Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

There are also times when I really like the CLI and the power of shellscripts. Last night, I spent about 5 hours hand-drawing just a few technical pictures in gimp 6x each because I didn't like how they turned out. Today, in about 5 hours, I wrote and debugged scripts using ImageMagick and a short text file to draw 34 pictures for me, and to write a whole HTML table of data (including ASCII art) to go with the pictures besides.

Specifically, "while" loops on the receiving end of a pipe. Variables are local because the loop is executed in a subshell. Oops.

There are times when I really question my choice to do things in shellscript. Did you know that in BSD /bin/sh and in Bash, variables inside "for" loops are global like normal, but variables inside "while" loops are automatically local to the loop? I didn't, and I wasted about an hour fruitlessly debugging everything because of it.

Am I the only one who pronounces the 8-bit OS "GEOS" as "gee-ohs"? I've heard like four other pronunciations now.

This ✨ sparkly shellscript princess ✨ spent her weekend writing a shellscript to convert numbers from one base to an intermediate representation to another base. The result is the most uselessly useful shellscript I've written in a *very* long time, a script to convert a conventional date into a Rickdate string: https://thornton2.com/rickdate.html

Pictured: my sense of accomplishment.

While adventuring in the lands digital, refrain from stabbing thy trustworthy companion, ye olde Amiga 500.

It took 20 years for me to take this picture. IDK if the larger one works, but the smaller one still works.

Important related trivia if you use real or emulated Commodore 8-bits: Never, ever validate a disk containing GEOS files outside of GEOS. If you do, you'll corrupt all those files.

I may have found one, & I'm almost kicking myself. cc65 has a symbol table lifted from the Hitchhiker's Guide to GEOS, checked only for fidelity not correctness. But it also uses a few include files for cross-compiling Apple II GEOS programs, which means conflicting addresses *had* to be resolved: https://github.com/cc65/cc65/tree/master/libsrc/geos-apple

Back in the day, GEOS was so popular that (by one account at least) nearly half of all C64 owners used it. GEOS 128 didn't quite reach the same status but it was still a bit respectable. The Plus/4 & Apple II versions, however, never made it out of obscurity.

Does anyone happen to know where I can find information on Apple II GEOS programming? "The Hitchhiker's Guide to GEOS" has serious errors, & JFGI is completely failing me.

Ooh, Tusky has a pinned toots tab on user profiles now. Nice!

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a trebuchet loaded with MicroSD cards.

I had a floppy disk that I took between Win95 & WinNT computers, & the Briefcase feature made syncing files *so* easy. It's probably the only feature of any Windows version I actually miss.

I have finally, actually finished a project I started: my static website generator! Of course, immediately after I uploaded the package, I spotted typos & grammatical errors, & I had to pack up & upload a revision.

http://files.thornton2.com/amtswg/ if you want to check out the tarball & my samples, or http://files.thornton2.com/amtswg/amtswg-1.1.tar.gz if you want to check out just the tarball.