You know...

You know that moment, when it's been over a week since you blogged, and yet you feel like it's been five minutes as you're so busy... Yeah, I've got that feeling right now...

So I thought I'd take a moment to list a few planned projects I have for these pages, if I ever get time for them....

The first is to look at the Intel TBB library, this is intended to assist in taking full advantage of the multicore capabilities of Intel chips, not something that has ever fully come into my sphere of interested (beyond running threaded code with posix threads or boost::thread or std::thread of course).

The second is some more Javascript, Python and MySQL interconnection code, in order to write a ticket/development control system, this is because I need a new one, I'm a little tired of the ones I use professionally, and the good ones out there on the interwebs are generally paid for, or limited for free, services.  So I want something super simple to handle my tickets... "Super Simple Tickets"... SST... That has a ring to it.

The third is to finally, go through some of my old Atari hardware, I plan to go through a video series just building from all the spares I have an Atari STE and I'm going to sadly sell it, as I have a LOT of junk left around the place.

A fourth might be to put together some AM1 powered AMD based machine, in order to see if the Intel TBB leverages itself smoothly onto that platform, and it appears to be pretty cheap to get entry there.

A fifth is to start recording some more game-play on my brand new EVGA nVidia 1080 GTX SC, which is an awesome piece of kit and has opened up the scope of my game play from my retired EVGA nVidia 700 GTX SC... Yes, Superclocked to Superclocked I have moved, and it was a tear because the 770 still stood up and produced such good results on the games I play, however, Unreal Engine 4 based games coming out over the last year have started to test it, and I never could get good performance in early versions of Ark (before they optimised it) and not at all in the currently unoptimized Player Unknowns Battlegrounds... So an upgrade I had, and nearly £600 later I'm a very happy puppy.  Though the delivery was rather shoddy.

And the final sixth is related to the fifth, to record more about the Medieval Minecraft Fortress and underground themed base I've been building from the excellent book I reviewed previously.

Anyway, that's what I'm planning to be up to... 

What are you guys doing?

Electronics Tinkering : Project Plan #1

I've been wanting to tinker with some electronics for ages, and in my store, I have some Z80 CPU's and lots of TTL logic.  But before I dive into that, and since I'm totally untrained, I thought I'd have a play about with my soldering iron and see what I could mash together.

My plan therefore is to desolder a PS2 connector from one of the Socket 775 motherboards I killed, and to connect it to an arduino uno to read the pins.

Looking at this, I can mount the PS2 connector to a project board, solder on a set of headers and wire each pin to a known point on the header.

From there I can use jumper cables from my breadboard to bridge from the headers on the project board to the arduino.

At least, this is the theory.

The first thing I need to worry about is the clock, I have no idea what the clock rate is, if I need a crystal, or if a capacitor charging & discharging will do, or even if I can create the signal from a GPIO pin or PWM pin from the arduino... I'll have to look into that and let you all know.

My rough schematic is going to look like this on the project board:

The outer shell will be going to ground, and it has four feed to solder.  Then the four pins seem to point to clock, Ground, VCC and Data.  I'm not clear on which of the pins below become the sockets, so I'll have to insert something into the socket holes and check for continuity to the pins to know the order.

But each group of four will be soldered to a header, which I've marked read and blue.  One will be the upper set of ports, the other the lower.  I'm not going to distinguish keyboard/mouse because I just want a keyboard signal.

So, a bit of soldering with my new iron.  I'm going to have to de-solder with it too.

Below follows a list of the links I'm interested in looking through:

• http://www.computer-engineering.org/ps2keyboard/

From the Wikipedia entry (yes I read Wikipedia) states:

"Communication is serial, synchronous and bidirectional.^[1] The attached device generates the clock signal. The host controls communication using the clock line; when the host pulls the clock low, communication from the device is inhibited."

My Silent & Popular Videos

Some of you may have noticed that over the years I've created some example videos, however, most of them before 2015 are silent, there's a very good reason for this, many of them were created on a system which had no sound input, or were recorded in places where I could not perform to the camera or microphone.

However, recently I've started to perform for you all, and you can hear my droning monotonous bullshit spouting off gob on most all the videos.

Unfortunately, this leaves me in a difficult position, because I have multiple uploads getting many views (multiple thousands on some), but they're silent and get commented as such.  People apparently need me to explain some of these items.

So, my new focus through June for technology is two pronged, the first is to remake those original videos which are silent, specifically the Boost Libraries on Windows stuff, that is all very popular, it is still accurate, but we're currently on boost v1.61.0, and it would be advantageous to remake those videos.

The second prong is an effort to start explaining some more programming topics, the first of which is linking to MySQL from source, another is building the GCC toolset from source, and finally there's going to be a series on programming C++.

This last item however, is going to be related to a book I'm putting together, to self-publish on Amazon's platform.  Which is going to be my own personal, probably quite antique feeling "Introduction to Programming with C++".

This is perhaps one of the hardest topics for a programmer to write upon properly, because you have to constantly stop yourself running a head, or assuming anything about your audience.  Many other books on the programming topic tend, in my experience, to leap a head assuming that the reader knows more than they might.  Or that they understand some technology or phrase being used.

I'm hoping to break that down, and get over the hurdle of introducing the topic by giving away the first part of the book for free, here on this blog perhaps, and that first part is really going to be a guide on how to use the rest of the book, it'll contain details of whom might benefit from the content, and it'll also help an absolute beginner understand what programming is, and how to start to think, before trying and perhaps getting frustrated by the actual tutorial segments of the tome.

Expect all this, through June & July!

And of course, keep tabs on my YouTube channel, which I am posting to very regularly now...

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCT8m3rFQoGJ_nEs22m3xoPw