One year ago today: July 7, 2023, tweedle-dee
Five years ago today: July 7, 2019, baked, boneless.
Nine years ago today: July 7, 2015, less than half price.
Random years ago today: July 7, 2009, the spider from Borocay.
That screen door has sagged an inch since I squared it less than two weeks ago. I wonder if it is the frame of the house? The way the rest of the place is finished, that possibility cannot be ruled out. I gave all the pets a special Sunday breakfast. Blueberries for the turtle, turkey for the cats, chicken for the small doggie, and a hearty helping of raw fish for the big doggie. They have figured out the combination of me being here and her away more than a day. So well-behaved they strike a pose.
You are reading text from the iMac, but it has many issues and settings I’ve long forgotten. It won’t display pictures in Gab, and it is slower at some operations. That’s a suspicion because I recall when Apples were so fast people would miss the result and keypress a second time, ah, those were the days. I’ve been toying with building a RAM circuit off and on (ha-ha) for a while, and last evening sketched on of my later plans, all based on what I’ve read. This morning I had my flabber gasted when I found out I had re-invented DRAM. I recall the acronym from doing upgrades at the computer shop. Today, however, is my first real investigation into how it works. Part of what stalled me was that each junction requires 3 connections, which I found difficult to visualize and draw.
The good news was during this lesson, it hit me that I had once seen the pin-outs from the old 6502 chip, the one used in my original Apple ][e. I know nothing of this chip, but I know about pinouts thanks to the robot club. I quickly located this 6502 video (hope your ad blocker is enabled) and, although I got lost on most of the points, I completely understood what was happening. It, again, was one of those moments for me, why didn’t anybody tell me about this when I was eight years old? What’s more, in this video, the guy uses an Arduino to interpret the output signals. I intend to look closer at this type of arrangement when I return to Florida.
If you do watch the video, around the 22 minute mark, I began understanding the output, not what it means, but the why it was behaving like it does. This again, was a discover of the robot club, that each person had an ability to grasp one phase, as opposed to all of us learning the whole process. We were not rich kids on a campus playground, so each of these factors was a painstaking baby step. I’m far from getting it, but rather proud I could interpret what’s going on. Check with me again in the near future.
Making potato chips.
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Back to work, I got the yard about half cleaned up, that is, all the big heavy pieces. All gone into the burn barrel. I paced out the fence, including the wings it is more like 66 or 67 feet long. That makes it the longest picket fence I’ve built in my life. And it was not even in my own yard. There’s some irony in all this. It ends around six days of effort, about double the time it would have taken a younger man. Or if I’d gotten a lick of help from the company, but that never happened. Since I have nothing better for you this morning, here is another photo with a name. This one is called “Omelette, Phase 1”.
For a number of years now, I’ve persisted reading specs on electronic components, which included memory circuits, gates, latches, and registers. I don’t unsay ny contention these things are taught funny and I know I don’t have a conventional learning curve. But this afternoon something clicked. While the video this morning overwhelmed my brain, there were several follow-on tutorials that finally made sense. I have said before I could build a computer from scratch if I had to, but now the inner workings of the parts has fallen into place. I was right about latching circuits, they cannot be drawn out the way they work. Like a light, they went on this afternoon and I intend to build one, now knowing what to look for.
As for the yard work and the back door, I will do what I can tomorrow. I admit, the level of effort plain tires me out too much. You get tired, or weary is a better word and don’t recover as quickly. Don’t skip those afternoon naps on super to days, they are a requirement for a proper retirement.
