💾 Archived View for sdf.org › stug › phlog › 2021 › 20210729.txt captured on 2022-07-16 at 18:55:25.
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29 July 2021 Visited Slapton Ley today. It is the largest freshwater lake in the south west of England and yet a shingle beach, car park and a road is all that seperates it from the sea. I ended up on a walk with my Dad and the dogs around the Ley. Lots of butterflies and dragon flies to admire. One dog had a paddle where she was drinking water as she waded in a pac-man sort of way. I bought a recent Humble Bundle of O'Reilly books which were mostly cookbooks for different programming languages. There was one book in particular which caught my eye. One on regular expressions. It has been a good read so far and seems useful in work dross. I have also been reading about heirloom computing, written by Steve Lord, thanks to a comment from Agk's phlog. The concept of a 100 year computer seems ridiculous to the electronic engineer in me but actually, we could keep such a thing going. We only have to look at the WITCH at the National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park for how long a computer can keep going. Sure the GUI is via decatrons and that you could work out the answer to an arithmatic question quicker but the WITCH is the oldest working computer in the world. It was released in 1952 so we have 69 years of computing. However, the concept is more about having a consistant set of IO standards and OS rather than hardware which will keep operating for 100 years. The idea of emulating a basic OS which could be done with cheap and cheerful processors galore is appealing. Things to think about along with how to harvest energy from radio broadcasts. I need to do some circuit building with that one. Got to explore the reality of the theory.