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Submission + - SPAM: The Monkey Island (TM) PC speaker music player

Submitted by ttsiod
ttsiod writes: After more than a year's isolation due to COVID, I will (finally!) be visiting my family in a week; and see my nephews and nieces. So what better gift to prepare, than to "rip out" the PC speaker melodies of Monkey Island — a game I introduced to them when they were very young — and create a standalone player? :-)

What better gift indeed! But to make it a decent challenge, right after hacking DOSBox to dump the songs' frequencies, I made a portable player with the tiniest target I had — an ATtiny85 micro-controller, with 512 bytes of RAM and 8 KB of flash. Fitting the music data inside it was quite demanding... I started with Huffman compression, but even after that I had to deal with some challenges... Read all about it in my blog post :-) And have an excellent summer vacation, fellow Slashdotters!
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Compiling my own SPARC CPU in a cheap FPGA board (www.thanassis.space)

Submitted by ttsiod
ttsiod writes: After reading an interesting article from an NVIDIA Engineer, about how he used a dirt-cheap FPGA board to code a real-time ray-tracer, I got my hands on the same board — and "compiled" a dual-core SPARC-compatible CPU inside it... basically, the same kind of design we fly in the European Space Agency's satellites.

I decided to document the process, since there's not much material of that kind available. I hope it will be an interesting read for my fellow Slashdotters — showcasing the trials and tribulations faced by those who prefer the Open-Source ways of doing things... Just read it and you'll see what I mean.

Submission + - A Breathtaking View of Jupiter's Clouds from the Juno Spacecraft (youtube.com)

Submitted by ttsiod
ttsiod writes: When science meets art... Looking at this video, I had to remind myself that I am not watching yet another Hollywood fantasy... That I was instead watching images that traveled incredible distances to share with me the colors and patterns of the Giant that protects us from the onslaught of comets from the Kuipert belt.

If you haven't seen it, it's 4 minutes that are really worth watching.

Comment Android Treble may finally help... (Score 1) 29

by ttsiod (#55101961) Attached to: Tech Firms Team Up To Take Down 'WireX' Android DDoS Botnet
Android is currently more or less a disaster in terms of updates and security fixes. To people used to "apt-get upgrade" and "unattended-upgrades", the situation is laughable - you buy a phone and you know from the start you will get (maybe) one update to the next version of the OS - if you're lucky. After that, you're left in eternal limbo - an easy target for exploits and all sorts of malware.

Android Treble may finally help with this disaster - but for now, those of you that can, should try LineageOS.

Submission + - A reverse-engineering journey (www.thanassis.space) 2

Submitted by ttsiod
ttsiod writes: My old tablet died, and I bought a new one... Just like it's predecessor, I wanted to run a Debian chroot inside it — that would allow me to apt-get install and run things like Privoxy, SSH SOCKS / VPN tunnels, Flask mini-servers, etc; and in general allow me to stay in control.

But there was no open-source way to do this... and I could never trust "one-click roots" that communicate with servers in China...

It took me weeks to reverse engineer my tablet — and finally succeed in becoming root. The journey was quite interesting, and included both HW and SW tinkering. I learned a lot while doing it — and wanted to share the experience with my fellow Slashdotters...

I am sure you guys will enjoy reading this :-) Cheers!

Comment Turned broken NAS into fully functional Debian srv (Score 1) 251

by ttsiod (#50668955) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What Is Your Most Awesome Hardware Hack?
Blogged about it 2 years ago:

http://users.softlab.ntua.gr/~...

The server...

  • - costs me, energy-wise, only about 3-3.5W
  • - is always accessible even though I have a dynamic IP (via free DNS providers)
  • - has a Lighttpd web server so I can share things with the world
  • - has an Exim mail server, so I can receive mail over (E)SMTP, store it in my house, and read it over SSH/mutt
  • - can be SSH-ed into, which allows me to Wake-On-LAN my main desktop, whenever I need access to it
  • r- uns long running web downloads (e.g. wget/rtorrent) from within screen-ed sessions, and shares them over Samba to my house-bound devices (e.g. watch movies from my Android tablet)
  • - SSH is exposed over sslh in my HTTPS port (bypassing several firewall limitations in various places - cough, work, cough) etc.

