So it’s April Fools 2000. I’m working at the bank on a nice sunny Saturday afternoon and we are taking delivery of a new IBM S80 Computer. This thing was expensive clocking at nearly 1/2 a million dollars.

The modern Mac platform makes a great development environment for embedded programming. The Raspberry Pi is a very inexpensive, and even in 2023, relatively available embedded board. It’s very easy to interface it with other devices. And there are many language options. The Arduino, µPython, or the native C development tools all great options that work well on macOS.

The Arduino and µPython environment are simple and straight forward to get working.

The C development tools for the Raspberry Pi Pico work fairly well on macOS. However, it does take a bit to everything set up. It seems there are different sets of instructions, some work, some don’t works so well. I used a mixture of things and figured some stuff out myself So I provide what I did to get everything to work under macOS 13 on a Mac Studio with an M1 Max processor.

All 3 provide powerful tools to develop software for the Raspberry Pi Pico SBC.

Last year, I managed to acquire a C=64 Maxi. It’s a faithful replication of the original Commodore 64 based on an ARM SBC, similar to a Raspberry Pi, running a minimal Linux kernel and VICE. As I’m also a Mac user, I had to figure out how to access and transfer files, and develop software for the C=64 on the Mac. This should be mostly the same if using The C=64, or emulation of the C=64 on the Mac itself.

Hugo is a pretty powerful Web development tool. But everything isn’t always obvious. I’ve had to figure a few things out that could probably be documented a little better. So here are my notes on a few random things.

After several years and trips to my parent’s house searching, I finally found my mother’s UFO books. She gave them to me upon her death. In with them, I found Night Siege: The Northern Ohio UFO-Creature Invasion by Dennis Pilichis.

It chronicles the strange events in the summer of ‘81 in rural Ohio. Reading it after all these years, brought back a lot of memories. It was a crazy time.

Using AWS s3 to host a web site is easy, and rather inexpensive. Also using S3, there is no code or database required, so not only is security better, but there is a lot less complexity than using Wordpress. If you have your own domain name, you can either use Nginx or Cloud Front with Route 53 to front end it. I chose the former as I didn’t want to give up control of my domain to AWS.

You’ll also need a static site generator, unless you want to write the HTML yourself. I started with Pelican, but switched to Hugo. Pelican just didn’t work the way I wanted it to. So far, except for a few minor issues, Hugo is working just fine.

Here we have a collection of Goblin’s Horror soundtracks on vinyl LPs. This is the first Goblin boxset on vinyl and has many titles that haven’t been available in a long time. The is for LITA 20th Anniversary and is limited to 1000 copies. The albums are on a blood red transparent colored vinyl that look particularly cool. It comes in a nice box and has an 8 page book featuring liner notes on each soundtrack by Fabio Capuzzo.

It would seem that installing Marlin 2.0 on an Ender 3 3D printer is suppose to be done using PlatformIO within Microsoft VS Code. Even though not recommended, it can be done using the Arduino IDE. It does require a little Set up and preparation first.

In 2020, since the beginning of the Pandemic, the US Government has passed 5 stimulus packages for a total is about $ 5.2 trillion. But how much is that really? Well, it turns out, it’s a lot! Lets find out exactly how much.

So having recently gone back to the Mac after a 7 year hiatus to try out using Linux as a desktop environment meant getting 7 years worth of code working. Any Perl code I had would have been originally written on macOS, so it worked just fine. 3/4 of my C code was written on macOS originally as well. But Just installing some packages with Brew and it all compiled just fine. And of course, all the BASH and awk code was no issues either.

And that brings us to Python. For some inexplicable reason, the system python is still 2.7. As you’d guess, all my code is Python 3. But, you should never use the system python anyway.