doop

About the Tower Bridge Lifts bot

Years ago on Twitter there was a lovely little bot run by Tom Armitage which would post whenever Tower Bridge was opening or closing. I live just about within earshot of the sirens that sound whenever the bridge opens, and it was really neat to be able to glance at my feed whenever I heard them and know what ship was passing through; occasionally it could answer questions such as "what's that amazing old-school paddle steamer going past?". Rather endearingly, it also posted in the first person. Hello Bridge!

Anyway, since then, Twitter got taken over by an awful person and filled up with other awful people and revoked API access, and Bluesky felt a bit like the Twitter of old. I remembered the Tower Bridge bot in particular when trying to work out when a Viking longship was going to pass beneath it, and I thought.. ..why not just make one?

How it works

I have a python script which s

doop

How to do a TIC-80 byte-jam on an ARM mac

Byte jams are a fun demoscene event where there's usually music from a DJ and several participants who use the TIC-80 fantasy console to code up a graphics effect from scratch within an hour. I usually watch the Field-FX stream on Monday evenings, and occasionally take part; there's an archive of the graphical effects people have made in these sessions, here.

A rather neat part of this is that TIC-80 has been modified to allow its programs to access the FFT of a sound stream, so that you can make your programs respond to the music in real-time. However, this can require a bit of setup on a mac.

In this document I will describe how to set up the audio software, plus byte jam client and TIC-80 itself, to allow participation in a byte jam.

Initial downloads

doop

Installing linux (Debian) on a 2011 Intel mac mini

Apple have long stopped supporting the mid-2011 mac mini I had sitting in the living room, so rather than contribute to the e-waste problem I decided to stick linux on it. The general consensus seems to be that you should keep macOS bootable to make it easier to deal with any firmware issues down the line, so I wanted to set it up to dual boot. The documentation I was able to find on how to do this seemed scattered or out of date.

There are a number of little wrinkles to this process:

• macOS quite reasonably assumes it'll be the only thing running on the machine; you need to install a boot manager to let you choose between macOS, linux, or whatever else. I went with rEFInd.
• Something seems a bit off with the default video setup, such that when I first booted into Debian the screen went blank immediately after enabling kernel modesetting.
• The mac mini wifi uses a Broadcom chipset with non-free drivers which you have to download separately. I s