I have a vague memory that people like Sun would go into bids for dot com work with Oracle and BEA around then. Funny how all those companies were eventually hoovered up by Oracle…

Pro level laptops and desktops with user upgradable RAM and SSDs.

We had these in some of our work machines in late 90s. All good and well, but our clients mostly did not so when we had to send data physically we’d end up burning it to CD or a Zip disk, which at least had a wider user base. Come 2000 though both formats were dead in the water.

I’ve wondered if that’s because it was new “recently” in people’s minds.

Maybe it’s just what happens as we’re getting older and identifying that something you owned as a twenty or thirty-something is now ancient sits a little too uncomfortably.

Everyone’s still 28 in their mind, right?

a man in a trench coat and tie is standing in front of trees in a park . ALT: a man in a trench coat and tie is standing in front of trees in a park .

No! They got to you!

Saw them too in Home Bargains. After my experience with the ice cream flavour, I gave them a very wide berth. So wide I had to present my passport to the Authorities in Calais.

Look what they’ve done to my beautiful boy.

By the looks of it, the comment that they intend to lock down the firmware updates is in the release notes for the latest firmware on their website, so it’s not like they are hiding their light under a bushel. So not sure why people would then say it’s fake news…

I don’t Facebook so was unaware. It’s not on the YouTubes as far as I can see.

I wasn’t aware of this - which video is this mentioned in?

Which was pretty much the reaction of the people in This Island Earth!

I’ll never forget listening to The Case of Charles Dexter Ward on my way home on New Year’s Day 2020 in preparation for Whisperer in Darkness. It really gripped me as I sped through the winter gloom.

Lost count of the how many times I’ve listened since! Glad they’re back!

Exeter, one of the characters from This Island Earth. He may look humanoid, but his high forehead and white hair give him away as a Metalunian.

Used to marvel that the schematics for a Commodore Vic 20 and C64 were readily available. Just there for you to copy if you wanted. Bet you if you sent off for the bits and built your own, you’d have been recruited by this guy to join his crack team of scientists…

SonicStage? It was awful. Sucked so much it bent light. That you had to check in/out music to stop music piracy was misguided. I liked MiniDisc but as a user experience, NetMD was painful to the point it punished users.

Cover for the CD of the Sneaker Pimps single “Six Underground” featuring a Lego Space moon surface baseplate.

The Sneaker Pimps got there first, but no-one likes to mention it.

The cover of Return of the Jedi : Death Star Battle

Return of the Jedi : Death Star Battle on the Spectrum. As a kid who loved the films even though everyone else by 1985 would groan at “Oh not Star Wars *again* when looking at the Christmas TV listings, I loved it. Not the best Star Wars game, but I still enjoyed it when it was all I had!

It’s at gopher.antiques-for-geeks.net but it’s died again this morning. Suspect that it’s to do with the dynamic DNS. Going to have a fiddle.

I kind of like Gopher. I like the lofi-ness!

That’s really cool! What’s a long weekend for if not for messing around!

Found out yesterday that my Gopher site (hole?) has been down for months and the only reason I didn’t know is that I’d changed my laptop’s hosts file points to the address of the production server and not my test server…

I take your “Wrong” and raise you “In Chains”.

Specifically the Alan Wilder mix.
Especially the Alan Wilder mix.

Some amount of advertising on that piece. I could barely follow the thread of what was being said for scrolling between acres of ads every couple of paragraphs. I get that it costs to keep a website up, but good site design that does not break flow would be nice.

Mr Fernández said the McCormick deal was "another decisive step in sharpening our portfolio and accelerating our strategy towards high-growth categories". He explained: "We are unlocking trapped value through a growth-led separation of foods, creating a scaled, global flavour powerhouse.

Or to put it another way.

We sold it because it wouldn’t make us enough money.

We all know it’s cheese.

One of my great regrets? Scrapping a 386DX-40 in early 2000s. I was literally using it to power a monitor for my laptop at home and as a glorified backup drive. It’s one in a line of things I wished I’d done differently…

Why? I doubt most will do anything other than take what they are given. We’ve seen that on other platforms.

Curation isn’t about being told what you should like, but exploration and finding out for yourself. And algorithms can’t mimic serendipity.

Made up - and superb timing! Wondering how many people will be laughing to this on their journeys this weekend!

Not seeing this on my Threads and I’ve not allowed Meta to use my data - I got something similar on Instagram a while back, but as I barely use it I decided that I would be staying off the platform. Threads too? Would not be a great loss, to be honest.

Wonder what will happen with WhatsApp?

What’s utterly staggering though, reading more about the PS5 reprice is that the same console is $649 in the US and €649 in Europe. The same console is £80 more expensive in Europe. I get ram & storage is more expensive etc, but that feels like a geographical gouge. Plus, the US will have tariffs…

Sadly, we’ve hit a new low of YouTube ads. Now when I get an advert, now I have an annoying little link for the same advertiser pop up in the bottom left hand corner of the screen that I have to dismiss. Who on Earth, except the bean counters, would think trashing your UI this way is a good idea?

Yes, Apple TV Foundation and the Asimov books are different; that’s not the point. I can enjoy both. But Julian Glover got the savvy and smart Hober Mallow just right, and he’ll always be that character to me.

There’s a lot being said about Julian Glover turning 91 today and his body of film and TV work. Rightly so. But he was also on radio, certainly here in the UK.

For me, his Hober Mallow in the BBC adaptation of Foundation is the definitive. Not the poundshop Han Solo of the Apple TV adaptation.