I also re-started training in martial arts, after a break of around 12 years. Initially Aikido (Aikikai), to which I then added traditional Okinawan Goju-ryu Karate (IOGKF), eventually dropping Aikido after a year. I've tried out Muay Thai and will give BJJ a shot sometime soon. I'm still training in Goju-ryu.
In addition, I've gotten into faffing around with electronics, and retro computing. Partly because I've been less able to travel, and have less time for astrophotography, which is already difficult enough in Singapore.
I deal with modern computers all day long at work, writing mainly C++ and Haskell for all sorts of stuff - HPC grid, distributed systems, DSLs, bits of compilers, etc... So when I get home from work, I don't have much appetite to e.g. hack on ghc, or write some nice hackage packages. You should, though.
Getting back to basics with old kit and playing on the bare metal is kind of fun.
Geeky purchases since the last post:
- Zeiss 85/1.4 (Contax mount)
- Nikon Ai-S 105/2.5
- Rokinon 85/1.4 (Nikon mount)
- m.Zuiko 17/1.8
- m.Zuiko 75/1.8
- Zuiko Digital 50/2 macro
- Pentax 67 300/4 EDIF (and hence sold the 645 300/4 EDIF)
- Pentax 67 45/4
- Pentax 67 55/4
- Pentax 67 90/2.8
- Borg 125ED/2.8
- Pentax XO eyepieces
- Borg Reducer 0.7x DGT
- Borg Flattener 1.08x DG
- Baader MPCC
- GPU 4 element coma corrector (from Teleskop Service in Germany, seems to be the same as the Skywatcher one)
- ASA 2" 0.73x reducer/corrector 2KORRR
- Astrotrac TT320X-AG travel system
- Kasai Trading GINJI 200FN 200mm f/4.0 fast Newtonian to keep at my in-laws in Japan.
- Yokogawa DL1200A oscilloscope
- A shed-load of tools and components for electronics stuff - cheap USB logic analyzer, programmer, prototyping stuff, whole bunch of retro processors, etc.. etc...
- Terasic/Altera DE1 FPGA board
- Lots of video stuff to try to get video from old kit onto my Mac... sigh
- Some Nortel telephony exchange boards (for the 68060 processors)
- GPIB interface
- Sony HB-F1XDJ
- Toshiba HX-20 (knackered video output)
- Yamaha CX-11
- An issue 3 Spectrum board to play with
- Commodore Plus/4
Geeky things done since the last post:
- Replaced dud Dallas nvRAM in my HP 54502A 'scope with an STK16C88
- Hacked this RAM test for the ZX Spectrum to work with DivIDE - not as useful as the ROM, but still handy
- Learned how to (de-)solder properly. Thanks to the ever-shouty EEVBlog
- Lower and upper RAM replacement for 48k spectrums
- Got a 6502 to do something on a breadboard
Vaguely planned things/write-ups that might happen:
- "Around 100" shootout - Zeiss 85/1.4 vs Rokinon 85/1.4 vs Olympus OM 100/2.8 vs Zeiss 90/2.8 (Contax G) vs Olympus m.Zuiko 75/1.8 vs Pentax 67 90/2.8
- Light throughput and falloff (and maybe field flatness) of some scopes and lenses
- Homebrew 8 bit (and later 16 bit, maybe 32 bit) computer
- Hacks, repairs, mods, prods and restoration of old 8 bit computers
- Thoughts on the Questar 3.5 duplex
- Dynamically querying the symbol table of a process on Linux
- Astro-imaging (or rather, trying to) on my recent trip to Oita, Japan. Thoughts on the Vixen Sphinx and GP mounts
- Attempt at fixing the Toshiba HX-20 video output
- PS2/USB keyboard interface for Spectrum
- Joystick-port based fast downloader to get binaries onto retro computers
- Arduino-based function generator
Things I'd like to do, but for which will never have the time:
- Small functional language for 8-bit computers
- 6502, 6809 implementations using Lava
- Port some retro games to different retro platforms
- Build multi-chip synth with old-school parts
- Floating point library for 8-bits (maybe IEEE, maybe not)
- Garbage collection playground to try out different implementations on different problems
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