Posts by Chris Gray 1

The wild world of non-C operating systems

Re: Jupiter ACE

Jupiter ACE? I recall a Franklin ACE. I could be confusing old machines -its a long time ago. My CP/M modem program got transmogrified into "ACE Talk" or somesuch.

Re: What about Assembly Language?

I don't see any indication of intended humour, so I'll feed the troll...

APL is darn near the highest level of the programming languages from long ago. One character to multiply matrixes. (OT: I worked with Ken Iverson's nephew for a few years.)

I also wrote a RAM disk driver for CP/M. You do that by taking the assembler source to the existing disk driver for your system and modifying it as needed. I don't recall if the assembler source for the rest of the system was available from Digital Research or not.

Hackers weigh in on programming languages of choice

Hmmm

So, a language is successful if hackers use it?

Hacking is an activity with different requirements from other programming activity, so one would expect the language preferences to differ. Hacking, I expect (not something I've ever been interested in doing) involves quite a bit of file manipulation and command execution, so more "typical" programming languages wouldn't be terribly useful. Perhaps in the past Perl rated higher?

BBC points Russians to the Tor version of itself

Re: The nuke power station attack was not accidental

Did you read the article here on El Reg indicating that the fire has been put out, the plant folks had plenty of warning, there never was any serious issue, and there has been no release of radiation? The Russians probably want to shut the plant down to cause problems for Ukraine (apparantly it supplies 1/4 of their power). The simplest way to do that is to cause enough fuss that the Ukraine authorities shut it down themselves.

Ubuntu applies security fixes for all versions back to 14.04

Re: Don't use &&

Ok, now I'm *really* embarassed. Sigh. I don't do shell programming much. Heck, its even consistent with what the operators do in C programming (which I'm sure is quite deliberate).

Don't use &&

Since "&&" allows the processes to all run at the same time, methinks you *must* use ";" to separate them - you want them to run sequentially, not all at once. Even if there is some magic locking that is done, there is no guarantee which command starts first.

Jeff Bezos adds some more overheads to his $485m yacht by taking down historic bridge

Jumps?

And my thought was "The brits can buy real chocolate frogs?!?!" Can they jump out of train windows?

Alien life on Super-Earth can survive longer than us due to long-lasting protection from cosmic rays

Huh?

To quote the El Reg article:

"In other words, the cores Super-Earths need to be cooled to much lower temperatures before they solidify. Their larger-sized cores also mean they lose heat at a slower rate than Earth’s too."

But, the article also says that the higher pressure in super earths makes their iron melting point *higher*, meaning less cooling to reach solidifacation. The first sentence in the above has it backwards. Or am I missing something?

BeOS rebuild / Haiku has a new feature / that runs Windows apps

Re: "relatively modern programming language"

ELF is "Executable and Loadable Format" - its the file format of object files and libraries used on Linux and some other systems. It isn't an ABI. It isn't even an API.

Now, its certainly possible that that latest BeOS stuff does use a system call ABI much like Linux uses (which is distantly based on the SVR4 stuff, I believe), but my gut feel is that that would mean a number of interfaces had to change significantly (callbacks, auxilliary code, etc. done via expected methods and class members).

Multiple programs?

Er, why do you say that?

I just looked at the "installed files" for Wine here on my Ubuntu Mate system. Two binaries of about a Meg each ("wine64-preloader" and "wine64"). Plus dozens of shared libraries and a whack more things in a "fakedlls" directory, some named <xxx>.exe .

This *is* a quite old distribution.

Re: "relatively modern programming language"

I read about BeOS when it was first coming out. Sounded all good, until I got to the part where its OS ABI (Applications Binary Interface - a difference beast from an API) was based on the C++ object representations of the specific C++ compiler they used for it. Makes it painful for native code written in any other programming language.

Has that changed at all since then?

Apple custom chip guru jumps ship to rejoin Intel

ARM, RISC-V

"Client SOC Architecture". I wonder what his NDAs are like? Could he be targetted at doing something at Intel that is quite similar to what he did at Apple? I doubt he would be terribly interested in diving into X86-64 stuff (no-one wants to do that!), unless it is at an architecture-independent level. Intel have announced they will be doing SOC's based on ARM and RISC-V, so those, or general stuff, is my guess. (See "Integrated Device Manufacturing", IDM 2.0)

Alexa and Webex to hitch a ride around the Moon on Artemis I – what could possibly go wrong?

