ribbons at the fair, but it’s still a couple weeks away. I tried something different with this one, taking photos and doing a slideshow with voiceover, instead of live video. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/c-programming-tic-tac-toe-simulator-part-3/ Sun, 08 Jul 2018 21:53:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/c-programming-tic-tac-toe-simulator-part-3/ This is the one where I spend an embarrassing amount of time figuring out how exactly to avoid losing a game of tic-tac-toe. Got it figured out, though. Now the players are smart enough to force a tie every time. In Part 4 I’ll clean up the code somewhat, add a few more features, and maybe talk about what comes next in the series. Part 1 Part 2 Part 4 tttbot repository https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/c-programming-tic-tac-toe-simulator-part-2/ Sat, 07 Jul 2018 13:54:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/c-programming-tic-tac-toe-simulator-part-2/ Here in part 2 I write most of the code, getting the program to where it can simulate one game. The AI is very dumb at this point, on purpose, so I could make sure the win and block conditions worked correctly. Part 3 will make it smart enough to produce all tie games, clean up the code, and do any debugging. This isn’t a tutorial, so I’m not trying to teach C in it, though that’s something I may tackle at another time. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/c-programming-tic-tac-toe-simulator-part-1/ Fri, 29 Jun 2018 08:10:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/c-programming-tic-tac-toe-simulator-part-1/ This the first part in a series of videos on C programming, which will walk the viewer through programming a tic-tac-toe simulator (a program which has the computer play against itself, a la War Games). I will be making it up as I go along, so you’ll get to see how the sausage is made, from designing to debugging. I hope that doesn’t result in too many long pauses as I think about things, or too many times of backing up and starting over, but we’ll see. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/june-19-garden-update/ Wed, 20 Jun 2018 13:59:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/june-19-garden-update/ Shot this one yesterday, after the tiny bit of rain we got out of some pretty dark clouds. Better than nothing, and at least it cooled things off some overnight. The weed situation is much more under control now than two weeks ago. There are still a few here and there, but now that the ones I pulled have died, I can spot the stragglers. Everything I started inside is now transplanted, but I have a few plants – cauliflower, kale, and tomatoes – that I picked up cheap at Farm & Home to find a place for. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/little-buddy/ Wed, 13 Jun 2018 17:34:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/little-buddy/ One of the kittens turned up starving a few days ago, so I have a new best friend. Nothing like hunger to tame a wild cat, I guess. I took this a couple days ago, and she’s still filling out and doing better. Feisty enough to run past me a couple times when I opened the door, anyway, but we’ll be having none of that. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/first-peas-2018/ Fri, 08 Jun 2018 07:46:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/first-peas-2018/ Picked the first peas of 2018 yesterday; got a little over a pound. Those early plants are already fading fast in the heat, but this was more than I expected to get from them, considering how spotty they came up. It took about 20 minutes to pick them and another 40 to shell. Not terribly cost-efficient, but 40 minutes spent shelling peas in the shade with a beer and the Stanley Cup game on the radio isn’t a bad thing. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/june-4-garden-update/ Tue, 05 Jun 2018 10:09:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/june-4-garden-update/ Sorry about the video quality on this. It seems like I either get too much light and things are washed out, or too little and it’s fuzzy. That’s what I get for using a cheap phone as a video camera, I guess. It’s been really dry here this year, so I’m already watering quite a bit. Strawberries are finished for the year, and asparagus and the early lettuce will be soon, and then it’ll be time to pick peas. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/pork-buying-demonstration/ Sun, 27 May 2018 18:42:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/pork-buying-demonstration/ There are a few questions people often have about buying pork by the hog or half-hog, so I thought I’d do a little video to answer them with my latest haul. It should give an idea how much meat you have to be prepared for, what kind of cuts you can look forward to, and how the pricing works (if you get the hog from us). I hope it’s informative. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/tables-in-org-mode/ Tue, 22 May 2018 18:48:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/tables-in-org-mode/ Here’s another nice thing about blogging in org-mode: easy tables. You can create a table in org-mode as simple as creating the first line with pipes between each item, and then tab for the next cell or line. Formulas are also pretty simple. Then exporting to a blog turns that into a nice HTML table for you. For instance, here’s the table I’ve been using to track my garden harvest so far this year, as it looks in org-mode as of today: https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/comparison-programming-languages/ Tue, 15 May 2018 21:09:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/comparison-programming-languages/ As I say in the video, I get asked now and then what programming language a person should learn. I thought I’d put together a simple demonstration of several, to show some of the similarities and differences, and why it’s a good idea to be proficient in more than one. I’m also trying something new in using my phone as a webcam. Works okay, though it does add a short delay. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/tau-station-intro/ Tue, 08 May 2018 23:17:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/tau-station-intro/ I’ve been playing a game called Tau Station lately. It’s an online, multiplayer, text-based, sci-fi role-playing game which is in alpha development. I got involved in it because I played Lacuna Expanse, a previous game by some of the same people, and wrote some scripts for that game. I was interested to see what they would do with this one, which is also being written in Perl, so I got in on the alpha phase. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/first-garden-video-2018/ Sat, 05 May 2018 19:10:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/first-garden-video-2018/ A few days ago, I was wearing a stocking cap to keep my ears warm. Today I’m wearing a hat to prevent sunburn. At least the weather isn’t boring. Now that it’s warmed up, things are starting to move in the garden. The early crops are up and growing, and it’s time to plant a lot of the warm weather ones. The asparagus has produced several pounds so far, and there will be lettuce and radishes to harvest soon. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/mint-jungle/ Thu, 03 May 2018 18:06:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/mint-jungle/ If you live in the area and could use a couple mint plants, let me know. I started with one snipping from one of my mom’s mint plants last fall, and this is what it’s developed into now, plus the four plants I already put out next to the grotto. I’ve just kept dividing it when it seemed ready, and now I’m not sure what to do with it all. Make mint juleps for Kentucky Derby weekend coming up, maybe. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/first-asparagus-2018/ Tue, 24 Apr 2018 15:27:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/first-asparagus-2018/ I finally harvested the first asparagus today. It started poking through a couple weeks ago, but the cold weather slowed it down. Now that it’s warmer, it’s coming on for real. Wound up with 1-1/4 pounds – pretty good lunch with butter on it. I’m going to try to keep track of how much of everything I harvest this year. I’ve planned to do that before, and never managed to stick with it, but I think it would be really interesting to look back at the end of the year and see how much was produced from a little seed and a lot of labor. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/gut-punch/ Tue, 17 Apr 2018 22:14:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/gut-punch/ Art doesn’t usually do that much for me. I tend to take things at face value, expect them to mean what they say. So the idea of reading a poem or looking at a painting and seeing things that aren’t there on the surface – it doesn’t happen much. But once in a while something works, and then it can be a real punch to the gut. This video is one of those. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/dont-be-spammed/ Mon, 16 Apr 2018 09:06:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/dont-be-spammed/ A note to anyone who emails me: don’t put anything in your subject line like “website proposal” or “domain proposal,” even if it’s correct in context. I get so much spam with subjects like that, that you’re almost certain to be spammed. In fact, if you’re emailing from an address I haven’t already whitelisted, the best subject line is probably, “Hey, this is so-and-so, for real!” https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/spinning-up-new-digital-ocean-droplet/ Tue, 10 Apr 2018 13:41:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/spinning-up-new-digital-ocean-droplet/ I have a $5/month virtual server at Digital Ocean, which I use for some light work and for an extra location outside my usual networks from which to test connectivity. I noticed recently that they’d increased the RAM and disk space included for that price. It turns out I could have just clicked a button to expand it, but I decided to make a new droplet and move everything to it, since that’s really how you’re supposed to handle the cloud – lean toward spinning up new systems rather than getting attached to the ones you have. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/dragged-me-in-kicking/ Thu, 05 Apr 2018 11:50:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/dragged-me-in-kicking/ They may be able to make me sign up for their data tracking nonsense to get coupons, but they can’t make me use my real name. (If you know where that’s from, you are a cultured individual.) https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/early-asparagus/ Tue, 03 Apr 2018 16:40:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/early-asparagus/ I spotted two asparagus spears just poking through the surface in the garden today (April 3rd). I wasn’t expecting it yet, as cold as it’s been, but happened to see one as I was walking by. Considering it’s supposed to get down as low as 18 this week, I’m not sure that’s a good thing. I don’t know how asparagus handles freezing, or whether it will freeze off and then come back when it warms up. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/should-have-been-hoarder/ Mon, 02 Apr 2018 08:30:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/should-have-been-hoarder/ I get an automated eBay notification for Commodore C128s, because sometimes I think it’d be nice to have a real one again, and I’m curious about what people are doing with them. But the prices on them keep going up, and an emulator is a pretty good substitute, so I haven’t bought any yet. The picture below is an example of what they’re going for these days: two completely untested systems, which may not work at all, and have missing keys, have a bid of $116 (including shipping). https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/commodore-8-bit-memories-0002-mule/ Sun, 25 Mar 2018 12:43:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/commodore-8-bit-memories-0002-mule/ I’ve been playing some MULE lately as I work on the design of a new game inspired by it, so I thought I’d do a play-through video. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/fixing-emacs-bbdb-migrate/ Mon, 19 Mar 2018 19:26:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/fixing-emacs-bbdb-migrate/ I recently upgraded Emacs and BBDB, and it stopped working to auto-complete addresses in Gnus. The error turned out to be that it was trying to run bbdb-migrate to update the database, and I wasn’t loading that. So I just needed to add this to my .emacs: (require 'bbdb-migrate) And do a C-x C-e at the end of that line to execute it. Then the next time I tried to use BBDB by auto-completing an address, it took a few moments to migrate the database, then worked fine. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/change-org-agenda-time-grid-org-9-1/ Mon, 19 Mar 2018 03:11:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/change-org-agenda-time-grid-org-9-1/ Another small one that others might be searching for. The upgrade to Org 9.1 included a change to the arguments in org-agenda-time-grid, adding a new one and rearranging them a bit. This was my previous setting (from Bernt Hansen’s config): (setq org-agenda-time-grid (quote ((daily today remove-match) #("----------------" 0 16 (org-heading t)) (0900 1100 1300 1500 1700)))) And now it’s this: (setq org-agenda-time-grid (quote ((daily today remove-match) (0900 1100 1300 1500 1700) " " ". https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/switched-ido-to-ivy-org-mode-completion/ Sun, 18 Mar 2018 14:48:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/switched-ido-to-ivy-org-mode-completion/ I used ido-mode for completion in org-mode for a long time, based on settings I got from Bernt Hansen’s Org Mode config. Recent changes to Org for version 9 have broken a few things. One is that org used to have its own hook into ido-mode for completion on things like refile tasks, using the variable org-completion-use-ido. That no longer exists. The docs say it can use a completion engine via completing-read, but while researching how to do that, I ran across ivy-mode. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/design-notes-mule-type-game/ Sun, 18 Mar 2018 08:46:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/design-notes-mule-type-game/ I’ve been playing some Stardew Valley lately. I got it from gog.com for $15, which is the most I’ve spent on a game in a long time. It’s a very well-made game, and even more impressive when you find out it was done by one man. Not many people can code well enough to make a complete game work, and do good graphics, and do good music, etc. Most games are made by teams of people with different skills, and when one skill is missing, it shows. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/fixing-org-protocol-issue-with-conkeror/ Sat, 17 Mar 2018 22:06:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/fixing-org-protocol-issue-with-conkeror/ I have a function in conkeror that saves a web page’s URL and title, along with any selected text at the time, in Emacs/Org-mode as a captured task, when I hit C-c r. It does this by feeding an org-protocol command through emacsclient. A recent upgrade of org-mode broke it, so I had to change it up a bit. The function in my .conkerorrc used to look like this: function org_capture (url, title, selection, window) { var cmd_str = 'emacsclient "org-protocol://capture:/w/'+ url + '/' + title + '/' + selection + '"'; if (window ! https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/i-left-him-cheese/ Sat, 17 Mar 2018 16:37:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/i-left-him-cheese/ I was reading through some old notes, and was reminded of this Dairy Council ad. It’s been almost 20 years, but thinking of that little girl’s grinning last line still makes me chuckle. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/putting-my-old-usenet-posts-online/ Sat, 17 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/putting-my-old-usenet-posts-online/ I was hunting through my old Usenet posts recently, and thought it might be useful to put them online for searching. Google still has the Groups archive, but it’s clear that they’ve started scrubbing things politically, so who knows how long that will survive. These are from 2002-2008, which must be when I mostly stopped using Usenet. I keep trying to get back into it, but unfortunately it’s kind of a wasteland now. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/bwn-driver-freebsd-dell-latitude-d520/ Fri, 16 Mar 2018 08:34:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/bwn-driver-freebsd-dell-latitude-d520/ I run FreeBSD on a Dell Latitude D520 laptop. One issue in installing it is that the wireless doesn’t work out of the box, so you have to install firmware for it. In this machine’s case, the needed firmware is in the net/bwn-firmware-kmod port. So you have to connect with the Ethernet port long enough to get that installed, or pull it in some other way, like a flash drive. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/starting-gardening-year/ Mon, 12 Mar 2018 16:52:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/starting-gardening-year/ It’s time to start working on the garden. Actually, a little past time. I planted a double-row of peas about ten days ago, as well as lettuce, parsnips, radishes, and carrots in the little bed in the grotto. The cold weather last week made that seem too early, but those things should still come up. I have a lot of leftover seed that germinated okay last year, but it might be iffy this year. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/hammer-all-the-cores/ Sun, 11 Mar 2018 17:38:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/hammer-all-the-cores/ My current workstation has 8 CPU cores (each core can handle a stream of instructions independently, so it’s more-or-less like having 8 CPUs – 8 different “brains” that can each be running its own thing at the same time). My last computer had 2, so I’m guessing my next one will have 32. They seem to be hitting a wall on how fast a single CPU can be, so the next best thing is to stack more and more of them together. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/my-750-words-a-day/ Sat, 10 Mar 2018 09:35:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/my-750-words-a-day/ I’ve been wanting to do more writing, but have had trouble getting in the habit. I got some inspiration recently, though, from a podcast series done by Mike Nelson of MST3K and Rifftrax fame, where he and a friend read and discussed Ready Player One, the best-selling book that’s being made into a movie. I haven’t read it, but based on the excerpts they shared, it sounds as if Tommy Wiseau (The Room) and James Nguyen (Birdemic: Shock and Horror) co-wrote a sci-fi novel. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/starting-over/ Tue, 27 Feb 2018 17:11:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/starting-over/ I’ve decided to revamp this site from scratch. I had built a very simple CMS based on Dancer, and it was fine, but I’ve been looking at static site generators and the possibility of creating my content in org-mode. I don’t really need dynamic content generation on the back-end, and I do everything else in org-mode anyway, so that seems like a better way to go. I’ll write more about it as I get familiar with it. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/quitting-facebook/ Wed, 21 Feb 2018 16:11:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/quitting-facebook/ I quit using Facebook a few months ago, when I wiped the app off my phone because it kept moving itself back to main memory and hogging it all. Normally I don’t announce when I’m going to stop using an online forum; I just stop. But in this case, it occurred to me that people might comment or post stuff on my timeline, and think I’m rudely ignoring them. I’m not, I’m just not seeing it. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/new-years-two-furnace-morning/ Mon, 01 Jan 2018 11:22:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/new-years-two-furnace-morning/ Cold morning to start the year, -11 degrees when I went out to feed and water the beasts. Fired up both furnaces for a while to get things comfy for the day. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/podcast-whats-up-with-google/ Fri, 11 Aug 2017 00:31:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/podcast-whats-up-with-google/ A summary of the recent events at Google, with the firing of James Damore and their crack-down on dissenting opinions by both employees and content providers. 36:23. Click to listen or download: What’s Up with Google? (32.6MB high quality audio) Click to listen or download: What’s Up with Google? (11.2MB low quality audio) If the YouTube video above ever fails, you can also find it at Vidme in two parts: Part 1 and Part 2. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/podcast-happening-status-its/ Fri, 28 Jul 2017 00:20:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/podcast-happening-status-its/ My wrap-up of the political happenings of July 27th and leading up to that. 40 minutes. Click to listen or download: Happening Status, It’s (36MB high quality audio) Click to listen or download: Happening Status, It’s (13MB low quality audio) https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/podcast-going-to-fair/ Mon, 24 Jul 2017 00:18:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/podcast-going-to-fair/ I talk about hot weather, chickens and eggs, hot weather, and the county fair coming up this week. 22 minutes. Click to listen or download: Going to the Fair (21MB high quality audio) Click to listen or download: Going to the Fair (7MB low quality audio) https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/podcast-dns-malware-russia-oh-my/ Thu, 13 Jul 2017 00:17:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/podcast-dns-malware-russia-oh-my/ A bit of a tutorial on how DNS works to let computers find each other on the Internet, how that and some other clues told me Salon’s October Surprise article about a Trump/Russia server connection was bogus at first glance, new info that’s coming to light now, and what I think might really have happened to prompt that article. 31 minutes. Click to listen or download: DNS, Malware, Russia, Oh My (34MB high quality audio) https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/podcast-web-hosting-musings/ Mon, 10 Jul 2017 00:14:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/podcast-web-hosting-musings/ I ramble about work, and how to market web hosting and other online services to small businesses and individuals in a way that’s more accessible than the current offerings. 23 minutes. Click to listen or download: Web Hosting Musings (20MB high quality audio) Click to listen or download: Web Hosting Musings (6.6MB low quality audio) https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/latin-mass-propers/ Fri, 07 Jul 2017 17:11:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/latin-mass-propers/ I’ve added a page containing many Latin Mass propers to the St. Rose web site, so I thought I’d link to it here as well. I’ve been making the propers for St. Rose since it opened, so I’ve gradually accumulated a decent collection that covers all the Sundays, Holy Days, and some other feasts. (A “proper” is the prayers and readings in the Mass that change from day to day.) Haven’t needed to do a new one in a while. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/podcast-cnn-delenda-est/ Fri, 07 Jul 2017 00:12:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/podcast-cnn-delenda-est/ I talk about CNN’s recent self-immolation, and the broader issue of the dying days of the Old Media. 30 minutes. Click to listen or download: CNN Delenda Est (22.7MB high quality audio) Click to listen or download: CNN Delenda Est (8.5MB low quality audio) https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/latin-rosary-card/ Mon, 03 Jul 2017 17:11:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/latin-rosary-card/ This is a prayer card I designed back when I was teaching a Latin class, so I could give one to each student. I ran across the files recently and thought I might as well put them online where someone else might get some use from them. They have all the standard Rosary prayers in Latin: the Sign of the Cross, Apostles Creed, Our Father, Hail Mary, and Gloria. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/podcast-chicken-drama/ Fri, 30 Jun 2017 00:09:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/podcast-chicken-drama/ Today’s excitement with chickens and a coyote. About 9 minutes. Click to listen or download: Chicken Drama (11MB high quality audio) Click to listen or download: Chicken Drama (3.3MB low quality audio) https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/podcast-growing-up-x/ Wed, 21 Jun 2017 00:07:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/podcast-growing-up-x/ Reminiscing about growing up in the middle of Generation X, farm style. About 37 minutes. Click to listen or download: Growing Up X (44MB high quality audio) Click to listen or download: Growing Up X (11MB low quality audio) https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/podcast-auctions/ Mon, 12 Jun 2017 19:18:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/podcast-auctions/ The one where I ramble for 15 minutes about going to auctions. Click to listen or download: Auctions (11MB high quality audio) Click to listen or download: Auctions (4.3MB low quality audio) https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/podcast-cant-stop-signal/ Mon, 12 Jun 2017 19:16:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/podcast-cant-stop-signal/ Could a government in the West shut down the Internet or major portions of it? What would happen and why? I give my opinions. 