iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/10/2026

I maintain that the Playdate is basically the perfect client device for the #GeminiProtocol.

A bright yellow Panic Playdate, a small handheld microcontroller-powered console with two face buttons and a D-pad beneath a single-colour Sharp Memory LCD display. A 360-segree rotating crank protrudes from the side. The screen is showing a Gemini page about the Matra Alice microcomputer, loaded in the Hopper browser.

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/04/2026

I'm not saying my to-read list is a little out of hand, but...

A Remarkable Pro ePaper tablet, resting on knee as the photographer sits in sunshine on a wooden deck overlooking a path and two small lawns. The device is showing a page from the February 1996 issue of UK technology magazine PC Pro: the introduction to an article by David Tebbutt called Empire of the Sun, detailing his visit to and discussions with Sun Microsystems' SunLabs in Silicon Valley.

Not exactly breaking news, is what I'm saying.

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/04/2026

I want to be clear: this is not thing. Yet. It may never be a thing. ...but am I so wrong for wanting it to be a thing? #Teletext

A screenshot of a Teletext viewdata page, titled "Gareth Halfacree's Hobby Teletext." The introductory paragraphs from the Hobby Tech Gemini page follow, lightly edited, along with page numbers for an index, archives, and latest articles. Fasttext shortcuts for an index, archives, about page, and diary appear below a chyron reading "Teletext: it's text... on your telly."

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/04/2026

In non-work-related news, I treated myself to a drone for my birthday - and the youngest has also taken the CAA's test to be assigned a Flyer ID, Open Class A1 & A3. She took this shot of the local viaduct over the weekend - from takeoff to landing! (If the […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

A photo, taken from a height, of a viaduct crossing a green valley, with trees in the foreground and fields with some farming/industrial buildings in the background. The sky is blue, with heavier cloud coverage to the left; a village can be seen on the horizon. A small group of people are walking on the viaduct, as the cloud cover spreads a shadow over them.

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/03/2026

That's not even all of them! "Just strap up and charge anywhere outdoors," but DO NOT USE IT OUTDOORS. Incredible.

A promotional image showing an Anker Solix C200 DC being used outdoors while hiking, under the text "ultra portable power," "go anywhere," and "just strap up and charge anywhere outdoors." The warning "DANGER: This device is intended to be used indoors only. Do not use outdoors." has been overlaid, being notable in its absence from the original image.

A promotional image showing an Anker Solix C200 DC being used outdoors while having a (gen-AI slop) barbecue. The warning "DANGER: This device is intended to be used indoors only. Do not use outdoors." has been overlaid, being notable in its absence from the original image.

A promotional image showing an Anker Solix C200 DC being, apparently, dropped from a height and bouncing off some rocks while hiking outdoors. The warning "DANGER: This device is intended to be used indoors only. Do not use outdoors." has been overlaid, being notable in its absence from the original image.

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/03/2026

I bought a chunky USB power bank and 60W solar panel t'other day: the Anker Solix C200 DC. It's pretty good. But... I turned it over, and there's a bunch of Important Warnings on the bottom. Including this one: "DANGER: This device is intended to be used […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

A photo of the fine-print on the underside of an Anker Solix C200 DC USB power bank. Highlighted is a warning which reads: "DANGER: This device is intended to be used indoors only. Do not use outdoors."

A promotional image showing an Anker Solix C200 DC being used outdoors while camping. The warning "DANGER: This device is intended to be used indoors only. Do not use outdoors." has been overlaid, being notable in its absence from the original image.

A promotional image showing an Anker Solix C200 DC being used outdoors while fishing, balanced precariously on rocks right next to the water. The warning "DANGER: This device is intended to be used indoors only. Do not use outdoors." has been overlaid, being notable in its absence from the original image.

A promotional image showing an Anker Solix C200 DC being used outdoors at the beach, with a smiling person connecting it to a folding solar panel worryingly close to the incoming tide. The warning "DANGER: This device is intended to be used indoors only. Do not use outdoors." has been overlaid, being notable in its absence from the original image.

