And here’s a rather nice pair of Doctor Who-themed adverts for the Prime Computer range of minicomputers. There are so fairly obvious hints that Tom Baker and Lalla Ward are phoning it in but the shoutout to their current – but brief – marriage is rather nice.
Tag: Geekery
Converting PDFs to JPEG sequences using imagemagick
Imagemagick (available from all good package managers) has the ability to split a .pdf file into a set of numbered images via the following incantation…
convert -quality 100 -density 200 -colorspace sRGB <PathToPDF> -flatten <PathToOutputDirectory/>Page-%02d.jpeg…where, of course, ‘%02d’ represents the auto-numbering element of the incantation.
The cost of a PDP-11 circa 1971
Whilst trying to track down the cost of memory for a PDP-11 I stumbled across The PDP-11 FAQ and it’s rather excellent collection of early 70s PDP-11 price lists. It’s a fun little list, rammed through of interesting little nuggets – today it’s hard to imaging it but in 1972 a line printer would have set you back at least 12,000 USD. That’s almost 92,000 USD in 2025 prices!
Continue reading “The cost of a PDP-11 circa 1971”A 27 Year Old Easter Egg
So apparently the firmware for a number of of the old PPC Macs had Easter Eggs embedded within them and, with the right combination of woo, you could get the firmware to spit these Easter Eggs out for you to view.
‘Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script’
Another aide-memoire so that I have the link kicking around…
There used to be a somewhat famous ThinkGeek teeshirt called ‘Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script’ that, even now, gets periodically referenced on the more tech-ish end of the internet. With ThinkGeek now lost to the mists of time, it’s not as easy to Google for as it used to be.
Prompt Theory
‘Magic’ and ‘More Magic’.
It’s an old one but, from the jargon files, A Story About Magic.
Your Name In Landsat
NASA’s ‘Your Name In Landsat‘ is neat; it attempts to spell your name – or any other word you provide – in land features from satellite imagery as recorded by the Landsat satellite network.
Continue reading “Your Name In Landsat”Vodafone using UK Mobile Network to Measure Rain
This is funky, the River Severn Partnership Advanced Wireless Innovation Region is using the Vodafone mobile phone network as a virtual rain sensor. ISPReview has a short introduction
Continue reading “Vodafone using UK Mobile Network to Measure Rain”Maps – Mid March 2025 Update
It’s time for another little update and this time it’s 238 Ordnance Survey maps of various towns and cities across North Yorkshire.
Interesting map sets include:
