toolikethelightning | Member Posts

From their web site's FAQ:

Is Amiga part of Commodore?
Well, Amiga was a Commodore! Later, at least. But, officially, not yet - though we’d love it to be. And we won't repeat the mistakes of the past relating to that. We’re in open dialogue with the most relevant rights holder to explore a potential reunion, and techno-optimism is in the air. Commodore and Amiga belong together in spirit, and we hope to make that true in practice as well. We're just waiting for them to give the green light and let the fun begin.

The Amiga was an amazing bit of kit. It had true preemptive multi-tasking, not just cooperative multi-tasking. It had a very advanced operating system, far more so than Windows had for many years. And it supported multiple programming languages, as I recall. And currently, has an active user community online, one group is making improvements to the operating system and releasing it!

It also had truly incredible video capabilities. Remember the TV series Babylon 5? ALL of the CGI was rendered on banks of Amigas! The system was called Video Toaster, each rendering machine had 32 MEGABYTES of memory, and it took 45 minutes to render ONE FRAME OF VIDEO!

https://www.generationamiga.com/2020/08/30/how-24-commodore-amiga-2000s-created-babylon-5/

An FPGA version of the Amiga would be absolutely amazing and nuts! It would definitely be a lot more expensive than the C64, which is - let's face it - a fairly basic computer as it was a computer of its era. Kind of like comparing an Apple II and a Mac, apples and oranges - no pun intended. But still, once they get the kinks of the FPGA adaptation worked out, and they now have a lot of experience with those now that they've implemented the C64 on one - again, not that the two computers are comparable in complexity - it should be doable.

Interesting times may lie ahead. It'd be so cool to have a viable third hardware platform, rather than just PC and Mac. I really hope their acquisition and resurrection of the Amiga comes to fruition.

https://www.commodore.net/faq

thewayne

This is pretty cool.

Someone bought the remains of the Commodore company for "low 7 figures", hired back original engineers, and reinvented the machine via FPGA chipsets. There are three different models, all in the same basic form factor with the addition of USB and HDMI ports. The original ports are still there, so you can plug in that original CRT display and floppy disk drive that's sitting in an old box somewhere. All of the original games work, and they come with a spiral-bound manual and a USB drive with 50 LICENSED games on it!

The base model is currently $250 and is a plain beige case, more expensive models include a clear case with LED lighting and a founder's case that is spiffier yet, but still quite affordable. You will be charged for tariffs, and that charge may go up or be refunded if lowered before shipping.

The boxes are planned to ship in October but may slip. If you order one now, your card will be charged immediately but you can cancel and get refunded prior to shipment.

To connect to a CRT TV, you need to buy a cable adapter to connect to an edge card, it's designed for HDMI interface. It has 3x USB-A ports, 1x USB-C, WiFi and Ethernet and a MicroSD slot, and a headphone jack. And as expected, two DB-9 joystick ports, the datasette port, and the floppy disk drive port. That's fairly nicely equipped, all in all.

AND, in a shout-out to the originals, it has the original signatures inscribed in the cases and PC boards!

For $250-300, I think I may buy one. I never owned one, and I've considered getting a used one but I've balked at such old hardware. With this being new and warranted hardware, that reluctance is lifted. It would be interesting to do some 'low-level poking into the hardware' programming again, and theoretically I should be able to slave this into a KVM switch to share the monitor around.

https://www.commodore.net/

https://slashdot.org/story/25/07/19/0528234/after-30-years-you-can-buy-a-new-commodore-64-ultimate-for-299

thewayne

McD's hired a company called Paradox.AI to run an "AI" chatbot to conduct hiring interviews for its restaurants. Pretty basic stuff. I'm a little unclear as to how much of the application/interview/hiring process Paradox was responsible for, but it at least conducted an online interview with the applicants.

There was a recent data spill from Paradox that exposed "64 million records, including applicants’ names, email addresses and phone numbers." That's a lot of records. Then again, McDonald's has a lot of locations and high turnover.

Security researchers were able to get in to McDonald's access portal by guessing their password. Said password?

1
2
3
4
5
6.

I guess I'd better change the combination on my luggage.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/07/poor-passwords-tattle-on-ai-hiring-bot-maker-paradox-ai/

The most common passwords for 2025, thus far, are:

123456
123456789
qwerty
password
12345
12345678
111111
1234567
123123
1234567890

https://www.passwordmanager.com/most-common-passwords-latest-statistics/

Now, here's the ridiculous part: it would be pretty trivial for the programmers at Paradox to BLOCK THE USE OF PASSWORDS LIKE THIS! These are common patterns, and it would be easy to test the password and say "NO! You have to use a good password!" There are APIs that enforce good password measures, and clearly they are not using them.

