iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jonathan Pallant @thejpster.org.uk · 24/09/2026

NDC TechTown was great. The location is incredible and the catering was brilliant. Lots of great conversations. I hope we can come again.

Water rushing over a weir in Kongsberg, back by Nordic fir trees and a gorgeous sky.

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Jonathan Pallant @thejpster.org.uk · 17/07/2026

Decided to walk. It’s only a mile and a half.

A man with a beard walks down a suburban street in the sun wearing a tan hat and sunglasses

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Jonathan Pallant @thejpster.org.uk · 27/06/2026

What do you want to hear today?

A photo of a CRT. It’s showing some white on black text in the MS-DOS style. It’s asking you to pick a synthesiser, from

PC Speaker

Tandy 1000

Ad-lib

Sound Blaster

Roland MT-32

Gravis Ultrasound

Sound Blaster AWE32

Roland SC55

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Jonathan Pallant @thejpster.org.uk · 01/05/2026

This is normal.

$A screen shot showing a CDE desktop. The wallpaper is the Sun logo, tiled. There's a filemanager window showing my home directory, and two applications. One application is titled Macintosh Application Environment and is showing a System 7 desktop, with Finder showing the same home directory. The other application is SunPCI and the screen is white on black text looking a lot like MS-DOS (it's Caldera DR-DOS I believe). A DIR command was executed in R:\EXPORTS\HOME\JONATHAN, showing the same directory listing again, but with DOS 8.3 filenames.$

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Jonathan Pallant @thejpster.org.uk · 22/03/2026

ebay.us/m/hE8quU What the hell is going on with this cover?

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Jonathan Pallant @thejpster.org.uk · 13/03/2026

The DB Museum has this map on display…

A map of the British Isles. Great Britain is labelled The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (British Rail and Northern Ireland Railways) with a pin somewhere near Wrexham.

The island of Ireland is labelled Ireland (Coras Iompair Eireann), with a pin somewhere north of Belfast. The Irish border is not shown.

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Jonathan Pallant @thejpster.org.uk · 18/02/2026

This is an absolute dog’s breakfast of a UI. It’s just embarrassing.

An iPhone screenshot of posting a comment in a GitHub issued in portrait mode. There are multiple overlapping GUI elements leaving it largely unreadable. I’m typing a comment but the text is appearing almost entirely off the top of the screen so you can’t read it.

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Jonathan Pallant @thejpster.org.uk · 07/02/2026

Truly amazing work by GitHub here.

$It’s a screenshot of a Pull Request on github.com taken in Safari on iOS 26. The top section is narrow, filling a fraction of the screen. The first comment is rendered full width, comically wider than the area above it. It’s basically impossible to use on a phone in portrait mode.$

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Jonathan Pallant @thejpster.org.uk · 01/02/2026

This crap should be illegal. Sort it out Apple.

A screen shot of the Mac App store. I searched for "Zoom" and the top five entries are apps with Zoom in the name that are not Zoom. The sixth is WhatsApp. None of the entries list their official publisher.

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Jonathan Pallant @thejpster.org.uk · 25/01/2026

I have a SPARCengine Ultra AXi - an ATX OEM board from Sun with an UltraSPARC-IIi processor. It is in a stupid gamer case with blue LEDs, because it's funny. But what OS should I install on it?

A photo of a messy workbench. On it is a tall black tower case (a Gigabyte 3D Aurora from the mid-2000s) with a window. Through the window you can see the glow of blue LEDs, and an ATX mainboard (the SPARCengine Ultra AXi). On the right is a 17" TFT showing the Solaris 7 installer. Further right is an HP 9000 B-class, covered in DDS2 tapes and random 72-pin SIMMs. There's an Atari ST poking out from under some junk too, and a spare SGI O2 power supply.

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Jonathan Pallant @thejpster.org.uk · 25/12/2025

The OEM navigation I added to my 2001 Skoda Octavia was great though. The GPS antenna was mounted under the dashboard and had a good view of the sky through the windscreen, which helped. Plus it could dead-reckon in tunnels using the speed input from the car. I fitted it in around 2007.

A Skoda Auto marked photo of the "RADIO NAVIGATION SYSTEM DX" (the same as a Volkswagen MDF), a double-DIN LCD navigation system with a low-res map that looks a lot like AutoRoute for DOS.

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Jonathan Pallant @thejpster.org.uk · 07/12/2025

Did you know Sun made an ATX form factor UltraSPARC board?

A photo of an ATX mainboard. It has a comedically large 120mm case fan sat on top of the cpu heatsink, and a large graphics card in the UPA slot.

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Jonathan Pallant @thejpster.org.uk · 06/12/2025

How many SCSI LUNs (Logical Unit Numbers) is too many LUNs? Here I have 12.

A photo of a monitor showing the Adaptec AHA-2940UW BIOS scanning the SCSI bus on boot up. Target ID 1 has six LUNs and Target ID2 has another six. All are marked PIONEER CD-ROM DRM-6324X.

A photo of two external SCSI magazine load CD-ROM drives. They are marked Pioneer DRM-6324X.

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Jonathan Pallant @thejpster.org.uk · 06/12/2025

So, this O2 sort of works. The power switch is broken but there’s a jumper on the main board to bypass it. SCSI drives are toast, obviously. But I have a box of them.

A monitor showing the “Welcome to O2” boot screen

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Jonathan Pallant @thejpster.org.uk · 08/11/2025

Too much fun. homes.luddy.indiana.edu/ccshan/for/f...

