Paolo Amoroso's Journal

Tech projects, hobby programming, and geeky thoughts of Paolo Amoroso

A few years ago I bought a cheap Bluetooth keyboard from Amazon.it. At €14, it was mostly an impulse buy for exploring mobile typing on the go and similar settings, such as work stations with limited desk space. This is the device:

FREALL 7INKEYBD-BK 7" Bluetooth keyboard.

I initially used the keyboard with the Android tablet and smartphone I had at the time, a 7” Lenovo Tab E7 and a Pixel 2 XL. I later repurposed the keyboard for the devices I replaced those with, a Lenovo Tab M8 HD 8” tablet and a Pixel 4 XL smartphone. Here is the keyboard with the Lenovo Tab M8 HD:

FREALL 7INKEYBD-BK Bluetooth keyboard with a Lenovo Tab M8 HD 8" tablet.

Despite the simplicity, it took me some trial and error to figure how to pair the keyboard and what keystrokes insert the symbols I need, such as accented letters. So I’m posting these notes in case you come across the same or similar keyboards.

Hardware and packaging

The keyboard is a cheap, compact, plastic 7” chiclet unit that comes with a small foldable stand to hold a tablet or phone. To charge the keyboard I plug it into my Chromebox via the keyboard’s mini-USB port.

The product and packaging have no branding and Android identifies it simply as “Bluetooth Keyboard”. The Amazon listing indicates FREALL as the manufacturer and 7INKEYBD-BK as the model.

The instruction sheet isn’t of great help for learning how to operate the keyboard. The document is short, incomplete, and inaccurate. But reading the Amazon reviews helped me understand the pairing procedure. I discovered the rest by experimenting.

Pairing

Although the keyboard can work with different mobile and desktop operating systems, I use it only with Android and this is the experience I’m sharing here. To pair the keyboard with an Android device:

  1. turn on the keyboard
  2. on the keyboard, press CONNECT
  3. on Android, turn on Bluetooth and start the pairing flow
  4. on the keyboard, press Fn+Q
  5. on Android, tap the keyboard entry
  6. on the keyboard, type the pairing code Android prompts to enter
  7. on the keyboard, press Enter

After pairing is complete, on your Android device you’ll get a notification prompting to configure the keyboard by selecting a language and layout. This step may not be necessary.

From now on, to use the keyboard enable Bluetooth on Android and turn on the keyboard, which should connect automatically.

Keyboard shortcuts

The keys hold up to four labels for entering symbols, controlling media playback, or executing commands.

Accessing most of the symbols or functions of a key is often self-explanatory. For example, to type a blue symbol on a key, press that key while holding the modifier key with the blue Fn label.

Typing other characters or executing commands not printed on the keys is harder, so I include below some lists of useful keystrokes.

Symbols

You can directly insert the symbols in the following table by pressing the corresponding keystrokes. To type an accented character, press the keystroke that selects the accent you want and then press the character. For example, to get an e with a grave accent, è, press Alt +` and then e.

Keystroke Symbol
Alt+E é
Alt+ ` grave accent
Alt+U umlaut
Alt+I ~
Alt+S ß
Alt+c ç
Alt+N ẽ

Android commands and actions

The keyboard accepts the standard Android keyboard shortcuts. I found a few more and listed in the table below the ones that are handy, little known, or frequently used.

Launching apps

To launch one of these apps, here are the corresponding shortcuts:

Keystroke App
type search query Google Search
command Google Assistant
command+B Chrome
command+C Google Contacts
command+E Gmail
command+L Google Calendar
command+S Google Messages

Actions

The keyboard lets you invoke other Android features and navigation actions. Here are the ones I found:

Keystroke App
Alt in text field emoji selector
control+Enter set focus
command+Delete Back
command+Enter go to home screen
command+N open notifications shade

#Android

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The Fediverse presence @paolo@journal.paoloamoroso.com of this blog has some limitations and quirks, such as the way commenting is set up. Another quirk is if I edit an old blog post, a new Fediverse post ends up in the followers' Mastodon timelines.

#blogging

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The option 4: Autoboot-80 of the V20-MBC boot menu switches the Nec V20 to Intel 8080 mode and loads version 1.4 of the IMSAI 8K BASIC interpreter. In this session I typed in and run a short BASIC program to print the ASCII character set:

IMSAI BASIC on the V20-MBC homebrew computer.

The code is:

10 FOR I=32 TO 127
20 PRINT CHR$(I);
30 NEXT I

Despite the brevity, entering the code I bumped into some unexpected errors and behavior. It's been almost four decades since I used a resident BASIC on a microcomputer, and never with a terminal. No wonder interacting with IMSAI BASIC felt weird.

Reading the IMSAI BASIC manual and experimenting with the interpreter cleared the hurdles and let me make progress, though I'm not sure whether the issues may be related to the terminal settings. By the way, the commented Assembly source of the interpreter in the manual is an interesting reading.

Here are some notes on what I learned.

