Jerry Stratton's Blog, page 21
July 6, 2022
Every state should plan to secede
A state cannot secede without a plan for handling the duties of the federal government. It’s the same stuff a state would need a plan for if the federal government becomes temporarily unable or unwilling to perform its duties.
July 2, 2022
Cruise night in Hesperia
Cruise the town in your favorite form of transportation and in your favorite eighties clothing. Then gather for cocktails at Angelos.
June 29, 2022
Let mortal tongues awake
Samuel Francis Smith’s America—more commonly known as “My Country, ’Tis of Thee”— is short, direct, and a wonderful hymn to God as the soul of liberty. It’s a perfect hymn for the Fourth of July. It’s also very easy to play using the piano script from 42 Astounding Scripts.
June 28, 2022
TIL: Color BASIC device numbers and more. linked on Hacks
Like many old computers, the TRS-80 Color Computer assigned a device number to the screen that most people never used. Allen Huffman has a great overview of device numbers on the TRS-80 Color Computer. It turns out you can print to the screen just like you print to a printer, to tape, or to disk. This can make for very simple code when you have something that might need to be displayed on a choice of devices.
June 22, 2022
Ice cream from your home freezer
You can make great ice cream with whole eggs, egg yolks, and egg whites. You can even make it without eggs at all. All you need is syrup and cream—and a refrigerator with a freezer or a standalone home freezer.
June 15, 2022
No premature optimization
Don’t optimize code before it needs optimization or you’re likely to create unoptimized code.
June 8, 2022
UFO contact imminent… any day now
In yet another example of how the seventies was another planet, I ran across a set of seventies UFO magazines with a roundtable including Gene Roddenberry about super-children and their relation to alien contact.
June 1, 2022
Kolchak: The Montique Fantom (A Daredevils adventure)
A reskin of the Daredevils adventure The Body Vanishes for The Night Stalker in 1976.
May 25, 2022
ISBN (128) Barcode generator for macOS
Building on the QR code generator, this script uses CIFilter to generate a Code 128 barcode for encoding ISBNs on book covers.
May 18, 2022
A Decade of Jell-O Joys: 1963-1973
What changes a decade brings! I have the 1963 Joy of Jell-O and the 1973 New Joys of Jell-O. What happened to Jell-O and gelatin between the sixties and the seventies?
