You know what LISP is an acronym for? "Lots of Irritating Single Parenthesis" 😀
I started to learn in in an AI subject back in the late 80's but the lecturer had a very strong accent that I couldn't understand and I dropped the subject.
I think the programming I liked the most was 68000 Assembler.
These days about the only programing I do is in unix shell script, with the occasional bit of perl. I wouldn't count puppet as programming....
Tony.
In 1965 I was playing with vacuum tubes. I had no money and they were free!
I think there is one electrolytic in one board. The linear power supply I built in 1971 is long gone. It made 3.6 volts at something like 20 amps. I remember robbing the germanium pass transistors and their heat sinks for a novelty audio amp somewhere in the mid 70's. I have a Sorensen bench supply now that can produce the required power.
I did some assembly programming on my 6809 system, since it was the best choice at the time. C or Pascal for the 6809 didn't exist and all of the available BASICs just sucked. I really started programming in earnest on the HC11's (there were many variants), using compiled C and assembly in the 1980's.
The PIC16C54 appeared in the market in the early 90's and one of my little projects consumed 250,000 of them over a 2 year period. All assembly language, 20 MHz part overclocked to 24 MHz, and the most often used instruction in my program was a No-Op. I got a lot of free parts from Microchip in the 90's, but I had to keep it all quiet since I worked for Motorola at the time. There were a lot of simple tasks that only this amazing little chip could do.
Motorola really had a cow in about 2010 when I stuck a Microchip part in a two way radio design. Being a development engineer, I explained that it was not only the right part for the job, it was the ONLY part for the particular job. After several others tried to re-engineer things for another chip, they relented and shipped the product with a Microchip fet driver inside.
Most of my one off prototypes and test fixtures at Motorola used Microchip parts programmed in C. My favorite board at the time (5 to 7 years ago) was the MAX 32, a 32 bit Arduino compatible, with LOTS of I/O.
Max32: Arduino-programmable PIC32 Microcontroller Board - Digilent
There are better choices today for small low cost projects like the Teensy boards. They are also Arduino compatible, but more powerful. There is a neat drag and drop GUI based audio development platform for the Teensy. I used it to code much of my music synthesizer.
Products
Teensy Audio Library, high quality sound processing in Arduino sketches on Teensy 3.1
And some not so random bursts of impulse noise......some call them gunshots. At least here you don't have to be that close to the trailer park either.
here in our board we do not discuss persons as persons, we discuss ideas.....
i have learned a great deal from Leach, his designs i would say is the most diy'ed amps.....i have not learned anything from you, but then that does not matter to me....
i followed the debate between Leach and Cordell when TIM was a hot topic on the Audio magazine in the 80's, their design preferences are opposed, like JC, Leach is fond of complementary symmetry amps...
And i didn't learn anything from Leach....
one of my favorite quotes, I believe it was Margaret Thatcher :
(may be paraphrasing here)
Great minds discuss ideas....
Average minds discuss events...
Small minds discuss people.
to which I might add
Truly tiny minds discuss only themselves.
Which makes mine truly tiny indeed...n'est ce pas?
Yes!...you might insist. I know better, and i'm not going to lose any sleep over your opinion of me.
But I posted here for a reason...to scare up old contacts anonymously.
It worked, and I've PMed them with my personal contact info.
As far as not learning anything from me, and not caring...i could say i care even less, but that would be the obvious retort, and not true.
Another favorite quote (Robin Wlliams, i think)
"If you can't laugh at yourself, don't worry - there are plenty of people out there who will do it for you..."
An apropos segue from that would be to the great scene in the 1972 movie version of "Steppenwolf", by Hermann Hesse, in which he is exhorted to look at himself, realllly look at himself, in a mirror, and laugh at everything he sees...and achieves enlightenment, of a sort. It used to be available on on VHS, or those obsolete 14 inch Laserdiscs, but due to recent upsurge in public interest has now been rereleased on DVD, and for direct download.
