29 July 2021

Visited Slapton Ley today. It is the largest freshwater lake in the 
south west of England and yet a shingle beach, car park and a road is 
all that seperates it from the sea. I ended up on a walk with my Dad 
and the dogs around the Ley. Lots of butterflies and dragon flies to 
admire. One dog had a paddle where she was drinking water as she 
waded in a pac-man sort of way. 

I bought a recent Humble Bundle of O'Reilly books which were mostly 
cookbooks for different programming languages. There was one book in 
particular which caught my eye. One on regular expressions. It has 
been a good read so far and seems useful in work dross. I have also 
been reading about heirloom computing, written by Steve Lord, thanks 
to a comment from Agk's phlog. The concept of a 100 year computer 
seems ridiculous to the electronic engineer in me but actually, we 
could keep such a thing going. We only have to look at the WITCH at 
the National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park for how long a 
computer can keep going. Sure the GUI is via decatrons and that you 
could work out the answer to an arithmatic question quicker but the 
WITCH is the oldest working computer in the world. It was released in 
1952 so we have 69 years of computing. However, the concept is more 
about having a consistant set of IO standards and OS rather than 
hardware which will keep operating for 100 years. The idea of 
emulating a basic OS which could be done with cheap and cheerful 
processors galore is appealing. Things to think about along with how 
to harvest energy from radio broadcasts. I need to do some circuit 
building with that one. Got to explore the reality of the theory.