It also required soldering to access the board's serial port - all in all, very useful tinkering :-)

Comment A solver and a simulation of the solution, in Pyth (Score 1) 167

by ttsiod (#46675001) Attached to: A Rock Paper Scissors Brainteaser
Based on @ShanghaiBill's solution, I wrote a solver and simulation in Python (that also fixes ShanghaiBill's buggy pinning of "him.rock" to 0.5 - the player could in theory, choose to play rock at more than 50% probability). Use Pypy for speedy execution - I uploaded the code to GitHub: https://github.com/ttsiodras/R...

Comment My Speccy was the gateway to a life of IT... (Score 3, Interesting) 212

by ttsiod (#39768247) Attached to: Sinclair ZX Spectrum 30th Anniversary
My Speccy was the gateway to a life of IT (I ended up becoming a software engineer, and part-owner of a startup). Will always feel grateful to the designers of the 8-bit micros that started all this...

Oh, and I still remember my first hack - dissassembling JetPac and finding the POKE that gave me infinite lives. Now *that* was fun :-)
AI

Submission + - AI - Playing Score4 (functional/imperative style) (ece.ntua.gr)

Submitted by
ttsiod
ttsiod writes: "... I always try to find ways to "lure" my nephews and nieces towards science and engineering, so after a number of Score4 rounds with my 7 year-old niece, I told Theodora that by being a programmer, her uncle could create something "magical" on her laptop: a program that would play Score4 so well, that it would beat her, me, and every other human she knows.

She smiled and said "I'd like to see that, uncle!"... and that's when this story started..."

Comment Re:Answers and Suggestions and Further Questions (Score 1) 249

by ttsiod (#34345206) Attached to: Coder Accuses IBM of Patenting His Work
HeapCheck, Electric fence, Dmalloc and all memory debuggers in general, are basically replacing the allocation functions in the executable with their own version.

The "extra" stuff that the patent proposes, is a BOOLEAN flag, that HeapCheck functions would check upon entry (at runtime) - therefore allowing the developer to control (ON/OFF) the machinery at runtime. For example, the substitute allocation function can check a registry setting, to decide whether the functionality is on or off, and a separate utility GUI can toggle this registry setting on/off (I believe Microsoft's PageHeap has something exactly like that).

So tell me, do you REALLY consider this addendum - a boolean flag, for pitty's sake - enough "innovation", to warrant the term "invention"? Patentable "invention"?

Comment Re:ludicrous (Score 1) 249

by ttsiod (#34345034) Attached to: Coder Accuses IBM of Patenting His Work
Er... let me get this straight:

You are actually arguing... that adding a boolean flag, controlled at runtime - a BOOLEAN flag! - constitutes enough... innovation, to make this... a completely new invention, worthy of patenting?

That is, if the allocation function checks e.g. a registry setting upon entry, and a GUI application simply sets this registry entry to True/False.... then suddenly the contribution is so enormous, to warrant the label of "new invention"?

Really? Are you serious?

Comment Re:They aren't claiming your invention. (Score 3, Informative) 249

by ttsiod (#34342350) Attached to: Coder Accuses IBM of Patenting His Work
I am a coder, not a lawyer - and from reading the patent's claims, I can see only one thing that was not in HeapCheck, but which DID exist in Electric Fence: the ability to enable heap checks at runtime, without recompilation. Electric Fence allowed one to do that via LD_PRELOAD, so I am sorry, but I stand by what I said - I can see nothing in there that didn't exist in either Efence or my HeapCheck.

Comment Re:Answers and Suggestions and Further Questions (Score 5, Informative) 249

by ttsiod (#34342296) Attached to: Coder Accuses IBM of Patenting His Work
I only take an issue with your last paragraph - I certainly didn't leave the code in a graveyard, I released it with an open source license, so that anyone could use it and make his life a bit better. The fact that 10 years later, someone else has now patented the ideas in Electric Fence and HeapCheck, and can now sue me and everyone else using it, is what got me mad (hence the "trolls" comment).

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