Tag Archives: Mac

How to bring Amstrad NC100 screenshots to modern graphics apps

While browsing some scans of old, out-of-print books about the Amstrad NC100, I discovered that it has a built-in screenshot facility. I knew my various Psion devices could do this, but not the NC100.

NC100 screenshot BBC Basic

The trick — press Control–Shift–S — was mentioned in Robin Nixon’s The Amstrad Advanced User Guide, published in 1993 by Sigma Press. The book contained BBC Basic and C utilities for converting the raw bitmap data generated by the keypress.
I immediately keyed in the C code to try it out. It did the job.

Typing in a listing! What an old-school feeling!

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How to find the right Pi Pico board or retro tech connected to your Mac or Raspberry Pi

Recent work connecting old mobile devices — the Psion Series 3a and the Amstrad NC100 — to my Mac caused me to run into an issue with the script I use to determine the Unix device path of the USB-to-serial adaptor I use to talk to these gadgets. Long story short: I ended up converting a Z Shell function into a Swift CLI tool — and adding Linux support into the bargain.

Adafruit’s RP2040 board connects to the host via an integrated USB-to-serial adaptor (Image © 2021, Tony Smith)
Adafruit’s RP2040 board connects to the host via an integrated USB-to-serial adaptor
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How to get a 1990s palmtop communicating 2024-style: connect a Psion 3a to the Interweb

Recap I have acquired a UK-made Psion Series 3a palmtop. I’ve connected it to my Mac. I’ve connected it to my headless Pi server over serial. My next goal: connect the 3a to the Internet.

I never had any great expectations for getting the 3a online. To summarise the problem: the 3a shipped without integrated Internet support. And while it later received it, via the PsiMail email package, Internet access was predicated on a dial-up connection using a modem and an analogue phone line. It is possible to bridge this ancient approach to the modern world of always on broadband and WiFi, but yes, it’s a bit of PIA. Anyway, this is what you do.

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How to intercept STDOUT and STDERR output in Swift CLI code

My open source images-to-PDF utility, pdfmaker, makes use of Apple’s PDFKit. While this partnership works as it should, just one aspect bothered me: PDFKit warnings and errors don’t bubble up to the calling code, but are piped via STDERR. The upshot: anyone running pdfmaker may see messages that it hasn’t issued. pdfmaker is a CLI tool, but I can’t just redirect the output to /dev/null — you’d lose everything, not just PDFKit’s grumbles. Instead I had to figure out how to sink PDFKit’s output even though it wasn’t coming via pdfmaker. Here’s how I did the pipework.

Steel pope (c) 2024, Tony Smith. All rights reserved.
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Xcode 15.3 zaps Swift packages: here’s how you fix it

I have cd "${PROJECT_DIR}" ; agvtool bump set as a script in a number of my macOS projects’ Xcode schemas’ Build phases. The second of the two commands auto-increments the project build number on completion of the build. It continues to do so, but with Xcode 15.3* there’s a side-effect: it deletes the project’s Swift packages.

Xcode and Swift icons
Icons owned by Apple
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Tailscale: a VPN for the rest of us? You bet!

A one-time colleague of mine recently put me onto Tailscale, a rather nifty product that allows you to wrangle all of your computers, phones and more into a single, secure and Internet-spanning virtual private network (VPN). I decided to give it a try and I’m very impressed with its performance and ease-of-use — the latter very important for someone like me who’s not a network guru.

Tailscale: VPN for the rest of us?
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How to talk to I2C sensors, displays from… Linux

T’other week, I wrote about my work on building a Raspberry Pi RP2040-based I²C host device and some macOS client software to control it. I mentioned that I might get the latter running under Linux too. I now have, and it does.

The matrix display client and the CPU activity display example running on a Raspberry Pi 400
The matrix display client and the CPU activity display example running on a Raspberry Pi 400
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Now available: PreviewMarkdown 1.3.0 with YAML support

Version 1.3.0 of PreviewMarkdown has just been released. Its key new feature: you now have the option to view YAML front matter in Markdown file previews. This is really handy if, like me, you use a static site generator and use YAML to record content metadata at the top of your Markdown page files.

With PreviewMarkdown 1.3.0, you can now preview files’ YAML content too
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How to migrate to native Homebrew on an M1 Mac

Let the great Homebrew migration begin. Yes, Homebrew now has native support for Apple’s ARM64-based M1 chip. The latest version, 3.0.0, released 5 February, will run nicely on your Apple Silicon Mac. There’s a catch, of course. Well, several catches: first, not all of the tools you can install using Homebrew are M1 native yet and, second, Homebrew doesn’t offer explicit migration instructions, that I could find at least.

Apple Silicon Mac, now with native Homebrew support
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How to debug a Raspberry Pi Pico with a Mac, SWD and… another Pico

When you’ve used Serial Wire Debug (SWD) to help you correct the C or C++ code running on your Raspberry Pi Pico, you’ll never want to go back to USB and the UF2 file system again. I don’t — no more messing about unplugging and re-plugging cables for me.

The Raspberry Pi Pico
The Raspberry Pi Pico is ready for Serial Wire Debugging
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