What's Going On

08:59 Wednesday, 24 December 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 33.12°F Pressure: 1025hPa Humidity: 74% Wind: 16.2mph
Words: 208

I was playing around with this last night. Made a movie out of it this morning. The algorithm is here. I probably didn't implement it correctly, but it creates some interesting tapestry-like images. I switched the high-resolution Applesoft "white" from 3 to 7, which is why everything is purple and green. 3 gives orange and blue, which I think are more attractive.

Today I may play around with it and see if I can switch between 3 and 7 every other line, might make things more interesting.

(An important note: This program is running in Virtual ][ at max speed. This wouldn't be any fun at all at 1MHz.)

Anyway, it may be like watching paint dry, feel free to scrub through. The Applesoft BASIC program is listed at the end.

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More Fun

07:19 Wednesday, 24 December 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 33.71°F Pressure: 1021hPa Humidity: 72% Wind: 18.12mph
Words: 402

This is why Jack Baty should buy a Commodore 64 Ultimate. Well, this too.

I stumbled upon that first link yesterday as I was trying to do a deep dive on serendipitous circles. Which it seems I can't link to just now, because the Internet Archive is offline. Yeesh. [Update: It's back.}

I'm sure you could do all that stuff in a modern programming language, and at vastly higher resolutions. But I don't understand modern programming languages, I'd probably have to install a bunch of crap, and then maintain it. I don't want to do any of that. I just want to turn the machine on and start noodling around.

I've been capturing BASIC listings from books and magazines at the Internet Archive, editing them in Apple Notes and then pasting the cleaned-up code into Virtual ][. If there are still errors, it's easy enough to copy the virtual screen to the clipboard and paste it into Notes to edit it.

Then I was reading the feeds and happened upon this from the macosxguru. It kind of prompted me to think about simplifying things a bit. I use Apple Notes for a fair amount of stuff, partly because it's on the iPhone and iPad as well as the Mac, and I can share notes with Mitzi.

But since Virtual ][ only runs on the Mac, I could probably use Tinderbox for the same purpose. One of these days I'll have to figure out how to use Posters in Tinderbox, and install a Javascript Apple II emulator into Tinderbox.

The Apple IIc Plus (Which I've since learned, "Is the preferred nomenclature, Dude.") didn't arrive yesterday. It's supposed to arrive today. Paid a kid $50 to plow the driveway so the mail carrier wouldn't skip the delivery. We got about eight inches of snow. I played around with the Maverick in it and learned that FWD with all-season radials is no match for eight inches of wet snow. I'll have to invest in some snow tires.

Then the temperature went up last night, and a lot of the snow has melted, but whatever. I'm pretty confident the RAV4 would have been able to get out of the driveway with AWD and the Michelins.

Hopefully I will get my new toy today, and hopefully it'll have survived its journey. The world's still insane, so I'm grateful for the distraction.

As ever, the beat goes on...

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