- Видео 17
- Просмотров 387 771
Computing: the Details
Добавлен 28 ноя 2020
Hi, I'm Lex (they/them), I like to make things, normally computer related. Hopefully this channel will slowly fill up with videos of interesting computer stuff, and will go deep into the details about various fascinating topics.
How I made a compiler that you can Fax your code to
Hi, I'm Lex (they/them)
You've found a video about one of my many silly projects.
This one is a compiler that you communicate with by fax.
The code for it is all on github, if you want to build your own: github.com/lexbailey/compilerfax
The original short video where I introduced it can be found here: ruclips.net/video/pJ-25-pRhpY/видео.html
Enjoy!
You've found a video about one of my many silly projects.
This one is a compiler that you communicate with by fax.
The code for it is all on github, if you want to build your own: github.com/lexbailey/compilerfax
The original short video where I introduced it can be found here: ruclips.net/video/pJ-25-pRhpY/видео.html
Enjoy!
Просмотров: 11 958
Видео
Call the compiler, fax it your code
Просмотров 71 тыс.5 месяцев назад
Hi, I'm Lex (they/them) I made a very silly fax service. In the video it is running on York Hackspace's internal phone system. It also ran at EMFCamp 2024 on the copper telephone network. Source code is here: github.com/lexbailey/compilerfax Enjoy :) Explanation of what's going on in this video This is a regular fax machine sending a normal fax to fax service that I built. The service runs on a...
I built a laptop for EMF Camp 2024
Просмотров 2 тыс.5 месяцев назад
Hi, I'm Lex (they/them) I built this laptop to take to EMF Camp: emfcamp.org It's based on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum (48k), a Prism VTX 5000 Viewdata Modem, a modified BT Duet, a BT Digital Voice adapter, and a Bush Compact Cassette Deck. The software I wrote for it is here: github.com/lexbailey/EMFInfo Try Ben's EMF Live service on his website: viewdata.microwavepizza.co.uk/ Many thanks to mavica...
A very silly CPU monitor
Просмотров 178 тыс.11 месяцев назад
Hi, I'm Lex (they/them), I make silly projects. This one is a physical CPU usage display. Kinda like the CPU usage display in task manager, but with a physical analog meter for each CPU. It also does memory usage! Enjoy! FAQ: Q: How do you get the performance numbers from the computer to the arduino A: I wrote a Rust program that uses the systemstat crate to get the data from linux, it then doe...
ZX Spectrum Printing Banners Like it's 1982 (kinda)
Просмотров 1,5 тыс.Год назад
Hello again :) I made this thing years ago, I've been meaning to make a video about it for a while. Finally I did it, and here it is! The code for this project is available on github: github.com/lexbailey/zxquickprint If you want to reuse it as-is then you'll need a thermal printer that speaks the ESC-POS protocol, it needn't be the exact model in the video. These are the Epson printers, normal...
Perspective Twist: Cube
Просмотров 748Год назад
This is Perspective Twist: Cube. A demo that I did in collaboration with TôBach. We released this at Nova 2023 in the Newschool Demo category. A bit of a departure from the content I normally put on this channel, but, if you enjoy demoscene stuff, then I can certainly do more :) Lex (they/them)
Why my Word document terminal emulator sucks
Просмотров 3,5 тыс.Год назад
Hey look! it's a video about how my Word document terminal emulator works! If you didn't see the original video and want to know what I'm talking about, click this link: ruclips.net/video/GWlNTg-i3YA/видео.html Making a Word document into a terminal emulator is hard, it turns out. Most of the things work, but in this video I explain why some things don't work. I hope you enjoy the video! :) Lex...
terminal.doc: A word document that's a terminal emulator
Просмотров 2,7 тыс.Год назад
Hello! I made a really silly thing for fun. It's a terminal emulator inside a word document. It's not practical at all, its value is only in entertainment. And I hope you find it entertaining (and find this video entertaining). If you want to try it out, you can find it on github here: github.com/lexbailey/terminal.docm Enjoy! UPDATE: see the explanation video here: ruclips.net/video/3MvpOwHXlC...
Solving Advent of Code with a ZX Spectrum (2022, Part3: days 9 to 11)
Просмотров 561Год назад
Hey! it's part 3!This is my series of solving Advent of Code 2022 using only a 48k Sinclair ZX Spectrum.If you missed part 1, you might like to see that too, it introduces what I'm doing a little bit more: ruclips.net/video/rp4MzTb1j9oY/видео.htmlou can find all the code for my solutions on github here:github.com/lexbailey/AoC2022/ Lex (they/them) Chapters: 0:00 - Introduction 0:51 - Day 9 5:10...
echo is broken: a follow-up video
Просмотров 11 тыс.Год назад
Hey, it's me again! This video is a follow up to my video about echo being broken in bash. You can find that video here: ruclips.net/video/lq98MM2ogBk/видео.html Watch that one first, if you haven't already then come back here :) This follow up explains answers to the challenge I set in the first video. It also covers some common questions I got after that video, and a couple of corrections tha...
