Hacker News: markb139

New comment by markb139 in "I learned PCB design, 3D printing and C just to listen to music"

markb139 — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 14:58:38 +0000

Way back in time (1980s) I worked in the broadcast tv industry. We used to used digital still stores. A single frame of PAL took up 1MB of RAM. The machines had 2MB fitted. The board had a hardware cross fade function implemented in discrete logic chips. They also had a 20 or 40MB scsi drive. It was all controlled by a 6809 cpu. Quite impressive for the time

New comment by markb139 in "Nokia’s years of mobile-phone supremacy ended in an afternoon"

markb139 — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 11:31:48 +0000

Nokia had touch screen built into symbianOS from the start. All the API’s were there as was the UI handling. The Psion 5 was based on an earlier version of the same code and it was developed in 1995 or there abouts. In 2002/2003 much worked was done producing a touch based UI (I worked on a few of the apps). We had a customisable Home Screen with drag&drop icons. Multitasking with inter app communication.

Sadly, the hardware wasn’t quite up to it and they were silently dropped instead of working on improving.

New comment by markb139 in "CrankGPT"

markb139 — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 14:45:11 +0000

My best is 980W - for 1 second

New comment by markb139 in "Why is almost everyone right-handed? A new study connects it to bipedalism"

markb139 — Wed, 20 May 2026 09:23:55 +0000

I’m a leftie and I don’t think I learnt it. My mother said as a very young child she noticed I’d mainly used my left hand to take things - probably food :) These days the only real problem for me is scissors, especially the ones with moulded plastic handles.

New comment by markb139 in "Why is almost everyone right-handed? A new study connects it to bipedalism"

markb139 — Tue, 19 May 2026 21:12:59 +0000

I’m a leftie from a 50% leftie family. Apparently I showed my left handedness as a baby when grasping for things and hardly used my right hand. My mother was also a leftie, but in her generation she was forced to write with her right hand. The net result being she could write equally well with both hands. When I learnt this I tried to copy it.

New comment by markb139 in "Details of the Daring Airdrop at Tristan Da Cunha"

markb139 — Fri, 15 May 2026 10:24:37 +0000

I think this was also a “look what we can do at short notice” kind of exercise. Just in case a country was thinking of maybe trying to take over another set of islands in the south Atlantic

New comment by markb139 in "If AI writes your code, why use Python?"

markb139 — Tue, 12 May 2026 17:42:51 +0000

Why use any high level language at all if AI is writing the software. The high level languages seem mostly about humans not being able to handle complexity. Not an issue for an automated bot.

New comment by markb139 in "Running Tesla Model 3's computer on my desk using parts from crashed cars"

markb139 — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 11:11:29 +0000

I’ve recently built a disassembler and emulator using Claude to help reverse engineer a 90’s ECU based on an Intel embedded cpu. It was quite impressive to watch when Claude started to use the emulator to help understand how bits of the code worked.

New comment by markb139 in "Setting up OpenClaw on a cloud VM"

markb139 — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 18:32:32 +0000

It seems to be perfectly happy to run on virtual box with a Debian install. The host pc is running a local model. I’m quite impressed with what it’s capable of.

New comment by markb139 in "Pebble Production: February Update"

markb139 — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 08:23:52 +0000

I’ve got the solar version. It runs a long time between charges. Maybe I haven’t done enough tracked exercise recently

New comment by markb139 in "The Future of AI Software Development"

markb139 — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 17:59:56 +0000

I used to think photography was an expensive hobby until my wife got back into the horse world.

New comment by markb139 in "A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks"

markb139 — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 20:00:10 +0000

Im definitely going to build some small tools when I need them. One tool I use occasionally, but not so often I want to subscribe is Insomnia.

New comment by markb139 in "A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks"

markb139 — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 08:15:56 +0000

I retired from paid sw dev work in 2020 when COVID arrived. I’ve worked on my small projects since with all development by hand. I’d followed the rise of AI, but not used it. Late last year I started a project that included reverse engineering some firmware that runs on an Intel 8096 based embedded processor. I’d never worked on that processor before. There are tools available, but they cost many $. So, I started to think about a simple disassembler. 2 weeks ago we decided to try Claude to see what it could do. We now have a disassembler, assembler and a partially working emulator. No doubt there are bugs and missing features and the code is a bit messy, but boy has it sped up the work. One thing did occur to me. Vendors of small utilities could be in trouble. For example I needed to cut out some pages from a pdf. I could have found a tool online(I’m sure there are several), write one myself. However, Claude quickly performed the task.

New comment by markb139 in "Adafruit: Arduino’s Rules Are ‘Incompatible With Open Source’"

markb139 — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 09:02:51 +0000

“ The process of getting a binary onto the board is just dragging a file, and on linux at least you can script it with picotool”

Even easier if you setup debugging using another pico, debug probe or even a Pi (not sure if this works on the 5)

New comment by markb139 in "Implementation of a Java Processor on a FPGA (2016)"

markb139 — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 10:29:55 +0000

I briefly worked in a team that implemented a JVM on a mobile OS (before the iPhone) and one of the senior devs said Jazelle was in effect very inefficient because of all the context switching between ARM mode and Jazelle mode. Turned out a carefully tuned ARM JVM was in practice th best

New comment by markb139 in "Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context"

markb139 — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 18:14:45 +0000

I’ve tried 2 AI tools recently. Neither could produce the correct code to calculate the CPU temperature on a Raspberry Pi RP2040. The code worked, looked ok and even produced reasonable looking results - until I put a finger on the chip and thus raised the temp. The calculated temperature went down. As an aside the free version of chatGPT didn’t know about anything newer than 2023 so couldn’t tell me about the RP2350

New comment by markb139 in "GPT-5"

markb139 — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 12:04:17 +0000

I just checked. The code it gave me, though syntactically correct, was wrong functionally. The rp2040 temp reading increases and the ADC value decreases. ChatGPT didn’t invert the values.

New comment by markb139 in "GPT-5"

markb139 — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 20:04:10 +0000

Ha. I asked it to write some code for the Raspberry Pi RP2350. It told me there might be some confusion as there is no official product release of the RP2350. If it doesn’t know that, then what else doesn’t it know?

New comment by markb139 in "A 37-year-old wanting to learn computer science"

markb139 — Sat, 05 Jul 2025 22:03:09 +0000

37 is young. Trust me, in a few weeks I’ll be 60.

My whole life I’ve known I was an engineer. However, for a great chunk of the early years I couldn’t express that and did really badly at school.

I just learnt at my own pace and eventually worked as an electronics engineer in the broadcast industry. Then quit that and moved into sw dev.

One piece of advice is to just build stuff, fail and learn.

Good luck

New comment by markb139 in "The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million"

markb139 — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 10:13:07 +0000

It's doable, but it took me closer to 20 years. I got to zero net assets in July 2001. Retired from paid work (mainly sw eng contracting) at the start of covid in April 2020.

I should say, at the start I wasn't married and had no dependents. Also, for large parts of those 20 years, I didn't need to own or use a car.