Almost forgot to bring out the #Christmas bunny! *meow*

@HoffmanLabs
The hardware was cool, but the frequency of repairs was what made me give away all the old hardware I had accumulated some time ago.
The paper tape punch is a pretty recent model with LSI chips inside.

@HoffmanLabs
Hacks were much more physical back then! Now that you mention it, my punch has no take-up reel, because it is a TTY output, i.e. it was used with real teletypewriters, not to communicate with a computer. Maybe if I take an electrical drill... :)

@amalia12
I have never sold many books on Amazon, and if I could stop Amazon from selling my books, I would.
For ebooks it is easy, fortunately. You add a little glitch in the ebook format that makes Amazon reject them. Done so for all of my ebooks. For physical books, it is not so easy, though.
Amazon is the worst thing that has happened to writers in a long, long time.

First test of my paper tape punch. I had expected it to punch the feed holes only when depressing the "feed" button, but it punched a long sequence of all-ones and then a few alternating sequences of 21 all-ones and 21 all-zeroes.
At least the mechanical part of the device seems to work. Next step: somehow connect the RS-530/RS-422 interface of the punch to the RS-232 port of a computer.

@simoninireland @amoroso
Thank you for the great and detailed review! :) Will probably link to it on the book page.

@amoroso @simoninireland
Thanks for the pointer, I appreciate it! :)

I find it disillusioning to see the casual use of "AI" slowly creeping into our hacker circles. Most of the discussions about AI focus on the quality of its output. I think we're not doing a good job communicating its more fundamental dangers.

In this blog post I write about how tools shape who we are and why the resource intensiveness of AI is ingrained in its purpose. About the devaluation of skills, and power cycles.

Let me know what you think.

https://fokus.cool/2025/11/25/i-dont-care-how-well-your-ai-works.html

@dotyk There are more of us and you meet them in the most unlikely places! :)

@lukianos Danke! :)

@RonJeffries Thank you! :)

@hp Thank you! :)

@galdor Good to hear! Thank you! :)

@goetz
I think so! Especially because you also enjoy retro-computing, and there are lots of historical trivia in the book

@goetz
Good choice! It's on its way to overtake Practical Compiler Construction as my best-selling book!

Some of the books I have written in the past 30 years. Some are not in the stack, some are not even on my homepage (http://t3x.org), some are out of print. I have lost track over the years. It has been quite a journey, though.
#books #writing #LISP #compilers #yoga #buddhism #sciencefiction

@spacehobo @anjune Funny, I think I had a copy of that for the Apple ][, but never played it.

@bbeaker Wow, I think I remember the AT8, it was quite common in Xenix machines.

@anjune
Did not know that modern text adventures are different. So I will put playing one of those on my ever-growing to-do list. :)
The thing I enjoyed most was the humor in the Infocom games. In the lurking horror you have to cook a box of shrimps in a microwave. Not knowing what a microwave is, I set it to 30min and it came out as "a box of radioactive shrimps". 8)
Somehow I managed to finish the game with commands like LOOK TREE.

@bbeaker Interesting! So they only rebranded the gear and the manufacturer might be a different company?