There's a new #raspberrypi out today, the Raspberry Pi 500+ - an upgraded wedge-style Raspberry Pi 500 which doubles the RAM, populated the M.2 slot and adds a bundled 256GB SSD, and includes an RGB-backlit mechanical keyboard. My review's up now, if you're curious. (And if you're not curious […]

Huh, #microsoft just open-sourced #6502 #basic. Permissive MIT licence, even. https://github.com/microsoft/BASIC-M6502 #vintagecomputing #retrocomputing #programming

Calling #psion and other #retrocomputing and #vintagecomputing #pda enthusiasts: doing an article about an OPL language server, and was hoping to get comment from someone who still writes OPL in the year 2025 - why, what do you use it for, would you find OPL autocomplete a help or a hindrance […]

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

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. https://github.com/ravachol/kew Advantages over MOC: neat live visualisation, ASCII-rendered cover art (or actual […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Here's the article I was working on today, and the first I've written for The Register in a hot minute: a look at a new, generated-from-actual-1980s-hardware, 1.5-million-strong test suite for the Intel 286 and compatibles. In 2025. Yes. Emulator devs are a different breed, I tell you, and […]

Calling #vintagecomputing #retrocomputing and #emulator developers/enthusiasts/and so forth. I'm writing a piece about a new hardware-generated test suite for the 286: https://github.com/SingleStepTests/80286 and I'd love to include some comments. Will you use it, and if so how? Why has the 286 […]

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

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]

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

Now that April Fool's morning is well and truly over, I'm pleased to confirm that @rc2014 isn't pulling your leg - well, not about the existence of the #rc2014 Mini II Picasso, at least. https://mastodon.social/@[email protected]/114261521469282296 How do I know? Here's my hands-on review […]

Honestly, sometimes I marvel at the things I get paid to do... #retrocomputing #z80 #programming

Right, after the disappointment of that last scanner arriving broken (and filthy), it's time to get serious. I've found a more reputable seller and ordered a Fujitsu Fi-7160. No flatbed, but I'll keep my current SP-1425 for that, but it's got intelligent […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Finally, after ordering it on the 6th, got my second-hand document scanner. And it's broken. And filthy. And the power cable's... melted? "Good used condition" my backside. Now to work on getting my money back...

Had just scanned the last page of a magazine... when the desktop crashed. 300-odd pages. Rebooted... Simple Scan had autosaved! But it crashed when I scrolled to the end. Never seen it do that before. Reopened it, told it to export the files. It got to Page 302 before crashing again, which […]

Product photography morning today. Well, early afternoon, too. Always takes longer than you think. Microchip Curiosity Kit, which looks so similar to the Discovery Kit I thought they'd sent me the wrong thing at first. Different chip at the heart, though: a […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Today (well, last night, mostly), I have been investigating JPEG and JPEG-adjacent file formats. (Yes, I'm still tweaking my mag-scan PDF outputs.) Let's take a look at a baseline. The first image is a PNG, straight from the scanner at 300dpi. I'm pretty […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

PDF wranglers! I've got a question, and it's... niche, I think. I scan mags to images then use Tesseract OCR to produce a PDF with an invisible but searchable-and-selectable text layer. Works great. However, I want to produce some low-resolution PDFs. I can do this fine, but the lower […]

I am still very much on my magazine-scanning kick (https://mastodon.social/@ghalfacree/114069867420929055) - more so, in fact, as I've now taken possession of a bunch of '90s/'00s PC Pro mags I'm currently scanning. I had someone ask if I'd tried Genius Scan, or a similar smartphone scanner […]

Now that #firefox has removed the pledge not to sell its users' personal data and to protect their privacy (https://mastodon.social/@[email protected]/114078711152286668) I'm giving @Vivaldi a whirl. Yes, it's Chromium-based, which isn't ideal. Yes, it's closed-source. No, you […]

