All the kids are gone bananas about computers. There’s approximately 1,000 Commodore 64s in Irish schools. In 1983. Gay Byrne on the Late Late Toy Show in 1983 interviewed nine year old Oric whizz kid, Mark Feldman who has been playing games since he was six, and thirteen year old Johnson McEvoy who does programming and games and creates graphics. Nice demo of the Commodore 64, playing some sort of typing tutor game too! I had no idea the C64 was ever on the Late Late Show!
Music
Stop your messing around
Better think of your future Time you straighten right out Creating problems in town Rudy, a message to you Rudy, a message to you What an earworm. Once you listen to it, you’ll be humming it all day long. RIP Terry Hall. Today I learned that “rudy” is slang. I always thought it was about a specific person! A ‘Rudy’ (or rudi or rude boy) is a 1960s Jamaican slang for a youth who is out of control. The term became popular in England in the late 1970s, referring to teens who listened to ska and their fashion of the […]
Tech
3 months free Backblaze again
Well, well. Backblaze are offering 3 months free if you sign up before December 31st, again. I first heard of this offer in 2013 when I published a post about in March that year. Backblaze is a cloud backup company that have a neat app that runs on your computer and backs up everything on it to encrypted storage. If you have external drives, as long as they’re plugged into your machine, Backblaze will happily keep all of it safe. You get your normal free month to test it and figure out if it will work for you. If you […]
Music
Lazing on a Sunday afternoon
If you don’t know, “Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon” by Queen, you’re in for a treat. Absolutely lovely song and one of my favourite songs. Just over 1 minute of perfection. Jai on the Recovering Queen Podcast did a great cover of it too! When you’ve listened to that, follow it up with Seaside Rendezvous. Another delightful song! If you’ve never heard either of those songs, you should run, without hurting yourself, to the nearest record store and purchase a copy of Queen’s 1975 album “A Night At The Opera”. A stupendously good album, and I guarantee you have heard […]
Tech
The Twitter Meltdown (again)
I don’t really have anything enlightening to say about Elon Musk kicking journalists off Twitter, except that it’s not really surprising. He seems to be rocking from one crisis to another. Has the Twitter Terms of Service been changed to, “Don’t hurt Elon’s feelings”? CNN journalist, Donie O’Sullivan shared an interview on his Mastodon account about it, which of course you can’t share on Twitter. Anyway, I can see from here that there are thousands of people opening new Mastodon accounts every hour since that happened. I jumped ship in early November when he fired half the staff in the […]
Tech
Restore terminal access to Dropbox on macOS
Dropbox just updated and moved the Dropbox folder to ~/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox, a secure location. There is still a symlink from ~/Dropbox to that folder, so hopefully any local scripts will continue working. The first thing I did was open an iTerm2 and attempt to look in ~/Dropbox with cd Dropbox. As it is hard-coded in my brain, when I change to a new directory, I will want to see what’s in it, so I immediately typed ls -l. Too fast for my own good, as I noticed the flicker of a dialogue appear and disappear when I tapped the return key. […]
Comics , General
A tribute to Charles M. Schulz
Yesterday would have been Charles’ 100th birthday. He is the creator of the Peanuts cartoon strip, you know, the one with Snoopy and Charlie Brown! Charles passed away in 2000 at the age of 77, but yesterday the Charles M. Schulz Museum featured comics by syndicated comic artists on their site as a special tribute to the great man. There are some great strips there and if you’re a Peanuts fan you’ll love them. I must find my Peanuts books and have a look at them again.
Android
Save space by resizing Google Photos
On the 1st of June 2021, Google Photos stopped offering free storage. Google Photos is a fantastic service, but at the rate I take photos I knew I’d fill the remaining gigabytes of storage in a matter of months, so I stopped uploading photos from my phone. I don’t regard Google Photos as a backup system for my photos. I use Backblaze for that, where everything is backed up from my desktop computer. Google Photos is very useful for sharing albums, the face recognition is amazing, and utilities like HDR photo generation and time lapses are nice bonuses. In Lightroom, […]
Photography
Drag the Lightroom Histogram
I discovered yesterday (or maybe rediscovered?) that you can drag the histogram in Lightroom to adjust the exposure of a photo. From right to left, these are the sliders affected when you drag: It can appear like a blunt, inaccurate tool to modify the exposure of a photo, but do it at least once, and you’ll get a better appreciation for what the histogram actually displays. Originally shared on Mastodon yesterday.
Music
It’s a Miracle, Another Post!
What! Two posts in one day? Well, I’ve been miserable with Covid-19 this week. But there is good news. Today is the day when Queen released The Miracle (Collectors Edition) which is a 4 disc compilation featuring the original tracks of the album. It’s the sessions disc that is getting my attention. There are great reworkings of the album songs, cleaned up demos, and well, Face it Alone, which in the context of the sessions, is not that bad. I thought I was the only one who loved the original Party and Khashoggi’s Ship, but no, there are two of […]