sdomi:

In 1999, some members from the MMC Association decided to split and create SD Association. But nobody seems to exactly know why.

I’m sure there’s some folks out there that were part of these associations. Hopefully they will get in touch with sdomi and enlighten us all.

Nathan Dyer:

A couple weeks ago I decided to purchase a MacBook Air M2, with the specific purpose of running Asahi Fedora Remix. I chose this particular model because it’s the newest chipset that is supported by Asahi, and Best Buy was having a $200 off sale on them, presumably before Apple announces a new slate of laptops and stops offering the aging M2-based systems.

There were several things I really loved about the system (battery life was astounding, the trackpad was marvellous, and the display was beautiful), but ultimately I made the decision to return it; the experience just wasn’t what I needed for a daily driver.

Seems like there’s still a bit of polishing required for Asahi to match the experience of Linux on non-Apple hardware.

Arnaud Carré:

The Commodore Amiga 500 had a blitter chip. Its main function was to move bitmap graphics from one location to another while applying logical operations. The Amiga’s blitter could handle up to three bitmap sources at once and perform logical operations between them. To specify which operation to use, you needed to set an 8-bit value in the chip, known as the “minterm.”

Three bitmap sources and an 8-bit value to control logical combinations! Doesn’t that sound like a primitive version of the modern AVX vpternlogd instruction?

An unexpected correlation between a particular AVX-512 instruction and 35 year old Amiga graphics hardware.

Dion interviewing Julius Gustavsson, System Architect at Volvo Cars on the Tweede golf blog:

It turned out the low-power processor was a perfect fit for using Rust! It was not classified as a safety-critical component and it was an Arm Cortex-M processor, so there was no technical or bureaucratic blocker for using Rust.

And so it has come to be that, at this moment, EX90s and Polestar 3s are rolling off the assembly line that would not work without their Rust components.

Great to see embedded Rust see more industry adoption.

Jeffrey Starr:

In December 2022, Adobe, through the Computer History Museum (CHM), released the source code for PostScript®, version 1.0. PostScript is one of the foundational technologies of the desktop publishing revolution of the early 1980s, along with laser printers, the graphical user interface of the Apple Macintosh, and Aldus PageMaker. PostScript is a programming language and a page description format for translating visual content into printed documents.

Adobe immediately enjoyed business success through licensing PostScript to laser printer manufacturers and it became the de facto digital publishing format. While multiple histories have studied this event through a business lens, what historical questions may be answered through the source code? Further, as software practitioners, what can we learn from the source code to apply to present and future designs?

Detailed dive into the history and development of PostScript. Remarkable what was possible on the resource constrained computers of the time.