Norton was always a PC company — Norton Commander, the file manager that launched a thousand clones, was only ever available for DOS, like the rest of the company’s offerings in those days. If they’d decided to port it to the C64, though, it would likely look a lot like [retro3872809] aka [Chicken 64]’s Multi Floppy Commander with Turbo, available on GitLab.
As you might be able to see on the screen shot above or in the demo video below, the application provides an 80-column interface with a split view to show a pair of floppies side-by-side. Not that you’re limited to two floppies, however. The software is happy to swap between all the drives on the bus, to the C64’s maximum of four. All four drives will be usable since the file manager lives on a cartridge.
All drive models are supported, though not all have turbo. As a file manager, it looks like it has the normal functionality you’d expect: renaming, copying, moving and deleting files and directories. You can also launch programs or print disk listings, assuming you have a printer attached to your Commodore.
Launch a single static binary executable, send someone a QR code or URL (or failing that, text a numerical code or shout it across a room), and they’ll get an encrypted terminal in their browser. No VPN, no port forwarding, no firewall modifications, and no account setup required. It’s BitBang by [Rich LeGrand], and there is a lot to go through in this one.
The best part? It’s not actually limited to just firing off a terminal. It’s a whole open framework for establishing an encrypted peer-to-peer connection between two systems over WebRTC without needing either a trusted central authority, or any special network configuration.
The signaling server brokers the handshake, then has no further involvement. By design, it couldn’t see application data even if it wanted to. Click to enlarge.
Opening a remote terminal, transferring files, or accessing web apps on a remote machine’s network is done with bitbang-cli, an implementation of BitBang focused on providing simple, zero-config remote access.
Before we go on, we want to mention that BitBang does require a lightweight, trustless signaling server only to broker the initial connection, but more on that in a moment.
On the machine to be shared, one first downloads the binary. Easiest way to do that is to go to bitba.ng and download manually, or copy and paste the one-line installer to auto-detect one’s system, download the correct release, and verify the checksum.
After the binary is downloaded, simply run it in a terminal and receive a QR code to scan, a URL to copy & paste, or a numerical code if those are inconvenient. One the remote side, one accesses the signaling server and the connection is made — one gets a terminal on the target machine open in the browser tab, with added options for file sharing and accessing web applications on the target network.
The signaling server isn’t involved in authentication or encryption, and couldn’t see private data between the two ends even if it wanted to. Prefer not to use someone else’s regardless? Run your own local instance with bitbang-server.
It includes not just the remote-access tool mentioned above, but also a BitBang Octoprint plugin for cloud-free remote access to 3D printers, and bitbang-python is a library for turning local Python web applications into a URL that can be opened from anywhere.
We’re sure some of you are getting more than a few ideas from this. If it lets you bring a project over the finish line, let us know on our tips line.
Emacs is one of the big classic text editors, right up there next to vi. It’s famous for its interface and its ubiquity across the *nix world. It’s such a core piece of software in the coding world that it has showed up a fair few times in popular culture—and [Ian Y.E. Pan] has collated some of those appearances.
Emacs played a role in The Social Network, the retelling of the origin story of Facebook (the social network everybody used to use). Notably, Mark Zuckerberg used the tool to slap together a script for scraping a website. It also appears in Tron: Legacy, Arctic Blast, and the tech TV comedy Silicon Valley—more than once, in fact.
Other appearances include comics, Japanese anime series Key The Metal Idol, and a few miniseries and documentaries to boot.
[Ian]’s list is unlikely to be exhaustive. Both because he hasn’t seen every movie or TV show ever made, and because you can make new content featuring Emacs references tomorrow if you so desire. Still, it’s fun to see some of the famous properties that have featured good ol’ Emacs.
Don’t hesitate to let us know if you happen to put together a similar list about vi. The tipsline is waiting.
Got an idea and want to make a simple 3D model, but don’t want to install a full-fledged CAD modeling suite and queue up a few hours of tutorial videos? Check out SketchForge, a 3D modeling program that runs locally in one’s browser without any need for an account, or external services.
