iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 01/10/2026

Some kind of bird of prey swooped in right in front of me during the commute home tonight! The bike camera makes it seem kind of plain but it was only a couple of feet away from me, I had started to pull on the brakes before it successfully passed me (to grab something on the ground)

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 23/05/2026

I too loved this song (and the cartoon) since I was small but somehow I’d never seen this video!

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 26/04/2026

I had a few of these (though I'm not sure where they went, I should still have them) with a ZX Spectrum +3 I bought off a high school friend in the '90s for £20. At the time I was already using 3.5" and 5.25" disks on our PC so it was pretty wacky to see this third long, surprisingly chunky flavour.

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 19/04/2026

One of my favourites from my "antique computer collection", anything with a built in screen is much more convenient for retro computing :D This one was kept under a dust cover when not in use by the original owner so the plastic looks really good.

An Apple Macintosh SE running After Dark with the famous flying toasters, sitting on a shelf next to a Next Cube monitor. Nearby a CRT TV can be seen along with some tools.

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 30/03/2026

I am unreasonably excited about this. I found the manga first so it was always my favourite version (and I also love Dan da Dan)

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 21/02/2026

I actually have one of these! I posted about it last year when I spotted it in a movie. bsky.app/profile/thef... Mine is branded British Telecom since it was distributed with a PBX at some point. It had PBX management software in ROM, I had to erase and reprogram the chips to restore MS-BASIC.

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 14/02/2026

Weird Asian comedy horrors are a favourite of mine, so many hidden gems to discover. Just recently I watched one I think from South Korea that was about a woman who thought she had the perfect husband, who turned out to be an alien that drank petrol.

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 09/02/2026

My favourite version of this was cryptobros stumbling into subreddits about bigfoot to inform people about their favourite new cryptocurrency

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 05/02/2026

I’ve been setting those things on macOS for years too, since it makes things look much cleaner. People comment “wow, that looks like classic macOS!” whenever they see it with the white title bar but it doesn’t look enough like it for my liking 😛

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 23/01/2026

Yes, I had a similar thought. I do like the effect of the (admittedly pretty gentle and shallow) river running underneath it right now

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 22/01/2026

I enjoyed this mural while I was riding along the Guadalupe river trail today. Don’t know how I didn’t notice it before!

A mural depicting a lady bathing in lovely cyan water, amongst mossy rocks at the she of an ocean. There are some flowers on the closest rock, and some mountains on the horizon. The mural is under a bridge over a river and the mural can be seen reflecting in the water of the river.

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 17/01/2026

Shivers was one of the many games we bought back in the day, our entire family loved adventure-type games. I recently introduced my mum to gog and she initially thought it was a piracy site the prices were so cheap. I still listen to the songs from Shivers II: Harvest of Souls occasionally...

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 12/01/2026

Yeah, that sounds like it’ll be super cool to see, even if it’s a bit inconvenient ;)

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 28/12/2025

It's funny, I don't remember the show at all but I do specifically remember trying to record and then read the "datablast".

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 22/12/2025

I really enjoyed that ending with the warehouse full of PC98s. I need to watch it again

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 22/12/2025

Achieved this myself a slightly different way (grabbed this thing off eBay recently as I always wanted one when they were new in the ‘90s but couldn’t buy such a thing for myself back then!) it’s mostly DOS compatible, just some oddities as it’s a 186. Graphics are CGA

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 16/12/2025

I loved 16-bit Sensation, I wish it had some kind of physical release in the west so I could buy it.

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 27/09/2025

I love when these tickle some weird distant memory from deep in my subconscious

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 22/09/2025

Considering trying that diet where you just eat potatoes

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 13/09/2025

Ah, a Munro is a mountain in Scotland over 3,000 feet, so named by a Sir Hugh Munro who compiled the original list :) Wikipedia has a list: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...

en.wikipedia.org

List of Munro mountains - Wikipedia

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 11/09/2025

Just went to use Google with lynx/links, something I use semi-regularly when I just want a quick, text-based search. Good to know they're continuing to try really hard to become worse in all sorts of random ways.

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Reposted by Colin

𝕡𝕙𝕠𝕤𝕡𝕙𝕠𝕣 𝕘𝕝𝕠𝕨 @phosphorglow.bsky.social · 06/09/2025

found a new stupid obsolete and dead-end tech product that i desperately need

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 04/09/2025

My favourite thing about House (1985) is that, much like if I were in that situation, the first thing the main character does after experiencing something paranormal in the house is to run out and buy all sorts of video cameras to capture it.

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 03/09/2025

I got the Bluray a couple of years ago, the week before my parents were visiting. Obviously I showed it to them, and they loved it too! It has a lot of stuff I love, like some sets being built out of each other and some funny transitions (paintings to scenery/etc.). And all the cat stuff, of course

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 27/08/2025

Finally, after five years of avoiding it through masking and such, I have caught COVID. Before I had "symptoms" I had several nights of insomnia (which have continued) so I assume that was the actual start. One day I hope to have a good night's sleep again :(

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 27/08/2025

Took this photo testing some videophones I found for $20 each. Sadly the software couldn’t be made to realise that the devices are portrait-only ;)

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 26/08/2025

48k ZX Spectrum, tape for storage. I actually remember asking my dad to try it before I could even read, and seeing what appeared at the time to be mysterious heiroglyphics appear on the screen as I pressed the buttons. He did this very intentionally as he knew computers were the future.

