cat /proc/cpuinfo for an Intel NUC7PJYH NUC kit running Kubuntu 21.10.
Continue readingCategory Archives: Tech
Dot Zip Domains Considered Harmful
So… it appears that Google, in their infinite wisdom stupidity, has bought and launched the top level domain ‘zip’ and thus introduced such wonderful domains as ‘https://details.zip’, ‘http://taxforms.zip’ or, as you can see below, ‘https://financialstatement.zip‘. And thus possibly confusing everyone, for ever, all of the time.
But Google is not alone in partaking in this stupidity. ICANN, who should have been on the ball and who already had rules about homophones in UTF domains, seem to have let this slip though without a single thought.
The damned fools.
Apple Digital Sales
Apple’s European DSA Recipients of Services Report (Archive.org) turned up in my RSS feed and it has some quite shockingly low numbers! Whilst personally I prefer a real book over an e-book, I was very surprised to find that Apple has less than 1 million monthly e-book purchasers across the entire EU! And the tvOS and watchOS user base feels incredibly low as well!
Retro Directory
Retro Directory is a listing of retro computing orgs, museums, podcasts and youtube channels. I knew about a few of these but most are a complete surprise to me!
My own little bit of retro computingness can be found at Period Sites in Period Browsers.
More DALL-E
Yes! Yet more DALL-E spam!
A Giant Duck Menacing 1950s London
The top left duck appears to be constipated. The bottom right appears to be nesting within the product of its destruction.
Continue readingBuilding QEMU 7.0 on Raspberry Pi OS
***NEW: Building QEMU 8.0 on Raspberry Pi OS***
The Introduction
And spring 2022 brings us another major release of QEMU – in this case, QEMU 7.0, available in all of its tar.xz’d loveliness directly from qemu.org.
Whilst the Raspberry Pi OS‘s package repository remains the fastest, simplest way to get QEMU onto your Pi, Pi OS’s Debian lineage often leaves it trailing the cutting edge – in the case of QEMU, the packaged release for Raspberry Pi OS (version 2022-04-04) is version 5.2 from way back in December 2020.
Fortunately, QEMU is fairly easy to download and compile ourselves.
Continue readingDALL-E Verses DALL-E Mini
And, shortly after my last DALL-E related post, I finally got access to the full product!
And what better way to start off with the full-fat version than by running the same requests as my last post and comparing the outputs.
Clive Sinclair drawn by HR Giger
Continue readingThe Now Obligatory DALL·E Mini Spam
Some DALL·E Mini spam. It’s a little late but… meh.
Clive Sinclair drawn by HR Giger
Continue readingLeaking Pipes with Swift and External Executables
Observed with MacOS 12.4/Xcode 13.4.1/Swift 5
There are quite a lot of tutorials out there covering the basics of running external executables from within Swift and, with very little effort, it’s quite easy to throw together something like this…
import Foundation
let wrappedUname = Process()
wrappedUname.executableURL = URL(fileURLWithPath: "/usr/bin/uname")
wrappedUname.arguments = ["-v"]
let unameOutputPipe = Pipe()
let unameErrorPipe = Pipe()
wrappedUname.standardOutput = unameOutputPipe
wrappedUname.standardError = unameErrorPipe
do{
try wrappedUname.run()
} catch {
print("Unexpected error: \(error).")
}
wrappedUname.waitUntilExit()
let unameOutput = String(decoding: unameOutputPipe.fileHandleForReading.readDataToEndOfFile(), as: UTF8.self)
let unameError = String(decoding: unameOutputPipe.fileHandleForReading.readDataToEndOfFile(), as: UTF8.self)
print("Output: " + unameOutput)
print("Error: " + unameError)
Continue reading MacOS Updates Are Getting Slower
With 30 minutes to prepare and another 25 minutes to actually perform this mere point update (12.3 > 12.4), what – exactly – is a relatively modern Macbook Pro that’s capable of of writing to it’s boot disk at 2.2GB/s+ doing when it upgrades?