A Little More Web Kipple
The Raspberry Pi 4 is out! And I’m not going to buy one because A) revision zero is buggered, B) the load this site produces on it’s current 3B+ host is functionally zero (so there’s very little point in upgrading it) and C) I’m currently far too busy to do any pottering around with one outside of that.
However other people have and they’ve started playing around with the new PCIe bus – even going as far as desoldering the USB controller and adding a PCIe riser.
Which is very neat indeed.
Look what I found in a West Midlands charity shop window…
I think I may have made a terrible mistake when I sold my old games. Who knew that a bunch of fairly mainstream titles would end up being worth so much?
Notes on films I’ve recently watched.
A medical drama with clear roots in The War Game, Threads and The Day After. Well filmed and well cast, it seems to loose confidence in the story it’s trying to tell when it diverges into a Chinese kidnap plot that neither explores the desperation that a village in China might feel or ratchets up the overall tension.
Rubbish! A mish-mash of ideas and themes and – quite possibly – scripts makes this a terrible sequel. The first – though a little wooden in places – understood the concept of the slow reveal and that, while human drama was a traditional element of a Godzilla movie, the drama was always wrapped around the actions of the monsters rather than the other way around.
Oddly enough, I think there was actually the hint of a good idea hidden under the layers of mess. The eco-terrorism angle had potential legs and could have led to a very nice Night Moves-with-giant-monsters concept. Perhaps that’s an idea who’s time has yet to come?
Continue reading “Recent Films”194.66.232.91 - - [01/Jul/2019:07:54:49 +0100] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 47 "-" "bl.uk_lddc_bot/3.3.0-LBS-2016-02 (+http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/legaldeposit/websites/websites/faqswebmaster/index.html)"
194.66.232.91 - - [01/Jul/2019:07:55:02 +0100] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 1851 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Unknown; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/538.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) PhantomJS/2.1.1 Safari/538.1 bl.uk_lddc_renderbot/2.0.0 (+ http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/legaldeposit/websites/websites/faqswebmaster/index.html)"
194.66.232.91 - - [01/Jul/2019:07:55:11 +0100] "GET /assets/main.css HTTP/1.1" 200 9924 "https://www.chrisrcook.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Unknown; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/538.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) PhantomJS/2.1.1 Safari/538.1 bl.uk_lddc_renderbot/2.0.0 (+ http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/legaldeposit/websites/websites/faqswebmaster/index.html)"
194.66.232.91 - - [01/Jul/2019:07:55:11 +0100] "GET /resources/images/home.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 382760 "https://www.chrisrcook.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Unknown; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/538.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) PhantomJS/2.1.1 Safari/538.1 bl.uk_lddc_renderbot/2.0.0 (+ http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/legaldeposit/websites/websites/faqswebmaster/index.html)"
This is kinda cool – this site seems to have made it as far as the UK Web Archive’s crawlers! Apparently I will now taint the web long after I’m gone.
There are also a couple of snapshots on Archive.org but they only exist because I was playing with their Wayback Machine website – alas, I have not yet to made it far enough up the list for them to visit of their own accord.
Oasis covering Slade’s ‘Cum On Feel the Noize”. I think it works rather well.
“In early versions of the Mouse program, you could enter the call sign of the AP bureau to which you wanted to connect.”
This is a funky little tale of a cub reporter and his TRS-80 back in the early days of computerised journalism.
Sorting through an old box of crap, I accidentally came across my ancient DVD of ‘28 Days Later’.
Ever-happy to put aside something I should actually be doing and procrastinate, I popped it on and spent the next two hours (ish) rewatching a film I’d not seen since I first bought the DVD back in autumn 2003 – some 16 long years ago.
Continue reading “16 Years Later: An (almost) review of ’28 Days Later’”A trailer for the new DOOM dropped at E3 yesterday and I have to say that I’m rather looking forward to it. I’ve played DOOM – in it’s various incarnations – since the mid-late 90s and, in a world where stories seem to be ever more complex, the simplicity of DOOM is a refreshing change.
It’s mindless escapism with black and white antagonists which, given my ever more limited gaming time, manages to strike a deeply appealing note to me.
Mac Open Web is an interesting little link for Apple users out there; it’s a curated web directory (remember those!) of open source and small developer software targeting the open/indie web with nothing from the big players and the major corporations.
I do hope that, as we push into the early 2020s, the slash-and-burn axis of facebook-twitter-reddit-google starts to weaken.
I have now managed to screw my Amazon Advertising Profile up so much I now receive adverts for ISDN Splitters!
ISDN? ISDN was old when I took my first job (a worryingly long time ago). It was, along with some older vampire tapped BNC, one of the first things I tore out and replaced with a more civilised solution.
I mean, I could understand someone with some new old stock and a huge warehouse quietly listing it in the hope that someone might buy it and that they wouldn’t end up paying for recycling, but to actively advertise ISDN kit? That takes both commitment and an up front cash payment.
Madness!