Solving Advent of Code with a ZX Spectrum (2022, Part 2: days 6 to 8)
Просмотров 2,5 тыс.Год назад
Hello again, Lex here :) (they/them) This is part 2 in my series of solving Advent of Code 2022 using only a 48k Sinclair ZX Spectrum. If you missed part 1, you might like to see that too, it introduces what I'm doing a little bit more: ruclips.net/video/rp4MzTb1j9o/видео.html You can find all the code for my solutions on github here: github.com/lexbailey/AoC2022/
Solving Advent of Code with a ZX Spectrum (2022, Part 1: days 1 to 5)
Просмотров 13 тыс.Год назад
This is the intro to what will hopefully be a series where I solve all 25 days of Advent of Code 2022 using only a 48k Sinclair ZX Spectrum. You can find all the code for my solutions on github here: github.com/lexbailey/AoC2022/
bash's echo command is broken
Просмотров 82 тыс.Год назад
Bash's echo command is broken. You can't reliably print variable contents using echo. This video explores how it's broken, and some things you can do to work around it. There's even a demo of a bug in some other software caused by the strange behaviour of echo. !!! Spoilers for the challenge below !!! At the end of the video is this challenge: make bash's echo print "-n" with no other character...
A Floppy Disk is Technically a Letter
Просмотров 4 тыс.2 года назад
It turns out that, in the UK, a floppy disk is technically a letter that you can send with Royal Mail with just a first class stamp stuck to the front. So that's how I'm going to use up all my old stamps before they become invalid and are replaced with the barcode stamps.
I found a ZX Spectrum demo in a box of old tapes.
Просмотров 8222 года назад
Hi, I'm Lex. My pronouns are they/them. I found a mystery tape in a box of old tapes I got from eBay. It contained a ZX Spectrum demo written by Rachel Bradley. Who is this person? I have no idea. A raw capture of the demo running can be found in this unlisted video: ruclips.net/video/tjLsHF5Jboo/видео.html
echo -ne --"\b"n just learned about \b
Isn’t it fair to say, dashed filename handling can be problem for all commands, not just echo command?
2:19 -- Shellcheck doesn't catch this, not even as a warning such as "this expression could lead to unexpected results when used with echo". Also, using "--" (two dashes) to stop parsing arguments works with echo too, but "echo -- -e" will output "-- -e".
I would like to purchase one of these?
Wait. Fax still exists?
The RGB computer community is about to go nuts with this one xD Although this is genuinely one of the coolest projects I've seen, I love this!
I think including an OCR friendly font will help out a bunch. There's OCR-B which is found below bar codes and on passports, and E-13B which is found on checks. E-13B in particular should be useful, as it's designed for magnetic scanning of characters, potentially even allowing for skipping the OCR step entirely and instead use signal processing tricks. E:also using something like S record or Intel Hex should allow for mostly keeping the spirit of faxing your code alive while allowing for sending/receiving arbitrary characters.
Kind of makes me sad to think that there are long-term Linux users who didn't know that `echo` was also a `bash` built-in. Although, it sounds like a BS challenge to say you can't do the most obvious thing that everyone who expects some consistent behavior from `echo` should do, which is to just use `/bin/echo`. Also, I'm pretty sure most POSIX conformant programs use a double dash to indicate the end of argument processing as the single dash is commonly used for informing the program that standard input is the file to read. Sure, exceptions such as `echo` exist, but it doesn't read input from files or write output to files. If you were to complain about `ffmpeg`'s non-conformance with command line options, then I'd agree.
Just for fun?
thats gay :3
You know what, with OTCC, you can fax yourself a C compiler. You may want to choose the deobfuscated version, it's still faxable.
公務員がまだfaxを使う理由
What's the number so I can fax you some malware to run? Also I need that burger phone
with printer ink being the most expensive liquid, you can finally recreate AWS infinite loop costs at home
oh yeah baby we’ve almost made it back to punch cards
Other than you printed it on a 8x11 in piece of paper this is exactly how you did computing in 1957 on a 1401.
To make your 1957 Mainframe experience more authentic you could extend the JCL on the page by add //LANG=FIV. The FIV would be for FORTRAN IV and point it to GnuFortran. To make it more authentic (this is a stretch) put a QR code in place of your code so it "feels" more like an non-human readable EBCDIC punch card. To simulate it more you can put hard time limits on compile and runtime. Then you could add billing to as well for the compile and runtime.
