I now have to take off my Garmin watch before I start drawing art, because when I come into a flow, the watch registers it as “asleep.” It messed up my training readiness, since a three hours sleep period is deemed “too short and detrimental.” That is computers judging personal health for you.

I drew this stylized head of B.A. Baracus of the 1980s hit series The A-Team, played by Mr T.

I refined my Free Pascal program to accept 64-bit unsigned integers, which allows up to 19 decimal digits. However, testing with Big Primes, it is only usable up to 15 decimal digits on my Raspberry Pi 4. Any bigger primes take forever to test, in human perspective. The problem seems to be in how primes are generated in the primality test. The prime number generator uses a simple algorithm of odd numbers greater than one, and less than the square root of of the number of which its primality is tested. For small numbers it’s fine, but for larger numbers testing with odd numbers instead of actual prime numbers is a bit of waste of precious CPU time.

Still, being able to test primality with a relatively simple algorithm is rather awesome as a first attempt.

The slow-down in the algorithm is not caused by testing primality, but by the inefficiency of generating prime numbers. So I need a faster algorithm to do just that. I’ve looked around, but it requires me to learn new concepts in mathematics. I could do that, or, come back to it later when I’m more versed in writing in Pascal, or even stop here, since I don’t really have any incentives to create a full-blown efficient prime number generator, in other words, reinvent the wheel.

program isPrime3;
uses crt;

const
  zero  : qword = 0;
  one   : qword = 1;
  two   : qword = 2;
  three : qword = 3;

var
  num   : qword;
  again : char;
  
function isprime(num : qword) : boolean;
var
  iscomposite : boolean;
  test        : qword;

begin
  if num = one then 
    isprime := false
  else 
    if (num = two) or (num = three) then
      isprime := true
    else
      if (num mod two) = zero then
        isprime := false
      else begin
        iscomposite := false;
        test     := three;
        while (test * test) <= num do begin
          if (num mod test) = zero then
            iscomposite := true;
          test := test + two;
        end;
        isprime := not iscomposite;
      end;
end;

begin
  again := 'Y';
  while (again ='y') or (again = 'Y') or (again = chr(13)) do begin
    num := zero;
    while num < one do begin
      write('Give a whole positive number: ');
      readln(num);
    end;
    if isprime(num) then
      writeln(num, ' is prime')
    else
      writeln(num, ' is not prime');
    write('again? [Y/n] ');
    again := readkey;
    writeln(again);
  end;
end.

P.S. I fixed a bug that caused a press on the Enter key to exit the program, instead of continuing it as I meant it to do. Checking additionally for the Enter key chr(13) was easy enough. There are still bugs, though, but it’s usable enough for now, as throw-away code, not meant for application in a realworld app.

P.P.S.S. You can test this code on TutorialsPoint, which has a Pascal IDE, you could type the source code in, or copy and paste it from this article.

I refined yesterday’s Pascal program to have somewhat more functionality, and found a way to turn the contents of a terminal window into a PNG. It is a bit unwieldy, though. I’m curious how Timeline will possibly balk on this. I suppose @manton will have to tweak things a bit.

More Pascal programming in Free Pascal on Raspberry Pi OS. Apparently, the robot understands programming, since the alt description is spot on.

Remember Pascal? It’s still around. Here I’m running Free Pascal in a RaspberryPi OS terminal window.

A modest place to relax in the mornings. Most of this was given to me, both new and second-hand, except for the plants, which I bought a month ago for less than 30 Euros.

It seems the basis of good 2D animation is solid drawing skills. Without it, the result will be poor, or, at best, occasionally hit, but mostly miss. I know where to spend my time in the coming months. I only hope I don’t lose my Divoom Master Pixel Artist status with still images.

I made a rough animation in the Animatic app on iPad and traced the frames into a pixel animation with Pixaki. It took much longer than I expected, but I’m pleased with the (very rough) result running on my Pixoo64 LED panel.

I can’t escape the thought that BlueSky verification is another nail in the coffin of anonymity, which can be legit. Those up to no good just use identity theft to get around this trend of spying on people.

Not sure why servicing the connection to the Internet by one’s provider requires an outage, but I did have one of those for somewhat less than an hour. It was announced, but I missed it. Still, why the required outage?

While it’s fun to run races, it’s the training to prepare for those race which takes up most of the time. It also takes a lot of time to make one’s own training schedule that is balanced, tough enough to improve (or maintain) one’s fitness, yet flexible enough to appear recovered at the race.

I’m happy I ditched Strava in time, with their AI cr!$p. Now they’ve bought Runna as well, another AI-powered service. I’m sure free users will be bombarded with “promotions” to join Strava, because, guess what, the customers have to pay for all of that. The general consensus is Strava’s AI is bad.

I finished my marathon in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Despite the worst preparation in years, I beat the time Runalyze predicted by more than 3 minuten. My official nett time was 4h42m48s (6:43 min/km, 10:48 min/mi). Especially after the 32 K mark it became exceedingly hard to keep running.

About task lists. Once I’ve finished a task, I’m done with it. I keep forgetting I’ll have to update the list constantly. This hasn’t changed since iOS 7 and before. I get no kick out of checking off items, and find it a bore.

I’ll be running a marathon on 13 April 2025. It almost didn’t happen because of injuries, which only healed a week ago. To celebrate in advance I made this jumble of legs, arms, and a confused head. Its animation lives on the Divoom community, where I became a master pixel artist, also this week.

Using Quick Poses I found a reference for a pose. After pixeling the nude I put some clothes on her to avoid flagging on the Divoom community. BTW, it wasn’t quick at all.

A larger piece, and Fate/Apocrypha fan art. I know I can do better, if I weren’t so out of practice. I also might have traced a little to get it done, after spending more than 12 hours on it today,

It’s been a while since I posted some pixel art on here, while I’ve been inundating the Divoom community with my creations, being mostly recommended by the staff. I don’t judge it high art, but I can see why they want to see more of it. Most don’t seem to post anything, or at best it’s low-effort.

Seen on my 8 km long walk today. This obelisk commemorates 75 years of independence of the Kingdom of the Netherlands on 17 November 1813.