Believer, Father of 3, #OpenBSD user, motorcycle/running/hiking enthusiast, gamer, fountain pen addict, sysadmin by day.
Desire to understand more low level of code, systems and hardware.
Can read some code, can't write lots of it.
Attempting to learn guitar (again) & audio recording/engineering
| Website | http://tech-wolf.net/ |
Oh, summer is here in Phoenix. 105* F (41C) at 1645PM.
Well, i guess its actually late. So I should be grateful.
Boss had me drive a meeting to take notes on the problems we discovered moving away from our current patching of environments.
Boss: "Have you guys checked access and used copilot yet?"
Everyone: "No"
Boss: "X, go ahead and pull up copilot, then type 'reword: <rest of text>'"
Boss: "Now it allows you to sound more professional"
Just kill me. Not only was I trying to avoid any and all AI as long as I lived, being forced to use it at work, and in front of my boss just takes the cake.
Later, my coworker told me he could hear my soul dying. 
​ 
​
after years of digging and research, i finally found the toolkit that was used to make MS multimedia software Encarta, Dinosaurs and Dangerous Creatures.
when i fell in love with these programs, i imagined they were built with a rich multimedia authoring environment/IDE like Macromedia Director. e.g. dragging and dropping images, sounds, text and video onto a stage, animating it with keyframes, and then scripting it for interaction.
the toolkit used was, as it turns out, a very roughly hewn collection of individual programs. there was no IDE. all of the content was written in RTF files, which were then compiled with links to external resources like wavs and avi's.
i cannot imagine what a nightmare this was for the MS Home teams to work with. there is no drag and drop of any kind, no object linking and embedding (OLÉ!), nor animation editor. this is a dog's breakfast of individual programs written by different people.
i'm frankly amazed that the MS Homes teams put together such well-designed programs *despite* how painful this toolkit is to use
the one thing i can say in its favour is that it has one badass tetricube logo for cover art :D
huge thank you to @david_rysk and @philpem for archiving this extremely obscure piece of software
https://archive.org/details/microsoft-multimedia-viewer-2.0-rips-20210921-1.7z
@rubenerd Love your article on painting parts beige.
I certainly miss the era of those cases.
Now I've got ideas of painting a "modern" black tower all beige!
As people know, I'm all about Psion's machines. It's less about the retro and more about how people can use them now. I firmly believe that they're still relevant today as offline pocket computers, separate from the connected world. A breath of fresh air.
In fact, a woman in her early 20s came to my table on Sunday, saying she'd never seen Psion PDA before. She said she'd been looking for a pocket word processor for ages, that no one makes anything remotely like that now, and the 3a could be exactly what she needs!
She then asked me how easy it was to get new batteries, because surely they were obscure.
Her face when I told her that it just needs 2x AA batteries!
Back in 2024, a different woman approached my table at the Retro Computer Festival in Cambridge. She was also looking for some sort of distraction-free word processor. For her, the Series 5's keyboard was a better fit.
So yeah, the market's not big. But that's fine! There's enough of these machines on eBay to go around. And if we can keep them going with new parts (cases, flex cables), and make comms easier so that non-techies aren't struggling with RS232 and VMs, then we don't need to recreate Psion.
after months of behind the scenes coding, i'm happy to announce the re-launch of my podcast: CD-ROM Safari!
if you're new to the show, it's a friendly and welcoming look at multimedia software of the 1990s.
i've rebuilt the entire site to use kiki, my php-based homepage construction kit. it now generates podcast RSS feeds on the fly, along with nice cover art and episode metadata :D
prior episodes (from 2018 to early 2026) have been archived into season 1.
the new episode, posted 5 minutes ago, is the first episode of season 2. it's a relaunch of the show, along with a whole new website to facilitate software preservation for educational games, edutainment and multimedia.
the website: https://cd-rom.ca/podcast
podcast rss 2.0: https://cd-rom.ca/podcast.xml
apple podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cd-rom-safari-podcast/id1393890581
enjoy the show :D
#multimedia #cdrom #retroComputing #retroGaming #dosGaming #msdos #macintosh #vintageApple #kiki #softwarepreservation #podcast
rasteri
vga256
The Last Psion | Alex