Kevin Boone
Kevin Boone
Kevin Boone
Musing on computing, math, electronics, de-Googling and the small web, from an old warhorse of the IT industry.
Latest Posts
This article describes a method for deploying the Mosquitto MQTT message broker on OpenShift. Such an installation might potentially be useful in its own right, but the main purpose of the article is to discuss issues that are relevant...
Back in the 70s, desktop computers booted to BASIC. In this article, I describe my efforts to implement a BASIC programming environment on the SparkFun Pro Micro, a small Arduino-like 8-bit microcontroller.
In the last few years there has been a revival of interest in 8-bit microcomputers from the 70s and 80s. Many of these were based on the Zilog Z80, and many ran CP/M. This article about getting started with CP/M using an emulator on Linux.
Introducing a simple graphical browser for Project Gemini content; back to the 90s -- in a good way.
Many retrocompting projects are designed to be used with a serial terminal. It's easy to emulate a terminal using a desktop workstation, but more authentic to use a dedicated serial terminal. Real VT52-style terminals are expensive, and...
Part 2 of my article on installation the Mosquitto MQTT message broker on OpenShift.
The notion of "change data capture" (CDC) is becoming increasingly significant, in an IT industry that stores and manages an ever-increasing volume of data. This article describes how to begin using the Debezium CDC framework with Apache...
This article extends my earlier article on using Avro with a message broker. In this article I explain how to use the Apicurio schema registry to store Avro schema artefacts that are shared by multiple clients, rather than providing...
My first CP/M program for nearly 40 years -- how, and why, I wrote it.
Why was the CP/M operating system so successful? Forty years on, why should we care?
This article introduces CPICOM -- an emulator for CP/M 2.2 on the Raspberry Pi microcontroller.
On websites, and in hobbyist kits for Raspberry Pi and Arduino, you'll often see I2C devices connected that have different supply voltages. This is (usually) safe and, in non-critical applications, tends to work. But why?
The MAX7219 IC is widely used to control an 8x8 matrix of LED, but they can be chained to create much larger displays. This article describes how the chaining works, and how to create a driver for the Raspberry Pi Pico.
Make an "auxiliary LCD display" for a computer that displays data sent to it over a USB connection. Ready-made devices of this sort are widely available, but it's more fun to build your own.
There is a tabular method for organizing integration computations which require repeated application of the integration-by-parts formula. It is seldom taught, which is a shame: it hugely reduces the algebraic complexity of the problem.