Enlightenment is what Hesse himself was chasing...and was disappointed that Buddha, having achieved it, didn't teach how to do so. Buddha explained that wasn't his purpose...it was that of Maitreya Buddha, who was his successor, and who would come later. Several people have claimed to be him, but the proof of the pudding that they're not is this : Buddha stated clearly that Maitreya could be recognized by the simple fact that by following his teachings, it would be common (emphasis on common - 'an everyday occurrence') for a student to achieve enlightenment in ONE lifetime. And we haven't seen that.
But Buddhism, and Hinduism, various Yogas, the Kaballah.... all agree on something that is sometimes paraphrased by the saying "Chance favors the prepared mind" and is stated in the biblical saying "A seed strewn on stone will not grow"
Alternative viewpoints
There was a commercial way back in the 70's or 80's that showed a typical, working-class neighborhood scene; white picket fences, wives hanging laundry, etc. and then gradually you began to hear the unmistakable thump thump thump of a boomed-out car stereo approaching. A lowrider slowly crests the hill with loud bass-heavy music thumping, and the wives in the front yard started the typical pantomiming of holding their hands to their ears, and mouthing "What", indicating they couldn't hear each other. The lowrider slowly drives into view and the driver turns a bored looking (or stoned-looking) face straight at the camera, which then it pans back to show everybody staring in consternation, except for the young people (in particular, very attractive teenage girls) who are obviously staring with awe.
I believe it was advertising car stereos, or speakers...
A sales rep I knew had a boyfriend with a lowered Volvo sedan, which he did for performance reasons. I had a bunch of Hispanic friends who lived in dang-near stereotypical neighborhoods in north San Jose. I came up with the idea of doing a spoof. Same neighborhood scene with the ethnicities switched.
You hear the theme to Masterpiece Theatre blaring, and the scenario plays out the same way, except it's a bored looking white yuppie rolling by....
My friends pointed out that wouldn't be realistic. In their neighborhood, it would just turn into a reverse drive-by.
I said "Great - we can get Smith and Wesson or Glock as a sponsor." They thought that was funny. Then we decided to make it less confrontational, and the guy just rolls on by unscathed, the scene fades to black, and you hear crickets chirping...the the scene lightens up, and you see the guy's car parked outside his condo at 3 AM. Up on cinder blocks, trunk and hood open,
doors open, fancy wheels gone, stereo and battery gone...dissolve to a scene in a chop-shop garage, where the perpetrators are leaving with the cash, then a dissolve to scene outside a package store, another fade...back in their neighborhood, partying, and you hear that oh-so familiar voice call out "Nowwwwww - it's Millllller time!"... slow fade back to the scene outside the victim's condo, he's standing there in his pajamas, on his cell phone.
Equally-familiar voiceover saying "Relax...you're in good hands with Allstate" or perhaps "Time to switch to Geico..." That was before the Internet (just DarpaNet at that time; no place to share it, except at an amateur film festival.
Couldn't get my friend's boyfriend Glen to sign on...
My Hispanic friends said, "You could do it with your BMW!" - except it was a motorcycle. We would have had to strap a boom-box on the back, as there was no place for the speakers in the factory-installed fairing.....My car at the time was a 1962 Dodge Dart station wagon...not yuppie enough.
Before anyone makes charges of racism - this was while I was working at NexGen. There was a very diverse mix of cultures represented there, and a group of us - Indian, Chinese, Vietnamese, two white guys (one of them myself) and a particularly stunning Dutch Polynesian girl - all used to go to lunch together, out for drinks and dancing, dinner. We got nicknamed "the U.N." and had a lot of fun together. And quickly learned which bars, clubs and restaurants gave us a frosty reception (mostly franchises full of white people) and which welcomed us...places in Japan town, our favorite Indian, Chinese, Thai restaurants, the one Eiritrian restaurant in north San Jose (the "Red Sea"), the Kabuhl in Mountain view, Chelo-Kababi in Sunnyvale and another Persian restaurant in Palo Alto (I had a lot of Persian friends from my days at Data General). And pretty much anywhere on Castro Street or in the Haight-Ashbury area in San Francisco at the time, or pretty much anywhere in downtown Palo Alto, or the neighborhoods close to U.C. Berkeley.
I live in the Deep South now, and racism is not dead here, or even sleeping.
