ahonhn

I have on my bookshelf an unopened and still shrink-wrapped copy of Spaceward Ho! (Win 95 version IV requiring at least a 486/33). I like its bold red colour and the exciting way the unseen floppy disk and manual rattle about inside when I turn the box!

I should very much like to watch the Tom Baker seasons again, Sadly, I can see only the 1965 season 3 videos on the channel. The Shada link (and presumably all the rest of it) are "The uploader has not made this video available in your country" :-(

Computers ruining lives with wrong or misleading output has always been a thing, consider e.g. the Post Office scandal in the UK or Robodebt in Australia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme

It seems to me that most people regard computers as some kind of infallible truth machine. If told its spewing garbage they're more likely to double down and shoot the messenger than try and get it sorted out.

But wouldn't the text it generates reflect such motivations and emotions that were present in the training data?

Decades later I still have better muscle memory for the Beeb's typical ZX*? ( and ELITE's SX<> ) than I do for WASD or arrow keys.

A HN audience is so sure to parse "WA" as Washington state that leaving it in the title would be misleading with every second response along the lines of "I only clicked because I thought it was Washington".

Should it be expanded to "Aussie"? (since "West Australian", "Australian", "Sandgroper", or "Doubleyooalien drivers" doesn't fit the title field).

I reckon the location is secondary and the interesting part is about technology enabling universal and intrusive enforcement of easy to break rules that were previously difficult to enforce absolutely.

Such rules tend to have rather draconian 'example making' penalties attached to them because of that.

Is AI camera enforcement 'not a problem' in Honduras or Washington State because they don't use them there yet? Is seeing how it pans out somewhere else first of no interest to them?

This mention of verbs reminds me of Steve Yegge's blog post "Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns" from 2006.

https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdo...

I am happy to anthropomorphise a rock with googly eyes. It is when the rock with googly eyes starts to anthropomorphise itself that I get creeped out.

I often remember something I posted and wish nobody had ever seen it.

I stopped using a mouse when I moved from desktop to laptop computer because I found the touchpad is so much more convenient for keeping my hand near the keyboard. However, doing this for over 20 years means I'm now very stuck in my habit of needing touchpads with real buttons. All my attempts to get used to the awful buttonless modern touchpads have been an absolute nightmare so far :-(

Common practice was to increment line numbers by 10 instead of 1. Would give a bit of wiggle room to add more lines in later without having to renumber everything else.

WinAmp's yellow lightning icon is still sitting happily in my Windows icon tray right this very moment. Pageant is in there too with its cute little spy-hat :-)

I had SAS/C which came on 5 or 6 floppies and my A2000 had no hard disk at the time so compiling meant lots and lots of disk swapping and I used the RAM Disk a lot. Later, for a princely sum I recall being over a grand, I got a SCSI controller card and a massive 40mb hard drive which made the process so much more pleasant.

I threw out a 17" Trinitron last year. It had outlived all of the flatscreens bought to replace it and was still working, but after ~23 years the plastic casing was dangerously brittle. It left a trail of little bits of broken plastic all the way to the dumpster.

Very. In simple terms there's just a lot more of Brazil to deal with.

Brazil is a massive 8,514,215 km2 while Singapore is just a tiny 734 km2 island which is very highly urbanised and developed and doesn't have a significant rural population (hence the description of "city-state").

Its small enough that you can monitor mozzie levels at the individual building level, and locate and deal with breeding spots at that level too. That might also be practical in urban areas in Brazil, but for rural areas I suspect is not feasible?

Had such inspections before whenever kena red zone here.

As well as checking all these things the agent will advise on what to look out for. For example our unused plastic buckets in the bathroom are upside down so they don't accumulate water, ah! but then also must check that little rim channel as it too can also accumulate enough water from nearby splashing to become a breeding spot!

SG also has Zika which transmits via Aedes mosquitos.

The common corridors in many blocks also have "Gravitraps" they use to monitor numbers by counting how many mozzies get trapped.

https://www.nea.gov.sg/dengue-zika

Indeed, though I suspect many might first have learnt of it watching Blackadder. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rNopZDwahg

I'm reminded of the last page of "Orbitsville" (Bob Shaw, 1975).

"In time even the flickering ships ceased to ply the trade lanes between the entrance portals, because there can be no reward for the traveller when departure point cannot be distinguished from destination."

Many cases of this happening in Singapore where people get tricked into installing malware. It feels like the banks have been going out of their way to make it hard if not impossible to use many services without installing their app now, so all those non-technical aunty uncle are like lambs to the slaughter.

e.g. https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/android-malware-sc...

