There comes a time in any software developer’s life when they look at their achievements, the lines of code written and the programming languages they have relied on, before wondering whether there may be more out there. A programming language and its associated toolchains begin to feel like familiar, well-used tools after you use them […]
If there’s one thing that characterizes the Information Age that we find ourselves in today, it is streams of data. However, without proper ways to aggregate and transform this data into information, it’ll either vanish into the ether or become binary blobs gathering virtual dust on a storage device somewhere. Dealing with these streams of […]
[Hunter Irving] is a talented hacker with a wicked sense of humor, and he has written in to let us know about his latest project which is to make a GameCube keyboard controller work with Animal Crossing. This project began simply enough but got very complicated in short order. Initially the goal was to get […]
The Blackberry made phones with real keyboards popular, and smartphones with touch keyboards made that input method the default. However, the old flip phone crowd had just a few telephone keys to work with. If you have a key-limited project, maybe check out the libt9 library from [FoxMoss]. There were two methods for using these […]
To paraphrase an old joke: How do you know if someone is a Rust developer? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you. There is a move to put Rust everywhere, even in the Linux kernel. Not going fast enough for you? Then check out Asterinas — an effort to create a Linux-compatible kernel totally in Rust. The goal […]
When [Ben Eater] talks, hackers everywhere listen. In his latest video [Ben] shows us how to make computer noises using square waves and a 6502 microprocessor. [Ben] uses the timer in the W65C22 Versatile Interface Adapter to generate the square waves which generate a tone. He then adds support for a new BEEP command into […]
Considered by many to be just a dull output for sequential text, the command-line terminal is a veritable canvas to the creative software developer. With the cursor as the brush, entire graphical user interfaces can be constructed, or even a basic text-based dashboard on which values can be updated without redrawing the entire screen over […]
There comes a moment in the life of any operating system when an unforeseen event will tragically cut its uptime short. Whether it’s a sloppily written driver, a bug in the handling of an edge case or just dumb luck, suddenly there is nothing more that the OS’ kernel can do to salvage the situation. […]
Have you ever heard of INTERCAL? If you haven’t, don’t feel bad. This relatively obscure language dates back to 1972 with the goal of being difficult to read and write. It is the intellectual parent of systems like brainf**k and other bad languages. Now, you can read the INTERCAL-72 source code thanks to a found […]