Nice, I'd like to follow this. I tried browsing there with EWW, but I'm blocked by an "Enable JavaScript" message. This seems to be a Mastodon 4.x thing; 3.5.x servers work great in EWW (read-only at least). I'm hoping there's some ?nojs=1 type workaround that I haven't found yet. I wrote a blog post about this just the other day: https://www.fitzsim.org/blog/?p=465
The Talos II is blob-free. At launch, proprietary binary-only firmware was required for the network interface, but Raptor Computing Systems offered a bounty to reverse engineer and do a Free Software re-implementation of the firmware, and that effort succeeded and the bounty was paid. See:
For larger programs you can interact with the Lisp Badge via a serial console. Here's a setup for using Emacs's built-in serial support. This makes programming the Lisp Badge very similar to working in SLIME, with an on-target REPL and the ability to evaluate code fragments onto the target:
After (save-image) and unplugging from serial, I had a portable Lisp-hackable handheld gaming system. I made small tweaks to the game code -- like new cheat modes or modified sound effects -- with the built-in keyboard.
Sort of meta, but why does plopdown.video require JavaScript? Without JavaScript enabled it renders as a blank page. The actual post is just text and images. Why put that behind a JavaScript wall? Doing so excludes all non-JavaScript-supporting browsers from viewing the site. That's also a type of open web failure, another example of the type of problem the article does a good job of dissecting.
In my case, the actual plugin doesn't work without Javascript, and this was actually the cheapest option for hosting and staying within what I already had in my Nx monorepo. (it literally costs me $10 a year and I'm only paying for the domain)
I'm looking into some options for this with cloudflare, but it's been pretty low on my priorities for the above reasons. I'm also one of those people that turns off javascript by default, so I know your pain, but I'm also not a multi-billion dollar company.
I recently built three of these. There's no kit, so to build one you have acquire all the parts and learn TQFP soldering. The result is a really neat little computer. I did a write-up on my blog:
