GRG's Miscellany

TLDR: I made a desk-like thing which attaches to the arms of my computer chair (see pictures below). Recently I changed my PC desk to take up less space in my living room.  The new desk is an IKEA metal/glass laptop desk.  Unfortunately it was about an inch too long to sit in the gap between my fire hearth, so I had to prop up the other side on bits of wood.  This made the desk too high for comfortable use of my cardboard steering wheel. So I designed and built a work-surface which attaches to my PC chair. The first step was to make some struts which sandwich the chair's arm rests.  They are secured with carriage bolts and wing-nuts/washers from Wilko. Then come the blocks with dowels which are screwed to the struts, and the work-surface which sits on the dowels. The surface is reversible and asymmetrical so my keyboard/mouse can sit close to me.. ...but my steering wheel can sit further away. As shoddy as it might look, I'm quite proud ...

The original goal was to make a Mega-drive-like virtual games console which wouldn't have a keyboard.  After some thought, I realised that keyboard input might help me with both the teaching/learning goals (by giving scope for a wider variety of activities) and the development (by giving me easily testable incremental steps towards the final program). So now I have a keyboard device which populates two memory locations: one for the currently-depressed key, and a second for the current modifier state (CTRL, SHIFT, ALT). Plus, after much painful debugging, I have a program written for the VM in assembler which reads the key state and displays typed characters to the screen. This highlighted the need for development/debugging tools for the virtual console itself, and I am seriously daunted by the prospect of having to develop them. Also, I no longer like the BusController being in its own separate thread.  I've already had problems with the compiler optimising out re...

It's been a while since I played around with qemu-kvm, but there's an app I have to use for work which only has a Windows installer. BOO! Setting up qemu on Linux was as simple as following these instructions: https://www.linuxtechi.com/install-configure-kvm-ubuntu-18-04-server/ Getting Windows 7 to install without taking a million years required the virtio drivers as described for Windows 10 here: http://bart.vanhauwaert.org/hints/installing-win10-on-KVM.html I then had problems with a seriously annoyingly jerky mouse pointer.  Searching around told me to add a USB tablet input device through virt-manager's VM setup.  That got that sorted. So, some hours of searching and progress bars later, I have a working Windows 7 VM with the work app installed!  Hoorah! Addendum: I did try to get Windows 10 to work in a VM first, but it was sooooooo sloooooooow it was unusable.  Once I've got a server with more RAM, I might try to set it up with a main disk image...