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 18/08/2025

Spent way too long unsuccessfully trying to find out what make/model it was ;) It was very similar to this one (photo from eBay) but they don't seem to have an LPT model so I don't think it was a Panasonic. Either way, "portable" style but too big to actually carry around in your pocket ;)

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 18/08/2025

Nothing to do with the Jaguar but visually it reminds me of the first CD-ROM drive I ever used, borrowed from my dad's work, which was an extremely large "portable" form factor drive that plugged into our 286's parallel port. You could very slowly access the CD-ROMs that way!

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 15/08/2025

Sadly it looks like most of the replies I made during this several month period have disappeared into the ether - they were appearing on my account up until I fixed the issue, then gone. Only one I made today (and noticed the problem) survived. I should check to see if they're still on the disk...

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 15/08/2025

BSky pro-tip: don't configure your entire web server to block all requests from anything vaguely bot-like in an attempt to stop AI scraping...then spend several months replying to people's posts and things and only now discovering that nobody ever saw them because Bsky couldn't access your PDS!

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 15/08/2025

Test post, I think something is up with my pds

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 15/08/2025

I had the exact same thought when I got that same pop up, as I too run my own PDS so they don’t actually have any of my content, just access to it.

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 09/06/2025

I think in the end I just ended up borrowing a handheld scanner from somewhere and scanning in Dominion Tank Police (and other Shirow stuff) from Manga Mania/Max as that was much faster, at least for wallpaper use ;)

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 09/06/2025

The ones that set the colour attributes buffer to black before loading the 1-bit bitmap (like Manic Miner there) always bothered me, it was much more fun watching the 1-bit image load in live before the colour filled in :p

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 01/06/2025

Re: Dominion I think I read there was a third series made in the 2000s with CGI animation, which seemed to make absolutely no impact in the UK/US so I assume it was bad. But as a completionist I want to watch it!

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 01/06/2025

I had Dominion (both series), Appleseed and Cyber City Oedo 808 on VHS back in the day. I'd still have those tapes but I accidentally left them behind when I moved from Scotland to the US 😿 Also had Black Magic M-66 in a similar vein. I wish they'd made an anime based on the Orion manga...

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 01/06/2025

The PSX and PS2 GITS games were both great

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 15/05/2025

My dad had a V2000 VCR that loaded tapes like this. It was a very interesting format since it had better quality than VHS/Beta despite using the same tape stock, you could record on both sides (better quality in half the media!) and had already lost the format war due to being two years too late.

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 06/05/2025

I assumed they were doing it intentionally on the assumption people would be selfish. They work in Japan after all ;) Also in a UK airport a member of staff instructed me to double-press it and that made it work!

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 06/05/2025

I miss setup.exe for Windows 3.1/95 with the gradient. The *smooth* gradient when you upgraded to a 32-bit video driver too! It was magical.

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 05/05/2025

When I moved to the US Fry's was one of the places I visited weekly, having heard stories of it. Very sad when it closed, though it spent a few years in a very sad limbo where it wasn't really great for consumer goods, electronic components or games...

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 05/05/2025

I managed to place a preorder with Best Buy pretty much on a whim, quite excited to actually pick it up!

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 05/05/2025

Took this in a park near Cupertino. Wish I'd taken my DSLR, for the zoom lens

A bird of prey sits on a dead tree branch against a blue sky. Towards the right of the picture is the moon.

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 26/04/2025

I was watching The Return of the Living Dead and spotted an antique computer I actually own - an Epson HX-20! They stuck it in a console to make a keyboard. Later they show the general from through this prop and you can see the DIN serial connectors, power port and ROM/tape drive eject button.

A still from the movie "The Return of the Living Dead", showing a general in his pyjamas in dressing gown looking at the printout emerging from a dot matrix printer in a console concealed in a wooden cabinet, which also has many lights and knobs, a keyboard, a display showing a map of the US, a telephone and a keypad.

A picture of an Epson HX-20, featuring a full keyboard, an LCD screen, a speaker, a small dot matrix printer and a micro cassette drive. This unit is branded British Telecom Merlin instead of EPSON, and has the model number CM6000 instead of HX-20. This specific unit was intended to be used with a BT office PBX, though its ROMs have been switched to the original HX-20 software.

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 20/04/2025

Later on I had one of those Hauppauge PCI analog capture cards and it included a teletext app, and since PCs had plenty of RAM it just cached every page at once, allowing for instant switching. It could save pages as BMPs but I can't find any of the ones I saved just now :(

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 20/04/2025

My first (hand me down) TV had teletext, my dad had paid extra for that option as it was also the model that actually came with an IR remote control, not standard at the time. He had the repair manuals, it had no computer in it - just a character ROM, RAM, "modem" and glue logic!

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 18/04/2025

I remember when my dad bought our new pc in windows 95 from a shop in Edinburgh, and they had all these signs up saying they would not be supporting windows 95 and people should stop asking. The machine obviously came with windows 3.1 installed 😛

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Colin @thefizma.bsky.substandard.info · 14/03/2025

I’ve got the predecessor to this, the Epson HX-20, they’re visibly related. This thing is missing the built in printer but otherwise seems like a huge upgrade in every way! This one was sold as part of a BT PBX but I installed the original Epson ROM.

An early laptop computer, branded British Telecom Merlin CM6000 but actually an Epson HX-20. There’s a 16x4 character screen, a microcassette drive, a dot matrix receipt printer and a the printer paper has a small BASIC program to make sounds. The machine is running and shows the boot menu offering MONITOR and BASIC apps.

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