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Jonathan Pallant @thejpster.org.uk · 07/10/2025

I can confirm it needs an HIL keyboard as the HP-IB port is for a disk drive, amongst other things. But the DIP switches were set for serial console, which works great. A lovely machine.

The inside of an HP 9000 Model 340. You can see a PSU, some RAM sticks unlike anything from a PC, and a big graphics card with just three BNC outputs

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Jonathan Pallant @thejpster.org.uk · 19/09/2025

I think 7,500 for this bomb and 12,000 for a different bomb in Spandau. Happens all the time around here apparently. Here’s the view from my office. The bomb was in the lock.

A photo through a very German metal framed and highly energy efficient window. Through it we can see the River Spree, a big lock, and the Alexanderplatz TV tower behind.

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Jonathan Pallant @thejpster.org.uk · 14/09/2025

If you were 15 when the Sega Megadrive came out in the UK - good news! You can now go on a Saga holiday.

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Jonathan Pallant @thejpster.org.uk · 31/08/2025

MIPS, PowerPC, 68000, Z80, 65C816, x86, Arm.

A photo of my wooden TV cabinet. It contains a lot of consoles.

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Jonathan Pallant @thejpster.org.uk · 24/08/2025

I think I’ll wash my hands now

The inside of a very grubby sparcstation 10. It’s full of bugs and spider nests and nuts.

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Jonathan Pallant @thejpster.org.uk · 14/07/2025

I want to shout out dominio11, who, for my recent HP 9000 Model 712: - wrapped it in a plastic bag - wrapped that in two layers of bubble wrap and tape - taped on cardboard corners - placed it in a cardboard outer, padded with packing peanuts - covered the outer in tape It arrived safely.

A parcel I’m only half way done unwrapping. A big cuboid covered in bubble wrap sits next to a pile of cardboard and bubble wrap.

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Jonathan Pallant @thejpster.org.uk · 10/07/2025

If you want power and you want speed, the 700 series is what you need. I am now ready for molecular modelling in cyberspace, or something. (youtu.be/VLTh4uVJduI)

An HP 9000 Model 712 with no lid on. You can see the polystyrene drive trays, a big black PSU and a remarkably small main board.

The back of an HP 9000 Model 712. It has VGA, two PS/2 ports, 10baseT Ethernet (and AUI) as well as 50 pin SCSI.

The main board of an HP 9000 Model 712, at jaunty angle. There’s four SIMMS, a stick of cache and the processor is under a small black heatsink with no fan. The clock battery is a CR2032 which has not leaked.

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Jonathan Pallant @thejpster.org.uk · 29/06/2025

The Quantum drive was dead (obviously) so I squeezed in a 9 GB 7200 rpm SCSI drive. After much messing about trying to get a patched Disk Setup on there so it would Initialize my non-Apple drive … success!

A photo of a big CRT sitting in top of a PowerMac 7200/90. The monitor is showing the MacOS 7.6 desktop.

A photo of the back of the Apple Multiple Scan 1705 monitor, and the PowerMac 7200/90, which it is sitting on top of.

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Jonathan Pallant @thejpster.org.uk · 26/06/2025

October 2002. Details in the alt.

A scanned photo from 2002. An Iiyama VisionMaster 454, a Yeong Yang 0221B case in black, with the front removed extra fans and a side window, and a Canon BJC-4100 printer. And terrible student digs carpet.

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Jonathan Pallant @thejpster.org.uk · 25/06/2025

Now I've done it in Typst - and I haven't even listened to the latest episode of @sdr-podcast.com yet. gist.github.com/thejpster/aa... Literally the first thing I've ever done in Typst, and I don't really know what I'm doing.

It looks like like the powerpoint slide from the previous post, except the formatting is slightly different, and all the destinations are "London Marylebone" because I didn't want to type them all out again, and one train is Delayed (in yellow) and one is Cancelled (in red)

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Jonathan Pallant @thejpster.org.uk · 25/06/2025

I made this in Powerpoint. Because, reasons.

It is an image that looks like an old UK railway station platform information display, circa late 1990s. The heading is "Departures" and underneath are a series of locations and departure times. It uses the font ModeSeven.

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Jonathan Pallant @thejpster.org.uk · 14/06/2025

Well now I see why the picture quality was so astonishingly bad. What a terrible video cable.

A vga cable has been cut and the outer insulation stripped, to reveal three audio grade unshielded wires where the three RGB co-ax lines should be.

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Jonathan Pallant @thejpster.org.uk · 31/05/2025

Casually running Solaris Acrobat on a Sun Ultra 80, with the display routed to an SGI Indigo 2 running IRIX. X11 is great. Check out @cathoderaydude.bsky.social ‘s most recent video!

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Jonathan Pallant @thejpster.org.uk · 26/05/2025

AAAAAAAAAH I’ve tried so hard for so long to get this screen to appear. But what is it running on? Hint: count the lines of text. It’s not 25, which a VGA card in a PC would do.

A photo of an LCD monitor next to a grey desktop computer (mostly out of shot). The text on the monitor starts:

Software in the Public Interest presents Debian GNU/Linux 2.2.

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Jonathan Pallant @thejpster.org.uk · 17/05/2025

You should visit the Centre for Computing History.

A CRT monitor from Sun showing the Open Windows desktop

A next cube with matching monitor and keyboard

An SGI Indy with crt monitor, keyboard and mouse

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