Apparently the hot new things is to train your A.I. on Reddit – something that doesn’t have a particularly great track record…
Linkspam: MIT fed an AI data from Reddit, and now it only thinks about murder
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Tag Archives: Tech
Linkspam: 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.
Retrieving the Time Machine Estimated Full Backup Size
Another handy little magic spell for MacOS Sonoma’s Time Machine tool is…
log show --predicate 'subsystem == "com.apple.TimeMachine"' --info | grep "Estimated full backup will"
…which – when entered into a suitable Terminal instance – will print out Time Machine’s recent estimates of the storage costs of a full backup…
2024-05-02 06:46:35.507588+0100 0x3c5be8 Info 0x0 291 0 backupd: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:SizingProgress] Estimated full backup will contain 3113124 files (8.91 TB) from all sources
2024-05-02 07:46:49.802454+0100 0x3cd657 Info 0x0 291 0 backupd: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:SizingProgress] Estimated full backup will contain 3113163 files (8.91 TB) from all sources
2024-05-02 08:46:57.526626+0100 0x3d611b Info 0x0 291 0 backupd: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:SizingProgress] Estimated full backup will contain 3113223 files (8.91 TB) from all sources
2024-05-02 09:47:03.731963+0100 0x3e04eb Info 0x0 291 0 backupd: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:SizingProgress] Estimated full backup will contain 3114585 files (8.91 TB) from all sources
2024-05-02 10:47:35.409635+0100 0x3ecb04 Info 0x0 291 0 backupd: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:SizingProgress] Estimated full backup will contain 3116304 files (8.91 TB) from all sourcesAll very useful when shopping for a new target disk of if your monitoring your storage growth.
Linkspam: The Man Who Killed Google Search
Ed Zitron’s polemic into the origins of Google Search’s increasingly visible rot is worth a read.
Mastodon
I am – for the time being at least – now on the mastodon.social Mastodon instance as ‘@chrisrc‘.
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 readingThe Strange Death of the Square Checkbox’d UI
This is a nice little potted history of the use of the square checkbox. It ends noting that Apple appears to have abandoned the use of the square checkbox and chosen to use an icon very similar to a radio button in their new VisionOS – which feels like a big step back in usability.
Period Sites with Period Browsers – Machines No. 99 and 100
I’ve just added two somewhat interesting machine/browser combinations to Period Sites in Period Browsers.
Machine 99 – Windows 98 RTM x86 with Grail 0.6
Grail 0.6 running on the release to manufacturing version of Windows 98. Grail 0.6 is interesting as it’s a cross platform browser written by Guido van Rossum in Python and uses the Tcl/Tk windowing toolkit for display. Was Windows 98 the ideal platform for Grail? Probably not, but it did run and it did pretty well with pre-millennial web pages…
Continue readingCounting Chrome Tabs on MacOS (Or, I have an open tabs problem!)
Another aide-mémoire; open Chrome tabs can, on MacOS, be counted via the following incantation. This particular incantation will pull the tab count from all open windows – minimised or otherwise – without the need to activate Chrome in any way.
osascript -e{'set text item delimiters to linefeed','tell app"google chrome"to url of tabs of windows as text'} | wc -lWhich, when run on my currently open set of tabs, comes back with a number slightly higher than 4,000.
Continue readingPimoroni Raspberry Pi 5 NVME Kit
So I picked up one of the Pimoroni Raspberry Pi 5 M.2 NVME kits. While there is supposed to be an official adapter coming from the Raspberry Pi foundation, the Pimoroni kit is well priced for what it claims to offer.