Discovery

Clearly our esteemed editor is not up on Star Trek: Discovery's latest antics. :-) (See Zora)

What a bunch of bricks: Crooks knock hole in toyshop wall, flee with €35k Lego haul

They sort-of do

Go to the Lego website and click on "Pick a Brick".

Prices there are high, it doesn't include all in-stock parts, and it doesn't include out-of-stock parts, but it satisifies many needs if you don't want to use Bricklink or BrickOwl.

And of course, if you are missing a part or two from a recent set, just ask nicely and they will send you replacements.

Re: Lego is surprisingly valuable

Yep, take a look at bricklink.com

Now owned by Lego, but still quite independent. Hundreds of Lego repackers all over the world. Some specialize, others have huge stocks, etc.

A friend of mine is one such seller. There was a recent Walmart sale of "sets" which are just lots of bricks of various sizes, shapes and colour. He got 50, and they are now here for me to sort the 75,000 parts, for his Bricklink store. It's going to take a fair while - my guess is one of the 11 different bags of pieces per week, roughly. He would do it *much* faster, but I've got computer work to do, and he's got lots of regular sets to sort.

Everything but the catch: '90s pop act or a successful mission for Rocket Lab?

Simples

The helicopter they use is actually a giant, genetically modified Eagle. It flips over onto its back, grabs the booster with its claws, then flips back the right way up for the actual return, resuming its helicopter disguise as it does so.

Keep calm and learn Rust: We'll be seeing a lot more of the language in Linux very soon

Re: Any good docs?

That worked great - the PDF is now on my Kindle. Thank you very much!

Re: Any good docs?

Thanks - I tried. In my upper-right corner I just get a link to Git for the doc sources. If I try the browser's print function, I only get the one page, as expected.

So, I went and got my old Kindle (the original "Kindle Keyboard"). The web browser is under "Experimental", but it had bookmarks for Wikipedia, Google, etc. None work. The only pages I could load with it are some very old straight HTTP pages. Errors it shows suggest that it can't do HTTPS. Oh well, thanks anyway.

Re: Any good docs?

Sorry, I forgot that I had gone there. I don't live in a browser - my eyes weird out with a white background (like I see now). I want something I can put on my Kindle and read in an easy chair. I guess I *could* try the Kindle's ancient web browser, but I'm not holding my breath that that would work. I was looking for a PDF (likely a .docx would be *huge*).

Any good docs?

I'm a language developer and compiler writer (both professional and as a hobby). Strange, I know. Anyway, I'd like to get good documentation of the Rust language (and maybe standard libraries, and some tutorial stuff). From what I've seen, the official way to do that seems to be to install the whole Rust distribution. I won't do that, except perhaps in a virtual machine, since my current language/compiler project needs my current setup. I found one free book for my Amazon Kindle, but it is very bad (not proof-read, mostly cut-n-paste, too much on crates, etc.) Anyone know where to find proper docs? Or, can they be legally extracted from the Rust distribution?

Juno what? Jupiter's Great Red Spot is much deeper than originally thought

Stargates!

Given that the vortices now appear to be quite deep, do we really know that they aren't exactly like the ones that form in our bathtubs as they drain? Would a relatively small loss of atmosphere be noticeable? Has anyone tracked Jupiter's mass over time? Do we really know that there aren't a bunch of locked-open stargates down there?

Get ready for full holograms and 6G while living in the metaverse, says Samsung

I'm pessimistic

AI/ML as we know it could be useful in choosing how and where to send packets. However, the number of levels in the AI model will directly influence the latency of that decision, as will typical overhead processing, and simple semiconductor switching time. As a user moves around in a big city, they will be approaching, passing, and departing access points/antennae, hence those decisions will have to be made quite frequently. If you are streaming 3D hi-res VR needing that Terabyte per second, can you really do that without hiccoughs? With lots of buffering, you might, but then you won't be in real-time - there will be time deltas among people who are physically close, simply because the routing decisions for them differed. For people far apart, e.g. continents apart, those deltas could be very noticeable - simple speed-of-light will ensure that.

Its all a nice dream, but I expect physics will get in the way.

Oh, and how is your reliability? My understanding is that as semiconductor feature size decreases, overall reliability, especially over the long term, decreases. 10 times as many transistors of 1/10 the size will get, what - 100 times more observable bit corruptions?

REvil gang member identified living luxury lifestyle in Russia, says German media

Re: Almost as bad a crime...

I tripped over "combing". That's what you're supposed to do with your hair. He used it as short for "combining". Either that or its a typo.

