Tech – www.chrisrcook.com

Building QEMU 10.0 on Raspberry Pi OS

Introduction

And so it came to pass that QEMU – a dependancy for ‘Period Sites in Period Browsers‘ – moved from version 9.0 to 10.0.

Netscape Navigator User Demographics circa 1996

So this lunchtime Period Sites in Period Browsers (PSPB) threw up an interesting bit of history – a brief overview of Netscape Navigator users circa 1996.

A Macintosh Independence Day

I’ve started to develop a fondness for these older computer adverts. This ‘Apple/Independence Day’ tie-in ad – from the dark days of 1996 when Apple was on the cusp of bankruptcy and Jobs was yet to return – feels comfortingly of that moment.

The Doctor Shops for a Minicomputer…

And here’s a rather nice pair of Doctor Who-themed adverts for the Prime Computer range of minicomputers. There are so fairly obvious hints that Tom Baker and Lalla Ward are phoning it in but the shoutout to their current – but brief – marriage is rather nice.

Converting PDFs to JPEG sequences using imagemagick

Imagemagick (available from all good package managers) has the ability to split a .pdf file into a set of numbered images via the following incantation…

convert -quality 100 -density 200 -colorspace sRGB <PathToPDF> -flatten <PathToOutputDirectory/>Page-%02d.jpeg

…where, of course, ‘%02d’ represents the auto-numbering element of the incantation.

The old MS Mac Lab

A 27 Year Old Easter Egg

So apparently the firmware for a number of of the old PPC Macs had Easter Eggs embedded within them and, with the right combination of woo, you could get the firmware to spit these Easter Eggs out for you to view.

‘Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script’

Another aide-memoire so that I have the link kicking around…

There used to be a somewhat famous ThinkGeek teeshirt called ‘Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script’ that, even now, gets periodically referenced on the more tech-ish end of the internet. With ThinkGeek now lost to the mists of time, it’s not as easy to Google for as it used to be.