By Roy Mathur, on 2019-03-31, at 23:27:38 to 00:23:54 BST, for Captain Roy's Rocket Radio Show
Something to do with Brexit is, was, and is always happening in the immediate past, right now, and into the foreseeable future. I think the whole idea of leaving the EU is blazingly stupid. Personally, I think Brexit should be cancelled. Let's be honest (again, as if no one knows by now), it's not about anything except xenophobia.
If it comes to another vote, I'll vote (again) to stay in. Yes, I'm one of those remoaners, but that's not why we're here tonight. Tonight, we're going to cheer ourselves up by not talking about the B word at all... er, well, anymore than I have already.
What's the studio look like now? Just as noisy as ever, but tidier...
Episode 250: Bok the prancing gargoyle from Doctor Who: The Daemons (1971) is the Master's henchman/thing. It's not explained where it comes from, but I'm guessing it's either some kind of robot disguised as a gargoyle and built by the Master or a lesser imp alien, far less powerful than a daemon, summoned by the Master. I'd say robot because it shoots lightning, but then it's also made of stone, so there's a bit of the later Weeping Angels type creature in there too. Early Who has influenced so much other pop culture, but also even itself in later years.
Episode 249: Regarding the sizable non-white population in Tudor times, I forgot to mention the Guardian article, which I read relating to this story. I've now appended that link to the show notes of that episode. Again, this is one bigots need to look up. Also, and just to double and triple down on this, and because I relish upsetting the bigots, I have included that, and some extra links, on the same subject right here:
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/mar/17/skeletons-of-the-mary-rose-review-how-multicultural-was-tudor-england
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/29/tudor-english-black-not-slave-in-sight-miranda-kaufmann-history
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18903391
https://www.macleans.ca/society/the-astonishing-history-of-black-people-living-in-tudor-england/
Not that much, as supplies are dwindling, but I do have some very tasty Cola Chewits.
Nothing. I haven't bought I thing and I don't intend to, despite what I said about wanting a new banjolele. Why? There's so much out there after NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) 2019 that I want to bide my times and get something really cool. Hint: I still want to play really, really loud.
Nothing! I think this episode has helped clear everything away. Thanks for listening!
Apparently, Angelina Jolie is back in a Maleficent sequel and a Marvel movie. Yeah, this year she's back as one of my favourite characters in a film I really enjoyed on so many levels including the Lana Del Rey song Once Upon A Dream.
The Eternals is a Jack Kirby creation that I know very little about except what I quickly cribbed from the internet. The Eternals are humans uplifted by aliens to defend earth. Jolie plays Sersi (Circe--get it?).
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/mar/28/angelina-jolie-joins-marvel-superhero-universe-the-eternals
https://www.slashfilm.com/the-eternals-cast/
https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Sersi_%28Earth-616%29
I keep toying with Linux, because most of my previous IT life was centred around UNIX systems.
After tinkering with a Commodore 64, my first proper computer, I had a huge hiatus in tech for several years until I bought my first PC in the 80s with my first wages. It was a terrible Amstrad 80386sx 25Mhz PC that came with MS-DOS 5 and a useless memory hungry GUI called Counterpoint. This was when I really started getting into computers, DOS at least. Then, a few years later, when the internet came along--BLAM!--I'm not sure what happened. I think I was just physically spending more time at the computer and that led to me doing more stuff with the computer. Like my wardialer. Oh dear. Never use "9"s as dummy numbers to test your wardialler in the UK. Anyway, playing with DOS batch files got me into programming in hobbyist programming with QBASIC 1.1, QuickBasic 4.5, and FreeBASIC, Rexx, and Lua (and C and Perl and Awk and Sed and... quite a lot of other languages too---professionally---and it wouldn't surprise me if some of my code is out there on a production server right now--even after so many years. Here's the point: if I were to pick an OS to use, just for fun, it would be DOS. At the time, I bought a few games, but they weren't cheap, and now... Well, you can get all the DOS games you ever wanted on the internet (though real packaging is just lovely--but, have you seen the prices on eBay?). Here's the thing. I've used every DOS going: MS-DOS 5 and 6.22, Caldera OpenDOS, PC DOS, Win95 to 98SE, and FreeDOS. For nostalgia, I like 6.22, but FreeDOS is also good. At the moment, my delightfully retro repurposed thin client (parallel and serial ports, IDE attached to PATA SSD... and it just works) is running MSDOS 6.22. But I'm building a USB drive to play around with FreeDOS too. As an OS, DOS is very basic, but that also means there isn't too much to learn.
