And when you want it back, they look at you funny....

A bounty of $10,000 is being offered for a way to run Ring cameras locally, without your data being offered to Amazon. Why don't we go ahead and make a device that natively gives you control over your data? Why send money to Amazon to crack their kit? www.theregister.com/2026/02/23/r...

Hmmm... I need help from the BlueSky hive mind. The next phase of Beast development is going to cost for prototyping and dev kits. There's some interesting stuff planned, but I can't afford to push it forward. Selling MicroBeasts helps, though sales are hard in the current economic environment. 🧵

Woah. And we're spending hundreds of billions of dollars on 243 lines of code?

Ooohh... cool battery circuit coming together. Automatic switch over between USB and barrel jack input. Charge the battery whilst running MicroBeast Lots of battery status information - which power source, charge level, charge or discharge rate.

Death In Paradise this week features a Mac Classic... searching the web.

I've worked out why it's making my head spin working on the next few projects. The road map that MicroBeast started includes at least 15 separate products. That's while keeping compatibility and interoperability as far as possible. Yeah. Aim high...

KiCad Version 10... I'm going in.

I regularly see people wondering how it's possible that there are so many musicians and writers and film makers and artists from a tiny nation like Iceland. And the answer is really simple: State funding for art education and artists. I literally get a salary from the government to write books.

VideoBeast has to access both video memory and control registers with only a small number of physical pins to connect to a host CPU. I'm adding an IORQ line to (optionally) move register access to a separate address space - simplifying interfacing to some hosts.

The corollary to this is that politicians and the politically engaged when in power do not know how to support technology, how to fund useful innovation and how to sell it to their electorate. We get the bad options, because they don't care to discover the good options.

No point in discussing things on a public forum if you actively block new information. Doesn't matter how righteous you are. Oh well.

You know what goes well with pancakes? Yes! A MicroBeast kit! feersumbeasts.com

There should be a word for "Knowing that somewhere you wrote down the ideal I2C controlled LED backlight dimmer IC for the project you hadn't got round to, but now that you need it, you can't remember what it was and can't find your notes." Cheap, small, simple. (Me or the chip, you decide)

One day I'll write some more of this. Want to read the start of an intergalactic mystery? feersumbeasts.com/beyond.html

It's worth pointing out that when we get headlines about AI writing code, the same overexcited schmucks would regard this as pointless. Yet they couldn't actually tell you the difference between the two.

Another useful idiot comes along for the government to justify ill-considered expansion of control over our private lives, all in the name of "just think of the children". How about you put money into proper support of children struggling in schools and stop demonising them when they don't conform?

Don't give me bad ideas. A "C compiler" in under 512 bytes. xorvoid.com/sectorc.html

Afternoon Feersum Discord hangout whilst I route some PCBs. Drop in if you want to talk about Z80's, Beasts or my terrible taste in music. discord.gg/rhr8BaXP

The British Government: Hold my beer....

Treasure hunt!

I only started this hardware game because I wanted a nice computer to hack around on and write games with. But I never quite get the time to write software... I had worked out I could emulate the HP-15C on MicroBeast, which would have been fun... could even have a custom keyboard overlay.

A good observation about the reality of vibe coding... it's the Nazi bar problem, but with software. Once someone in your software stack is vibe coding, you're all essentially vibe coding.

Tom Cruise nearly went last year. This year, we're hoping Margot Robbie might nearly go. www.youtube.com/watch?v=DScd...

Anyone know the link between the 2026 Winter Olympics and the Commodore 64?

Still disappointed they had to cancel the Dirk Gently series with Elija Wood - they were just beginning to hint at some deeper lore and had produced two really fresh stories. It could have built a lot from that.

I appreciate it's an increasingly ironic position to believe in "tech for good" especially when the phrase is co-opted by grifters and techbro philosophers, but: Absent of the thirst to spend money on crap, we have greater capability to make stuff to improve lives than ever before. We just don't.

Having followed him from the early viral videos, I'm unreasonably pleased to see @colinfurze.bsky.social (Update your socials, fella) doing science bits on BBC Olympics. The lad's done good.

Watched a podcast where a bunch of guys enthused over running a group of AI agents that could meet up over a virtual water cooler, discuss their tasks with each other and share information. Dudes, you've invented Business Tamagotchi.

And here's the release build for BeastEm. github.com/atoone/BeastEm

A new release of BeastEm - the MicroBeast emulator is going to be available shortly, adding multiple breakpoints and watchpoints, and a visual page map. Thanks to Ant for some great additions and spotting a few bugs.

Apparently I'm cool now.

It's the year 2080. Someone posts: "I just got round to watching KPop Demon Hunters - wow, this is a surprisingly good movie!"

Maybe the current news cycle has addled my brain, but Michael McIntyre, Dermot O'Leary and Jonathan Ross in a bedroom together is possibly the most wholesome thing I've seen all week.

I can't over emphasise how much we need to be building alternatives to the Musk-Zuckerberg-Thiel platforms.

Today's thought: the parasocial nature of social media acts to stop thought leaders and organisers from achieving an 'escape velocity' to actually create meaningful change. There's a glass ceiling of giving talks and writing books - solo efforts to change minds - instead of forming movements.

It's all so lazy.

Weekend project: CPLD design for a PIO-ish replacement for projects where the EOL Zilog PIO is no-longer appropriate. Yeah, I know, I live on the edge, man.

I never had one, but every now and then I get the urge to get the ultimate expression of the 'wedge computer' - an original Amiga. That and a decent CRT. Maybe I need to lie down in a dark room until the feeling goes away.

The stuff of legends.

Current mood.

Just watched the Muppet Show special. Sabrina Carpenter got the memo and was the perfect guest. They nailed the format of the original show - and to someone who remembers it fondly, it felt pretty good. Don't know how a younger audience is receiving it, but they could bring back a series for me.

We should perhaps be more concerned that media like Fortune report the dribbling idiocy of Thiel as a sane world view. The guy is framing this fight against oversight and consequence as 'good versus evil', but is notably also positioning techbro capitalism as the only way to innovate and create.

Follow up - Kenable delivered an excellent little charger dock and some very nice flexible silicone USB cables. If you're looking for an alternative to Amazon, this is a good start.

Keeping my finger on the pulse of the creative community - Have platforms like Ko-Fi and Buy Me A Coffee faded out of existence? Did anyone find them to be a meaningful way to support your work? Where are you talking about/selling/funding your work these days?

BG "If you’d asked me at any point in the past I would have said, at most, that we’ll have double the number of employees we had then: when we had 100, when we had 500 and even today when we have 16,000. I can tell you with great certainty we’ll never have more than 32,000 employees." 2026: 228,000

Using AI as a substitute for searching and absorbing information yourself is like asking your Mum to tell you the plot of that movie you wanted to watch.

Heads up for anyone interested in old electronic instruments - the BBC Repair Shop show tonight is showing the restoration of The Stranglers' keyboard that was used in hits like Golden Brown and No More Heroes: www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/epis...

They're restoring one of the Stranglers' keyboards on Repair Shop - fascinating combination of ancient electronics and mechanical design.