Kevin Boone writes about Linux, retrocomputing, privacy, software licensing and electronics, plus explainers on topics like Hamming codes.
HN commenters link it for his explanation of the Hamming bound and for his piece on open source liability exemptions.
You're Australian, didn't grow up on Dick Smith Fun Way kits .. but some German thingy sourced through Dads adventures instead?
Mate .. strewth! Hand in your Vegemite card, ocka!
Disclaimer: I had all the Fun Way books, all the beginner kits on crappy particle boards, the 'advanced' kits with PCB's and things, the soldering iron special bundle with all the books and a couple of kits .. but I still preferred hacking around with my Denshi blocks instead.. ;)
Denshi Blocks, oh boy are they great. Still got mine! It even has a synthesizer in it, ffs ..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denshi_block
Comparison with the spring kits:
https://kevinboone.me/denshi.html
I put together a simple CP/M emulator here:
https://github.com/skx/cpmulator/
Alongside that there is a collection of CP/M binaries, including the Aztec C compiler:
https://github.com/skx/cpm-dist/
So you can easily have a stab at compiling code. I added a simple file-manager, in C, along with other sources, to give a useful demo. (Of course I spend more time writing code in Z80 assembler, or Turbo Pascal, rather than C).
The author has a followup post here for thos interested:
* Getting back into C programming for CP/M -- part 2 * https://kevinboone.me/cpm-c2.html
Indeed, Hamming and Golay codes are an absolute thing of beauty. For folks that wanna read more about Hamming Bound, Kevin Boone does a good job in starting from the basics and explaining the intuition behind the proof:
https://kevinboone.me/hamming_bound.html?i=1
Open Source is exempt, provided you don’t make a profit: https://kevinboone.me/open_source_liability.html