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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.