We made a little bit of hay today: 200-some bales. We had to stop and fix a couple things but mostly it went fairly smoothly. When we first started, we had lubricated a sticky billhook (the part that hooks the loops of twine and pulls them through to make a knot) and then it was too slippery so we had to adjust the tension on its jaw. And then the pickup tines on the baler were catching on a bent piece of metal and making a racket. The weather got a little ominous-looking toward the end but it still hasn’t rained. And now it’s a little lighter out there.
Here’s a picture of one of my brothers running the tedder first thing this morning to turn the hay over one last time to let the underside dry out.
Didn’t do much computer stuff today, beyond picking away at some ongoing projects.
I’m usually not that nostalgic for retro-computing things, but I have been thinking that it might be fun to use an emulator for IBM-compatible PCs with a VGA display (like DOSBox) as the runtime for a Forth-based fantasy console. Working title VGameForth16. So I did spend a little time installing DOSBox and nasm and writing a 20-ish line assembly-language program to generate a bootable floppy disk image that fills the screen with bright yellow smiley-face characters on a blue background. Funny how much of that I still mostly remember from the mid 90s when I did a lot of asm programming because it was all I had.
I think it’d be fun to bootstrap the whole thing from Forth so the next step is probably to write a minimal Forth interpreter loop in JavaScript so you can build the initial floppy image in your web browser.