News and Updates

ChatGPT and me

Posted on 16th Jun 2023

I had to give it a try, maybe late to the party. Lots of wikipedia like verbage, but interesting

Where does a program start

Posted on 17th Apr 2023

When we added SUB and FUNCTION to BASIC, and the compiler remained a single pass, which meant a SUB had to be defined before its use. The issue comes up, where does your program start. We adopted the C convention of using MAIN: Some other BASICs use that as well or we could have made it START: BASICtools allows compiling files (normal method as your program gets bigger) as well as being able to type in short programs to test something. The later I find to be very useful for quick debugging. But...

Not everything needs a microprocessor

Posted on 15th Mar 2023

I was skiing in Colorado most of February and one simple thing I need is a way to heat up ski boots just to make them easier to get on.

Playing with Chromebook

Posted on 18th Jan 2023

I'm going on an extended trip, so I decided to leave my heavy Dell laptop at home. Since I won't be doing any code development, I decided to give a Chromebook a try. They are light, do email and web surfing. So I've been trying to do all the things I might normally do on my PC on the Chromebook. So far so good.

Switch to Stripe

Posted on 28th Dec 2022

About this time of year is when I monkey with the web site. This time I am thinking of switching out of OScommerce and PayPal to Stripe. It was easy to setup, maybe not all the features I want, but close enough for now

Add baud settings in Linux

Posted on 27th Dec 2022

Got a request for allowing baud rate changes in Linux. Seems like for at least the USB com ports Tcl supports that. So here is a one-liner change to TclTerm to allow baud settings in TclTerm. It worked on Linux Mint on my HP netbook. Download and unzip from here