So here’s something of an oddity; the Oxford English Dictionary thinks the word ‘Anglosphere’ is a mere thirty years old this month.
Happy 30th Birthday ‘Anglosphere’!
Tag: Geekery
Doomsday Machines
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.
Photographs – A Trip to The National Railway Museum
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
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.
Mastodon
I am – for the time being at least – now on the mastodon.social Mastodon instance as ‘@chrisrc‘.
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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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 reading “Getting Red Hat Linux 5.2 up and running on 86Box”Automatic 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 reading “WhoPlayer”