Just veneered over like a cheap pair of particle-board speakers, masquerading as quality hardwood - to make it relevant to audio. And I'm not knocking particle board either. I use it to build prototype speakers. But I use quality drivers and don't veneer them and tell people they're solid Teak.
There was a commercial way back in the 70's or 80's that showed a typical, working-class neighborhood scene; white picket fences, wives hanging laundry, etc. and then gradually you began to hear the unmistakable thump thump thump of a boomed-out car stereo approaching. A lowrider slowly crests the hill with loud bass-heavy music thumping, and the wives in the front yard started the typical pantomiming of holding their hands to their ears, and mouthing "What", indicating they couldn't hear each other. The lowrider slowly drives into view and the driver turns a bored looking (or stoned-looking) face straight at the camera, which then it pans back to show everybody staring in consternation, except for the young people (in particular, very attractive teenage girls) who are obviously staring with awe.
I believe it was advertising car stereos, or speakers...
A sales rep I knew had a boyfriend with a lowered Volvo sedan, which he did for performance reasons. I had a bunch of Hispanic friends who lived in dang-near stereotypical neighborhoods in north San Jose. I came up with the idea of doing a spoof. Same neighborhood scene with the ethnicities switched.
You hear the theme to Masterpiece Theatre blaring, and the scenario plays out the same way, except it's a bored looking white yuppie rolling by....
My friends pointed out that wouldn't be realistic. In their neighborhood, it would just turn into a reverse drive-by.
I said "Great - we can get Smith and Wesson or Glock as a sponsor." They thought that was funny. Then we decided to make it less confrontational, and the guy just rolls on by unscathed, the scene fades to black, and you hear crickets chirping...the the scene lightens up, and you see the guy's car parked outside his condo at 3 AM. Up on cinder blocks, trunk and hood open,
doors open, fancy wheels gone, stereo and battery gone...dissolve to a scene in a chop-shop garage, where the perpetrators are leaving with the cash, then a dissolve to scene outside a package store, another fade...back in their neighborhood, partying, and you hear that oh-so familiar voice call out "Nowwwwww - it's Millllller time!"... slow fade back to the scene outside the victim's condo, he's standing there in his pajamas, on his cell phone.
Equally-familiar voiceover saying "Relax...you're in good hands with Allstate" or perhaps "Time to switch to Geico..." That was before the Internet (just DarpaNet at that time; no place to share it, except at an amateur film festival.
Couldn't get my friend's boyfriend Glen to sign on...
My Hispanic friends said, "You could do it with your BMW!" - except it was a motorcycle. We would have had to strap a boom-box on the back, as there was no place for the speakers in the factory-installed fairing.....My car at the time was a 1962 Dodge Dart station wagon...not yuppie enough.
Before anyone makes charges of racism - this was while I was working at NexGen. There was a very diverse mix of cultures represented there, and a group of us - Indian, Chinese, Vietnamese, two white guys (one of them myself) and a particularly stunning Dutch Polynesian girl - all used to go to lunch together, out for drinks and dancing, dinner. We got nicknamed "the U.N." and had a lot of fun together. And quickly learned which bars, clubs and restaurants gave us a frosty reception (mostly franchises full of white people) and which welcomed us...places in Japan town, our favorite Indian, Chinese, Thai restaurants, the one Eiritrian restaurant in north San Jose (the "Red Sea"), the Kabuhl in Mountain view, Chelo-Kababi in Sunnyvale and another Persian restaurant in Palo Alto (I had a lot of Persian friends from my days at Data General). And pretty much anywhere on Castro Street or in the Haight-Ashbury area in San Francisco at the time, or pretty much anywhere in downtown Palo Alto, or the neighborhoods close to U.C. Berkeley.
I live in the Deep South now, and racism is not dead here, or even sleeping.
Just veneered over like a cheap pair of particle-board speakers, masquerading as quality hardwood - to make it relevant to audio. And I'm not knocking particle board either. I use it to build prototype speakers. But I use quality drivers and don't veneer them and tell people they're solid Teak.
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be that as it may, would just like to make you aware that we have rules here...take care now...
You used the word “reasons”, yet....
You listed only one motivating reason for an entire subculture of people.
You supported your singular reason with a single example.
