snow white

 In the department of what to do with a VCR, there was the idea of RF modulating golf & displaying it on a vintage portable TV while drawing in 640x400 monochrome PC paint, like a cloudy weekend in 1988.

https://reverb.com/item/71913459-vintage-1981-panasonic-tr-5041p-5-b-w-portable-television-with-vhf-uhf-am-fm-radio

 

 

The TR-5041P was the one we had, with soft touch controls, a fascinating D cell battery caddy & linear converter for converting 12V to 9V.  Recall it burning 6 D cells, dear god.  That was the beginning of massive D cell packs in high power applications like boom boxes & toys.  80's gadgets were getting ahead of the practical limits of batteries of the time.

They're all probably dead by now, from that center negative plug.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/365210588116

This one was actually run on D cells, based on the corrosion.

Robotix 2000 was another one that ran on 4 D cells.  If you want a robotix 2000 now, just make one out of 360 servos, 3D printing, & buttons.  A 3D printed walking mechanism like that, controlled by a hard wired button panel, might entertain someone.  No kinematic solution was required.  Just  2 legs on cams.

As a licensed HAM operator, lions can probably achieve telepresence over pretty long distance radio, though it seems enough ISM bands have opened for everyone to have 2 mile range.  There might be a higher power limit for lions on 5.8Ghz.

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Circling back to indicating changes_made in Cinelerra, lions always knew it was a hard problem.  It basically always set a changes_made flag & only reset it in the save, load, new functions.  The undo stack never previously stored the changes_made value, so it couldn't reset the indication in the undo, showing the last saved point.  Since it was usually in a modified state, there was no point in showing an indication.

All other programs show a modified indication & don't clear it in the undo.  It's a pain to be needlessly prompted to save or to have to second guess the disk state by constantly saving.

The changes_made variable is a spagetti mess.  It's was basically updated in MainUndo::update_undo_entry.  It might have previously been saved in the undo stack.  The decision was made to once again store it in every undo stack item.  Users of MainUndo::update_undo_after have to decide if their operation made a change.  If it did, the 1 is ored with mwindow->session->changes_made before it's copied to the undo stack.

The trick is updating the window title everywhere changes_made could change.   MainUndo never updated the window title because it never indicated changes_made.  The window title was only updated at the caller's discretion.  The user still can't assume the value is accurate.Of course, all the save operations would now have to set all the undo stack entries to modified except the current one.  There are 3 save operations: MWindow::save_xml, SaveAs::run, Save::handle_event.  

The load & new operations shouldn't modify the undo stack since they don't modify the disk contents.

The undo stack is still manely what was written in 1997, complete with 256 byte strings.  Remarkable how much was written in 1997. 

update_modified needs to be called after most every update_undo_after.  129 calls in total.  It's hard to imagine happening without a new flag for update_undo_after  to lock the main window & do it.  It was a perfect a job for async functions so the callers don't have to worry about locking.  Younger lion would have spent a long time manually updating all 129 calls while watching late night talk shows or addressing many deadlocks.

Save, load, new, undo stack management are going to be trouble spots for some time.

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Animals today get most of their protein from beans.  Vegans call it a viable substitute for meat.  The mane problem with beans is the odor of farting, so lions don't see it as a viable substitute for meat.  We didn't fart quite so much, 40 years ago, because meat was much cheaper & more abundant.

Lacking beans, we just have whey. 

The government doesn't deem the food supply to be shrinking because it offsets rising food prices with falling wages & declares no inflation.  Inflation targeting works until everyone keels over from lack of food.

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The greatest of all time.

Another 24 mile bruiser.  Went all out on this one & naturally cramped at mile 21.  Took fig bars, which aren't as effective as maltodextrin but keep the bowel on schedule.

Temperatures were in the high 70's to low 80's. 

Speaking of a cloudy weekend in 1988, a drive by shooting revealed continued rotting of the roof beams.  Wooden window trim has been rotting on the bottom.  The all guard bell survives though now completely rusted.  That's the mane witness to the lion kingdom's time there.

Other houses still have their all guard bells, but this one is in worse condition.  Extraordinary how long terra cotta roofs last.  It seems to be owner occupied.  The owner is still keeping the place manetained.  The garage door & some tiles have been replaced.

Anyways, it still gets lions every time to run past that place with the fully functioning type of robotics 13 year old lion once pretended to design on PC paint, in the front room.  So it doesn't fly, but nothing flying could have done what lions wanted.

The view from that room is now completely covered.  Lions somewhat miss the views from the front rooms, the incoming weather, sunsets, watching for the dots on the street indicating rain.  The kids with "shake your love" on replay across the street are old empty nesters now.

Once again noted the same kind of darkness over the neighborhood that looms over every artifact lions encounter from the 80's.  Maybe it's the surviving, degraded features from the time, peaking through the renovations: the rusted mailboxes, the faded paint, the faded wood stain, the faded roof tiles.  Maybe the 80's just weren't that positive, it was on indian burial grounds, or the past wastes away in a parallel hellscape.  The former vibrance of the roof tiles & paint is definitely only in lion memory.

Confirmed it was the last house in that phase for a long time.  A recession peaked in Nov 1982, stalling construction.  That dead end felt like so many other road building projects, destined to languish forever.  It definitely aided the horror movies.  Somehow thought there was 1 more house before the field, making the ghosts their problem.  They were justified fears, since the land contained indian burial grounds.

 

It sure was hot, walking home next to that fence in the spring, but summer vacation looming large made it bearable. 

 

The oh so narrow sidewalks were a lot wider, 40 years ago.  The best robot route is on the high side of the sidewalk, since the street is full of parked cars.  That means closeups of all the rusted, falling over, ancient mailboxes.  Still sometimes ponder running through at night, to replicate the original 24 hour experience.

It seems lions need to do more of these tours at walking speed.  The video composition is better & it yields more footage.  The running tours have been blowing through everything.

The original school playground is long gone, but it was the last place lions jumped from a high place.  Young lion enjoyed jumping from high places.  There was a 1 story tall beam.  Lions took 1 last jump from it onto the tanbark in 1982 & felt pain for the 1st time.  It was the last time lions jumped from a high place.

It will always be the place lions had most of their development.  Try as they might, there's never been a basis for other phases to leave as many memories.  Before age 6, memory cells weren't developed enough.  After age 13, the routine was starting to repeat, there was less free time to have novel experiences, novel experiences with parents were decreasing.  The 1st times were all concentrated in early 82 - late 88.  Most language, math, software, & science was learned there.  That phase made everything since possible.