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Tag Archives: Geekery
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:
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Newcastle upon Tyne and Gateshead
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And Berwick upon Tweed and Tweedmouth
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Getting Red Hat Linux 5.2 up and running on 86Box
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.
Continue readingAutomatic Logon for Fedora Core 5
In 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!
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….
Continue readingRaspberry 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.
A copy of a copy of a copy of a copy…
Another little YouTube find – the old BBC 2 Firecracker Ident, except every time a firecracker goes off the video suffers from VHS generation loss.
Losslessly Joining JPEGs with JPEGTran
The Introduction
On occasion, you may find that you need to join – or tile – two or more JPEG images into a single image and that you need to do so without the usual JPEG degradation that comes from saving an edited JPEG again and again and again. Fortunately, under some circumstances, there is a solution – JPEGTran from the Independent JPEG Group.
The Images
Our sample images are two tiles taken from The Map Project – in this case map Yorkshire Sheet CLXXIV.SW, a 1950s map of south-west York in the United Kingdom.
Aliens
Very true.