Apple's Safari browser runs the risk of becoming the new Internet Explorer – holding the web back for everyone

An example

A perfect example of this is the official government of Canada weather web page (weather.gc.ca). For years it worked just fine. Had a button for radar maps, which came up and didn't change other than when they had to wait for radar data to fill in the space.

A year or two ago they started messing with it. They have continued to make it worse.

Now, it bounces around two times before stabilizing (I suspect async stuff, and the actual data arriving after the basic web page is shown).

I once tried it on my old Android phone. The weather radar stuff was slow to load. I scrolled around to try to find actual radar imagery, and it let me scroll to places 1000 miles away. Eventually I realized that its another async monstrosity - I should have simply waited after the page first came up, hoping to see local radar data. Only when it was done should I have tried scrolling the page to center the radar imagery. Ick.

Ubuntu 21.10: Plan to do yourself an Indri? Here's what's inside... including a bit of GNOME schooling

Re: Sounds bad

Thanks for explaining the Activity View. An overblow version of a 1cm x 3cm area that I have on Mate's panel. :-)

I actually did know what workspaces are - as you say, four seemed to be standard, so I've seen that. As soon as I knew how, I shrank it to just one, of course.

As I mentioned in my diatribe, I don't really do multiple things at one time, so have no use for workspaces. I also don't use a web browser as much more than entertainment, so I don't generally have busy ones with lots of tabs. Firefox starts up in under a second, and then clicking on the vulture icon takes another < second, so I have no reason to keep one running.

I fully understand that other folks have different work requirements - I just like to know that my particular desires continue to be catered to.

Off to Emacs now to extract my memory dump code into a utility routine...

Sounds bad

What is an "Activity View"? I'm thinking its not something I want. I've never used multiple workspaces, so hopefully all that stuff for them will just vanish 100% from the screen.

I've been an Ubuntu user for many years. I spend much of my day sitting here, programming, testing, debugging. My screen is a 1920 x 1080 monitor rotated to portrait mode. I have two permanent xterm windows - one on the left where I run stuff, do email with Alpine, etc. The one on the right runs mouseless Gnu Emacs. There I do my editing, compiling, etc. That leaves a bit of space on the right where I have Mate's panel. It has icons for a few status indicators, common program launchers (e.g. Firefox), and my active programs.

I have an incredibly poor memory, so don't even try to remember key combos or mouse waves. I have no interest in the system scanning my stuff, so turn off the thing that nightly scans drives and builds an index. I start programs from menus or commands, not from some goofy "search" thing.

Tried KUbuntu for a while a few years back. Hated the "Peanut" thing I couldn't get rid of - never even understood what it was for. Couldn't understand their complicated settings filters, etc. Settled on Ubuntu Mate - comes with customizable menus which remind me what the weird names of needed-but-not-commonly-used programs are. So, will there be something usable for me, or am I doomed to continual frustration and annoyance?

Computer scientists at University of Edinburgh contemplate courses without 'Alice' and 'Bob'

Totally American

For testing purposes, I've used the same set of names for a *long* time, and am unlikely to change:

Fred Flintstone

Wilma Flintstone

Pebbles Flintstone

Dino

Barney Rubble

Betty Rubble

Bam-Bam Rubble

Often without the family names.

Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram deplatform themselves: Services down globally

Re: Scuttlebutt in the tech community on twitter is that it's a BGP issue.

If so, the problem has spread somewhat. Here in Western Canada on Shaw cable, there were temporary issues for a few minutes - couldn't get to the government weather site, Slashdot or El Reg. I actually had to do some work!

Hmm. I'd report my lunch too, but since I've never used Facebook, other than when I could follow links to pics, I guess that would be wrong.

Calculating the big picture: Future HPC efforts will soon see off its von Neumann past

Re: A but no I

No, I don't mean a generalist AI. With current approaches that would be quite ambitious, since likely you would have to merge *many* different AI datasets, likely running several different ways (number of layers, specific details of processing, etc.) Either that or figure out how to classify situations to feed questions into, and get answer from, those many independent sub-AI's. But, those problems can be solved by a couple more AI's, right?

Because these number-based AI systems cannot guarantee that their answer is correct, they are, to my mind, not as good as programmed solutions which *can* guarantee correctness within their domain. I want those guarantees for something which is to replace human brains at tasks of critical importance. What good is an answer that is perhaps even more wrong, but in a way that a human supervisor might not even recognize?

