One week to the Festival of Portable Computing... eek.

I'll be there, and not only will I be showing a unique early ancestor of modern computing, but I might have an announcement of things to come...

You'll like it. It involves bananana....

computinghistory.org.uk/det/72231/The-…

If you design a calculator that runs Zork, are you morally obliged to call it the Zorkulator?

.. OK, own up. How many of you immediately rushed off to see if the domain is registered?

My head is spinning with all the things I'm trying to juggle together right now..

..and whilst I'm at it, why are mechanical designs still the hardest part?

The nascent UK drone industry was effectively killed by the powers that be who told us that the best way to help a new industry grow was to regulate it thoroughly before it even started.

Who knew that bureaucrats would believe the solution to a problem would be more bureaucracy?

I was slightly hoping it would rain today so I could stay indoors and write code...

But it's a lovely day so I'm going to have to go out and plant trees.

Ugh... nature.

Best way to solve problems - mow the lawn. Gives me time to think.

So: CP/M Drive B is a RAM Disk on MicroBeast.

I'm going to add commands to SAVE and RESTORE it from the onboard Flash. Solves the limitation of read-only drives, without hammering flash write cycles.

Using FreeCad is like going to an architect for your family home, and the first question they ask is:

'So.. what is the name of the mine?'

'The what?'

'..the mine. What is the name of the mine you want to produce the clay for the bricks?'

The evolutionary process has worked hard in Silicon Valley to breed a class of people (white, male, rich) who gain attention by having a saviour complex.

Not good enough to have a decent product that does something useful. You've got to be on a mission to change (save) the world

Reviews like this make me smile! Thank you Aaron, I'm glad you're enjoying your kit.

Does anyone else find routing PCBs therapeutic?

The BeastEm emulator also emulates the current specification for VideoBeast (feertech.com/microbeast/vid…).

The recent news from Zilog has forced me to juggle projects a little to meet deadlines, so there is a LOT going on in the Beast-Shed (it's a thing).

github.com/atoone/BeastEm

It's not dead... won't be for a long time. For now, MicroBeast kits only include new stock Z80s.

feertech.com/microbeast

Today's random question - how thick is the aluminium faceplate for the Sinclair Spectrum keyboard?

I wish Andrew Neil wouldn't sit on the fence like that. 🤣🤣

Apropos of nothing in particular... how do we feel about 3.3v electronic projects and kits?

Though the Z80 is discontinued, it is still widely enough available to produce MicroBeast kits, and have a few other things in the works.

The 8-bit world remains a great way to have fun with programming and electronics, and your support keeps it that way.

Opti-who?

The Humane story is interesting - they allowed the myth of the 'ex-Apple employees' to muffle rational analysis of a product that is still struggling to find a use case.

It's clever, it's beautifully made... it doesn't really 'do anything' that makes it uniquely valuable.