Ed Zitron’s polemic into the origins of Google Search’s increasingly visible rot is worth a read.
The Man Who Killed Google Search
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Tag Archives: Tech
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.
NYMR’s LMS No. 5428 “Eric Treacy“ at Whitby, New Year’s Day 2024
LMS No. 5428 “Eric Treacy“ of the North Yorkshire Moors Railway leaving Whitby on New Year’s Day 2024.
And a few pictured before she left.
It also turns out that the North Yorkshire Moors Railway has a lovely 3D tour of 5428.
Period Sites in Period Browsers Machine Number 90 – Windows XP Home x86 with Amaya 6.0
It’s been a little while since I’ve posted about Period Sites in Period Browsers but, given I’ve just added my 90th combination of Operating System and Browser, it feels like a good time to flag it again.
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!