Does this suggest an extra-galactic origin for The Moon?

Don't think it works for Win10 Home, but with Pro use gpedit and go to Local Computer Policy --> Computer Configuration --> Administrative Templates --> Windows Components --> Windows Update for Business, find "Select the target feature update" and set it to 'Windows 10', and '22H2'

We used to have a thing called TV Mobile on the bus here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TVMobile

Anytime you wanted to get from A to B you would be subjected to noisy TV, and it was invariably something tedious like endless repeats of Ellen or Oprah with loads of adverts.

It was hell and I am so glad the service failed and was discontinued.

I've been avoiding Sony products almost 20 years now because they thought it was a cool idea to put autorunning rootkits on audio CDs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

An example from last month. "Byron Bay breach victim told to pay Adidas, National Basketball Association $US1.2m by US courts" https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-25/byron-bay-data-breach...

For me dialup wasn't an option to get fish disks. Nearest BBS were in the city, so it was a long distance call ($$$), and I'd have to stick to 1200 bps because of the line noise. Downloading a full 880k disk would have tied up the phone at long distance rates for hours and hours.

But there were a couple of shops in the city that did Amiga stuff and some of them could get you fish disks, so I got a lot of my Amiga stuff from fish disks.

Things like Az text editor, many small games. Med and Octamed! So much cool stuff. Getting box of 10 fish disks was like opening Christmas presents.

For what its worth, my favourite fish disk (well, the one I still remember individually with great fondness) was #162, and I'll post the contents below as its a great example of them in general. Many hours I spend playing LabyrinthII - a text adventure style single player battle royale game - with the "Unknown Girl" track playing in another window on my Amiga 2000 with its fully multitasking operating system...

CONTENTS OF DISK 162 ====================

Avi A workalike version of the UNIX vi editor for the amiga. Though not especially recommended for beginners, designed for those of you who may have the vi commands permanently hard-coded into your fingertips! Version 1.0, binary only. Author: Peter Nestor

CLI_Utilities This directory contains several subdirectories with small utilities, collected from various sources, that are only usable from the CLI. See the Readme file for further information. Some include source. Author: Various

Dark A small graphics and animation demo. Includes source. Author: Phil Robertson

Flow2Troff A little utility to convert from New Horizons Software "FLOW" files to UNIX "troff" files, suitable for printing on any troff-compatible laser printer. Version 1.0, includes source and a sample "FLOW" file. Author: Daniel Barrett

LabyrinthII A shareware role-playing text adventure game similar in operation to the Infocom text adventures. Includes source. Author: Russell Wallace

Iffar Maintains archives of Interchange File Format (IFF) FORM, CAT and LIST files in a manner that complies with the IFF CAT specification. Version 1.2, includes source. Author: Karl Lehenbauer

SetPALorNTSC A couple of utility programs for testing the suitability of a developed program in either the PAL or NTSC environments. Includes source and a sample program. Author: Peter Kittel

TES "The Electronic Slave" adds a gadget strip to the top of the cli window to perform such functions as device directories, info, run ED, and time. Currently, assignments are hardcoded but not difficult to change if you own a compiler. Version 1.1, includes source. Author: Joerg Anslik

UnknownGirl Another small musical piece similar in execution to "Synthemania" on disk number 153. Binary only. Author: Holger Lubitz

Source for listing: https://web.archive.org/web/20230629192847/http://www.amiga-...

When you are young, 2 or 3 years actually seems like a reasonably long length of time. When you are fifty it feels like a couple of weeks, so replacing products that last 2 years feels like you're replacing the damn thing every month.

Absolutely right about the paper. I use copier paper to write on, and a specific brand of it, because even between the brands of identical looking paper there are huge differences. Some branks seem to suck up the ink like blotting paper with more feathering than an explosion in a pillow factory, others are just too rough and feel horrible to write on. The ink also makes a big difference. Some inks just kinda suck, others work really well. (Currently I'm running Platinum Blue-Black in a cheap Platinum Plaisir on 'Double A' brand copy paper. Parker Quink also works very well for me.)

I've been using a Platinum Plaisir as my daily driver for 5 years now. ( < $20) It uses the same nib as the ultracheap Platinum Preppy ( < $5 ) (of which I also have far more than I need).

And if you're after old & classic pens (including New Old Stock), Peyton Street Pens is an awesome source https://www.peytonstreetpens.com/

I've not done much soldering because the cheap soldering iron I bought to do occasional fixes can't actually melt solder.