I had forgotten about AlphaGo, but note that it also is a relatively small domain. It is also a domain which *can* be done completely accurately with straight computation. As in the example of three-body problems, the numeric approach can be used as a pointer to a possible solution, but I would want that solution validated using the actual rules (whether they be the game rules of Go or the rules of gravitation, inertia, etc.)

I agree with your thought about this stuff yielding a more "alien" intelligence if it is pushed far enough. But, do you want critical decisions about your life made by such an intelligence, with no human oversight?

A but no I

As AC mentioned, the current "AI" is Artificial to be sure, but is not Intelligent. It's statistical pattern matching. It can produce good results in some areas. But, answers it produces cannot be guaranteed to be correct. We've all read of examples of "AI" producing ridiculous answers because of unnoticed problems in training data.

An example of something with computers that actually has a kind of understanding is Terry Winograd's blocks world, from decades ago. But, that kind of understanding requires lots of work to create, and is infeasable for more than a limited domain. Current "AI" is usually only valid in a limited domain as well, and with it, you usually can't find out *why* it makes a "decision". There has been a bit of work on that recently.

Now, it is true that we don't really know how the human brain (which we grant the label "intelligent") reaches its decisions either. And it can be just as fooled/deluded by false or misleading input. So, how is the current "AI" any worse? For one, the human brain typically has a far far wider set of inputs ("experience"), and so has better "understanding", whatever that is.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I have no confidence in turning over anything important to an "AI" system that might be almost as good as a human brain. If I'm to turn over something important to computers, I want them to be much *better* than humans at whatever that task is. I am sceptical that current "AI" can ever achieve that. Note that areas where computers are already better than humans, e.g. chess playing, are very limited domains, and don't rely on statistical pattern matching.

The Register speaks to one of the designers behind the latest Lego Ideas marvel: A clockwork solar system

Supported

I just went and supported this. I don't buy many Lego sets anymore, but this one is a must.

I see comments here that range from "Lego will make more specialty pieces" to "It's not accurate enough" (paraphrased). Well, given that the pair built an actual version, clearly it can be done with the current range of Lego pieces.

I would guess that to do this properly, Lego would have to produce the balls for the planets and the sun with painted-on detailing. You can't do that with decals. If they have to do that anyway, they *might* introduce a new ball size, but that would involve creating a new mold, and they likely wouldn't do that unless other upcoming sets could make use of similar pieces.

I wonder what the gear count is - looks pretty high, from the video.

US Air Force puts Godzilla in charge of autonomous warfare effort with Project Kaiju

Names Matter!

Hey, my copy of "Gamera vs Barugon" spells it with a "U", not an "A". Damn military can't get anything right!

100 minues, copyright 1965, "the second entry in the Dajei Studios' monster series"

I suppose its possible that whoever designed the disk cover is the one who got it worng.

....

Oooooh. Checking Wikipedia ... Baragon "Not to be confused with Barragon or Gamera vs. Barugon." Sigh.

Compromise reached as Linux kernel community protests about treating compiler warnings as errors

Not so simple

Some points and examples from an active compiler writer...

Take a look at the system include files on Linux. Huge amounts of conditional compilation, special-use macros, etc. Even finding where a given struct is defined can be quite hard, and some of them will have multiple definitions, depending on CPU, SysV versus ATT, Linux versus BSD versus HPUX versus AIX, etc. etc. I bow to the folks who maintain that stuff - its not something most programmers are capable of. Doing it all without inducing warnings in any circumstance has to be exceedingly difficult.

Distinguishing between development build and production build makes sense to me. Most of my source files are not dependent on stdio, so I don't include stdio.h or stdlib.h - just my own headers, and maybe string.h, typically. But, when chasing some kinds of problems, I need to have debug output, and that is simplest using printf. So, I can get reams of warnings from the compiler about those uses. I'm used to them. When I've found the problem and am checking in sources, all of those printfs will have been deleted.

I've put some warnings into my compiler that many don't have, e.g. dealing with uses of constant expressions having no effect. But, I want to be consistent in my usage. So, for some data sizes and the higher warning levels, I get warnings. So, I've added the ability to temporarily lower the warning level around a bit of code, then restore it after that code. Comments mandatory there, of course. I imagine similar things can happen with other compilers and languages.