BASIC keywords, commands, and identifiers must be in all uppercase. Lowercase is supported only in strings assigned to variables, but printing string literals yelds uppercase text.

Pressing Backspace or Ctrl-H moves the cursor one character to the left and Del does nothing. The only ways of fixing typos or errors are deleting the whole line with Ctrl-U or entering it again.

When the environment gets messed up I execute the NEW command that clears the program and data, thus letting me start from scratch.

#v20mbc #retrocomputing

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This blog is hosted at Write.as and uses the default commenting system of the sister platform Remark.as. The Discuss... link in the footer of every post leads to the Remark.as comment box, which does the job but requires a paid account.

To provide alternate options I added to the footer a link to email me and now I'm experimenting with comments from the Fediverse.

The blog has the Fediverse presence @paolo@journal.paoloamoroso.com you can follow. On Mastodon you'll receive a toot for every new blog post. To comment, reply as usual to the toot. But be sure not to delete my Mastodon handle @amoroso@fosstodon.org prefilled in the edit box, which is different from @paolo@journal.paoloamoroso.com

This setup is motivated by a limitation of the blog's Fediverse presence and based on a workaround Write.as founder Matt Baer suggested.

The problem is the blog is unable to receive Fediverse mentions or reactions, so Matt suggested to mention a Mastodon handle anywhere in the blog posts. This way the blog posts' toots automatically include the right Mastodon account in replies, in my case @amoroso@fosstodon.org

When replying to a toot, Mastodon highlights the textual handles of any extra mentioned accounts and typing anything deletes them. That's why you need to pay attention, for example by pressing the right arrow key to un-highlight the handle and move the cursor to the right spot to begin typing the reply.

How did I set up Fediverse commenting on Write.as? In the blog settings, under Customize > Post Signature I inserted this code in the signature, i.e. the footer Write.as appends to posts:

<!-- comment -->
[Email](mailto:info@paoloamoroso.com?subject=Reply%20to%20Paolo%20Amoroso%27s%20Journal) | Reply @amoroso@fosstodon.org

The <!-- comment --> shortcode inserts the Remark.as link (I had to insert spaces to escape it, remove them in your signature). The email link has an ordinary mailto URL. And the Fediverse commenting option is just my Mastodon handle.

#blogging

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Turbo Pascal 3 for CP/M comes preinstalled with the Z80-MBC2 and V20-MBC homebrew computers. Checking out the development environment made me rediscover Turbo Pascal and realize its potential for programming these computers.

Although I owned Turbo Pascal for MS-DOS in the early 1990s, I didn't use it much. Between other languages later getting my attention and Borland losing its market leadership, I eventually forgot about Turbo Pascal. Now, with the development environment handy on the Z80-MBC2 and V20-MBC, I began checking out the Turbo Pascal CP/M version I had never played with.

Being familiar with the Turbo Pascal MS-DOS IDE, which features a nice text user interface with pull-down menus and dialogs, the CP/M version seemed spartan and primitive.

But I pressed ahead, tried the various commands, edited and compiled some code, and got familiar with the keystrokes and workflow. I soon felt at ease with Turbo Pascal for CP/M. The environment is still suprisingly usable and productive, allowing fast edit-compile-run cycles with short compilation times even on the 8-bit Z80-MBC2.

I now understand why Turbo Pascal made such a sensation at the time and revolutionized development tools.

To learn the Turbo Pascal environment and language I began reading the manual, as well as books about Turbo Pascal and Pascal. The more I used Turbo Pascal and read about it, the more I enjoyed it and wanted to learn and explore.

Next thing I knew, I was down a rabbit hole.

This experimentation and reading made me realize the potential of Turbo Pascal as an ideal tool for hobby projects with these homebrew computers.

Pascal is an easy to understand, readable, and expressive language. Despite the age and design flaws, it allows to write fairly advanced code. Pascal makes practicality win over language purity.

Sitting at a sweet spot between ease of use, features, and power, Turbo Pascal is a perfect fit for CP/M as it consumes limited resources, generates moderatly small and fast executables, and can access all the features of the system. That's why it's a good environment for quickly developing small tools or programs for the Z80-MBC2 and V20-MBC.

#pascal #retrocomputing #z80mbc2 #v20mbc

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I was a heavy user of shareware software but my experience was like a story with missing clues and no ending. Reading Shareware Heroes: The renegades who redefined gaming at the dawn of the internet by Richard Moss filled the gaps, completed the story, and gave a sense of resolution.

Android tablet with the cover of the of the Shareware Heroes ebook open in a reading app.

I encountered shareware via the Amiga Fish disk collection, and later MS-DOS productivity software and utilities such as the PC-Write word processor and the CompuShow image viewer.

As an Italian student I loved the affordable programs and the wide selection of shareware, much wider than the fewer and expensive packages by traditional American software houses local retailers carried. I assumed everyone else loved shareware, so I always found puzzling this distribution model was little known even among computer geeks. Equally puzzling was why shareware seemed to have faded since the late 1990s.

