Robert van Engelen, PhD

Very concerning.

I extensively used a Psion 5 back in the 90s, but it died by accident at the Paris airport when my bag dropped 😔. I got a replacement, but that one died a few years later when a friend broke the hinge by snap-closing it 🤬. I got 2 5mx’s from an auction. The 5mx’s are really nice.

NYC covered in snow (again) after the blizzard. Magical to walk in Central Park. The peace and tranquility of these views remind me of old Dutch Masters winter landscape paintings.

Notice something? Software bugs are proliferating everywhere fast. Almost daily something that used to work, now glitches. Besides being annoying, it’s embarrassing and may lead to serious accidents. Hire good engineers for crying out loud. And don’t rely on AI to mess up, for real engineers to fix.

Psion 5mx, the pda of the 90s. It’s very useful, perhaps even today. Has a usable keyboard. Runs a full month on a pair of AA batteries! The 90s hi-res 4 gray shades LCDs aren’t the most legible. Backlight helps a bit. Did you have one? Like it or exchange it to something else of the same period?

vintage radio shack instruction manual cover titled “radio shack presents eliza.” cream-colored background with a black silhouette profile of a woman’s head at center. inside the silhouette, white text reads “how do you do? my name is eliza. what is your problem?” large red text below says “the amazing artificial intelligence simulation.” smaller text notes it is for use with trs-80 microcomputer systems. overall look is 1970s–1980s consumer computing design, earnest and slightly uncanny.

gm rise and grind, since 1979... WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM

@davidfrum.bsky.social

🤬 basterds

Trump says his Greenland fixation is about national security. Europeans are skeptical. Denmark’s prime minister urged the U.S. to increase its military presence in Greenland but the White House showed little interest in the offer.

Trump says the US "needs" Greenland for security reasons. But Danish officials have already offered him the ability to increase America's military presence there.

“The option has been on the table...the White House is not interested.”

www.politico.com/news/2026/01...

The Ridiculous Engineering Of The World's Most Important Machine YouTube video by Veritasium

ASML is an amazing company with amazing “unreasonable” people (watch to understand what that means). As a kid in the 80s I was lucky to visit Philips NatLab where my dad worked on silicon wafers to analyze properties of IC etching. But that was long before ASML youtu.be/MiUHjLxm3V0?...

Part of my studio.
Real stuff nostalgia: CRT scanlines, genuine hardware, loading from floppies, using ball mouse and wild joystick!
Re-creating the same gaming conditions as back then. That's my philosophy.
Here's how I build my setup : youtu.be/BhgM-b59cKI

We are failing our kids

I’ve written code with SWI-Prolog since 1994, so it’s certainly over 30 years. Jan came over to our Uni when I had invited him to give a talk. Glad he also added multi-precision integers later, like I added myself using the GNU MP lib, stored as atoms. The foreign interface was very useful.

SWI-Prolog is excellent. The author, Jan Wielemaker, keeps expanding it to a does-it-all Prolog platform.

The author admits in the article that numerical weather forecast models are still needed. Numerical models use physics (PDE math etc). But AI is a black box, trained with historical data to extrapolate a prediction. AI is not robust and will make mistakes when measurements do not align with history.

Inside the Best Weather-Forecasting AI in the World Autonomous weather balloons surf the winds to collect needed data

Weather balloons are largely unnecessary. We have excellent weather models that are fed land-based data and sea-based data. So I’m so disappointed in IEEE to publish this unscientific article claiming that AI and weather balloons are better. spectrum.ieee.org/amp/ai-weath...

💔

Naïve implementation that runs in quadratic time, so won’t scale. Instead of that, use a sliding window and update the sum incrementally (subtract outgoing, add incoming). Use C++ for speed.

Yesterday’s chore: fighting back Entropy by recombining kids Lego pieces back into complete sets to save. But Lego fought back with some brittle brown pieces self-destructing in my hand 💥 So sad 😔

Toshiba HX-10 AA checkup and cleaning. Mechanical Alps keyboard is rock solid and very nice to type on. Having great fun with this industrial-looking beauty. Good to have and use for my ForthMSX development and testing with MegaRam and PicoMSX+. #MSX #Forth

Fixed! RGB output via Scart Looks amazing (compared to composite). A tiny bit of jailbars effect on the blue background, something to fix later perhaps. Likely some other caps that are out of spec.

Fixing a Sony Hit Bit 75B 1983. Let’s see if this baby works. I suspect it was not turned on for decades, as the 240V UK power cord was cut off. Got that fixed. But before I power this thing on, I want to replace the two crusty filter caps at the 462 and 473 transistor boards above a huge heat sink.

Addicted? Nah. Just always close to grab, like these on our counter right now.

Forth MAIN program to print Happy Halloween :-) show unused bytes free and loop 10 times

Compiler with "slicing" optimization to create small headless binaries from Forth source code (without interpreter and with unused words sliced off). Only 1211 bytes binary remains with the Forth internals, runtime, and Forth words to run the compiled program for Halloween.

On an MSX1 machine screen, shows the binary hallow.bin program being loaded and run with its output "Happy Halloween" and a smiley (no pumpkin Emoji on MSX alas).

🎃 "Headless Slicer" cuts deep on Halloween nights 😱 Can you guess what it does? Some new retro wizardry Forthcoming! #retro #halloween #msx #forth #compiler #z80

Happy retro Halloween! 🎃

But does it connect to an Atari or Commodore 8-bit computer? Or maybe a 2-bit computer?

FujiNet - The Future of Retro Computing The Future of Retro Computing

I keep trying to tell people about #FujiNet.
That it is a WiFi adapter for your favorite #Atari8bit, #Apple2, #ColecoAdam, #TRS80CoCo, #Commodore, #Atari2600, #AtariLynx, and #MSDOS machines, with more to come.

But word isn't getting out.

Can u help?

fujinet.online

Made some progress! Got MSX VDP and VRAM access and control in ForthMSX now working. Playing around with a bit of Forth code to twinkle bitmapped stars live on screen in text mode (picture only below, sorry no GIF). Much faster than BASIC on my Sony MSX2. #MSX #Forth #Z80 github.com/Robert-van-E...

Philips MSX New Media System