2023-04-21 from the editor of ~insom
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I'm playing with Guile Scheme and I've generally spent more
time writing code than usual lately, including some for fun.
I currently have a computer hobby that makes me happy
instead of filling me with dread, and that's good and I've
sorely missed this. I've even fit in a healthy mix of
actually playing video games instead of just collecting
them.
I spent some time getting a Quake 1 port working on Haiku
(mostly Makefile and HaikuPorts stuff, because SDL is doing
the lifting to make things _work_). Spending time with old
computers is something I used to view as a bit of a
psychohazard -- it'd pull me in and eventually I would feel
frustrated at the time I had "wasted" on it. Armed with some
new mental tools and outlooks, I think I'm able to do
retrocomputing in a more healthy way.
Also: I am interested in the future. Like, typically when I
program for fun, recently, it's been with technology I'm
very comfortable in (like C, microcontrollers, Unix) or that
I'm picking up after a long break (like C++ and Python,
FPGAs, Win32). Now I am interested in seeing what's possible
in the low-latency but web-related world of Rust, io_uring
and WASM.
---
Originally I'd opened my text editor to write about Guinness
Foreign Export Stout. In my memory, Guinness used to be
brewed in other places, and then eventually its production
was centralized in St. James' Gate in Dublin. I remember
drinking Guinness imported from Nigeria (FES) during the
brief period where I was old enough to drink legally, and
while I lived in Ireland. I'd assumed this had disappeared,
but it's still brewed in Lagos. It seemed perverse to import
Guinness to Ireland, but it's a pretty different drink.
Anyway, it turns out I was wrong: only UK and Ireland
Guinness production moved to St. James' Gate -- it's brewed
around the world, although a lot of the precursors (like
flavoured wort) still come from Dublin. Its unlikely that
these breweries could continue to produce proper stout if
they were cut off from the motherland.
