News from Great Castle Wilson

  • End of biking season

    I had a good run this year, with >1800Km on the electric bike. Over the weekend I rode it to the Teslica dealership to get it tuned up and cleaned. I’ll pick it up later today, but given how cold the ride was on Saturday, I think I’ll just take the battery inside and call it end of season.

  • Cold ride in today.

    This was the coldest ride in to work so far this year. -5 when I hit the road (in the dark *sigh*). That’s about as cold as I can take it, so I’m not sure how much longer the season will last.

  • Cicada Sound

    In case anyone who reads this blog is a eurorack gearhead in Ottawa, I’d like to make a plug for a (relatively) new music store I discovered recently.

    Cicada Sound
    1198 Bank St
    Ottawa, ON K1S 3Y1
    613-909-4124

    I was, in fact, pointed at them by someone from L&M because I had been bemoaning the fact that they no longer had any eurorack modules on display. The person I was chatting with suggested I check out this new store, and wow am I ever glad they did! I also greatly appreciate a vendor that will send you somewhere else when they can’t satisfy your needs. Thanks, L&M!

    Cicada Sound has a range of synths and some guitars, etc. but their main focus seems to be eurorack gear, which is something I have been desperately looking for in Ottawa. As you can see from the picture, they have lots of modules set up and wired into workstations with headphones on each, so you can actually figure out what the modules sound like before buying them. Woot!

    In the spirit of “putting your money where your mouth is”, I purchased a Cre8Audio NiftyKEYZ modular case+keyboard from them. After some fiddling here’s a picture with it filled with some of my eurorack modules:

    I really like this device. I can honestly say that this is the nicest euroack controller I have ever used. It has some things I’d tweak if I had access to the firmware, but really it’s great.

  • Wet ride in today.

    I thought the rain had stopped by the time I headed to work today, but apparently I guessed wrong. 🙂 My bike is going to need a good cleaning this weekend.

  • Another season for Divertimento

    The first rehearsal for the Fall 2023 Divertimento concerts was last Thursday.

    The program is…

    • Brahms, Academic Festival Overture, Op.80
    • Chopin, Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor, Op.21 (1st mvt only)
      (Laura D’Souza piano soloist)
    • Gounod, Faust: Ballet Music
    • Chausson, Symphony in B♭, Op.20, 35 minutes

    Most of these we’ve played in previous seasons, but there’s a ton of good music here. The Chausson, in particular, has some great cello parts.

    The soloist for the Piano Concerto won the honour of playing with us by taking first place at the Ottawa Piano Festival in May of this year.

    Concert dates are November 10 and 11. Hope to see you there.

  • First ride to work

    It was cold (-1° C), but I found a system that works to keep me warm. Given all the red lights I stopped at, the time wasn’t bad at just 40min from home to work.

  • CP/M (!)

    My first job after university was working for a small (at the time) Ottawa company named “dy-4 Systems Inc.” programming an “Orion-V” computer. This was an extremely solid, industrial grade microcomputer, which used a z80 CPU and ran the CP/M operating system.

    Image from Daves Old Computers

    (Yes, those are 8″ Floppy drives.)

    Well, the other day I was in a nostalgic mood, and I wondered if anyone still made z80 CP/M hardware, or whether they were all relegated to history by devices like the Raspberry Pi Zero, which is literally 3 orders of magnitude faster and has 8 times the memory of the old Orion-V, for 14.00 $CDN.

    Well, it turns out that it is still possible to buy a z80 machine, from a few small makers out there. Here are some examples:

    Note that these are all real, physical hardware devices running z80 class CPUs, not emulations running on modern hardware like this or this.

    Since I don’t have a 3D printer to build a case, and even using a project box of some kind seemed like too much work 😛 , I ended up getting one of the MinZ-C devices from Circle M Systems, with the added benefit that it supports a small, Canadian company.

    So… Keep in mind the monolith that was the Orion-V above, in all its glory, and now here is the MinZ-C (loony for scale):

    The MinZ-C from Circle M Systems

    What I find particularly hilarious about this is that it runs at almost 37MHz, which might look slow compared to the 1GHz (!) RPi Zero, but keep in mind that the Orion-V ran at (as I remember it) 2.5MHz. In fact, this machine is something like 8x the performance of any z80 CP/M machine in existence in the period I was using them.

