Flash Is Dead, But Its Culture Should Live On

October 24, 2020 by Erin Pinheiro 46 Comments

Flash is all but gone already, but as we approach the official Adobe end-of-life date on December 31st, it’s picking up traction one last time as people reminisce about the days of Internet past. Back in July, [Jonas Richner] created an impressive website that catalogs not only almost 20 years of Flash games, but also testimonials for the software from dozens of developers who began their careers with it.

Flash started in 1996 with the intention of being a standard for animations and vector graphics on the early Web. With the release of Flash Player 5 in August of 2000, Macromedia (later acquired by Adobe) presented the first version of ActionScript, an object-oriented scripting language meant to bring interactivity to animated Flash movies. Since then, thousands of games made with the platform were released online through websites like Newgrounds and shared all over the world, with the most popular games easily reaching tens of millions of plays.

These games became popular in part thanks to how quickly they could be created with the Flash authoring tools, but also because it was so easy for players to run them. With a single plugin for your web browser of choice, the barrier of entry was extremely low. Most home computers from the mid-2000s were able to run Flash software without needing dedicated graphics hardware. This prompted a “creative chaos” as [Richner] puts it, spawning millions of games and animations which started genres and careers lasting to this day.

Unfortunately, browsers have been dropping support for the plugin due to vulnerabilities in the most recent iterations of its scripting engine and Google no longer indexes Flash files. It would seem this particularly creative era of the Internet is coming to an end. However, you can still relive old games and animations made with plugins such as Flash and Shockwave with [BlueMaxima]’s Flashpoint, and like [Richner], we also hope that the people building today’s platforms and technologies keep the lessons from Flash in mind.

Grab A Stanford Computer Science Education

October 14, 2020 by Al Williams 18 Comments

There are two reasons to go to school: learn about something and to get a coveted piece of paper that helps you get jobs, or at least, job interviews. With so many schools putting material online, you can do the first part without spending much money as long as you don’t expect the school to help you or grant you that piece of paper. Stanford has a huge computer science department and [Rui Ma] cataloged over 150 computer science classes available online in some form from the University. Just the thing to while away time during the quarantine.

Apparently, [Rui] grabbed the 2020 course catalog to find on-campus classes and found the companion website for each class, organizing them for our benefit. The list doesn’t include the actual online class offerings, which you can find directly from Stanford, although there is another list for that.

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Browser Makes Tiny Office Suite

October 13, 2020 by Al Williams 17 Comments

There’s a recent craze of people living in tiny houses of 400 square feet down to as little as 80 square feet. Maybe [zserge] was thinking about that and created a very tiny office suite in which each tool weighs in at less than 1K. If you are guessing you couldn’t squeeze much functionality in C or C++ code or even assembly, you’d be right. The language of choice? HTML and JavaScript. So while the code is small, it relies on a pretty big piece of software. On the other hand, you have a browser open right now, so the incremental cost of using these tools is very small.

We get the idea that there’s not much chance this is going to sweep the shelves of Microsoft Office, Libre Office, and all the many competitors. However, it is a pretty stunning example of what you can do with modern HTML. There’s even a GitHub repo and a subreddit.

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Teaching A Pocket Logic Analyzer (Many) New Tricks

October 1, 2020 by Tom Nardi 8 Comments

A few years ago, low-cost pocket digital oscilloscopes aimed at the hacker and maker crowd started hitting the market and gained quite a following. While few would consider them to be a replacement for a proper bench scope, they’re cheap and convenient enough that it’s hard to complain. Manufacturers are apparently looking to expand on the concept, as we’re now seeing similarly priced and sized logic analyzers pop up from the usual sources.

[Gabriel Valky] got his hands on a sub-$100 USD model known as the LA104, and decided that the stock software didn’t quite deliver. So he started a project to create a new open source firmware for the affordable gadget that greatly expands its core functionalities. The code has even been ported to a few of those digital oscilloscopes, as it turns out (perhaps unsurprisingly) that they aren’t too far removed internally.

Controlling addressable LEDs with the LA104.

In the video after the break, [Gabriel] shows off some impressive radio tricks by adding a small CC1101 transceiver to the mix. This allows his modified LA104 to scan for and decode popular RF protocols in the 300 – 900 MHz range. His software even allows for the received packets to be modified and re-transmitted, which he demonstrates by pushing a fake temperature signal into a wireless weather station.