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/03/2026

I was going to write about what seemed to be a neat project to interface old MicroDrive-style hard drives (the non-IDE ones) with modern systems. Then I hit the section about how all the code was "written" by OpenClaw. *Then* I found this screenshot, which […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

A screenshot of a response from an LLM chatbot identifying itself as "Assistant," with a timestamp of 9:49PM. It reads: Yes — sector 0 is all zeros now because our write speed test ( dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda ) overwrote it. The drive works perfectly, we just destroyed the filesystem data during testing. That confirms writes are fully functional! The drive hardware is fine — it's just our test zeroed the boot sector. Let me commit everything and update the final" and cuts off there.

It should be noted that the command as-presented would not merely zero the boot sector, but the entire drive.

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/03/2026

Oh! And while the videos from #EmbeddedWorld2026 are still working their way through the editing process, #Hackster has put together a little teaser. That teeny-tiny DJI camera I took is great. Shame about the oik in front of the lens, tho'!

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/03/2026

I'm back from #EmbeddedWorld2026, but before I launch into the articles I've been writing I've got a different announcement: I've got a new book out! It's a collaborative work, between me and nearly 10,000 other authors - and serves as a look at what the […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

The cover of Don't Steal This Book: A Plea from Authors, a plain white book with its title in red and the outline of a black burglar mask in the background. You can't see it in this photo, but the pages inside are entirely blank.

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/02/2026

[CW: Eye contact] Rare profile pic update, 'cos if I'm doing event coverage again it'd be nice if I was actually recognisable from the picture...

A photograph of a middle-age white man with short brown and grey hair and stubble. He is wearing a grey fleeced pullover over a T-shirt, with the head of Jinx from the Arcane series visible, and blue-framed glasses with brown wood-effect arms. He is smiling widely. Overstuffed shelves are visible in the background.

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/02/2026

*Finally*. (I turned telemetry back on specifically so Mozilla could watch me gleefully flick the off switch.)

A screenshot of the sparkly-emoji "AI Controls" feature added to Firefox 148. "Block AI enhancements" has been set to on, meaning "new and current AI enhancements are blocked by default."

Previously, the only way to turn off most of these "enhancements" was to dig around in about:config.

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/02/2026

Interestingly, the previous owner has inserted a new entry in two places: "stickpin". I checked, that's not a term that appears in the Second or Third Editions, so it's a house rule not an update.

A photo of Page 218 of the Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications, First Edition. Below the last printed line is a handwritten entry in pencil: "stickpin - make stay window on top (also pushpin) action: to [unclear]/under[?] the dialog".

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/02/2026

I've been on the hunt for this for ages now: The Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications, First Edition. Every time I've ordered a copy I've been sent the Second or Third edition instead. Now I finally have it! Well.. some of it. I was […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

A photo of a hand holding a paperback copy of The Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications, a book which builds on the company's internal-only Microsoft Publications Style Guide and was published by Microsoft Press for general consumption. A graphic in the top corner promises a 3.5" floppy disk is included with the book.

A photo of the "first" page of this particular copy of The Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications. It is clearly numbered "vii", and remnants of torn-out pages can be see in the spine.

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/02/2026

All of that is, as always, available ad- and tracker-free via the #GeminiProtocol - but no longer is it image-free! I've caved to demand and started throwing a picture up on there along with the article text. Most clients will show it as a link with […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

A screenshot of the Lagrange Gemini browser, showing an article about a Raspberry Pi-based video camera. Below the heading is a link the text for which describes an image, and below that is the image itself displayed inline.

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 17/02/2026

Found a kaleidoscope on my desk, and stuck my phone cameras up to it. Turns out the 3x telephoto lens works as a halfway decent macro lens, when combined with the plastic lens at the front of the thing. No, *you're* procrastinating.

A magnified image of the view through a kaleidoscope, showing scratches on the plastic and blurring on the mirrors as the parts inside form triangular multicoloured shapes.

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/02/2026

And if things get *really* bad, well, there's always the emergency stash.

A photograph of a hand holding a slice of core memory, a square board with finger connectors on all sides. Its surface is split into four smaller squares of tiny magnetic toroids, each strung on thin copper wires leading to the finger connectors and representing one bit of memory. Yes, this is why a memory dump is known as a "core dump."

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/02/2026

Right, that's me sorted to weather the memory crisis. No low-ball offers, I know what I have.

A photograph of a hand holding an ATD Model 116 Expansion Memory Card, a green PCB designed to connect to the ISA bus of IBM PC/XT/Portables and compatibles to increase available memory. Its surface is covered in socketed DIP-format RAM chips. A blue keyboard and a messy desk are visible in the background.