SketchForge takes a more WYSIWYG approach to 3D modeling by making it easy to put an object together with primitive shapes, and making it extra easy to specify dimensions and align parts with one another. There’s also a sketch feature that makes it easier to create more complex shapes by making a 2D drawing, then extruding or revolving it into a solid. We like that it has STEP format export as an option, making it easy to import your creation into another CAD program of your choice later. Most 3D printer slicers natively support the STEP format nowadays, too.
It’s a bit reminiscent of Tinkercad in concept, but entirely local. It’s still new, but there’s a demo online that gives a good idea of its capabilities if you’d like to give it a spin.
We’re reminded of CaDoodle, another project that takes the “Tinkercad, but local” approach but as a standalone executable, instead of browser-based.
I recently found myself in the market for a few IP cameras to keep an eye on my Prusa 3D printers, and quickly found that the options on the market weren’t exactly ideal. Prusa does offer up an official camera, but the price for a pair of them was a bit more than I wanted to spend on the project. Conversely, there’s no shortage of cheap network-connected cameras available online, but they come with expenses of a different sort, namely proprietary software and cloud services I didn’t want or need.
Somewhere in the deep and dark recesses of this particular rabbit hole, I came across a Reddit post mentioning how a camera running the community-developed Thingino firmware could be plugged into Prusa’s remote printer monitoring scheme. It wasn’t a project I’d heard of previously, and sure enough, a search of the Hackaday back catalog showed we’d never come across it before.
My interest was already piqued, but the discovery that I already owned a supported camera sealed the deal. It was time to explore a new entry in one of my absolute favorite project categories: an open source replacement firmware that turns a cheap consumer device into something more than the sum of its parts.
Regular expressions (regexes) are an amazingly powerful way to perform operations on collections of e.g. text. Regexss can also be considered to be a programming language, even a Turing complete one. Ergo it’s perfectly acceptable to thus design a way to use regexes to run and play a game of DOOM, as [Artem Lytkin] recently did.
The GitHub project page can be found here, containing the Python-based code that allows the demonstration to run, as well as the other components, including the C runtime and the 96.6 MB text string that defines a CPU’s registers, RAM, a framebuffer, the DOOM engine compiled to this custom CPU’s instruction set and the WAD file for the game itself.
The C-based driver applies the fixed, ordered list of find-and-replace rules to this string, which after more than ten-thousand of such substitutions later results in a single frame of the game. At about 80,000 substitutions per second on the given test system, that gets you to a sort-of playable framerate, even.
Naturally, the practical value of playing DOOM like this is pretty low, but as a demonstration of why regexes are awesome it’s hard to beat.
The lossy compression algorithm used by JPEG was useful for those on the early Internet not only because it enabled pictures to be shared easier, but because it allows a low-resolution version of the image to load first. This meant that users could make out the gist of an image before it finished downloading. This was a great feature for those on slow connections, but it hides some other capabilities of this image format as well.
Rather than effectively splitting up the image into chunks, each with successive amounts of detail, [maurycyz]’s project shows that this can be exploited to load more than one picture. The first is loaded into this lower-resolution area, with a second unrelated picture showing up once the higher-resolution information is available. Essentially this makes a one-way .gif of sorts. Though this method is only capable of loading about nine frames, which is not enough for much animation. Further limiting things is that there’s no way to encode timing data, so on fast computers with fast connections the animation could load faster than a user could see.
Still, it’s an interesting quirk of this older image standard, one which still is in widespread use today. And it’s also true that it’s hard to say in what ways various technologies will be used in the future. JPEG images have also been the subject of some artistic projects that might not have been possible without the JPEG standard itself, and even as other formats have tried to supplant it, it still maintains its firm grip on the images on the Internet. More JPEG, please!
As you might be able to see on the screen shot above or in the demo video below, the application provides an 80-column interface with a split view to show a pair of floppies side-by-side. Not that you’re limited to two floppies, however. The software is happy to swap between all the drives on the bus, to the C64’s maximum of four. All four drives will be usable since the file manager lives on a cartridge.