But that’s just the beginning. A perusal of the GitHub page for his replacement firmware shows just how many features have already been packed into this project. For example it can be used to control WS2812 LED strips, generate arbitrary PWM signals, log data from temperature sensors, interface with MIDI devices, and scan for I2C devices. Many of these functions can be controlled on the computer by utilizing a modern browser and WebUSB.

The replacement firmware that [Gabriel] has come up with for the LA104 is really an incredible accomplishment, and elevates an already intriguing piece of kit. Being able to pack all of these functions into something small and cheap enough you can toss into a bag is a very compelling prospect for hackers on the go.

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Boot Sector Pong As A Crash Course In Assembly

September 28, 2020 by Tom Nardi 13 Comments

Have you ever wanted to develop a playable game small enough to fit into a disk’s 512 byte boot sector? How about watching somebody develop a program in assembly for nearly two hours? If you answered yes to either of those questions, or ideally both of them, you’re going to love this project from [Queso Fuego].

Whether you just want to check out the public domain source code or watch along as he literally starts from a blank file and codes every line for your viewing pleasure, chances are good that you’ll pick up a trick or two from this project. For example, he explains how all of the “graphics” in the game are done in 80 x 25 text mode simply by setting the background color of character cells without printing any text to them.

We really like the presentation in the video after the break, which was recorded over the course of multiple days, judging by the changing light levels in the background. As he types out each line of code, he explains what its function is and gives any background information necessary to explain how it will fit into the larger program. If you’ve ever wondered if you had what it takes to program in ASM, watching this video is a great way to decide.

[Queso Fuego] mentions that this project, and his research into this sort of low-level programming, came about due to the social distancing boredom that many of us are feeling. While we’re certainly not advocating for him to kept locked in his home permanently, with projects like this, you’ve got to admit it seems like a win for the rest of us.

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TI And Cadence Make PSpice Free

September 20, 2020 by Al Williams 29 Comments

We like simulation software. Texas Instruments long offered TINA, but recently they’ve joined with Cadence to make OrCAD PSpice available for free with some restrictions. You’ve probably heard of PSpice — it’s widely used in academia and industry, but is usually quite costly. You can see a promotional overview video below.

The program requires registration and an approval step to get a license key. The downloaded program has TI models along with other standard models. There seem to be few limits as long as you stick to the supplied library. According to the datasheet, there are no size or simulation complexity limitations in that case. If you want to use other models, you can, but that’s where the limitations hit you:

There is no limitation of how many 3rd party models can be imported into the design. However, if 3rd party models are imported, a user will be able to plot a maximum of 3 signals at a time of their choice when any 3rd party model is imported from web.

We aren’t completely sure what “from web” means there, but presumably they just mean from other sources. In any event, you still get AC, DC, and transient analysis with plenty of options like worst-case timing analysis. Mixed signal designs are supported and there is a wealth of data plotting options, as you would expect.

This is a great opportunity to drive some serious software that is widely used in the industry. The only thing that bummed us out? It runs under Windows. We couldn’t get it to work under Wine, but a Windows 10 VM handled it fine, although we really hate running a VM if we don’t have to.

Still, the price is right and it is a great piece of software. We also liked the recent Micro-Cap 12 release, but we don’t expect any updates for that. Of course, LTSpice is quite capable, too.

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Linux Fu: Literate Regular Expressions

September 11, 2020 by Al Williams 20 Comments

Regular expressions — the things you feed to programs like grep — are a bit like riding a bike. It seems impossible until you learn to do it, and then it’s easy. Part of their bad reputation is because they use a very concise and abbreviated syntax that alarms people. To help people who don’t use regular expressions every day, I created a tool that lets you write them in something a little closer to plain English. Actually, I’ve written several versions of this over the years, but this incarnation that targets grep is the latest. Unlike some previous versions, this time I did it all using Bash.

Those who don’t know regular expressions might freak out when they see something like:

[0-9]{5}(-[0-9]{4})?

How long does it take to figure out what that does? What if you could write that in a more literate way? For example:

digit repeat 5 \

start_group \

   - digit repeat 4 \

end_group optional

Not as fast to type, sure. But you can probably deduce what it does: it reads US Zipcodes.

I’ve found that some of the most popular tools I’ve created over the years are ones that I don’t need myself. I’m sure you’ve had that experience, too. You know how to operate a computer, but you create a menu system for people who don’t and they love it. That’s how it is with this tool. You might not need it, but there’s a good chance you know someone who does. Along the way, the code uses some interesting features of Bash, so even if you don’t want to be verbose with your regular expressions, you might pick up a trick or two.

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