Paradox should be black-listed as a company not to do business with if they allow passwords like this.

Oh, and other Paradox clients? Several Fortune 500 corps including Aramark, Lockheed Martin, Lowes, and Pepsi.

brithistorian

I read a couple of articles recently, one about the recent Magic: The Gathering/Final Fantasy crossover and another a review of the most recent D&D book. The common thread in both of these articles was the way that the economics of being owned/produced by Hasbro (a multi-billion-dollar corporation) was affecting the content of the games. This got me to thinking that perhaps some games would be better off as lifestyle businesses. I don't think this is practical for all games — major corporate intellectual properties are more likely to deal with a major corporate game company than a lifestyle game company, regardless of the quality of the game — and I think at this point a lot of small game companies are just small companies that haven't scaled up ("yet," in the owners' hopeful thoughts) — but I'd like to deal with a game company that's run more for the good of the designers and the game than for the benefits of a huge faceless corporation.

ETA: It occurred to the just after posting this that a lot of the "companies" I dealt with when I was active in historical miniatures gaming were lifestyle businesses, simply because there's not really much room to scale historical miniatures. While this occasionally meant delays in orders because of issues in the owner's life (e.g. "I'm having my gallbladder out, so orders for the next couple of weeks will be delayed") or because of the realities of dealing with a small business (e.g. "I don't have any of Napoleonic Spanish irregulars on hand, so there will a slight delay while I cast some more"), it was generally a pleasant experience, even given the realities of transatlantic shipping in the late 1990s. It wouldn't really be compatible with today's "Amazon overnight delivery" mindset, though.

thewayne

This is the recipe that I used:
https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/141169/easy-indian-butter-chicken/

The major prep is doing a fine dice on the onion and cutting up a pound and a half of chicken into bite-sized pieces. Not a terribly expensive recipe - if you have the spices - I'd guess the chicken, tomato sauce cost, and cream to be under $20 or so. I did not have the spices, so that cost me another $13ish, but those will be usable for a few more iterations. It also makes for a busy stove: I had three burners plus the oven going: rice, sauce, onion reduction, and the oven was cooking the chicken.

VERY high-fat recipe! A cup of butter and three cups of heavy cream! I made it with rice and there was way more sauce than needed, if I use this recipe again I'm going to cut the amount of sauce by at least a third. Milk Street has a recipe that uses some sort of cashew puree, I'll be investigating that.

VERY yummy recipe! But as I said, also quite high-fat.

brithistorian

Colossal Biosciences is planning to bring back the giant moa, a 3m (10 foot) tall flightless bird that went extinct around 600 years ago, shortly after humans arrived in New Zealand. Peter Jackson is one of the major investors. Considering the difficulties the Australians had when dealing with emus, which are only 2/3 the size of the great moa, they really need to consider that there was probably very good reason that the early New Zealanders wiped them out.

brithistorian

I love YouTube Music — it's a great streaming system and gives me access to music that I could only have dreamed of when I was younger. But there's one thing about it — a small thing really, but still big enough that it bothers me: When you have a playlist, it should be a trivial thing for the software to add up the running times of all the songs in the playlist and give you a runtime for the playlist, and this works for shorter playlists, but once a playlist reaches 5 hours or more in length, the program gets lazy and anything over 5 hours is either "5+ hours" or "5 hours [XX] minutes," where [XX] isn't the actual number of minutes past 5 hours, instead the point after 5 hours where the software got lazy and decided to stop adding. Not a deal killer, not even that big of a deal, really, but it's annoying.

thewayne

Bill is, in my ever so humble opinion, one of the most brilliant musical comedians. I'd rate him up there with Tom Lehrer and Eric Idle and above them in many ways (Peter Schickele is still #1 for me). If you ever want to have a lot of fun, just cruise YouTube for Bill Bailey videos and you should have a good time.

In this one, he pays tribute to one of his favorite bands, one of the first techno bands, Kraftwerk.

Watch on YouTube

brithistorian

Two days ago, Twice and Blackpink both had comebacks on the same day: Twice's "This is for" and Blackpink's "뛰어(JUMP)" (links go to the videos, so as not to spam your feed with two embedded videos).

Blackpink's song is a 1-song single, per YG's strategy of keeping Blinks starved for new music from Blackpink, while Twice's song is part of a 14-song album, keeping with JYP's strategy of giving Once as much music as they could possibly want from Twice. I prefer the JYP strategy — at first I was a bigger fan of Blackpink than of Twice, but eventually I got tired of waiting for new songs from Blackpink.

