Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

This took entirely too long to write up, so many times longer than actually doing it, but here it is!

GELI Encrypted USB Backup in #FreeBSD 13: https://thornton2.com/unix/freebsd/geli-encrypted-usb-backup.html

Merry Litha to southern hemisphere friends!

Good morning and merry Yule, everyone!
I'm working and very busy today.

Today's achievement: Reliably backing up my #FreeBSD systems using full disk encryption onto a USB hard drive that's also using full disk encryption.

Making periodic #ZFS snapshots automatically: https://mwl.io/archives/2140

Sending those ZFS snapshots to the backup disk: https://www.ccammack.com/posts/back-up-zfs-to-a-removable-drive-using-zxfer/

I had to add "objsetid" to the list of -I exclusions in the zxfer command to work around a bug it has.

#Commodore - Am I imagining things? Does the Hitchhiker's Guide to #GEOS really forget to describe the GraphicsString routine?

Nothing gives me that Layer 1 energy like a can of fresh roasted RJ-45 connectors!

oops:
... & [if I'm not,] grab the byte at COLOR_MATRIX on startup instead.

The lesson I'm taking from this is, if I use colors, check if I'm in v1.2 or later, & grab the byte at COLOR_MATRIX on startup instead.

This lesson brought to you by geoAssembler & geoLinker resetting colors to default, & deskTop 2.0 repairing colors only for the disk directory pad area.

deskTop 2.0 doesn't repair screen colors after an application quits, but it does after a desk accessory quits.

#TIL The variable "screencolors" wasn't in #Commodore #GEOS v1.0 (& that geoAssembler crashes in v1.0). There's nothing like trying to use your test program on a black-on-black screen. I don't have a v1.1 d64, but v1.2 works as documented.

C lang trigraphs??/

Speaking of geoWrite...
Ever wanted to know how a featureful GUI word processor with only a single 0.001 GHz CPU, only 0.00006 GB of RAM, and only 0.000153 GB of storage space could pull that off?

Reverse-Engineered geoWrite 2.1 for C64 Source Code: https://www.pagetable.com/?p=1512

The article embeds a whole series of articles about how BSW pulled off a modern WYSIWYG word processor in such a tiny space.

There's geoText, but there's no manual, & I can't figure out how to type vital ASCII characters like the vertical bar (U+007C), geoAssembler's bitwise-or operator.

geoText:
- https://ftp.pokefinder.org/index.php?s=geoText&m=0&h=100
- http://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub/cbm/geos/productivity/index.html

Please do not shop around for Internet service providers while driving. Operating heavy machinery at high speed is the absolute worst time to absorb new information and make purchasing decisions.

Don't call me until you're stopped and out of traffic!

Hang up and drive!

Cross-compiling would probably be better, but I don't want to. The quirks of that old great machine just make using it a joy, & emulators don't diminish it enough to matter.

I'm back in the flow of learning the #Commodore 64 & #GEOS inside out, & reading code in geoWrite is such a pain. Text rendering is necessarily slow, but assembly is tall columns, the default margins/tabs cause frequent re-renderings, & the default font (BSW 9) is tall.

My first GEOS program is likely going to be a text editor. If I can't get geoWrite's format right, I can do pure ASCII & import it via Text Grabber with Generic II Form.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7niD6i4020
[YouTube, 3:15]: "Reyn vs Martin Galway - Wizball [high score]"