2023-01-02 - 2023

I am hoping that 2023 will be less stressful and more productive. Hopefully that statement won't draw the wrath of the universe.

Lupo

The priority for Lupo this year will be finding food that agrees with his stomach better. I also need to do some tests with food bowls to fine arrangements that work best.

House

In February I'm hoping that my financial situation will be calm enough that I can get my other two Desert Bus posters framed. Then I can put all of them up.

In March I need to look into getting a new furnace. Mine is thankfully still working but it's starting to act a little strange and is over 40 years old. I doubt a new one will last that long.

After that I need to see how my financial situation is looking and see about buying some new chairs.

Volunteering

I really need to find some kind of volunteer opportunity this year. At the very least I need 10 volunteer hours by may to claim as my Professional Development Hours for APEGA but I would also like to find somewhere that I can go routinely and really get involved with.

I can't spend all my time with the cats.

Sickness

I hope to get sick less

Mafia Story Comparison

I would really like to get this series done this year. There's a lot of things that I want to show people and I'd like to do it while I remember them.

Breadboard Computer Project

I've ordered the replacement ROMs and a Zero-insertion force socket which will hopefully work better than the other sockets I got. After that I need to connect up the switches and then I can start working on my own program ideas.

I also want to document the 6502 instruction set.

Scanning

After I got the breadboard computer finished and moved off of my kitchen table I can start getting back into scanning. I want to scan The front and back of each album in my CD collection. I also need to go through my set of photographs to see which ones I don't already have a scan of. Then I can work on filling out my photo album.

I also want to get a book scanner but that'll be expensive so it'll depend on how the house stuff go.

Boxed Software Collecting

I hope to spend significantly less money on boxed software this year. My plan is to put $100 into my PayPal account each month and that'll determine how much money I can spend. If I buy a lot of little things then I can't buy a big thing but if I don't spend a lot and save up then I might be able to.

There are a few things I would like. I've seen some interesting boxes for Windows 1.0 and I'd like a retail copy of DOS 3. I'd also like a copy of Word for Windows 2.0. OS/2 1.30.2, Warp 3, Warp 4.5 and a software development program.

My main goal for this year is to install and use all of the software I already have. That means I need to get a working 5.25 inch floppy drive and a setup to use it so that I can image the disks that I don't have a 3.5 inch version of.

Computer History Tour

The next stop on the history tour is Altair Basic. I have a paper tape and a caseate version for my Altair 8800 clone. I want to work through the manuals for those two versions and write up a reference for each of them.

Next I want to do a little bit of an investigation into the assembly development system for the Altair and then look into CP/M. Then I can write a reference for CP/M.

As an offshoot of this I also want to write a decompiler. This will start with support for 8080 instructions and CP/M executables but I hope to expand it to other systems.

This will likely also lead to the first in a series of posts looking at different executable formats.

Disk Structure Investigation

The next step for this project is finishing up the assembly program to make images of hard disks. Then I need to review the way the Disk Viewer application reads files. Currently it tries to load everything at once which is fine for 2 MB floppies but doesn't work well for 2 GB hard disks. My plan is to write an abstraction layer between the underlying image format and the disk structure model. The data from the image will get loaded on-demand as the model requests it.

My priority will be decoding the MBR so that I can hopefully get my OS/2 partition to boot. Next will be figuring out how to identify which bits of data are available in the BPB and then navigating the file system. The file system part is mainly where the on-demand loading comes into play.

Exercises and Posts

Along with everything else I also want to get back into the routine of working through chapters in my programming books and writing posts.