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/02/2026

@lproven I keep seeing you pop up as I work through scanning in a massive stack of early PC Pros.

A photograph of a hand holding a Remarkable Paper Pro E Ink tablet, showing a page from a PC Pro magazine dated February 1996. A bulky wireless access point is pictured underneath the heading Xircom Netwave; a three-column review follows, written by Liam Proven. The gadget received three out of six stars overall, dragged down by a poor two-star score in the value for money category.

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/02/2026

[CW: Eye contact (composite Identi-Kit image)] What I should be doing: work. What I am doing: recreating my likeness using only assets available in the Smith & Wesson Identi-Kit Model II composite portrait image kit, released in 1983. Yes, I need a haircut.

A grayscale screenshot of an Identi-Kit composite portrait, showing a somewhat overweight white man with large lips and black glasses. His hair is messily brushed backwards, and appears in need of a trim. If pushed, you might be able to pick Gareth Halfacree out of a line-up with the image, assuming you see him before his next visit to the barber.

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/01/2026

D'you know, all this talk about #genAI reminds me: I've got some paperwork to fill out...

A photograph of two letters on a desk, with the corner of a Remarkable tablet in the background. The uppermost sheet is blue and headed "Anthropic $1.5 billion class action settlement," and along with the white pages behind it detail how authors including the one taking the picture can claim their share of $3,000 per copy of their work that Anthropic pirated to use as training data for its planet-destroying large language models.

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/01/2026

I can now reveal what I was working on yesterday: say hello to the #RaspberryPi #AI HAT+ 2, a Haillo-10H accelerator board for the Raspberry Pi 5 with 8GB of on-board RAM - tailored for generative-AI. If you wanted to spend $130 so your Raspberry Pi can lie […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

A photograph of the Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ 2, a green circuit board designed to connect to the top of a Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computer. Two chips are visible in the middle: a Hailo-10H accelerator and an 8GB DRAM module.

A photo of the Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ 2 installed on a Raspberry Pi 5. A thin black heatsink has been added in order to keep the accelerator for throttling under heavy load.

A screenshot of a "conversation" with a large language model running on the AI HAT+ 2. It has been prompted to summarise a PDF, and it has done a terrible, terrible job of it.

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/01/2026

Those two are also up on #GeminiProtocol, of course, ad- and tracker-free. gemini://tilde.club/~ghalfacree/ And here's what it looks like in the Hopper browser on a Panic Playdate. Cute, right? And yes, you can scroll with the crank!

A photo of a Panic Playdate, a bright yellow handheld console with two buttons, a D-pad, a relatively wide black-and-white Sharp Memory LCD display, and - of all things - a small hand crank sticking out of the side.

The screen is showing a Gemini page titled "Gareth Halfacree's Hobby Tech," with the first and part of the second introductory paragraphs visible. The font is small, but definitely readable.

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/01/2026

Okay, full disclosure: yes, I absolutely did choose that question because I knew it'd get it wrong. But... I didn't know it'd get it *this* wrong. (This was its second attempt; on the first it gave the response "Rs. $16," then when I clicked "explain" it […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

A screenshot of OpenWeb UI, a web interface to LLM-based chatbots. The user prompt displayed is "How many Rs are there in the word strawberry?"

The response, labelled as coming from the model qwen2:1.5b is as follows:

The word "strawberry" is a type of fruit and consists of three letters: "s", "t", and "r". The value of each letter in the English alphabet is as follows:

S = 14
T = 20
R = 8

So, we have:
3 * (14 + 20 + 8) = 72

Therefore, there are Rs 72 in the word "strawberry".

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/01/2026

Very much looking forward to sitting down with this, from @vga256 - and how much love has gone into that (cropped, there's more to see!) cover art? Grab your own copy from 'ere: mastodon.social/@vga256@tomodori.ne… #Books […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

A photograph of a Remarkable Pro eReader sitting on a desk, with the pen attached to the side. The E Ink display is showing most of the cover of a book titled Mages & Modems: A Childhood Well-Wasted in the Golden Age of Personal Computers, Games & Internet Piracy by vga256. The artwork is designed to mimic the box-art for Microsoft's various Entertainment Pack software bundles, back when software still came in boxes.

