It's been almost a year since my last
confessional video.
A few weeks ago I started working on a small revision control system to handle
my C projects developed on my Mac and it's now at the point where I can at least
manage commits to the tool itself.
My old 2017 Huawei MateBook X has been my most reliable laptop and continued to be my daily-use workstation despite trying half a dozen others (and a desktop or two) in the past four years. Every time I'd try a new laptop, certain components wouldn't work properly, or the keyboard would feel strange, or the screen quality would be poor, or a constantly-running fan or some coil-whine noise would drive me nuts. And every time, I'd return to my trusty MateBook X and everything would just work silently.
I finally have a newer model of the MateBook X and I'm happy to say it lives up to its predecessor and has replaced my 2017 model.
The Cidco MailStation is a series of dedicated e-mail terminals sold in the 2000s as simple, standalone devices for people to use to send and receive e-mail over dialup modem. While their POP3 e-mail functionality is of little use today, the hardware is a neat Z80 development platform that integrates a 320x128 LCD, full QWERTY keyboard, and an internal modem.
After purchasing one (ok, four) on eBay some months ago, I've learned enough about the platform to write my own software that allows it to be a terminal for accessing BBSes via its modem or as a terminal for a Unix machine connected over parallel cable.
I've created an adapter for the Cidco MailStation Z80 computer which adds the ability to use WiFi for data transfer, code uploading, and to act as a WiFi modem for my msTERM terminal emulator.
Fifteen years ago, NetBSD's Bluetooth audio stack was
imported
into OpenBSD.
From what I remember using it back then, it worked sufficiently well but its
configuration was cumbersome.
It supported Bluetooth HID keyboards and mice, audio, and serial devices.
Six years ago, however, it was
tedu'd
due to conflicts with how it integrated into our kernel.
While we still have no Bluetooth support today, it is possible to play audio on Bluetooth headphones using a small hardware dongle.
On the modern web, everything must be encrypted. Unencrypted websites are treated as relics of the past with browsers declaring them toxic waste not to be touched (or even looked at) and search engines de-prioritizing their content.
While this push for security is good for protecting modern communication, there is a whole web full of information and services that don't need to be secured and those trying to access them from older vintage computers or even through modern embedded devices are increasingly being left behind.
Returning to the development of my IMAP client, I add SOCKS5 support to be able to connect through a network proxy, particularly the one I made that is able to convert TLS-encrypted data from my real mailserver into plaintext that the Mac's slow CPU can support.
In the
previous episode
I quickly ported OpenBSD's diff(1) but there wasn't any interface to select
files or scroll through the output.
I've since added a proper GUI with the ability to select files or folders, and
in this episode I walk through the GUI and filesystem code and then add a
proper Edit menu.
I also make a formal release of the code and binary available for download.
I've wanted a simple revision control system on my Mac since starting
development of my IMAP client.
Porting a large system like Git or even CVS would be overkill (and very slow),
but maybe something small like OpenBSD's
RCS
implementation would suffice.
For now, just having a diff utility would be helpful so in this video I port
the guts of
OpenBSD's diff(1)
and show it generating a unified diff between revisions of a C file.
In this episode, I fetch the flags of each message and for unseen messages, make them appear in the list in bold. That introduces an off-by-one which I run out of time to fix while recording.
Today, I implement plaintext message viewing and hook it up to the message list.
I also review a cleanup of int variables to make them either short or long
throughout the project.
I've been writing an IMAP client for and on my Mac 512Ke over the past many weeks. Taking inspiration from Andreas Kling's excellent YouTube videos documenting his development of the Serenity operating system, I thought I'd start screencasting some of my work.
This video is the first of hopefully many and presents a quick introduction to System 6, HFS resource forks, THINK C 5.0, and a look at some of the progress of my IMAP client so far.
I wrote a utility function to parse RFC822 dates/times sent by the IMAP server, which then converts them to a UTC time. In this video, I hook it into the IMAP parser and add a resource string for the local timezone offset setting, so these UTC times can then be converted to a local time and displayed in the message list.
I recently read about using a jump instruction as an LDEF resource to allow
keeping the list definition function in the main program executable/project, so
in this video I implement the technique for the message list.
In this video, I get the list of messages displaying again and fix a bug that
occurred when closing a mailbox.
I provide a quick summary of creating LDEF procedures in THINK C for drawing
custom list cells, which I will expand upon on in a future video.
