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Going viral and miscellaneous

A project log for PotatoP

A LISP-programmable laptop with battery life measured in years

andreas-eriksenAndreas Eriksen 03/11/2023 at 00:410 Comments

Going viral

I did two things since the last project log that had a much bigger impact than I expected.

First, I uploaded a short video to Youtube in which I add a tiny new feature to my text editor. I made this to be shared on the uLisp forum, as a quick demo for anyone particularly interested.

This highly compelling movie consists of 3 minutes of typing mistakes, several long pauses of nothingness where I count the number of closing parenthesis to type out, set to a soundtrack of a clacking keyboard and labored breathing. With an interlude of forgetting what the key code was, right after checking it, and then checking it again.

The second thing I did was to submit my project to the 2023 Hackaday.io Low-Power Challenge, after which hackaday.com wrote an article about it - and on my birthday! It got some attention, and went viral enough to be picked up by a humbling number of other tech writers, among them a hackster.com article. That article was submitted in a Hacker News post which was voted to the top of the front page for quite a few hours.

I got very excited and spent hours refreshing HN, reddit and youtube to answer comments and questions, during the time I should have been sleeping before the next day of work. If I didn't reply to your comment (there or elsewhere), apologies.

That the video I made would get 14 000+ views was unexpected - 230 hours of probably innocent peoples lives have been spent watching it - and if I had known, I would have put in more effort. It might have helped.

To conclude, I am very happy to see that so many are interested in my hobby project! And several people have approached me to offer assistance, which I greatly appreciate. I am really hoping this will speed along work on the project.

Running an UXN rom
Running the "primes" program from the UXN source distribution while measuring power usage
Power measurement while running UXN rom
Power measurement while running UXN rom - this is with the cpu at 100% and each discovered prime printed to the display (in hex).

Some actual miscellaneous project updates

It's been a long time since the previous project log. I haven't really worked on it as much since then, as I'm trying to get other commitments out of the way first. Here's what I can remember doing:

It does actually seem like a bit when it's all typed out doesn't it ... and I'm much too late for bed again. And my TODO list keeps growing. But I'm definitely enjoying myself.

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