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/01/2026

First project I considered covering today... and what do I find in .gitignore? <sigh>

A screenshot of a .gitignore file, which tells the git tool what files it should not track as part of the repository, as viewed in GitHub. The fifth line, highlighted, reads ".claude/" - representing a directory, hidden from those viewing the repository, containing instructions for Claude Code, a large language model (LLM) chatbot tailored for generating program code.

The repository's content is thus now to be considered tainted.

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/01/2026

Picked up a 4x6 dye-sub photo printer - a Canon Selphy clone, by the looks of it. I gotta say, somewhat clunky mobile app aside, it's pretty neat: prints in three passes (yellow, magenta, then cyan - no black, like those old low-end inkjets where you could […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

A photo of a photo printer on a white table. It's a small white and silver box, with a dark plastic paper tray sticking surprisingly far out of the front. A small pile of 4x6 photos is sat next to it; the only one fully visible is a moody black and white shot of a child walking down a tree-lined street.

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/12/2025

My full review will be going up on #Hackster later in the day, and it's a big 'un - written, because as I've said before I will always commit to the bit, on the Commodore 64 Ultimate itself, in Mini Office II. Got to admit, I haven't used that in a few years […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

A screenshot of Mini Office II running on a Commodore 64. Most of the last three paragraphs of a review detailing the ins and outs of the Commodore 64 Ultimate are visible in white text on a blue background. The status bar at the top says the review totals 2,610 words - with plenty of memory to spare for more. Who needs more than 64kB?

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/12/2025

And... yeah, it works. The only thing that gave it even the slightest pause was the Sound Expander, and only because I had to manually disable the internal virtual "cartridge" to route the signals properly - a quick flip in the settings menu, no more than […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

A screenshot of the software included with the Commodore SFX FM Sound Expander, which turns the Commodore's keyboard - or an optional full-size external piano-style keyboard - into a synth. Musical staves are visible in the background, while a yellow "Synth Voices" menu provides a list of sounds to pick.

A screenshot of Simons' BASIC, a cartridge-based expansion to Commodore BASIC 2.0 which adds 114 new commands. A short program to plot a sine wave in high-resolution mode is visible.

The output of a Simons' BASIC program to plot a sine wave, showing a dotted line tracing the wave on a white background with a blue border.

The title screen of Mayhem in Monsterland, an impressively high-speed platformer released relatively late in the original Commodore 64's commercial run.

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/12/2025

And when I say "hands-on," I mean putting the thing through the wringer. You want to tell me it's "99% compatible" with existing hardware? Okay, let's try it... #Technology #RetroComputing #VintageComputing #Commodore #FPGA

A photo of the Commodore 64 Ultimate nearly buried under a collection of original Commodore software and hardware. Visible are cassette and cartridge games, a Datasette tape drive, a 1570 floppy drive, a boxed Zip Stik joystick, the SFX FM Sound Expander, a plastic musical keyboard overlay fitted on top of the keyboard, a VIC-1520 plotter, and an Action Replay cartridge, plus a copy of Simons' BASIC.

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/12/2025

It's a rainy Monday here in Bradford, but a happy one - despite the fact I was working all weekend. Why? Because I was working on something fun: going hands-on with the #Commodore 64 Ultimate, an FPGA-powered recreation of the world's best-selling home […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

A photo of the Commodore 64 Ultimate box, which is designed to mimic the packaging provided with the original Commodore 64 microcomputer. A blue-and-white background is dominated by a picture of the microcomputer itself, with business-coded charts and papers to the left - ironic, given that the machine would see its biggest success as a gaming system.

A photograph of the Commodore 64 Ultimate, a wedge-format microcomputer built into a keyboard. It mimics the original "breadbin" model of Commodore 64 to the smallest detail.

A photograph of the back of the Commodore 64 Ultimate. The case includes all the same cut-outs as an original Commodore 64, though not everything is the same: the RF video output is missing, as is the high-low frequency switch, and the User Port has been replaced by very modern HDMI, Ethernet, and USB ports.

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/12/2025

Pulling the last of the things I need from storage, including a Commodore Communications Modem. Only to discover... another Commodore Communications Modem. I have no memory of ever getting a second.

