I'm scoping out a fourth edition of my book, Assembly Language Step by Step. I got wind of a simple FOSS utility that could be enormously useful in that effort: SASM (SimpleASM), which is an IDE created specifically for ( Read more... )

• The weirdest site to cross my desktop recently is this one, which attempts (and fails wretchedly) to demonstrate how to pronounce my last name. Many of my readers ( Read more... )

A week or so ago I bestirred myself and installed MediaWiki on my Web host. I'd been intending to do that for some time, but (as my friend Don put it) my life was ODTAA for a bit. Installing it was a snap. My provider has something called Installatron that did the job, no issues. The software, of course, is free and open-source.

I installed it in ( Read more... )

Yesterday the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced the Raspberry Pi Pico, at the boggling temporary low price of...$4US. It's ( Read more... )

My regular readers will recall that I wrote an article in the June/July 1994 issue of PC Techniques, describing a distributed virtual encyclopedia that pretty much predicted ( Read more... )

I'm of two minds about Twitter. Maybe three. Maybe seventeen. I'm on it, and I post regularly, typically two items per day. That's just how it averages out; I don't post for the sake of posting, but only when I find something worth linking to.

Why? Two reasons:

1. More people are on Twitter than cruise blog posts. By posting ( Read more... )

Today (or maybe tomorrow, depending on who you talk to) is the 25th anniversary of Borland's introduction of the Delphi RAD environment for Object Pascal. Delphi changed my life as a programmer forever. It also changed my life as a book publisher for awhile. The Delphi Programming Explorer, a contrarian ( Read more... )

Actually, I do pay for software, but not as often as I used to--and the reason is peculiar. This has been especially true since I started using Android on my Samsung Note 4 phone, and more recently, a Galaxy Tab S3.

Now, I still pay for commercial Windows software, like the brand ( Read more... )

24 years and some months ago, I published an article in PC Techniques, on the END. page, which was where I put humor, crazy ideas, and non-of-the-above. The article was "The All-Volunteer Virtual Encyclopedia of Absolutely Everything!and as I recall it generated a lot of mail. The idea was this: We ( Read more... )

Egad. Contra turned 20 when I wasn't looking. Actually, I was looking. What I wasn't doing was breathing. Enough. At night. I think I have a handle on that problerm now, and with any luck at all I'll be writing more of everything going forward. I'm 50,000 words into my new novel Dreamhealer, and tinkering the last bits of my free ebook FreePascal ( Read more... )