Not the actor.
These are pictures taken by father at the Henley Royal Regatta 1961. This was a notable regatta with a lot of international competition. British Pathé has a fun video covering the event as well, here on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Q13WWFcBwJA?si=UrZEJobVlf9ui1-g
I had known about Bletchley Park for decades but I had not really internalized the fact that you can go visit it or that it was easy to get to. That is until Nicolas Seriot https://seriot.ch posted on LinkedIn that he had gone to the museum there. I took my oldest son to the UK in March of 2025 and we made Bletchley Park one of our destinations for the trip, it was incredibly easy to hop on the train to Milton Keynes from London and just walk over to Bletchley Park from the train station. You’d think that a…
Sloss Furnaces- Birmingham Is Birmingham, Alabama on your bucket list? No? Maybe it should be. I had never given a thought to going to Birmingham prior to last year but my daughter went for a music festival hosted at the Sloss furnaces historical site and my interest was piqued. She decided to go again this year and I tagged along, I wanted to see Sloss furnaces, enjoy the music and also see Birmingham a little. I didn’t venture outside the historic district and it was rather charming. I hit a couple excellent restaurants (Helen and Automatic Seafood) and enjoyed the…
I picked this up at an auction somewhat cheap, when I plug it in and press Start I can hear the game but there is no picture. This is a terrible curse, I have to get rid of it or fix it if I can’t see the game! It’s completely original, no internal modifications, original key for the back and manual in excellent condition. I’ve listed it online high but in the meantime look into fixing the CRT without electrocuting myself. Lots of articles online. I’ve ordered a video converter so I can hook it up to an LCD and…
Some recently asked on Hacker News “ What is the best code base you ever worked on?” and a couple people chimed in with Cocotron here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40819146 Unfortunately the economics of Cocotron don’t really work out, there aren’t enough people who want to port from Mac to PC in this fashion. I did implement a ton of it, but … Thanks to Lou for pointing this HN post out to me!
TLDR; Scrapping electronics isn’t a very lucrative hobby, but when you have a giant pile of hardware you need to get rid of it may be more cost effective than paying someone to take it away. When I decided to buy a large lot of surplus computers online I had one part of my plan in place, as a small number of them were worth Crazy Xserve G5 valuations , but the rest of my plan was not. The first problem was moving this stuff, the machines were only a couple hours away but when doing the math on the…
I’ve been using eBay for 25 years, selling personal items and often buying new, used and hard to find items. A lot of this is pretty normal, items sell for expected market prices. Every once in a while I have an unusual transaction, maybe I get a great deal, or maybe I have something which fetches a nice price. An out of print children’s book which has become a collector’s item, or a 200 year old watercolor paint set which has a bidding war between museum conservators. Possibly the most odd thing I’ve seen for technology is Xserve G5 values…
Honestly, nothing could have prepared me for seeing Venice in person. The engineering accomplishment of all the stone buildings propped up by petrified logs in a lagoon is just mind boggling. The city is larger than expected and just an endless maze of canals and alleys, it did live up to it’s reputation of being such a unique place. I loved it! We stayed a little north of Venice in Mogliano Veneto, the train is regular, but does end a little early around midnight. The first night we had a mad scramble through the alleys and bridges to make it…
We didn’t stay in Bologna city center, we rented an AirBnB about 40 minutes outside the city on a hill in the countryside and I rented a car. Hertz doesn’t care if you have an international driver’s permit, but the police do, so I got mine before the trip. The funny thing is that we saw one of the Lamborghini police cars the day we arrived in Bologna and that was a fun sight. One for the bucket list – driving in Italy. This isn’t much different than Boston or New York, so easy enough. Bologna was interesting and nice…
Do I have too many pictures of pizza? No! Florence quite a fun destination, yes, there are a lot of tourists, but the city can handle it and there are a lot of great shops and restaurants. By dumb luck we discovered Giovanni Santarpia’s pizzeria outside the city center, rated as one of the best pizzerias in Italy, and we managed to get a table, just amazing and fun. Looking forward to going back to Florence, what a fun city with amazing food!