Geek

A bunch of old cranks.

A colleague told me they’d be doing a run today, so we went off to Kalk Bay for breakfast (Waffles. With ice cream. And ice cream coffee. My poor sinuses) to watch them come past.

A brace of Model Ts

They couldn’t have chosen a nicer day for their drive (through Muizenberg and Kalk Bay via Cape Point to Scarborough for lunch).

1901 Benz Ideal, co-piloted by my colleague Harvey.

Wolseley. Number plate says “1905” but this website* calls it a 1902.

They tell me this is the only remaining 1905 De Dietrich. Gorgeous big four cylinder engine which barely ticks over at Muizenberg / Fish Hoek Main Road speed.

The only known surviving Nordenfelt car, a 1907 model. Nordenfelt is better known for its multiple-barrel machine gun,  a predecessor of the Maxim.

* Evil website. They have a 1971 Citroen Safari for sale. Don’t tell my father. Hell, don’t tell me, I’m sorely tempted. Oh, and a 1961 Mercedes Ponton. Don’t tell my brother.

2012-02-05 by Cars Geek 0

Road trip

Alone on the open road with a mixtape for company. A purpose is optional, but nice.

It’s a luxury, fuel’s expensive and accommodation adds up.

But it’s cheaper than a head mechanic.

2011-12-31 by Cars Geek Guns 1

The times, they are a-changin’

Consider the significance of the following sentence, from a review of a book.

I got the book in trade paperback, which cost more but I’m glad I did it because I want this little book on my shelf.

Just think about that for a while.

2011-11-22 by Geek 0

30 Years

Thirty years ago Wizardry:  Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord was released. I bought my copy soon after that — unfortunately the invoice is not dated. (incidentally, R65 was a lot of money back in 1981).

I played the living bits out of this game. Eventually beat it, too. In the process I figured out, all on my own, how the characters were stored on disk and of course, how to cheat. How? Well, edit a byte on the disk, check what changed, make notes. After all, there’s only about 200 bytes per character, and each byte has 256 possible values… this can’t take long, can it? (Hint: yes, it does…)

After Proving Grounds it was Knight of Diamonds and Legacy of Llylgamyn after which… life happened. I went to varsity, didn’t quite yet discover girls, but… pretty much stopped spending endless hours on computer games.

Yet I’m still a retrogeek, and I follow various retro websites.

Wizardry is now available on iOS. And it’s thirty years better.

If there’s a reason for me to get an iDevice, this is it.

2011-11-15 by Computers Geek 0

I have a funny funny bone

You’ll either get it or you won’t, and in general it’s probably safer to bet on the latter.

I found the following while scratching around on The Digital Antiquarian*, and it really tickled my funny bone.

Elias was a banker, so we left with more than most. $1,600 to spend at the outfitters—three yoke of oxen, 2000 pounds of food, boxes of bullets and spare parts: tongue, axle, wheel. Two sets of clothes for each of us. “What kind of clothes?” the children asked.

“Who knows?” I said. “The store only sold Clothes. In sets, though. That’s something.”

They asked what we would eat. “Food,” I said. “Just ‘Food.’ Make your peace with it.”

Of course, my frame of reference for all of this is relatively recent, I grew up playing Hammurabi.

* “Filfre” is of course an obscure text adventure game reference.

2011-09-26 by Computers Geek 0

Mechanical marvels

As mentioned before, we visited both the Pacific Pinball Museum and the Musee Mechanique in San Francisco.

The former is great, you can play for free all day for the cost of admission, and they have a lot of machines.

The latter can get expensive, but you won’t get a chance to see something like this anywhere else in the world*. While some pinball machines take 75c for one game, the player pianos are one, maybe two quarters, and while I love pinball machines, I straight out adore the players.

The Wurlitzer is also way high on my want list You’ll hafta tilt either your head or the computer screen for this one, I don’t have the software or the patience to rotate it right now.

(And yea, it doesn’t start from the beginning since you hafta put the money in then step back and hit the shutter.)

*If you can, I want to know about it, please.

2011-06-27 by Geek Pinball USA 2011 0

XP on an Acer Aspire One

A while ago we bought Jessica an Acer Aspire One running Linux (this is the cheaper option, the XP ones were about double the price at the time).

She got tired of that and asked me to install Windows XP.

I tried following the tutorial , which involve putting XP on a memstick, but I gave up on that, borrowed the external USB CD drive from work, and installed from the CD. That worked well.

You’ll need to download the drivers here.

(I also tried installing Windows 2000 on my eeepc (I hate XP) but that didn’t work so well, so I’m running puppeee now).

2011-05-08 by Computers Geek 1

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