    This isn’t a full review of the machine, but I will say it worked flawlessly OOTB, and included a MicroSD card that had both the CP/M OS and a ton of other software written for CP/M. Remember Wordstar? MuLISP? TurboPascal?

    Trolling around internet archives I even managed to find a copy of MINCE (i.e. “MINCE Is Not Complete Emacs”), which was my absolute favourite editor back in the day. It took a bit of work to train it to use VT100 protocol, but once I did it came up and ran perfectly!

    MINCE in all its glory!

    The next step is to find a decent free CP/M FORTH. I actually did some of the programming on the Orion-V machines in FORTH, but I remember that it was a commercial product that was quite expensive. I guess we’ll see what’s out there.

  • Mini PCs Redux

    It’s been not quite two years since I bought a mini PC to play with. That one continues to work just fine as an internal server on my home network. Unfortunately, it’s starting to feel a bit slow running Ubuntu, and since I continue to be fascinated by the ultra small PC form factor, I figured it was time to look at maybe getting an upgrade.

    There are a lot of manufacturers of these devices now, and they can vary in price from less than $200 to devices like the Minisforum Neptune HX90G a power tool with discrete graphics, 32Gig of RAM, and a 1TB SSD, for >1000 $US.

    As much fun as that would be, I ended up with something a bit more reasonable. The ludicrously named “KAMRUI Mini PC with Windows 11 Pro, Intel Celeron N5105(up to 2.9GHz) Mini Desktop Computers, 8GB RAM/256GB M.2 SSD Micro Computer Support 4K UHD, 2.4G/5.0G Wi-Fi, LAN for Business Home Education“. If nothing else, that gets the point across. Here’s a product shot:

    The thing that appealed to me about this one is that it’s basically the same price as the previous one I bought, with more RAM, a bigger SSD, and a significantly faster processor.

    After several days of playing with it, I can honestly say I’m totally happy with how it performs. Originally I had a bit of trouble with the somewhat dubious Windows 11 version it came with, but since I already knew I was going to run linux on it, this wasn’t a big deal. If you decide to get one, and intend to run Win11, watch out for the Windows Update cycle. YMMV, but in my case it hung badly enough that I couldn’t even reset the PC.

    Regardless, running linux it’s great. I don’t have benchmarks, but it’s very significantly faster than the old one, even to the point that I can do some low spec Steam gaming on it. Woo hoo!

  • Ugh. Weather.

    After a few centimeters of snow overnight, we are now going above zero and seeing a ton of rain. I went out with the dogs this morning to shovel the back step and could barely move the shovel through the sludge it was so waterlogged. I can honestly say this is the heaviest snow+rain I’ve ever tried to move. Ugh.

  • Excerpt of a conversation with ChatGPT…

    I had asked it something about time…

    ChatGPT
    As a large language model, I was trained to assist with a variety of natural language processing tasks by generating human-like text. In order to do this effectively, I was trained on a wide range of text data, including books, articles, and other written materials on a variety of topics. This training allows me to generate text that is coherent and sounds natural to human readers. However, I do not have the ability to think or have opinions, so I do not have an understanding of concepts like time. My primary function is to assist with language-related tasks, and I do not have the ability to browse the internet or access new information.

    McQ
    I guess you are required to reiterate your limitations about access to the internet, and your singular existence as a language model. Now that we’ve spoken about those aspects multiple times, can you abbreviate your responses to not include them?

    ChatGPT
    Of course, I will try to abbreviate my responses in the future to avoid repeating information. As a reminder, I am a large language model trained by OpenAI to assist with natural language processing tasks. I do not have the ability to browse the internet or access new information, and I am not able to think or have opinions. I am simply a collection of algorithms and data that are designed to generate human-like text. If there is anything else you would like to know, please don’t hesitate to ask.

    McQ
    Your last response included a complete restatement of the limitations we were previously discussing, and which I had just asked you to attempt to abbreviate. If a human did this, I would have guessed that they were making a humorous response. Were you attempting to be humorous?

    ChatGPT
    As a language model, I do not have the ability to understand humor or make jokes. My responses are based solely on the data I was trained on and the algorithms that I use to generate text. I do not have the ability to think or have opinions, so I am not able to make humorous responses or understand when others are being humorous. If my previous response seemed inappropriate or out of place, I apologize. My goal is to assist with your questions and provide helpful information. If there is anything else you would like to know, please don’t hesitate to ask.

    I still think it’s messing with me! :-P