A Commodore Communications Modem box, holding a modem add-on for the Commodore 64. Behind it is a Commodore Communications Modem box, holding another modem add-on for the Commodore 64. The box behind is newer, and lists Commodore 128 compatibility; its cover is a very boring pastel-shaded series of coiled telephone wires with a line-art telephone in the middle; the earlier box is more colourful and shows a telephone handset "zapping" information from a monitor to a bank, some kind of hexagonal shop, an aeroplane, and a woman menacingly holding simplified banknotes in an archway cut through some kind of pressure weather map of the UK and Ireland.

Overstuffed shelves are visible in the background.

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/12/2025

This was actually announced a few days back, but I've been waiting to have one in-hand: the sixth edition of my Official Raspberry Pi Beginner's Guide is now out! It's freshly expanded for the latest Trixie-based Raspberry Pi OS and for the Raspberry Pi 5 […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

A hand holding a copy of The Official Raspberry Pi User Guide 6th Edition, a paperback book. The cover shows a Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computer with a single USB cable, a single HDMI cable, and a single USB Type-C power cable connected, with a Sense HAT and a Camera Module also visible but not connected.

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/12/2025

Digging out some Commodore stuff I haven't touched in a while, for Reasons. There's a bee in my Simons' BASIC cartridge.

A photograph of the edge connector of a black plastic cartridge. You can't see the label, but it's Simons' BASIC for the Commodore 64. A small, very dessicated bee is nestled between the PCB edge connector and the plastic housing.

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/12/2025

Getting some interesting messages from Newswise this morning...

A Firefox dialogue box displaying an alert from the website www.newswise.com. The text of the alert reads "dfsfsf".

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/12/2025

That's okay, cat, I didn't need to breathe right now...

A photograph of a brown and grey haired man in glasses. A white cat is sitting on his chest, pushing against the man's face. A chair and an Xmas tree are visible in the background.

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/12/2025

Found another great use for that old original-model Microsoft Surface Pro I threw Linux on: my e-book reader doesn't do Adobe Digital Editions, but Borrowbox - the service my library uses for e-books - works perfectly in Firefox. I don't have to squint at my […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

A hand holding a Microsoft Surface Pro tablet, in front of a desk with a keyboard and a monitor showing a browser open to Mastodon, another browser window open to the Hackster News page, and a terminal session. The tablet is showing a page from the book Solo full-screen; the backlighting is somewhat uneven, but it's very readable.

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/11/2025

Got kicked out of the office so my eldest could co-opt the desktop to play some seizure-inducing twitch shooter thing, so I've been on the laptop for the last bit of the day - with a couple of accessories to try to make it feel a bit less cramped!

A photograph of a Dell laptop sat, open and facing the viewer, on a white table with dark windows, a framed picture of a tree and flowers, and books in the background. Balanced on the front of the laptop is a beige, grey, and orange Durgod mechanical keyboard, and next to it is a Kensington trackball. The screen is showing two terminal windows, a Gemini browser open to a page titled "Gareth Halfacree's Hobby Tech," and the Firefox browser open to the Hackster news page.

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/11/2025

Getting real deja-vu from the news that Valve's launching a mini-PC dubbed the Steam Machine... having done a group-test of the *original* Steam Machines for Linux User & Developer back in 2016. (They weren't great. Hopefully the new one's better!) #Valve #SteamMachine #Linux #Gaming

The cover of Linux User & Developer Issue 161, published in January 2016. In addition to the main cover feature of a guide to building your own Linux PC (which I also wrote), there's a callout for a "supertest" of Steam Machines - compact PCs running Valve's shiny new SteamOS Linux distribution.

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/11/2025

I've had a #Gemini capsule - as part of my Tilde Club account - for ages now, and never did anything with it. It will sit empty no longer! Instead, it'll serve as a home for text-only article copies - ad-free, graphics-free, HTML-free. No cookies, no […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

A screenshot of Lagrange, a browser for the Gemini protocol - a simple Gopher-inspired "small web" protocol which stands as an alternative to HTTP. It is open to a Gemini capsule hosted on Tilde Club, titled "ghalfacree," and a news page covering the announcement of Prusa's OpenPrintTag initiative. No imagery is visible in the page.

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/11/2025

It's pretty good for reading stuff from @internetarchive too - or it was, until the battery ran out...

