Morning Walk 11-1-26
Current Wx: Temp: 42.26°F Pressure: 1033hPa Humidity: 79% Wind: 6.15mphWords: 741
Pleasant Sunday morning for a walk. No breeze, just clear and crisp fall weather.
I decided to add a little bit to my "workout." At the end of my walk, I usually pick up to 35-pound dumbbells and carry them down to the road and back up. That's about 70 rather short paces, so maybe 50 yards. It's downhill toward the road and uphill on the way back. I do that three times.
Usually by the last set my heart rate is hitting in the 150s. I want to increase the weight to 40 pounds each after the first of the year, so I decided to add another trip down to the road and back. I'm feeling it in my hands as I'm typing this. The weight really loads up my legs, and I feel that for a couple of hours after I'm finished too.
My super-whamodyne Apple Watch Series 12 always seems to lose track of my heart rate while I'm doing these. The band is comfortably tight on my wrist. Apple is often little more than a disappointment these days. Wasn't it once "surprise and delight"? Yeah, not so much anymore.
I'm down another pound and a half this week, which was a pleasant surprise. I'm adapting to the medication and I find I'm experiencing more appetite than before. But no cravings, so that's still a plus. I managed to bungle yesterday's injection. They gave me shorter needles for this round, so I checked and they're supposed to be fine. I think they're 4mm, and the first ones were 7mm. Well, this is my second shot with the shorter ones and I never feel them going in, but I can feel the pressure from the pen. But yesterday morning, I felt cold liquid on my skin and so I pull the pen away and there was blood at the site. I hadn't completed the injection, so I stabbed myself again and finished pushing the plunger. I have no idea how much of a dose I got, so we'll see how this week goes.
With both of the bigger desktop Apple IIs out of commission, I played with the IIc Plus yesterday. I decided not to install the Mockingboard 4c for the time being. We're at that time of year when there the humidity is low and static electricity builds up on me as I shuffle around here in the slippers.
So I did a little "research," instead, trying to somewhat quantify the performance advantage I get from the MegaFlash "math co-processor." (It patches the Applesoft floating point routines to offload the calculations to the Raspberry Pi Pico.) So I wrote a little BASIC program that filled an array of 2000 elements with the values of a meaningless equation I wrote that included a square root, an exponential and a sin and cosine.
With the IIc Plus at 4MHz and using the MF, it took 9.7s to fill the array. With the IIc Plus running at 1MHz without the MF, just using Applesoft, it took 6m 48.4s. At 4MHz it took 1m 55.9s, which is about what you'd expect, 3.5x faster. It's not 4x faster because it has to hit RAM 2,000 times at normal speed. The IIc Plus processor has a memory cache, and the program is small enough that it fits entirely within the cache, but storing all the array elements means slowing to 1MHz each time.
There are tricks to speed up some elements of Applesoft's floating point routines. Never use exponentiation for squares of cubes. (I think cubes. Pretty sure.) Just use multiply. Much faster. And Michael Mahon wrote a USR routine with a much faster square root algorithm, which I normally use for any formula that includes a square root. But the MF math routines are faster than both of those tricks by a lot. And they're more accurate. Applesoft has some problems with accuracy at small angles in trigonometric functions, and some other issues.
Anyway, that was entertaining for a while.
Today I'm spending some time building a revised ABIDE (Applesoft Beagle Integrated Development Environment) configuration. The current config includes Program Writer as the editor, along with Beagle Compiler and a couple of other utilities.
I'm thinking of changing it to include the late Glen Bredon's ProCMD utilities, which offer some useful functions not included in the Beagle utilities.
Anyway, keeps me off the streets and YouTube.
The beep goes on...
✍️ Reply by emailStar Trails 10-31-26
Current Wx: Temp: 36.09°F Pressure: 1033hPa Humidity: 84% Wind: 4.09mphWords: 7
Clear skies last night, but pretty chilly.
✍️ Reply by email