stevekemp

I googled the string in the DialogBox shown in the blog-post, "L502xa12", which lead me to a driver download page. The binary supports "-force", "/forceall", "&…

I remember complaining to a friend a few years ago that my reverse-engineering and binary-patching skills were atrophied because there were so few Linux binaries which prompted users to enter a regist…

There are some crazy things, but in terms of projects I've always thought that the time Sweden changed which side of the road traffic drove on has got to be up there: https://en.wikipe…

I suspect it depends upon your niche/field, there are certainly times when I've done assembly coding for production. Although I admit these days most of my assembly-coding is for retro-uses…

That was a lovely writeup, thanks for sharing.

From the site guidelines: > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. > Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Di…

At home I run Debian, as I have for 10+ years, and there I run firefox exclusively. (I download the binary and install to /opt/firefox) At work I use a macbook, and to keep a good separatio…

Agreed. I live in Finland, but my preferred language is English. Many many sites send me Finnish by default, although Google directions will always be in Swedish. I seem to have to "change resu…

I wrote a simple BASIC interpreter based on happy memories of the speccy, but to be honest I have more fun these days writing toy projects in z80 assembly. I guess it's all about nostalgia either…

Your writeup was awesome, and couple probably be resubmitted since it has been a few years. I'm surprised to learn there was a Starstrike 2, I just remember the original "3D Starstrike"…

Didn't they rebrand, briefly, as "Worse Than Failure", before going back to the real meaning?

You type "SYSTEM", the same command which was used on Microsoft's CP/M basic (and other flavours).

Dutch Elm Disease killed a whole bunch of trees in Edinburgh, Scotland. I know a lot of the old Elm trees in Princes Street Gardens, beneath Edinburgh Castle, were replaced by Limes. Of course the pr…

A minor bug-report, if you run "cd /proc/3" you cannot "cd .." afterwards. It looks like ".." entries don't exist beneath /proc.

While the pessimism is true it's also the case that post-Brexit it is very hard for many of them to actually leave. The lack of free movement really made it hard for a lot of UK people to move t…

This is a hard sell: sudo chown root electron/chrome-sandbox sudo chmod 4755 electron/chrome-sandbox Installing a new setuid root binary? I guess that the sandbox process i…

I wrote a simple "RSS to Email" application, there are a bunch out there, but I think that is simple and portable. https://github.com/skx/rss2email/ You can self-h…

ProductHunt has been gamed to the extent that it's no longer in any way real - it's just who can spam the most. What will stop your site from the same fate?

I started programming due to the ZX Spectrum https://blog.steve.fi/how_i_started_programming.html But yes they were everywhere when I was a kid, the BBC was in schools, and a few peop…

I have a collection of small sysadming/scripting utilities distributed as a single binary here: https://github.com/skx/sysbox One of those is "splay" to sleep a ra…

How much are they paying for you to do the work? How does that compare to your hourly-rate, or salary? If for free they're clearly taking advantage, so I'd assess based on payment.

It was the Clinton administration, back in the early nineties, that was all for pushing mandatory key escrow and the use of the Clipper Chip: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper…

Same idea I guess, but it's Aaron's has been broken for years - and probably for the best because it didn't stop people specifying things like "file:////etc…

Bank switching was the term I should have used, thank-you!

Sure floating point is possible, but if you're thinking of something like a 6502 or Z80 you'd have to implement it yourself - no maths co-processor, or dedicated instructions for it. In term…

Floating point maths would be hard, and fitting the model in 64k would be a challenge - but paging could resolve that, or streaming/paging from disk if you assume something like CP/M. Logica…

What about if you're within 100 miles of a border?