snac

Yeah, even if syslinux 6.x “falls back” when E820/E801 aren’t there, AH=88h is just a number, not a hole aware map. It can’t describe ISA/ROM/reserved regions, so the loader still might not be able to build something it trusts. If you want to prove it yourself, stick a log right around syslinux_memmap_find() and dump the memmap entries it thinks it has on that BIOS. Its interesting to notice that syslinux 6.03 had a fix for your same issue: "Fix hand over to kernel: "Booting kernel failed: Invalid argument" error." https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/%5Bann...

Based on the POST strings of your motherboard versus mine (https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/fic-486-jal-rev-c), we both have an AMI BIOS so I might be able to run a similar test for my board. You're right that syslinux 6.x should fall back if E820 doesn't work but that hasn't been my experience on my motherboard hence the reversion to 4.x, I can reliably boot with 4-16MB of RAM.

What’s your board and BIOS? Syslinux 6.x COM32 Linux loader goes through the memmap layer syslinux_memmap_find() to place the kernel/initrd. If INT 15h E820 is missing and/or buggy on a 486 BIOS, it can surface as “invalid argument”.

For my 486 distro[see snacklinux.org], I use syslinux 4.07 due to similar issues. I never had any luck with syslinux 6.x, I’d recommend a similar path. It always seems funny to me when I see similar projects, claiming it runs on 486 hardware but rarely do I see people actually doing that, and just fire up qemu instead. Running Linux in a vacuum isn’t realistic, especially when we’re talking old hardware and configuring IRQs manually.

Pleasantly surprised about the ease of porting to new platforms. Being able to inline assembly, nevermind call regular C functions (eg from an OEM SDK) is incredibly handy. I recently wrote a pure Nim implementation for the CH32V003 microcontroller https://github.com/snacsnoc/nim-on-ch32v003

Love your site! It was a great source of inspiration with the amount of data you collect.

I did the same and made https://grocerygoose.ca/

Published the API endpoints that I “discovered” to make the app https://github.com/snacsnoc/grocery-app (see HACKING.md)

It’s an unfortunate state of affairs when devs like us have to go to such great lengths to track the price of a commodity (food).

This is a cool idea for a website/repo for boilerplate scripts. I’ve used LLMs for boilerplate scripts and it’s saved me so much time, but sometimes required more effort (to edit, correct, etc) than I expected. Boilerplate code for the same scripts in multiple languages would be incredibly helpful.

This is right up my alley, I’d love for a more programmatic way to generate initramfs. Being able to template different use cases would be great for specific appliances. One of my projects aims to create a hackable minimal Linux distro, and thinking about extension has always been on my mind. https://github.com/snacsnoc/snacklinux

Have you found any specific niches that scratch an itch with your tool?

You might enjoy looking at one of my projects, a toy Linux distro compilable from a single Makefile. https://github.com/snacsnoc/snacklinux

It uses musl and builds using a musl cross compiler, working x86 and arm64 builds. You could easily build a toolchain for your desired arch and make a simple distro, adding in any user space tools.

Wow, this is just up my alley. I started a side project recently using Tesseract to read book spines for inventory purposes and hooked it up to ChatGPT to clean up the text, having it "fill in the blanks" so to speak. I'll definitely give this a go, having using two OCR engines I should get better results.

Any plans to add other OCR engines?

That's really cool! There are situations where data is unreliable or congested, having a backup is very handy. SMS is very common LMICs as data can be expensive, nevermind the devices themselves are difficult to come by. I could see a UCS-2 implementation being a great feature for a project like this.

I built something similar recently (inspired by this project), a SMS to DuckDuckGo search [1] and weather lookup [2]. The submitted repo's app is Android only, so having a more universal approach is fun to have. I live and work remotely, my closest neighbour's km's away do not have internet but only cell phones with unlimited SMS. With no internet, they would not be able to download the app. Sort a chicken and the egg problem.

[1] https://github.com/snacsnoc/smsferret [2] https://github.com/snacsnoc/tomorrowsms

This could be interesting paired with the documentation posted: https://github.com/dfloer/SC2k-docs/blob/master/simulation%2...

In the video you posted, the host talks about Magnasanti a project to create the perfect city (in the eyes of the game). There is no crime, abandoned buildings, or traffic. A population of 6 million with no hospitals, and no public funding except mass transit and police. Ultimately we can see that the game does not reward citizen happiness, but industry.

The "black box" nature of the simulation within SimCity is fascinating, thank you for the rabbit hole.

This is actually incredible useful for what I work with, very cool to get a pulse on brand strategies. How did you get the data in?

I'm a big fan of this for how simple it is. How anyone that has used Spotify for years, knows how bad their random song algorithm is. Can you elaborate more on your 'simple custom algorithm'? I 'recycled' a large playlist with 650+ songs and I'm listening to songs I almost never listen to, I love it.