I have a big ol' stack of magazines I'd like to scan for posterity, and am currently working on a flow for doing exactly that (or, rather, improving my existing workflow.) Question, though. For newsprint, as in this issue of ETI from 1980, what do people […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Started seeing the pernicious Gemini AI button appear in Google Docs, Sheets, and the rest of 'em? Got uBlock Origin? Here's the filter you need: ###docs-sidekick-gen-ai-promo-button-container

Got a deadline approaching with quite some rapidity, so today's been a photo-editing day. Now to put everything together! #photography #technology #fpga #riscv

When I head that @ArchiteuthisFlux was making a solderless jumper-wire-less breadboard, I figured it was a joke. When I heard he was running Doom on it - the breadboard itself, no external hardware required - I *knew* it was a joke. Yeah, wrong on both counts. Here's id Software's 1993 […]

In light of recent happenings over the pond, I'd like to make a few things clear: trans rights are human rights, trans men are men, trans women are women, non-binary people are neither or perhaps sometimes both or a mixture but whatever they're valid too, and sex is scientifically non-binary […]

The results of Raspberry Pi's RP2350 Capture-the-Flag contest are in: four winners, plus a fifth confirmed but probably-not-RP2350-exclusive vulnerability. All winners get the top $20k prize, and kudos to the company for making the results public. Sadly, two attacks have no known mitigation […]

The BBC has discovered the fact that you can DoS a Wi-Fi connection with a de-authentication attack, carried out on hardware no more complex than a cheapo microcontroller. For some reason, it's decided to focus on the fact that this can knock Ring Wi-Fi cams offline - rather than, y'know, all […]

Actually managed to have some time off over the holidays, for a change, but I'm back in the office today - and playing the usual game of new-year catch-up! Speaking of, my latest list of articles is up - everything I had published digitally in December 2024, including my review of the shiny […]

Bah. Bought a DVD drive to replace a failed one in the desktop, but it turns out it doesn't support raw reads - so dvdisaster just gets gibberish from it. Guess I'm in the market for another drive, then!

Merry Xmas to all who observe it, and a happy 25th of December to those who don't! (And have a great whatever-it-is to the contrarians working to a different calendar...)

Currently covering STMicroelectronics' STM32N6 launch, an 800MHz(!) Arm Cortex-M55 microcontroller with 1GHz(!!) Neural-ART in-house machine learning coprocessor. Seems like a heck of a bit of kit, but STMicro's claim that it's the first microcontroller to […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

A very dark and rainy start to the week here, and an early one too - 'cos it's new #RaspberryPi day. Yes, again: this time it's the turn of the Raspberry Pi 500, a keyboard computer throwback to the 1980s with all of the power of the Raspberry Pi 5. Also […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Remember that #acorn #archimedes games I was trying to hunt down a while back? https://mastodon.social/@ghalfacree/113533616652282871 I (and others) searched *everywhere* - the Archimedes Archive, fan pages, every issue of Acorn User and similar that the Internet Archive has available, even […]

Absolutely in awe - and extremely envious - of this successful project to build a functional replica of Harmut Esslinger's 1984 FlatMac tablet prototype - which was only ever a non-functional design prototype, never launched. I want one […]

Only just had a chance to gather up everything I've had published digitally in November. It's... a lot. 117 news articles, a press release, a long-form hands-on hardware review (hello, Compute Module 5!), and my usual newsletters for MyriadRF and the Free and Open Source Silicon Foundation […]

I'm the office a little earlier than usual, as it's a New Shiny day: the #raspberrypi Compute Module 5 is here at last, and it's a bit of a beast - all the power of a Raspberry Pi 5 in module format. #technology #gadgets #computing

Question for the #retrogaming/#VintageComputing crowd: my wife's trying to track down a text adventure game she remembers on the Acorn Archimedes. Set in the Second World War, the player visits a girl called Jean who tells her about her life as a civilian in the war. Doesn't ring any bells for […]

Didn't fancy signing up for BlueSky, 'cos Mastodon's much more my style, but there's a handy service that lets you mirror your Mastodon posts there: @bsky.brid.gy I've only just enabled it, so I'm not sure how seamless it all is - especially how it handles replies. My profile's live, tho' […]