Author Archives: Donncha

TIL about Star Trek Continues

Star Trek Continues Episode 1

The fan mad web series, Star Trek Continues, published their first episode in 2013 according to Wikipedia. Somehow, I think I have never heard of it, despite loving Star Trek. Better late than never, and I enjoyed the first episode this morning. It’s all available on YouTube.

The series continues on where the original series ended, with the 5-year mission of the Enterprise being wrapped up in the last 2 episodes. I recognised the computer voice in episode 1, and I see from Wikipedia that other guest stars make an appearance too. Definitely worth a watch if you’re a Star Trek fan. 🙂

Play C64 Games Online

The Great Gianna Sisters title screen

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.

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!

Bye bye Pebble!

Pebble, aka t2.social, was a short lived social network like Twitter. Last week they sent out emails to all their users to tell them that the site was shutting down on November 1st. I first came across it thanks to Topgold, but it was always a small site. In a crowded section of the Internet, another Twitter clone would have a tough time competing.

I hadn’t posted much there and wasn’t going to download my data, but this post by Eugen Rochko caught my attention and reminded me to go visit.

If was part of the social web, they would have had a network of 1.8M active users, not 1,000, and perhaps wouldn’t have had to shut down.

Eugen Rochko

Maybe it would have survived, but it would have had to be extra special and offer some compelling features to compete with all the “free” Fediverse servers out there. The Activity Pub plugin for WordPress recently hit version 1.0 and was launched on WordPress.com too, so potentially millions of new Fediverse sites are coming online, all of which are on more mature software.

I listen to podcasts

It was nice to hear an Irish voice, Sorcha, on the latest episode, Leif, of Heavyweight.

Also, I totally forgot that Pocketcasts has a web player that syncs with the app. So handy!

Another great episode of Cautionary Tales I listened to recently:

All their episodes are great. You should subscribe.

If you watched The Dig on Netflix, you’ll love listening to this episode of the Short History Of… podcast. Even though it’s a “short history”, it has a lot more detail about the dig at Sutton Hoo, the treasures found there and in nearby mounds.

I started listening to a new Sherlock Holmes podcast. I’m only on the first episode, but it has the same feel as the recent TV series, and I’m very much enjoying it so far!

Some of us are still blogging for the hell of it. (HN)

If you’re on the Fediverse, you’re blogging, IMO. 🙂

Final section of Macroom Bypass opens soon

The final section of the new road bypassing Macroom and other towns in Co Cork will be opening next month, hopefully. The existing sections make that drive a pleasure now, as we can bypass the bottleneck of Macroom, and avoid the twisting roads just west of Ballyvourney.

We drove to Killarney on Saturday morning to photograph the deer in Killarney National Park, and that road was lovely to drive. It’s disconcerting there’s no hard shoulder, but there are lay-bys at least. We passed through Ballyvourney around 7am, and saw a local shop was already open, but I wonder what effect the new road will have on local business?

On the way back, we stopped in The Mills, on the edge of that town, for lunch. It was well over a decade since I’d eaten there. The place was packed with diners, and even a Hen Party! The food was delicious and staff were friendly. Will it be so easy to get there next month, or will drivers have to drive through the entire town to visit?

Harvard Weblogs archived by Automattic

Dave Winer just reported that an ancient WordPress MU site that was shutting down has been archived by Automattic. I wasn’t aware that Harvard were using MU back in the day, but if you search, you’ll find posts like this and this one talking about upgrading WordPress MU.

Gives me a nice, fuzzy feeling seeing those long ago posts about using WordPress MU.

If you don’t know, WordPress MU began life as b2++, a fork of b2 (which became WordPress). The fork was started by me to provide blogs for the linux.ie community at blogs.linux.ie. That site is long gone, but you can see an archived copy of the front page here, where I talk about using Smarty for the theming:

We’re using the b2 weblog software, although heavily modified with the following:

  • Caching and templates are handled by Smarty. You don’t need to know PHP to create your template! The caching should make your page load just as fast when the server is busy as at any other time. Unfortunately, a side effect of that is that comment, trackback, and pingback counts might be stale until the page is refreshed. (Yes, I know about Smarty “insert” functions, that’ll come in a later version.)
Donncha O Caoimh, blogs.linux.ie, 2003.

I love that Automattic is now hosting the site, but I’m also glad that archive.org is out there preserving the open web. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an archive.org copy of a page show up in a Google search, however. Have you?

So much useful information is now locked in private Facebook groups, or Discord channels, it’s ridiculous. Here’s a very niche example from only yesterday. I wanted to know what bit depth RAW image files were, and one of the more useful hits was a dpreview thread from 2007!

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