UNIX/Linux is far superior and very powerful, but also labyrinthine, and leads to endless tinkering. What I want to do is escape some of the complexity and just have some fun playing games, using ancient software, and doing some very mild tinkering that doesn't leave me wanting to tear my hair out. Now, let's hope I can find a proper 4:3 monitor, or one with the OSD option in hardware.
The file systems sucks, Windows often thinks it's corrupt, which turns my exFAT drives read only; making any open apps on that drive hang , and necessitates a scan which reveals nothing. Once I couldn't even fix it without doing a 12 hour low level chkdsk. It sucks. The second time this happened, I decided I'd had enough. I use exFAT because I shared files between seldom used MacOS, Windows, and Linux.
So I tested Linux with NTFS drives to see if I could cope. Sharing between the systems using the NTFS-3G drivers used to be notoriously slow, glitchy, and sometimes difficult to install. I found that it still is on MacOS, but not on Linux, where, most of the time now it is installed by default. And it works! In my admittedly minimal testing, I can now write to NTFS drives in Linux without any problems. So I went though the monumental task of converting all my big spinning metal drives to NTFS and my USB sticks and Micro SDs to fat32. Then I used robocopy to copying everything back. Two days later? Goodbye exFAT! I thought you were the answer to my problems, but you were not. For TB storage, it's journaled files systems for me from now on.
https://superuser.com/questions/1388931/how-to-install-freedos-onto-a-usb-stick
http://www.freedos.org/
http://www.freedos.org/ebook/
http://www.allthethings.ca/2018/04/21/freedos-and-adventures-in-1980s-word-processing/
https://winworldpc.com/search?q=DOS
http://download.viatech.com/en/support/driversSelect.jsp
All that DOS talk, surely you haven't forgotten the legendary Gary Kildall? No, I haven't, and check out these links.
https://archive.org/details/GaryKild
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0452972/
https://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/in-his-own-words-gary-kildall/
I know... getting people to sort through my show notes is getting silly. I am updating my website as we speak! I've got some good short ones that are incredibly useful and that I use myself, so why not share them? They are, or were, sort of out there on my blog, but a mess, so I'm fixing that.
Sega finally announced Sega Mega Drive Mini at Sega Fes in Tokyo yesterday. It will come with two controllers that look very like the originals, though in Japan you get 6, not 3 button, controllers. It will also, thank god, plug straight into HDMI. Some of the forty games I suggested to Sega on Twitter (along with loads of other people, I'm sure) are on the list of 40 games that will be pre-loaded, including, I'm sorry to say, Ecco the Dolphin (I really hate that game). It will cost GBP 69.99 and will be available from September the 19th, but you can pre-order soon. It actually comes out a week before my birthday, so it's fair to say that I'll probably do an episode dedicated to the mini console around that time.
http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2019/03/30/sega-will-release-the-mega-drive-mini-on-september-19
https://twitter.com/SEGA_Europe/status/1111968818203643904?ref_src=twsrc^tfw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUDF9MtzmQk
http://megadrivemini.sega.com/
https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/30/18288193/sega-genesis-mega-drive-mini-retro-console-september-19-2019
As a podcaster, writer, and geek, I have again tried to engage with Reddit with little luck. In the end, just to get my stuff seen, I had to join an Upvote party, which defeats the whole purpose of the karma system, which is, in any case, broken with new users stuck in a loop of not having enough credibility to be heard. It also adds insult to injury when you are locked out of something that has badly appropriated something from your own culture.
Thanks for nothing Reddit. You suck. This is why I hate social media. It's not social and it's not media and it's not networking. It's an echo chamber popularity contest for the mean kids club.
Chew, chew, chew. Mmmm... sweeties.