Later I realized my narrow focus on productivity software and programming tools made me miss major events, hits, and market players of gaming shareware, which I never was into.

There were other things I didn't know or understand at the time, such as why some shareware never made it to Europe. And, not having owned a Mac until well into the Internet era, I wasn't aware of the role of Mac shareware. Finally, I always wondered about the business side of shareware.

Thanks to accurate and extensive research based on original sources and interviews, Shareware Heroes puts the pieces together and presents a complete, coherent history of shareware from the early days to the Internet era. It paints the big picture, discusses shareware in the context of the computer industry, traces the evolution of shareware business models, and ties the past with the present from early shareware titles to the contemporary indie scene.

Although I'm less focused on gaming, the book has a lot of material also on the application software and utilities at the roots of shareware. But I found the coverage of gaming equally interesting even if I'm a non gamer. For example, I realized the key role of Apogee and id in both the evolution of gaming and software business models.

Interestingly, Shareware Heroes indirectly provides some historical context on the dispute between Epic Games, Apple, and Google over app store fees. Founder Tim Sweeney has always been highly competitive since the early days of Epic Games, for example in his rivarly with Apogee and id.

Sweeney is a tough leader, Apple and Google should have seen it coming. Their executives may want to read Shareware Heroes.

#retrocomputing #books

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On this blog I regularly share my retrocomputing experience and projects with the Z80-MBC2 and the V20-MBC homebrew computers. In addition, on my Mastodon account @amoroso@fosstodon.org I often post screenshots, links, videos, and other short updates grouped under the #z80mbc2 and #v20mbc hashtags.

#z80mbc2 #v20mbc

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I needed to write some Bash scripts on Linux that read the input from stdin or a file passed as an optional argument, but couldn't figure how.

Googling turned up several designs and examples, such as on StackOverflow, where the script directly processes the input. But I actually wanted the script to assemble a pipeline, feed the input into the beginning, and delegate the processing to the programs and filters in the pipeline.

More googling turned up exactly what I wanted, a reply by the user Daniel buried in a long StackExchange thread.

The trick is to assign to a variable the input stream and feed it into the first program of the pipeline. To demonstrate the technique, the script unlc (unique line count) prints the number of unique lines in the input:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# unlc - print number of unique lines in the optional input file or stdin
#
# Usage:
#
#   unlc [input-file]

input_file="${1:-/dev/stdin}"

cat "$input_file" | sort | uniq | wc -l

The code assigns to input_file the first argument $1 passed to the script, if supplied, or the standard input. Then cat feeds the content of input_file to the rest of the pipeline. The script is invoked by passing a file as an argument or feeding the data into the script's standard input:

$ cat input-file.txt 
1
2
2
3
4
4
4
4
$ unlc input-file.txt 
4
$ cat input-file.txt | unlc
4

Simple and brilliant.

#Linux

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In these digital era there's a growing interest in analog writing with pen and paper, possibly fueled by a reaction to technology and a romantic vision of art.

Almost four decades ago, in 1983, I wrote a full-length book with these tools, all 216 pages of it. Plus one third of the manuscript worth of additional text I cut while editing. Also, for years I kept a personal journal with pen and paper.

Although a practical necessity back then, handwriting was an awful, time-consuming experience that brought no value to me.

Not anymore.

Now I use pen an paper only for occasional short notes of up to a couple of lines, and computers or other digital devices for everything else. I'm not missing the fascination with handwriting, at all.

You’ll have to pry my digital writing tools from my cold, dead hands.

#misc #publishing

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CP/M-86 is a footnote to the history of the personal computer, which is part of why it's interesting.

The downside is the limited popularity the operating system enjoyed makes it difficult to discover online resources, particularly software. I face this issue when looking for software and tools for my V20-MBC homebrew computer, which can run CP/M-86 with the Intel 8088 of its Nec V20.

Therefore, I'm keeping track of the programs and software collections I run across online.

I include a list here, which I'll revise and expand with more entries. On the V20-MBC I tested only a small fraction of this software, so some programs designed for vendor-specific CP/M-86 versions or machines may not run on the device.

Repositories and collections

Old BBS archives, repositories, personal websites, and CD-ROM collections are good starting points. CP/M-86 software in executable form is usually in a section under general CP/M resources.

I found these repositories and websites:

Programs and utilities

Some applications are provided for download from their own websites or distribution archives:

Source code

Some software that works on CP/M-86 is distributed in source form with no prepackaged binaries. It's usually available at general CP/M repositories, in sections specific to the programming language or environment it was developed with such as Turbo Pascal or BASIC. This code may need some tweaks to run on CP/M-86.

For example, the Walnut Creek CP/M CD-ROM has a Turbo Pascal section.

CP/M-86 Miscellaneous Ports is a collection of C and Unix tools ported to CP/M-86, such as yacc.

#v20mbc #retrocomputing

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