25 minutes. Click to listen or download: Can’t Stop the Signal (24MB high quality audio) Click to listen or download: Can’t Stop the Signal (8.6MB low quality audio) https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/podcast-not-even-in-a-bucket/ Sun, 04 Jun 2017 19:13:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/podcast-not-even-in-a-bucket/ For 15 minutes, I talk about gardening, trying, singing, and when did geek culture become a separate thing? Click to listen or download: Podcast #5: Not Even in a Bucket (14MB high quality audio) Click to listen or download: Podcast #5: Not Even in a Bucket (5MB low quality audio) https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/podcast-home-dentistry/ Wed, 31 May 2017 19:11:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/podcast-home-dentistry/ This is a short one, about 7 minutes, about finally losing my bad tooth, and garden progress. Click to listen or download: Podcast #4: Home Dentistry (7MB high quality audio) Click to listen or download: Podcast #4: Home Dentistry (2.6MB low quality audio) https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/podcast-teaching/ Thu, 25 May 2017 19:09:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/podcast-teaching/ Wherein I talk a little about how I got into teaching and tutoring, and some ideas of where I might go with it in the future. This one gets kinda rambling and repetitive. I think I’m going to start making at least a simple outline, because not every topic inspires a solid stream of ideas. I started this one with a single word in mind – “teaching” – and it didn’t go so well. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/reminiscing-about-computers/ Wed, 24 May 2017 19:06:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/reminiscing-about-computers/ Wherein I mention kittens and chickens, and the talk a while about old computers and a project idea for new ones. Click to listen or download: Podcast #2: Reminiscing about Computers https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/blogging-and-podcasting/ Thu, 18 May 2017 19:03:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/blogging-and-podcasting/ This is my first podcast, in which I mostly talk about why I’m trying a podcast, and problems I’ve had with blogging. Click to listen or download: Podcast #0: Blogging and Podcasting https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/back-to-task-after-email/ Wed, 18 Jan 2017 11:27:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/back-to-task-after-email/ This is a small thing, but it’s been bugging me for a while, so I’m glad I finally took the time to find a solution. When I read my email, I don’t respond to anything on the spot. Every message that requires a reply or any other action gets refiled as an org-mode task with a header, timestamp, and link to the message. When I’m finished going through mail and refiling everything that needs an action, I then go to my org-mode agenda, which shows those tasks, and clock each one in while I handle it. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/pepper/ Sun, 11 Sep 2016 17:11:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/pepper/ "[S]he lies in front of me curled up before the fire, as so many dogs must have lain before so many fires. I sit on one side of that hearth, as so many men must have sat by so many hearths. Somehow this creature has completed my manhood; somehow, I cannot explain why, a man ought to have a dog. A man ought to have six legs; those other four legs are part of him… [M]y dog knows I am a man, and you will not find the meaning of that word written in any book as clearly as it is written in [her] soul. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/freebsd-jails-zfs-1/ Mon, 04 Jan 2016 17:34:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/freebsd-jails-zfs-1/ For FreeBSD administrators, ZFS and jails combine to make virtualization easy, fast, and secure. A FreeBSD jail is a virtual machine which can only access the resources assigned to it when it was created, so its processes have no access to the rest of the machine. ZFS is an advanced filesystem that makes it very easy to create and destroy filesystems whenever they are needed. Together, they make it a matter of moments to create a new virtual system for testing, walling off network services, or other projects. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/my-public-key/ Fri, 11 Dec 2015 17:11:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/my-public-key/ For those who know what it is, here’s my public key. I’m going to start signing my email with it, so you can use it to verify me, and feel free to encrypt email to me with it. Contact me via any other channel you like to get my fingerprint to verify that it matches this, to make sure someone hasn’t compromised my web site and changed it. It’s a bit longer than usual because it has a JPEG of my smilin’ mug encrypted in it, for another possible way to verify it. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/reaching-unix-toolchain/ Tue, 13 Oct 2015 16:47:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/reaching-unix-toolchain/ The first time I used the Unix shell, I was hooked. The idea of having all these little programs, each of which did one thing, and being able to chain them together to do more complicated things, made perfect sense. Coming from an 8-bit background, where you were always up against the limits of the machine and waiting for programs to load, keeping everything small and focused was great. I still reach for the toolchain on my own systems on a daily basis. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/freebsd-administration/ Tue, 13 Oct 2015 12:00:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/freebsd-administration/ I’ve been doing FreeBSD sysadmin work and using it on my own systems since about 1998. I like its no-nonsene, professional attitude and the simplicity and openness of its licensing. I can build the kernel and OS from source (though that’s not necessary as often as it used to be). Other skills: System and security updates Security auditing Installing and configuring ports Networks (including wireless) and firewalls Installing and administering services (web, email, etc. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/saving-blog-comments-in-org-part-2/ Wed, 17 Jun 2015 11:27:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/saving-blog-comments-in-org-part-2/ After using </emacs/org-mode/saving-blog-comments-in-org|my mix of edit-server and org-capture for blog comments> for a while (see that page for instructions on setting up the org-mode template), I realized I’d like to have org-mode clock the time I spend commenting on blogs. I already have a ‘Reading Blogs’ task that I clock in for that, but it’d be nice to clock commenting separately, since that’s creating content. Plus, org-mode’s clocking is so nice that I like to use it as well as possible. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/org-mode-saving-blog-comments/ Sat, 13 Jun 2015 11:27:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/org-mode-saving-blog-comments/ Update: I added clocking as a feature later. I like to save my blog comments and other things I post to the web, for a couple reasons. First, once in a while a comment form fails, especially at sites like Blogspot. You spend 20 minutes writing and proofreading a comment, press the submit button, and poof – an error page and your comment is lost. So saving them provides a backup. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/org-mode-back-to-last-task/ Fri, 12 Jun 2015 11:22:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/org-mode-back-to-last-task/ I’ve been getting into http://orgmode.org|org-mode over the last couple years, using it to organize my work and as many other things as possible. Org-mode is an organizer (and much more) that runs in Emacs, which I use for many other things, so it’s a great fit. I owe a great deal of thanks to <http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html|Bernt Hansen, who put his complete org-mode configuration> online with detailed explanation and instructions. He uses it in a very http://gettingthingsdone. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/dactylic-hexameter/ Fri, 22 May 2015 17:11:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/dactylic-hexameter/ I made the mistake of telling the kids that their recent literature assignment might be more difficult than anything of the sort that I had to do in school. That gave them an opening to insist that it was impossible, and challenge me to prove that it wasn’t by doing it myself. Oops. The assignment was to write a 25-line poem in dactylic hexameter, the verse-form the Iliad was written in. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/wget-avoiding-robots/ Mon, 23 Mar 2015 17:06:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/wget-avoiding-robots/ I occasionally use the wget utility with the -m option to download a mirror of an entire website. This is very handy, but wget respects the robots.txt file, so it won’t mirror a site if robots.txt disallows it. Obviously, you should respect the downloading restrictions of other sites, but there are times when you have a valid reason to ignore them (when it’s your site, for instance, but you don’t want to change robots. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/how-to-treat-your-introvert/ Tue, 15 Sep 2009 16:34:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/how-to-treat-your-introvert/ I ran across this link called How to Care for Introverts today and realized I’ve never written about being an introvert, although I’ve mentioned it in passing a couple times. That link goes to a very crummy scanned image, so I thought I’d type it in here, and then add my own thoughts. First of all, for those who don’t know what an introvert is, the best definition I know is: “someone for whom spending time with other people is tiring. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/latin-mass-walk-through/ Mon, 20 Apr 2009 08:13:00 -0500 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/latin-mass-walk-through/ We had some new people at the 8:00 Mass this Sunday, and I discovered afterward that we’re not doing a very good job of helping newbies get started and follow along. After you’ve been going a while, it’s easy to forget how confusing it was the first time, but it doesn’t have to be that way if people are helped a little. So for people who are thinking about joining us at St. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/latin-mass-faq/ Wed, 04 Feb 2009 08:14:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/latin-mass-faq/ I’ve been asked several questions about the Latin Mass (which I should really call the Extraordinary Form, since it is technically possible to say the Novus Ordo Mass in Latin) since I started going, and some come up repeatedly, so I thought I’d answer them here. These are not official, just according to my understanding. I’ve touched on some in other posts, but I think I can answer them better now. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/why-latin-mass-7-reverence/ Fri, 16 Jan 2009 08:08:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/why-latin-mass-7-reverence/ (This is the seventh and final in a series of posts called Why the Latin Mass? I’ve been asked by several people why I like the Traditional Latin Mass—why people will drive a hundred miles to get to one, or spend a lot of time and money bringing it to their area. I’m trying to answer that from my perspective in this series.) When people talk about why they like the Latin Mass, lots of reasons come up: organ music, no one wearing shorts or tank tops, the beauty of the language, etc. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/why-latin-mass-6-what-its-not/ Tue, 13 Jan 2009 08:07:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/why-latin-mass-6-what-its-not/ (This is the sixth in a series of posts called Why the Latin Mass? I’ve been asked by several people why I like the Traditional Latin Mass—why people will drive a hundred miles to get to one, or spend a lot of time and money bringing it to their area. I’m trying to answer that from my perspective in this series.) I’ve been trying to keep this series positive, focusing on the pros of the Latin Mass (also known as the Extraordinary Form) rather than the cons of the Ordinary Form (aka the Novus Ordo), which is used in most churches today. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/why-latin-mass-5-consistency-community/ Mon, 05 Jan 2009 08:05:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/why-latin-mass-5-consistency-community/ (This is the fifth in a series of posts called Why the Latin Mass? I’ve been asked by several people why I like the Traditional Latin Mass—why people will drive a hundred miles to get to one, or spend a lot of time and money bringing it to their area. I’m trying to answer that from my perspective in this series.) Surprises are fun–in birthday gifts and haunted houses. I don’t find that they’re very conducive to a prayerful state, though. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/why-latin-mass-4-snappy-dressers/ Sun, 28 Dec 2008 08:03:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/why-latin-mass-4-snappy-dressers/ (This is the fourth in a series of posts called Why the Latin Mass? I’ve been asked by several people why I like the Traditional Latin Mass—why people will drive a hundred miles to get to one, or spend a lot of time and money bringing it to their area. I’m trying to answer that from my perspective in this series.) I’m not exactly what you’d call a clothes-horse. Since I work from home, most days my only fashion decision is whether to bother putting on shoes with my jeans and t-shirt, or stick with slippers. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/why-latin-mass-3-music-lack-thereof/ Fri, 12 Dec 2008 08:01:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/why-latin-mass-3-music-lack-thereof/ (This is the third in a series of posts called Why the Latin Mass? I’ve been asked by several people why I like the Latin Mass—why people will drive a hundred miles to get to one, or spend a lot of time and money bringing it to their area. I’m trying to answer that from my perspective in this series.) I grew up on rock and roll. It’s not my parents’ fault; they listened to country at home, and not a lot of that. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/why-latin-mass-2-beautiful-churches/ Sun, 30 Nov 2008 08:00:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/why-latin-mass-2-beautiful-churches/ (This is the second in a series of posts called Why the Latin Mass? I’ve been asked by several people why I like the Latin Mass—why people will drive a hundred miles to get to one, or spend a lot of time and money bringing it to their area. I’ll try to answer that in this series.) This one isn’t an absolute, of course. There are plenty of new-style Masses being said in beautiful, ornate churches like St. https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/why-latin-mass-1-everything-better-latin/ Sun, 23 Nov 2008 07:58:00 -0600 https://aaron.baugher.biz/post/why-latin-mass-1-everything-better-latin/ (This is the first in a series of posts called Why the Latin Mass? I’ve been asked by several people why I like the Latin Mass—why people will drive a hundred miles to get to one, or spend a lot of time and money bringing it to their area. I’ll try to answer that in this series.) One thing I always tell people is it’s not just about the language. There are many other differences between the TLM and the Novus Ordo (the new Mass said in most churches today).