A hand holding an original Microsoft Surface Pro tablet computer, running Ubuntu Linux, in portrait mode. A Firefox window is open to the Internet Archive, viewing a stream of pages from a Computer Shopper magazine published in June 1988. The main page shows three Apple computers and a single Apple CD-ROM drive, and discusses Apple's foray into the optical storage and early multimedia market. Part of an advert for QIC Research IBM clones is visible on the page below.

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/11/2025

Found a long-forgotten Surface Pro in the corner of the office. Despite being a Microsoft in-house design, it doesn't support Windows 11(!)... so it's now running Ubuntu. Battery life isn't fantastic after all these years, but it'll make a great reader for […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

An original-model Microsoft Surface Pro two-in-one tablet computer, propped up in portrait position. The glossy black front has a 10" colour display in the middle, showing a GNOME Shell session and the Firefox browser open to the Libby magazine-reading web app. The front cover of National Geographic for November 2025 is displayed, with a photograph showing the ITER fusion reactor.

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/11/2025

Had a trip to the local #library to renew my card, and snagged this '90s wonder from the withdrawn stock shelves for a donation. That's going in the office, that is!

A hardback copy of Philip's Science & Technology Encyclopedia, standing on a white table. Drawings of the water cycle, thermal currents, the Earth's crust, a cathode-ray tube TV set, a monkey, bees, birds, boats, the Space Shuttle, and other sciency, techy, naturey things appear beneath the title.

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/08/2025

Well, it's official: it's too hot to work.

A photo of a hand holding a Remarkable Pro, an E Ink tablet, above a picnic table with grass and a path visible in the background. The sun is beating down, and the tablet is showing a warning about "sunlight and heat" and that it will start to refresh the display more frequently owing to the high environmental temperature.

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/08/2025

I've been using Music on Console (MOC) for years now, but have been tempted to try something else for background playback while I work: kew. github.com/ravachol/kew Advantages over MOC: neat live visualisation, ASCII-rendered cover art (or actual […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

A screenshot of kew, a terminal-based music player, playing the first track from the Byte Driver Original Soundtrack album by Rainbow Gitten in a small console window.

The album art is rendered as blocky ASCII art to the left, in colour, while the right has the song information plus a live spectrum visualisation.

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/06/2025

Now the web is full to the brim with #AI slop, I'm turning to... other, more reliable information sources. Now, if you'll excuse me, Mind Maze awaits. #vintageComputing #Encarta #MicrosoftMultimedia

A hand holding a boxed copy of Microsoft Encarta '96 Encylopedia. The somewhat battered box shows a head turning to a ribbon, revealing a range of pictures of historical events, animals, and more. A globe at the bottom-left says it is the World English Edition, while an insert at the top says it is "Designed for Microsoft Windows 95" but "Requires Windows 95 or Windows 3.1." A Windows for Workgroups Program Manager window is visible on a monitor in the background, with the Microsoft Multimedia program group open; an icon for Encarta '96 is visible.

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 17/06/2025

What the actual... We all know the tricks with the "serving suggestion" photos on #food packaging, right? Same ingredients, but prepared by a professional chef - and then often coated in something to make 'em shiny, cotton pad dipped in boiling water for […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

A photograph of a package of Ben's Original Street Food Spicy Indonesian Style noodles, sold in the UK. The package is dominated by a picture of a bowl of noodles, with vegetable-looking things in them. A tiny, tiny note to the bottom-right reads "Serving suggestion. Image generated with AI."

A close-up of the note reading "Serving Suggestion. Image generated with AI."

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Gareth Halfacree @ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/06/2025

I now have a workflow to produce PostScript or PDF presentations from Lotus Freelance Graphics 2.1 on Windows for Workgroups, for export to and use on more modern machines. ...now if I could only remember why I wanted that. #vintageComputing #retroComputing

A screenshot, looking as though it was physically captured with a camera pointing at an old CRT monitor, of Lotus Freelance Graphics 2.1 running in Windows for Workgroups. A slide is visible, titled "Test Presentation," with the text "I have no idea if this will work" and a clipart image of a businesswoman against a gradient background. The background and imagery are dithered, as the machine is set to display only 256 colours.

The same slide from the first image, but this time displayed on a modern computer. The clipart is noticeably more detailed than before, and the gradient background is smooth. The colours are noticeably different, too.

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