With an alarmist, clickbait title, I guess not much more should be expected.
Why must we have to benefit commercially to spend our time effectively and enjoyably?
For example if I said:
Cooking at home is dying
Reasons for cooking:
It’s cheaper than buying pre-made food.
....And because there is this one microwaveable burrito at the supermarket that is less expensive to purchase than to make at home from scratch by a significant margin, we should all just give up.
Well, I’d be pretty foolish I think.
By all means, tell us about the burrito.... I love a good burrito, regardless of price... but come on you’re (we’re) better than that, I hope.
After the first Fast And Furious movie came out, myself and a few friends decided to do a spoof.
Those who know me here also know that I have no problems blowing stuff up. It's usually electronics related, and often accidental, like melting vacuum tubes, or other parts. Maybe some unwanted electronics stuff fell into a microwave oven and blew up one day.
Around the 4th of July and New Years Eve, the "fireworks are illegal" law in Florida gets overlooked, and people blow stuff up. Our neighborhood often looked and sounded like a war zone on those days. I was known for my DIY fireworks. People would gather outside after dark on those days to watch (and feel) the "tests."
I got a visit from a friendly law enforcement officer in late December after the World Trade Center incident. He said that "we know what you and your friends do, and we have been told not to ignore it any longer." End of the DIY fireworks, and other "destructive devices" era.
Technically a "destructive device" requires a "chemical reaction" often an explosive mixture, but an acid / alkali bang qualifies. As I found out Exploding a large Gatorade bottle with an air compressor will make them angry too, yet is not technically illegal.
In one of my "tests" (before 911) I removed the blade from an old lawnmower and connected a nitrous oxide bottle up to the carburetor. After bypassing the governor and starting the engine it revved to about 5000 RPM. I slowly turned on the nitrous as the engine increased in RPM. We all expected the engine to explode, yet it didn't. We found the setting that made the engine scream at some untold RPM level. After a few seconds the cylinder head began to glow red, and a lot of smoke started pouring out of the exhaust. About the time that most of the engine was glowing, it simply slowed down and ceased running.
Autopsy revealed that most of the oil was gone, and the cylinder wall was all torn up, but the cause of death was simply a melted exhauxt valve.
So what to do next time with Nitrous (after 911, so no big bangs)......Spoof the FnF movie.
PC running too slow? Well Turn up the power with a shot of NOS! Anyone who has ever boosted the power of a car engine with NOS knows that it makes things run HOT. So we took an old PC removed most of the guts, and stuffed the case with all sorts of fireworks, and about a foot of green fuse. Then we stuck the nitrous hose into the back of the PC, and made a video of a couple of neighborhood kids with their Nitroused Mustangs discussing the power that the "blue bottle" gave their engines, then cut to me attaching the bottle to the PC, I made a disclaimer about the excessive heat as I secretly lit the fuse and reached over to the bottle and turned on the NOS. The PC proceeded to burn brightly and explode into flames. Note, NOS was not actually used, the bottle was empty from previous experiments.
We wrapped up the video, but in sad irony it was eaten by the Microdrive in the Sony camera that I used for the video. A Microdrive is a compact flash sized hard drive that was required to capture 640 X 480 video in the days when flash was too slow. My wife took a few pictures with my old Nikon from a safe distance away.
It appears that we did make ONE DIY firecracker that year, probably for midnight. I had forgotten about it until looking through these pictures from July 2002.
Attachments
I gave two reasons that motivate me and perhaps entire organizations, The decisions to make it or buy it. Like costs, even IF we can make it better, it might take us further away from the core activity.
I'm sure if I provided more examples it wouldn't be enough ( BTW this post was originally in the "parts forum" so like minded folks could discuss the state of the nation Re. electronical parts. )
Like your burrito analogy
I always start with a store brand 'Pico de gallo and modify it. Just like modern DIY it's a false economy always starting from the bottom... hmm, make or buy Tortillas. And on project parts. some folks like to wind their own transformers.
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The PC was actually one of my more subdued experiments. Many others involved electricity, we would often pick up something from somebody's trash (as we did with the PC) and blow it up in a spectacular fashion, then place it in our trash. Sometimes we would find an old solid state stereo, remove the covers, jump the fuse, plug it in (outside of course) then add water, metal objects or whatever until something cool happened. Sometimes nothing happened, other times, things really fried.