Two interesting things I noticed:

Twice Jeongyeon has had difficulty meeting the ridiculous weight standards imposed on K-pop idols (i.e. still not fat by any measure), so in recent comebacks Twice's stylists have started dressing everyone but Jeongyeon in midriff-baring tops. I don't know if this was done at the company's request or at Jeongyeon's, but they did it again this time.
Blackpink's song actually includes the English lyric "Are you not entertained?"

brithistorian

I've got an idea about the plotting one of my fics, but I'm not sure if the idea I've got right now is the right thing. So. . . if any of you have read my fic "Turning of the Year" — or if you feel like reading it right now — and you'd like to give your input on the future course of the story (at the risk of possibly getting spoiled), send me a message.

thewayne

Not long ago, Google released an update that slammed the batteries in the Pixel 4 phone. That phone had batteries from two different makers, and it was found that one of those batteries did not age gracefully, the update greatly reduced its ability to charge to reduce its likelihood of bursting into flames. They also offered various compensation schemes to get the battery replaced or retire and replace the phones, but the hoops they put in place for said compensation were rather onerous.

Well, the circle has come around again and now it's the 6a's turn. But this time, the phone isn't particularly old. This one still has two years of updates available, and the compensation is higher than what was offered to owners of the 4. But it appears that the terms are just as bad, you'll need to make sure the screen is absolutely perfect and that there's nothing else at all wrong with the phone and that you read all the fine print before you try to comply with any of the terms.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/07/a-mess-of-its-own-making-google-nerfs-second-pixel-phone-battery-this-year/

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/07/11/1921242/google-nerfs-second-pixel-phone-battery-this-year

brithistorian

Yesterday I finished reading Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. I enjoyed it, but was frustrated with the ending — it seemed like it didn't end so much as just stopped.[^1] Today, I learned from cmcmck's comment on my July book record that this is actually the first book of a trilogy. This makes me feel better about the ending — I'll give an author more leeway on an ending when I know that a book is part of a series. But even if Mantel does give us a satisfying ending at the end of volume 3, that's still not going change the fact that, as much as I enjoyed the book, it feels like slice-of-life Thomas Cromwell fanfiction. (Of course, because it was professionally published and won awards, the literary establishment would quarrel with that characterization.)

[^1] Well, it didn't just stop — it reached a stopping place where one of the subplots had just resolved — but it didn't reach an actual conclusion.

brithistorian

Yesterday when I was in the grocery store, the music system started playing Elton John and Kiki Dee's "Don't Go Breaking My Heart", and my mind started rewriting the lyrics, turning into part of a M/M mafia musical rom-com. Specifically, it's the song in Act 2 where the two main characters realize they have feelings for each other. Below are the new lyrics I wrote for the first verse, where person A is the small business owner (I'm thinking baker) who's in debt to the mafia[^1] boss and person B is the thug sent out by the mafia boss to collect on a loan.

A: Don't go breaking my arm. B: I'm s'posed to shatter your knee. A: Tell Vinny I'll get him his money. B: He's not so patient like me.

[^1] I just looked it up (because of course I did), when using mafia in a generic sense you don't capitalize it, and when referring to a specific organization (e.g. the Sicilian Mafia), you do.

brithistorian

7 July
- Wolf Hall: A Novel (Hilary Mantel)
9 July
- Komi Can't Communicate, vol. 23 (Tomohito Oda)
- The Cartoonists Club (Raina Telgemeier and Scott McCloud)
10 July
- Adulthood Is a Gift (Sarah Andersen)
14 July
- I'm in Love with the Villainess, vol. 4 (Inori)
- Food Wars!: Shokugeki no Soma, vol. 13 (Yuto Tsukuda)
15 July
- Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age (Ada Palmer)

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Fans of Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning

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Another thing on that Commodore 64 - they want to bring back the Amiga!

BRAND-NEW Commodore 64s being released in October, $250-500!

McDonald's had an applicant data leak, for a ridiculous Spaceballs reason

(no subject)

I made Butter Chicken a couple of nights ago

You'd think that Peter Jackson would have seen Jurassic Park...

Computers, do computer things better!

Bill Bailey on Kraftwerk

Some things never change...

A question about plotting one of my fics

Do you use a Google Pixel 6a phone? Prepare for your battery to get clobbered.

Book reaction: Wolf Hall (Hilary Mantel)

Musical fanfic

Books read, July 2025

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July 2022

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