November 2023 – Something Odd!

Play C64 Games Online

If you’re in the mood for some retro gaming, head on over to this site, where you can play lots of old Commodore 64 games in your browser! Unfortunately, Firefox caused the audio to stutter, but the games play fine in Edge. I tested Flimbo’s Quest and The Great Gianna Sisters, and they were perfect. I somehow made it to level 5 in the latter game rather quickly. I normally use all my lives in level 2!

There is a huge C64 games archive at archive.org, and there are loads of demos there too! Give Arkanoid 2 a spin while you’re over there. It’s even trained, and you can play with infinite lives! The keyboard controls are the two shift keys and space to fire. 🙂

An interview with Richard Dean Anderson

I didn’t think Richard Dean Anderson (MacGyver, Stargate SG-1) gave interviews any more. I knew he had some serious health issues, but he’s looking good in this interview. The interviewer is such a fanboy. I suspect anyone who grew up in the 80s on MacGyver would be the same!

Here’s a screen cap from the video because, of course, the video will disappear.

A new epoch approaches!

Not long now until the Unix Timestamp flips over to 17 followed by many zeros. Watch it live here or run the following at a terminal:

watch -n1 date +%s

The Unix timestamp caught at 1699998077.

What is the timestamp? It’s the number of seconds since January 1st, 1970 UTC.

AI Spelling

Your kids won’t be using AI to spell any time soon. This is what Llama2 said:

> where’s the letter r in the word blueberry?

The letter “r” is the 18th letter of the alphabet, and it appears in the word “blueberry” after the letter “b”. The word “blueberry” spelled out is:

B – L – U – E – B – E – R

So, the letter “r” appears in the 7th position of the word “blueberry”.

> what about the last r and y?

My apologies! Here is the complete spelling of the word “blueberry”:

B – L – U – E – B – E – R – Y

So, the letter “r” appears twice in the word “blueberry”, and the letter “y” appears at the end.

Thanks to Cesar for posting those screenshots on Facebook!