I remember one damp summer day after a rain, there was no breeze at all. I decided to "test" a 2400 baud modem on 120 volts.....It stunk up the whole neighborhood.
My favorite......microwave ovens. The microwave and high voltage components were usually good, it was the controller that went bad. We bypassed all that since we operated our experiments by remotely switching power. Despite an expert telling me that it can't be done, I have proved that you can fill the entire cooking cavity with hot glowing plasma. I have pictures.
Note, despite what it sounds like, these experiments were carried out in a safe manner. All experiments were on the end of a 50 foot extension cord. All power was controlled from 50 feet away from the actual "test." We had an emergency shutdown system capable of killing any fire, explosion, or uncontrolled "event" that happened. We never had to use it. In fact the modem and a microwave oven whose cavity was breached were the only experiment that ended early.
We toned it down a bunch after the warning from a friendly cop. The little city I lived in west of Ft. Lauderdale was known as a speed trap and ugliness between the cops and citizens were too common.
I had a run in with the mayor over my satellite dish (used for PHD research) and ham radio antennas. Despite federal preemption for ham radio, I lost that one, was fined and threatened with arrest......several years later the mayor would face charges and be disbarred from legal practice.
Our little corner of the city remained rather peaceful until hurricane Wilma (2005) severely damaged most of the homes causing an immediate drop in the inflated property values. Many of the residents just walked away from their upside down mortgages. The banks then rented out the foreclosures (about 50% of the area) to government subsidized tenants, many of whom were illegal immigrants. Tensions grew and police presence was constant.
It was this period of unrest that made us decide to leave Florida when my employment ended. Unexpectedly I remained employed by Motorola for 41 years, while most everyone else got laid off.
I remember one damp summer day after a rain, there was no breeze at all. I decided to "test" a 2400 baud modem on 120 volts.....It stunk up the whole neighborhood.
My favorite......microwave ovens. The microwave and high voltage components were usually good, it was the controller that went bad. We bypassed all that since we operated our experiments by remotely switching power. Despite an expert telling me that it can't be done, I have proved that you can fill the entire cooking cavity with hot glowing plasma. I have pictures.
Note, despite what it sounds like, these experiments were carried out in a safe manner. All experiments were on the end of a 50 foot extension cord. All power was controlled from 50 feet away from the actual "test." We had an emergency shutdown system capable of killing any fire, explosion, or uncontrolled "event" that happened. We never had to use it. In fact the modem and a microwave oven whose cavity was breached were the only experiment that ended early.
We toned it down a bunch after the warning from a friendly cop. The little city I lived in west of Ft. Lauderdale was known as a speed trap and ugliness between the cops and citizens were too common.
I had a run in with the mayor over my satellite dish (used for PHD research) and ham radio antennas. Despite federal preemption for ham radio, I lost that one, was fined and threatened with arrest......several years later the mayor would face charges and be disbarred from legal practice.
Our little corner of the city remained rather peaceful until hurricane Wilma (2005) severely damaged most of the homes causing an immediate drop in the inflated property values. Many of the residents just walked away from their upside down mortgages. The banks then rented out the foreclosures (about 50% of the area) to government subsidized tenants, many of whom were illegal immigrants. Tensions grew and police presence was constant.
It was this period of unrest that made us decide to leave Florida when my employment ended. Unexpectedly I remained employed by Motorola for 41 years, while most everyone else got laid off.
I gave two reasons that motivate me and perhaps entire organizations, The decisions to make it or buy it. Like costs, even IF we can make it better, it might take us further away from the core activity.
I'm sure if I provided more examples it wouldn't be enough ( BTW this post was originally in the "parts forum" so like minded folks could discuss the state of the nation Re. electronical parts. )
Like your burrito analogy
What did you expect? When you're in a shooting gallery, it's a bad idea to criticize the other junkies.
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But Vishnu is a successful and popular person, of high intelligence. Just ask him 😀
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He really seems to think so. I'm still struggling with how he can be who he says he is yet didn't know patents expire.
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