It's an @8bitshowandtell.bsky.social kinda morning.
@mrdoornbos
- 328 Followers
- 60 Following
- 1.6K Posts
Engineer, pilot, accidental storyteller, and founder of http://imapenguin.com and http://evadot.com There's a good chance I'll be voiding a warranty today
The only upgrades I did over the original are to add a second line so you can see the Y register, and it can display all 32 bits of binary without scrolling (wider "LCD")
I wrote more than 200 tests, because the last thing a calculator app needs is to get the math wrong.
Submitted it to the app store (free). Now we wait for approval.
Over Christmas, I spent a lot of time with my beloved (and quirky) HP-16C. I decided I wanted to take it everywhere, but doing a phone calculator app seemed daunting. I've been plugging away at it for 3 months now as one of my many side projects.
I'm ready to call it a usable version 1.0. I'm sure there are bugs, but I'll work those out as I use it more.
I let a Commodore 64 run for three and a half days straight. 87 billion instructions, 303 billion clock cycles, 5.9 million candidate settings tested. It cracked an Enigma message in German without knowing a single character of the plaintext.
New post: Breaking Enigma with Index of Coincidence on a Commodore 64
https://imapenguin.com/2026/03/breaking-enigma-with-index-of-coincidence-on-a-commodore-64/
My wife found this for me and gave it to me for my birthday. I still know every word.
My Project Hail Mary review:
https://michaeldoornbos.com/2026/03/20/project-hail-mary-review/
My truck mileage is really interesting for those like me that like to do Octal math.
Happy Pi Day! The Wallis product is a 371-year-old formula that computes pi by multiplying fractions forever. I ran it on a C64 in BASIC, assembly, Python, and C. The C64 took 15 minutes for five digits. C got 8 in 0.87 seconds on a Mac M4. Eat some Pi and compute at 1MHz today! https://imapenguin.com/2026/03/the-wallis-product-for-pi-on-the-c64/
AI gave everyone a commercial kitchen. Sous chef, prep cooks, the works.
Doesn't make you a chef.
First principles, vision, and judgment are what separate the cooks from the people reheating frozen meals in a microwave.
