2023-01-29

Sunday Wind Down

Rechargeable

Arrived home as dusk was falling on this very windy and somewhat rainy Sunday evening.

I felt a headache coming, and it was quickly getting worse, so I took some painkillers and sat down on the bed, head against the pillow, laptop on my lap and a rather large blue shark silently observing me, waiting, just in case I needed it. I haven't charged the laptop since last I wrote on the night between Friday and Saturday, but it still have 50% battery and optimistically claims it should last me another six hours. Not too bad for a two year old battery on an Intel machine.

I remember getting a total of maybe four or five hours from my 17 inch PowerBook G4 back in 2004 and how I thought that was great battery life (although some people claimed the PowerBooks were named after "its only major shortcoming", granted, that was a few years prior). I hear the M2 machines these days can hit like 18 hours. That's just crazy.

On the Input of Text

Fredrik recently mentioned CotEditor in a blog post, and then wrote a little more about it the next day. I have always been rather conservative when it comes to text editors, but it can't hurt to try it out, so that's what I'm using to write this right now. So far it seems nice, but I literally just installed it 30 minutes ago and have so far only written Markdown.

My choice of text editor these days is Sublime Text. I have it set up just the way I like it, and together with Sublime Merge it fits my workflow very well.

Before I found Sublime I used something called jEdit, an editor written in Java. It was extremely flexible, extendable and configurable, and it did things I still can't do (easily) with Sublime. However, as MacOS was updated over the years, things started working less well. It felt like jEdit was lagging behind, as it was not really native for MacOS. Having the Java runtime environment installed also felt more and more like something I wanted to avoid.

Back in 2004 when I Switched to the Mac, jEdit was the one and only editor I could find that did all i needed. Before finding it I even considered going back to Windows XP. Really. Some recommended things like BBedit, saying it was the best editor ever, but that didn't fit my way of working at all. jEdit did however, at least after installing a ton of plugins and changing a lot of settings.

Since then, my way of working have changed somewhat, not to mention I no longer require text to be pixelated with no anti alias. In fact, I now only run hi-dpi screens with smooth fonts, even for code. There were also a lot of quirky things I depended on back then that I would not need today, so as long as an editor ticks a few basic feature boxes I could probably use it. Also, I think most software on the mac today is a bit more evolved than it was back in 2004 and there are more options to choose from.

So I will probably install CotEditor on my main machine also and try it out a bit.

More on the Game & Watch™

I wrote the other day about reviving my Super Mario Bros.™ Game & Watch™, finally getting a real ST-link that could flash it without problems.

It turns out that during the two years it was broken, there have been a lot of development in the G&W community. Not only has it turned out to be very easy to replace the 1 Mbyte flash chip in it for one with 64 Mbyte (256 Mbyte is also possible, though it requires small jumper wires to connect the tiny balls on a BGA chip, or a custom PCB adapter), but people have made custom firmwares that include all the original functionality, while also having a full set of emulators, with a nice front end, and the ability to store as many games as can fit in the flash.

Needless to say, I just have to try this out. Surprisingly enough, the recommended flash chip is in stock and I have my TS100 soldering iron, some good leaded tin and several millipauls of flux in a box on the shelf.

Just need to order the chip, and some connectors for making amore convenient programming cable. Expect there to be further entries on this later.

Unwound

The wind outside the window keeps whining as I wind down the dwindling week. Where once we were watching the vast expanse of time with the promise of a world with wonders to watch, now only wee hours will remain. Whatever will the next week hold?

My head actually feels a lot better now, so I will see if there might be anything to eat in the kitchen. 😊