My current-thing-of-the-moment is ‘Doomsday Machines‘ by Alex Wellerstein of NukeMap/Nuclear Secrecy Blog fame. Fairly new, it looks at the post-apocalyptic world in both fact and fiction and, if you’re looking for a starting point, then I’d suggest ‘The end of The Road‘ – a look at Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and McCarthy’s own take on the themes of the novel.
It’s been a little while since I last added any photographs, however you can now find a selection of images from at May 2024 trip to The National Railway Museum here!
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.
I am – for the time being at least – now on the mastodon.social Mastodon instance as ‘@chrisrc‘.
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:
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Newcastle upon Tyne and Gateshead
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And Berwick upon Tweed and Tweedmouth
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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.
Continue readingIn the unlikely event that this is useful for someone else – an automatic logon for Fedora Core 5 can be set via editing /etc/gdm/custom.conf and setting the following values
[daemon]
AutomaticLoginEnable=True
AutomaticLogin=<Username>Go! Go and have fun automatically logging into your nearly 18 year old operating system!
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!
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….
Continue readingSo 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.