vivdunstan

Hyperland (1990)

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 19:28:54 GMT

Very belatedly watching the 1990 documentary “Hyperland” about hypertext, starring Douglas Adams (who wrote it) and Tom Baker. It originally aired on the BBC just as Martin and I were starting as undergraduate students at St Andrews.

And for the computer science folks, my St Andrews CS PhD which I had to drop out of in 1996 due to my progressive neurological disease (still not then diagnosed properly) was about creating a system to support hypercode, a hypertext like programming system built on underlying persistence technology.

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USB what?

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 18:59:42 GMT

Decided to update the maps on our 8-year-old Garmin satnav - a very rarely used device! - before our trip to Perth. Then had the inevitable hunt the cable fun, to find the correct cable. Found it, but I've now ordered me a low cost USB C to USB mini cable to have near my laptop, for ease of use. No more hunt the cable, and no need for a USB A-C dongle.

Perth has a quite mind bending one way / partially pedestrianised heart. We are keen to get my heavy wheelchair + heavy me as close as possible to save Long Covid afflicted Martin pushing too far. We very much need the satnav to manage this! But may still end up parking further away than we'd like. I have a disabled Blue Badge.

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Dream

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 12:12:50 GMT

Had a very long dream just now, where Martin and I went into a secondhand bookshop in St Andrews - this made up secondhand bookshop in South Street (not the real one as was!) is a recurrent thing in my dreams, at least until now. And this time they were closing down and had a "Pay £15" at the door, then get as many books as you want for no extra cost deal. So I got dozens of books. History books, computing history ones, gamebooks, children's fiction, an amazing bound Dickens, so many Gaelic books, and so much more. It was a very good dream 😜

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Musing favourite computing books

Fri, 18 Oct 2024 14:34:02 GMT

Me just now: “I wonder what my 3rd favourite computing book would be?” I rediscovered my 2nd favourite today, complete with school prize bookplate in there. I had form for spending school prizes on computing books! Even a 5th year French prize on a Pascal programming book 😜 Will ponder. Then probably blog about it. So far we’re talking 1980s though.

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Old style web browsing

Tue, 27 Aug 2024 08:49:38 GMT

Resorting to Lynx in my Mac terminal/shell to read an article today. That won't load in normal web browsers - probably subscription only. But as a last try before giving up I thought of trying Lynx! A very very old text based web browser, that I've used occasionally (but little recently!) since the early 1990s. Unix based, but I downloaded a version many years ago to my Mac laptop, and can run it in the shell terminal. Here is Lynx viewing another web page.

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Bergerac take two

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 05:48:09 GMT

Belatedly following up a previous post about this to say I've resumed watching Bergerac. Though not helped by Britbox removing the programme recently (Britbox are in a bit of a transitional mess, with the part-way-through transfer to ITVX), alongside many other programmes (including Blake's 7), before realising that was a mistake and reinstating them. Though losing the records of where viewers like me had got to, including how far through individual episodes.

I'm not sure how long Bergerac will stay up on Britbox so am currently rewatching the many Philippa Vale episodes at priority speed. Also reminded by that blog post that I need to rewatch the Louise Jameson introduction episode, and also her character's final episode. And right now I've just started rewatching the episode with Michael Gambon and Connie Booth, which at the start has the most over the top introduction of a "computer conference" ever. Martin's mouth was on the floor when he came into the room at that bit. This episode was the last TV credit by renowned Doctor Who writer Robert Holmes, who died before it aired.

I am constantly being distracted by familiar faces. Also so many from Doctor Who. Eg apart from the very obvious in my limited rewatch I've already seen Richard Hurndall, Ian Marter (a glimpse and you'll miss it bit), Elizabeth Spriggs, and Michael Gambon in the current one. Plus many other familiar faces from the past.

I just hope I can get through enough, in case Britbox (or ITVX ultimately) do finally stop streaming it!

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Electronic Superhighway

Wed, 20 Sep 2023 15:53:32 GMT

This old comic came up on my Facebook today. Wow.

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