Geekery – Page 6 – www.chrisrcook.com

The Now Obligatory DALL·E Mini Spam

Some DALL·E Mini spam. It’s a little late but… meh.

Clive Sinclair drawn by HR Giger

Maps – Early July 2022 Update

I’ve added another 1108 map images:

422 maps from Cardiganshire.
686 maps from Cornwall.

Cardiganshire

A rather colourful image of Aberystwyth circa 1887

Interesting places covered in Cardiganshire include: Aberystwyth, Lampeter, and Aberaeron.

Cornwall

…And St Michael’s Mount. Again circa 1887.

Interesting places covered in Cornwall include: St Ives, Lands End, and St. Michael’s Mount

More Maps.

I’ve adde a little more to the maps thing.

First, I’ve added 300 additional maps from the mid 1850s – including York, Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield and Hull.

And second, I’ve added a local Google Search box which should make it easier to find various maps and locations. This can be found here.

The National Library of Scotland has placed parts of it’s rather a nice collection of old maps online. It’s all very modern – slippy, google maps style pages abound – and predominantly released under permissive licences. It is not, however, easy to get a full map for reuse in a school report or similar.

So I’ve run up a little code, grabbed some of the maps and put them on a new sub-site here. These maps are licensed by the NLS (as opposed to being in the public domain) and this license has carried down to my derivative work. As of writing, there are only seven of them, but I have several hundred more ready to go up shortly and a block of several thousand more to go up at some point after that.

Phobos transiting the Sun as seen from the Martian Surface.

Headless RDP for Fun and Profit

This solution has been checked on Windows 2019 fully patched as-of spring 2022. Other Windows variations may require tweaks. Those on *nix-based platforms looking to create a headless connection to a Windows host should skip the Windows related initial instructions.

Why?

Some applications are just not suited to running as a Windows Services – indeed some applications, such as those which require a full Windows desktop context, cannot be run as a plain Windows Service. One of the possible ways to get around this limitation is to run them under a fully scripted remote desktop instance – the remote user receiving a standard Windows Desktop experience with all the pros and cons this entails – however the default client available on Windows does not allow such a headless connect. Fortunately, newer releases of Windows – including Windows 2019 and Windows 10 – are able to run several versions of Linux as applications.

Popping Caps

Fun!

Omniweb 4.5

Omniweb 4.5 – first released in August 2003 and, apparently, lost from the general web (or, at the very least, Google!) – can be found here. While the base URL isn’t an Omnigroup URL, it looks to be reasonably trustworthy as that particular file is linked to from the Omniweb 4.5 product page.

Anyway, in completely unrelated news, Omniweb 4.5 on OSX 10.3 comes to PSPB today!

Sending Chrome Tabs to get_iPlayer on MacOS via the Command Line.

It’s a pretty simple command line…

osascript -e{'set text item delimiters to linefeed','tell app"google chrome"to url of tabs of windows as text'} | grep -E 'www.bbc.co.uk/programme|www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode' | xargs -t -n1  get_iplayer --pid-recursive

Mini Motorway

Not Playing? Click to Start!

And, as the apocalypse continues to rumble ever onwards, I find myself with more than a little time to kill. Enter Mini Motorways – a deceptively difficult, minimalist strategy game about moving things from A to B.

Tag: Geekery