Tag: Tech

Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements

Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements is a lovely online compendium of Henry T. Brown’s classic technical reference Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements. The classic illustrations (taken from a 1906 edition of the text) are just wonderful – as are the modern animated sequences that show the motions in question. My current favourite is No. 92 – better known to most as the mechanism used to drive a steam locomotive!

Retrieving the Time Machine Estimated Full Backup Size for MacOS Tahoe

Well, it’s been a little while since I last looked at sizing Time Machine backups on MacOS and, with MacOS 26 (‘Tahoe’), the magic incantation needed to pull that information out has changed.

Open up a terminal and enter the following…

log show --predicate 'subsystem == "com.apple.TimeMachine"' --info | grep "will be in backup of all sources"

…and this will print out a number of records from previous Time Machine sessions thus…

2025-11-17 08:59:01.989807+0000 0xdd79ec   Info        0x0                  27411  0    backupd: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:SizingProgress] Estimated a total of 3112764 files (13.52 TB) will be in backup of all sources
2025-11-17 09:54:37.554473+0000 0xde7d23   Info        0x0                  27411  0    backupd: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:SizingProgress] Estimated a total of 3113582 files (13.51 TB) will be in backup of all sources
2025-11-17 10:54:38.754477+0000 0xdfb366   Info        0x0                  27411  0    backupd: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:SizingProgress] Estimated a total of 3119251 files (13.51 TB) will be in backup of all sources
2025-11-17 11:54:25.417194+0000 0xe0dd3f   Info        0x0                  27411  0    backupd: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:SizingProgress] Estimated a total of 3123208 files (13.51 TB) will be in backup of all sources

New Old Stock IBM OS/2 Warp 3.0

Abort Retry Fail has a really nice post on opening and installing a new old stock Red Spine release of OS/2 Warp 3.0.

Now, while I’ve played around with OS/2 Warp 4.0 and 4.52 as part of Period Sites in Period Browsers, Warp 3.0 is not one I’ve yet reached.

And how uncanny it looks! Familiar but alien. Windows 3.1 but not. I should really get an instance of this up and running just so I can really feel – rather than just see – the differences between how I expect it to work and how it does work…

Anyway, I strongly suggest going and having a read of the article and a look at the pretty pictures.

ISS in Real Time

The ISS in Real Time is a fully interactive timeline of the ISS’s operation and is more than a little cool. They’ve managed to dig out all sorts of old footage and photos, crew manifests and daily schedules, and have put it all together in a pretty but usable interface. The flightpath widget is also a nice way of showing where the station was at any particular time.