So, I don't have -Werror, but I do have -Wall. And note that, annoyingly, -Wall with gcc does not enable *all* warnings. I haven't looked at them for a while, but mine are currently:

-Wall -Wpointer-arith -Wstrict-prototypes -Winline \

-Wundef -fno-exceptions -MMD -funsigned-char -fno-strict-aliasing \

-Wstrict-aliasing -fshort-enums -Wno-char-subscripts

Apple is about to start scanning iPhone users' devices for banned content, professor warns

Bandwidth!

I don't own any Apple devices (surprisingly, I'm OK with the walled garden, but can't afford them and since I run Linux, which has poor support for getting images out...), and it now looks like I never will.

My current cell-phone is an 8-year old Samsung S4, and my data plan is tiny by most standards. Any attempt by Google to do this sort of thing will result in me going back to a "feature phone", for purely financial reasons.

What to do with our leftover Saturn V Lego? Why, build another rocket, of course

Re: A typewriter ? Really ?

Out of interest, I went to see what new parts the set has (parts that appear only in the typewriter set, possibly only in that set in a specific colour). Look for the "NEW" here:

https://www.bricklink.com/catalogItemInv.asp?S=21327-1

The sticker sheet is new. Big surprise. All of the keycaps are new. That would be the biggest expense in producing that set. No other part is unique to that set, but the curvy pieces used on the top front are new in the "sand green" colour. A couple of others first appeared in the set in a particular colour, but are also used elsewhere.

For example, the 1x1 brick with axle hole is new in its colours, but it is in no way a special piece. The Technic folks will like it - it will fit in places where the 1x2 brick with axle hole won't, and it aligns the axle on a stud boundary instead of a half-stud boundary.

Re: A typewriter ? Really ?

A friend of mine is a Bricklink seller. His comment is that he will likely get a few copies of the typewriter set for the parts to sell in his store. True Lego builders can find strange uses for virtually any part, quite different from its use in any Lego set.

I bought the set myself. The final product looks good, and has some quite interesting Technic mechanisms within it. The build is a tricky one - I don't recommend it for beginners.

And no, it is not a working typewriter, but the carriage moves when you press a key, and a ratchet mechanism is used to load the springs that move the carriage. And you can load paper into the roller mechanism.

Giant Tesla battery providing explosion in renewable energy – not as intended

Re: It's not online yet

I hope everyone understands that the above is a humorous reply, and not to be taken seriously. Follow the link instead.

11-year-old graduate announces plans to achieve immortality by 'replacing body parts with mechanical parts'

That would be a handfull.

Dell SupportAssist contained RCE flaw allowing miscreants to remotely reflash your BIOS with code of their creation

Optional

Hmm. My Dell 2000 from 2013 seems to be too old to be vulnerable. F2 brings up something quite different from what the info on the Dell site says. Oh well, due to paranoia, I never have networking on while it is booting. At least, the cable isn't plugged in, and I very rarely use it with Wifi (it's a foot from the router), so that's turned off at the Ubuntu Mate level. It still has Windows 8.1 on it, which I haven't deliberately booted for a couple of years, and which I never let onto the internet. Paranoid? Me? Dang Windows rewrites the boot order stuff on every boot, whereas Linux only does it on an install, so I have to be quick with the F-key that changes boot order...

BadAlloc: Microsoft looked at memory allocation code in tons of devices and found this one common security flaw

Re: Need trapping

The description in volume 3 of the AMD64 architecture programmer's manual:

Using this instruction in 64-bit mode generates an invalid-opcode exception.

So, no go. They also removed the range-check instruction. Sigh.

Need trapping

The CPU vendors really, really need to have variants of things like integral add, sub, multiply that trap on overflow/underflow. Of course they need non-trapping versions too. If a language designer wants to detect trapping, they have to do multiple instructions to do it. Typically, the overflow *is* detected by the hardware, and sets the overflow condition code bit. Even a "trap on overflow" would be sooo useful. Some have them, I believe, so good on them.

There seems to be a rush to Rust for programming. Does it have trapping arithmetic operations?

Lego's Space Shuttle Discovery: No trouble with Hubble, but the stickers will drive a grown man to insanity

Re: Lego Technic 8480

Yes, it is very nice. I haven't put mine together for some time - perhaps it is getting time to do so again. It's another of the wonderful sets with an electric motor and a transmission with a "gearshift" to control what is getting powered. Plus the lever that raises and lowers all of the landing gear together. And, it uses one of the fairly rare "micro motors" to allow opening/closing of the solar panels on the satellite, as it is attached to the Canadarm. Others may prefer the pulsing light coming from the exhausts, courtesy of some optical tubing and a powered distributor.

