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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.