The cheap video cookbook
Some basics. Software design. Hardware design. Building the TVT 6 5/8. Transparency.
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- We humans have an uncanny ability to reshape our lives to meet the demands of our intellectual and physical creations. Hence: obeying the needs of cell phones, cars, POS software, airplanes, pretty much everything. It's like asking a fish about water.
Few of us do anything more creative than what you could do with Wordstar on CP/M, and many writers could barely fill a 250 meg disk drive.
But we adapt!
Now, I'm not knocking the genuine benefits of technology. Having missed my Mom at SFO long ago and having no way to contact her until she showed up at my place via a taxi, I love these gizmos. And there was no cell phone lot before cell phones.
Compare the experience of being an individual, with unique knowledge, experience, neural "wiring" and emotions to observe, experience, interact with and contribute to society - with an amalgam of everyone's knowledge, experience, processing and emotions (as they can be expressed in worlds or art)
I liken it to cat food. Cats may like chicken, liver and tuna, so some genius figured out "if they like the three, why not blend them so they can be happy at every meal?"
I love to interact with my daughter and son-in-law, who are amazingly and wonderfully diverse! If I take landscape photos, they take underwater critter photos. If I cook Italian, they cook Indian.
If and when I search the web, I am either looking for odd images that I can GIMP up for fun, or (being older now) when I get that "5 second lag" trying to remember some name [0] that should pop up immediately, I search the general topic so that the name pops up, and I immediately recognize it. It's a free association machine. Albeit one that is completely corrupted by results that are crap that someone is selling rather than anything factual, so my memory is often faster, as I scroll through page after page of stuff for sale.
Every day is different, and if it gets so complicated that I need HAL to tell me how to live it, Simplify. As I see it, young people are developing a sense of self through knowledge and experience, and very often get seriously bad advice. Like from the drug pusher. Engaging more fully with the world, as photography can help do, as a way to see for oneself, and engaging with others who have overcome obstacles and may even have used technology for very worthy causes, develops a self-confident and capable person, importantly, able to face unknown situations not in the LLM's data trove, as life flings at us [1], rather than seeking answers from a machine; not "thinking through, learning and exploring processes". Worst of all, seeking all sensation, "Matrix-like" from the system.
It can be a drug.
Purpose and meaning in life? It's to create and transform the ordinary, homogeneous, into the unique, expressive, and beneficial, and to share in a unique and expressive way with another person or persons. People like the special and funky person I am. Consistency helps them understand and interact comfortably with me, and having established trust is key, but they also get the unpredictable and quirky side of me.
"To Engineer is Human". Who really enjoys a car or computer? Someone who looks inside and thinks about the scads of complexity in there [2] and how it works, more so than a doomscroller or commuter. I briefly worked with aircraft engines. Marvels, in addition to being utilitarian. How did the LLM come up with that? More so than the (possibly deranged) result. And why so?
And Trust? right.
"But lo! men have become the tools of their tools" Henry David Thoreau, Walden.
[0] It's overload, people, not failure. Even the internet has this.
[1] And also, being a homeowner, fixing things that break at the worst times.
[2] It sure as hell helps to have been around old cars without computers and computers when there were none, and you built them from 8080 and Z-80 cards. A boss was debating whether to get a TRS-80 (beloved of Isaac Asinov, so he said) [3] and I said to get one before they become so damn complex that you'll never understand what's inside.
[3] https://i.pinimg.com/originals/87/be/6b/87be6b2a2906827b23a0...
Image at pinterest.
P.S. The ultimate must have been the late Don Lancaster's Cheap Video Cookbook or Son of Cheap Video, or the life and business lessons in ISMM [4]
- If anyone wants to avoid adding a full scale computer just to get TV out I recommend the late Don Lancaster's The Cheap Video Cookbook and Son of Cheap Video.
See https://archive.org/details/donlancaster_socv1/page/n3/mode/..., https://annas-archive.org/isbndb/9780672217234
- Maybe it is generational but Don Lancaster Cookbooks was far more influential on me. His books were far more useful and instructive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Lancaster
RTL Cookbook, TTL Cookbook, CMOS Cookbook, Active Filter Cookbook, TV Typewriter Cookbook, Cheap Video Cookbook, Son of Cheap Video, Apple books, Assembly Cookbook for Apple II/IIe, Enhancing Your Apple II - Volume 1, Enhancing Your Apple II and IIe - Volume 2, Applewriter Cookbook, Programming books, The Hexadecimal Chronicles, Don Lancaster's Micro Cookbook
- I stil have several of his books within a few feet: the TTL Cookbook was an inspiration back in the day, followed the CMOS version and in particular "The Cheap Video Cookbook" when VT100's were mad expensive things.
The book that still get used on a moderately frequent basis is the "Active Filter Cookbook", still very relevant when some hacking with op-amps is required.
Oh, and as an oldie I like his style.
- This is nice stuff. I built a TV-Typewriter using Don Lancaster's cheap video cookbook. He pioneered this technique of 'co-processing' with the 6502. However, if you were going to do this today, you would be better off just building a 6502 into an FPGA [1] or buying an existing design [2] and modifying it. Jan Gray did a nice RISC cpu [3] that clearly got some inspiration from the the 6502 and it was very small in terms of gates (although that isn't such a big deal these days).
It is well worth your time to get an FPGA evaluation kit (my all time favorite is the Altera DE-2) and learn for yourself how straight forward it is to build your own CPU which is has instructions that do things you need vs what the manufacturer thought you might need.
[1] http://opencores.com/project,lattice6502
[2] http://edablog.com/2010/05/06/mos-6502-cpu/
[3] http://fpgacpu.org/xsoc/cc.html
Don's book: http://www.abebooks.com/9780672215247/Cheap-Video-Cookbook-L...
- Author of TV Typewriter Cookbook, Cheap Video Cookbook, and many other electronics books.