There *are* some available on Bricklink, if you care to spend the money:

https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?S=8480-1#T=S&O={%22iconly%22:0}

Sitting comfortably? Then it's probably time to patch, as critical flaw uncovered in npm's netmask package

ancient history

I believe the leading-zero-for-octal convention came from early DEC assemblers. Since the first C compiler was for DEC machines, and it generated assembler output, having C use the same convention was the obvious choice.

In my programming languages (weird hobby), I've used 0b => binary, 0o => octal, 0x => hexadecimal, with no leading zero defaulting to decimal. And sometimes 0t => decimal. I like things explicit.

Some early assemblers/languages also used tags at the *end* of numbers to indicate the base. So, you could have 13ah. I'm guessing that that was done rather than a leading "h" so that numbers and identifiers were easily distinguished. See early Fortran, I believe.

Smart doorbells on business premises make your property more attractive to burglars, warns researcher

Geeks too!

Well, the home might not contain a lot of stuff that is of normal value to burglars, but instead contain a bunch of geek gadgets. A friend of mine likes this type of thing (can't remember if he actually bought electronic locks or not), and has bought lots of tools and gizmos. I don't think his place has much in the way of normal expensive stuff like fancy stereos, jewelry, keys to fancy cars, etc. Actually I don't think it has *ANY* of that sort of thing....

And yes, I do realize he is in a small minority of buyers for this sort of thing.

Excel-lent: Microsoft debuts low-code Power Fx language... but it is not really new

Poor Code!

Note the "if <condition> = true". Sigh.

Chrome 89 beta: Google presses on with 'advanced hardware interactions' that Mozilla, Apple see as harmful

Good on 'em

I for one will continue to support Mozilla and Firefox in this.

The web, as Google sees it, is intended to be unsafe (from the user's point of view) and to provide Google with the maximum access to user information and the user's hardware. That's how they make most of their money, after all.

Uncle Sam passes comms act that sets aside $750m for the development of OpenRAN

description, please

I know El Reg had at least one article about openRAN before, but this is an entire article about it that provides no definition of what it is. Not even what the acronymic name is short for.

It took me a couple minutes on Wikipedia to learn that "RAN" is Radio Access Network.

And then:

OpenRAN — enabling open ecosystem of GPP-based RAN solutions, chaired by Andrew Dunkin (Vodafone) and Adnan Boustany (Intel).

GPP: well, 3GPP is 3rd Generation Partnership Program - relating to LTE.......

New lawsuit: Why do Android phones mysteriously exchange 260MB a month with Google via cellular data when they're not even in use?

Re: Yikes!

Well, without the "Google" one, I can't do voice input for texts, and likely anything. Turned that back on for now.

Yikes!

My limit (before I pay extra) is 300 MB/month. The amount consumed by the Google stuff has skyrocketed in the last few months. My total usage is now getting disturbingly close to the limit. I have disabled network access to many apps, but the biggies so far this month are Google Play services, Google and Google Play Store, in that order. Android OS is down a bit later. Hmm. Why has "Setup Wizard" used 2.26KB? My phone is 7+ years old! I likely *can't* disable access to those top 3. ... Well, it did let me restrict all 3 to WiFi only, so maybe I'm safe! But..., I'll have to see if I still get notified of incoming gmails and emails.

We bought a knockoff Lego launchpad kit from China for our Saturn V rocket so you don't have to

Re: I have been a LEGO fan since I was born

I've only been a Lego fan since 2000. Hasn't stopped me filling my living room, however.

Pascal, try looking at different sets. E.g. the long running "Modular buildings" sets. They are loaded with regular parts that are easy to re-use, but are more interesting than plain bricks. E.g. bricks with mortar patterns, different colours, different kinds of connectors and decorations.

Sure, I've accumulated some specialty pieces I don't want - some of those eventually do get used, or I can trade them with other local Lego AFOLs (Adult Fan Of Lego). E.g. white partial cylinders I've used for a group of 4 white tanker train cars.

Another group of sets worthy of collection (at least by me) is the "Winter Village" sets, which are Christmas themed. This year's is the "Elf Clubhouse". These sets also have lots of useful pieces, although they do tend to like to use the little light bricks.

Some of our local fans *prefer* the stranger pieces for their own constructions. We have several who are huge Star Wars fans gobble up many that Lego produces. One of them has been slowing increasing in size his custom spaceship - made harder by him choosing to do it in yellow!