Linkspam: Starring the Computer

Starring the Computer is a fun – if somewhat geeky – site recording the use of various computers in films and television. As long with the usual suspects – such as the Apple Macintosh SE and the Commodore 64 – they have some more obscure devices, such as the Thinking Machines CM-1 pictured below. It is really worth a look.

The Thinking Machines CM-1 in The Fly, looking like a super-computer should look.

Maps – The Early April 2024 Update

It’s been a little while since I’ve done one of these but… here are 511 additional map images of Northumberland (using the old Meridian) from the Ordnance Survey Maps – Six-inch England and Wales, 1842-1952 series.

Interesting places covered this update include:

Holy Island

Newcastle upon Tyne and Gateshead

And Berwick upon Tweed and Tweedmouth

Getting Red Hat Linux 5.2 up and running on 86Box

A somewhat oddly rendered Feb 2024 google.com in Netscape 4 on Red Hat Linux 5.2. I suppose we’re lucky a 26 old browser can access google at all..!

Introduction

One of my longer-running goals for Period Sites in Period Browsers was to include a good number of non-Windows hosted web browsers and the first stage in that is the creation of a functioning instance of the operating system hosted within an easily managed virtual machine. Unfortunately, whenever I’ve tried to install premillennial versions of linux within QEMU, I have categorically failed.

And, given the lack of guides on the internet, I’m not the only one.

In this guide we’re going to install and configure a working (albeit non-perfect) version of 1998’s Red Hat Linux 5.2. By the end of this guide we will produce a Red Hat Linux 5.2 install with a working network connection and functioning XWindows/Desktop environment.

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Grabbing just the original files from Internet Archive objects

Time for another little magic spell that I need to jot down before I forget it. And this time for the Internet Archive’s command line tools.

Occasionally you’ll want to grab an object but you won’t want any of the Internet Archive-derived products. This can be done via…

ia download --source=original <object name>

And there you go – a whole bunch of bandwidth and disk saved!

WhoPlayer

As has been more than adequately commented on elsewhere, almost* all of the existent Doctor Who library has hit iPlayer – with the classic episodes, when queried by get_iplayer, reporting an expiry date of 2028-11-01T05:59:00+00:00. So that’s plenty of time to be thoroughly overwhelmed by choice!

*except for An Unearthly Child as – apparently – the writer’s son has issues….

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Raspberry Pi 5

So it looks like my Raspberry Pi 5 pre-order is about to ship via Pimoroni.

I’ve managed to snag an 8GB model along with the official power supply and the new fan-assisted case. When it comes to the latter, it’ll be interesting to see just how loud and obnoxious the fan actually is.

And, of course, just how much dust it collects before I get around to playing with it.