FreeRTOS scheduling is hard in as much at can be difficult to decide how to configure it. I wanted to try and figure out the options.
The popular real-time operating system provides the configUSE_TIME_SLICING and configUSE_PREEMPTION as settings values. You can add them to your FreeRTOSConfig.h file Tasks themselves can be assigned priority values, and there are API calls to allows tasks to sleep, to yield up the CPU, and be suspended and subsequently resumed.
PreviewMarkdown’s Thumbnailer component, an App Extension which generates Finder icon thumbnail previews of Markdown documents, recently started showing some odd behaviour. Tracking down the cause provided some interesting insights into writing macOS software for a multi-threaded environment.
In the mid-1980s, I loved Phantom Slayer. Written for the Tandy Color Computer and made available for the Dragon 32, Phantom Slayer was a 3D maze shooter. Think a very basic version of Doom with colours but no textures. It wasn’t sophisticated, but it was quick and, more to the point, incredibly atmospheric.
I have revised my Python drivers for the Holtek HT16K33 display controller, combining Micropython and Circuitpython versions into one and adding support for Adafruit’s Bi-colour 8×8 Matrix in the process.
Fontismo, my iOS-based utility which provides completely free and account-less access to 50 great open licence typefaces, now works on iPhones as well as iPads. It’s also fully compatible with iOS 14 and features improved font previewing, including pinch-to-zoom scaling.
Bear with me on this one. What really makes the Raspberry Pi what it is? Linux? No, because there are plenty of machines the open source OS will run on. Linux is a Unix derivative; the basis of macOS is FreeBSD, also a Unix derivative.
Sure the Pi is only 40 quid and small, but for me what really makes the Pi stand out from all those laptop and desktop computers is the fact that it makes its microcontroller’s GPIO pins readily accessible through a handy set of header pins. Unlike all ‘serious’ micros, it’s perfect for connecting to and controlling a whole stack of add-ons, including sensors, displays inputs and actuators.
Update My PreviewMarkdown app, which provides Markdown file previews and icon thumbnails in Catalins, is now available from the Mac App Store.
Providing content-based icon thumbnails in macOS Catalina follows the same pattern as generating file previews: QuickLook runs code from an app extension and calls a function within that code to draw the image that will be placed on the icon.
Update My PreviewMarkdown app, which provides Markdown file previews and icon thumbnails in Catalina, is now available from the Mac App Store.
macOS Catalina introduces a new mechanism for providing file previews and content-based file icons. The system for doing this is still QuickLook, but the standalone or app-hosted QuickLook generators that have been in use for some time have been deprecated in favour of delivering this functionality through app extensions.
I’ve just released version 1.1.0 of pdfmaker. You can view the source code here, and download an installer package here.
You can now select a single source file, not just a folder of files, and you specify the output PDF’s filename as part of the specified destination path, rather than separately (so the --name switch has been removed).
For a more detailed post about pdfmaker, click here.
smittytone messes with micros 