CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@0xabad1dea With excessive use of variable Q parametric equalizer, Odin could sound very like a steam locomotive.

@gelliottmorris.com I am deeply disillusioned with the DNC, but I know which party wants to literally kill me, and it's not them.

I probably should have noticed, by now, that the EEPROMs I was planning to use in the instruction decoder have a read access time of 150 ns. At the original target clock rate, that's more than 10 cycles, just to access the lookup table. And to think, I was worried about 2-3 cycles of delay from a multiplexor.

I am sorely tempted to shelve the ID/CU, and /temporarily/ replace it with an ESP32 surrounded by resistor packs, 74F138s, and 74F157s. I know if I do that, though, I'll probably never finish the real thing. Also tempted to use at least a PIC16F84 in what I'm hoping will eventually become at least a rudamentary MMU, which I see as the primary barrier to running something approaching an OS on this thing, apart from, you know, actually getting it to work at a satisfactory clock rate.

@paul_ipv6 Loosely based on events which occurred in Ellensburg, WA, in late Winter of 1999. Any and all parties who may or may not have been present shall remain anonymous, though at least one party was last heard-from working as a bartender on Phuket, Thailand, not long before the 2004 earthquake and tsunami, and is assumed to be deceased.

Forgot to list the splash of fake grenadine. It's very important to use the cheap "grenadine" that's just water, corn syrup, red dye, and citric acid, along with the usual toxic preservatives. It should contain no actual pomegranate juice.

And yes, if you assumed that Guns 'n Roses Appetite for Destruction is in the cassette deck, you were correct.

One thing I'm happy to release under the FHH License v1.0 right now, and do hereby do so:

The-Behind-The-Gas-Station-At-2AM Cocktail:

1.5 oz light rum
0.5 oz sweet vermouth
5 oz Dr. Pepper
Ice

Rim the glass with powdered tartaric or malic acid

Stir with awkward gentleness.

It's meant to evoke mixed memories of that special someone's clumsy fumbles under your shirt with sticky hands and slurpee/slushie/Ice-e+nacho+sour-patch-kid breath at 2AM, in a rusty 1986 Chevy S10 Blazer parked behind the gas station on the edge of town, out by the railroad tracks and that vacant lot with a bunch of semi-truck trailers and a rusty old crane, overgrown with blackberry bushes.

The FHH License:
https://git.disroot.org/bsdclown/filthy_human_hands

Kinda wishing I'd had at least one actual class on digital logic design, instead of gradually accumulating bits and pieces of knowledge, here and there, over decades. If I'd taken a class, though, I'd probably have known better than to attempt this project in the first place.

Back to working on my tooling. Rebuilt the 32 channel all high detector to indicate all low as a distinct state from partially low. Gave the 24 channel logic probe an 8 channel expansion module. Expanding what started out as a slightly modified version of Ben Eater's single stepper and low frequency variable clock with a series of logic-selectable fixed frequency oscillators, most of which are probably very optimistic at this stage: 500 KHz, 1, 3, 5, 8, 16, 25, 33, and 60 MHz. Kinda hoping I can eventually get it to work all the way up at 80 MHz, but that's probably a long way off. Also, due to compounding gate delays, some parts of this thing are definitely going to be waiting several clock cycles for other parts to catch-up, above 16 MHz. Learning that a lot of my early design assumptions were very naive, and I'm sure I'm still near the beginning of learning how much I don't know.

@GossiTheDog Who didn't see this coming? I kinda figured it was already happening.

Another day, another lament that neither my great, great grandfather stayed in Løsning, Denmark, nor my grandmother stayed in St. Johns, Newfoundland, and the Fortune successfully reached the Plymouth colony.

Grumble. Just noticed that the suspiciously cheap surplus card cage on its way to me is one of the very few ever made that does not have slot rails to hold the card edges. Since I'm too broke to buy another one, I'm going to have to improvise. I'd like to use four CNC-milled strips of UHMW, two on top and two below, but being short on CNC milling machines, at the moment, it's probably going to be more like EPVC notched with a Dremel cut-off wheel at hand-measured intervals.

@etchedpixels @paul_ipv6 @brouhaha Thankfully, I've never needed to know more about network time synchronization than how to enable the daemon and which sub-pool of pool.ntp.org to point it at, so I'm not in much of a position to judge. If you are, I'll take your word for it.

@paul_ipv6 @brouhaha TFTP just about lives-up to its name, I guess, but that's the only one that comes to mind.

@paul_ipv6 @brouhaha SMTP, SNMP . . . honorable mention for LDAP . . . yeah, checks-out.

@petersuber 1 sounds good, 2 sounds OK, I guess, 3 worries me.