11:00 If the output fax was just the input fax, you could send a quine and have it forever print the same thing. (A quine is a source code file which, when compiled and run, outputs its own text. Yes, C can do this.)
next time you do this if it's for something small skip the annoying OCR stuff and use GPT4-o or LLaVA. Those models are great at structured data extraction!
thats a really cute pride spider sticker!
i haven't downloaded it, i haven't had a windows box in 20 years, and i've already made the switch to full time
punch cards punch cards punch cards i dunno if tesseract can handle that but punch cards punch cards punch cards
If you make it public you should call the service cFax (ceefax reference).
Is there some kind of tool to automatically fix many ocr errors that result in compiler errors by replacing the char causing the problem by a lookalike until it works?
Hylax sounds lame, have you found any other alternatives?
Perhaps a language like brainfuck with fewer characters might work better here. And be more ridiculous
Love it :) Fax resolution is odd: 204 x 98 DPI 1 bit/px. "Fine" setting would do squarer pixels = explains your odd rescaling. Perhaps dont rescale for better OCR. Encoding was a crude run length limit scheme: eg 15 white px,2 blk,19 white etc to fill a line...then move to the next line... For a while, scammers realised this and would send out faxes by bulk electronic methods...with a "competition" on and a detailed pixelly image. Fax Back with the answer box ticked and your contact details written on to win a prize. Many companies were charged for this as the fax back number was one of those £1/min. ...and the optical scanning process made the return transmission reallllllyyyyy sssllloooowwwwww.
we got compiler fax before gta 6
You can make Hylafax working with FreeSWITCH or Asterisk. A phone number can be purchased from many of voip providers. You need to make sure the number provider support t.38 as transmitting FAX over voice codec like g.711 isn't reliable.
This opens the door to software development for a lot of Germans
First time, a german authority gets access to cloud computing. This will revolutionize our bureaucracy.
Finally german governments are able to use C ;p /s
dumb but cool.
Maybe you should check out the Piston code execution engine, and get this working securely for a ton of other languages. That sounds cool!
Fax-GPT next 😅
it always speaks fax
Fax-GPT
Awesome stickers!
I was gonna ask if you could try handwriting your code. But I guess the OCR is already buggy enough with typesets.
Aw the enby heart spider
It'd be cool if you could add an option to send the resulting ELF binary in a barcode or hex printout instead
*sees lgbtq flag and programing together* "TRANSSS" *sees NB spider on the printer* "ha i was right"
It would be interesting if you could use some sort of LLM to sort of "auto-repair" incorrectly formatted code if it errors out, that way you don't need to fiddle with the OCR as much
in the middle of the night your fax machine starts ringing and the printout just reads "SEGMENTATION FAULT [11]"
Couldn't you use "efax" linux command instead of hylafax? I've made similar setup with RPi receiving image over Bluetooth and printing it over simulated 12v phone line to a fax machine. I was sending the image with 'efax' cli command.
I have to say. Hamburger phone really sells the video!
finally, a use for all that code they ask us to handwrite in computer science exam papers!! 😂❤
they asked you to do what ?!
@@tatianatub In first year of programming class, some teachers make you write the test on paper
A small LLM could probably help with the ocr. Something like "The following source code might contain ocr artifacts, remove them if present" as a promt
Seems unlikely to me that you could get an LLM to run on a pi 3 in a reasonable amount of time, though. I guess you could send the OCR results to a web API if you wanted, but that seems to be counter to the project's design.
@@dumonu There are some small llms that run on a pi 4 or 5 like tinydolphin. It would add a couple seconds of latency but I don't think this matters. They are able to remove OCR artifacts but it requires some promt engineering and they something still turn the code into c++.
@@zweiblali3410yikes
Finally Germans will be able to code too.
Ive used Tesseract in the past and was surprise it was working just fine when you first mentioned it... i stand corrected... lots of post process was required
EasyOCR is supposed to be much more accurate than Tesseract, though I think it requires a GPU to be reasonably fast.
You see, the solution to your OCR problems is to have users convert their C code into a QR code, which has stuff like error correction built in, allowing for a much lower failure rate for me to fork-bomb-by-fax your machine!
Or maybe instead, fax a card where the text is encoded with holes punched into them. That could work.
@@tigersteinYou gonna give father of computer science nostalgia mate
no joke, that would work quote well probably. each qr code can hold 3kb of data, which should be well enough.
nah bits or asm would’ve been better xD
Don't worry though, my fork bomb will eventually halt. I pinky promise
brings me back
Seems like a waste of paper and slow too. Wouldn't it be better to just compile it locally? What is the benefit of this system?
fun
Found a product manager...
I don't know what you mean, this is much faster than mailing my source code to the office for someone to transcribe and compile.
All papers are a waste anyway, why do we even need bureaucrats and managers and HR people anyway ?
my dude really thought this was about efficiency