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ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Gareth Halfacree
@ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
68 followers 0 following 280 posts
#Technology, #science, and #computing #journalist and #photojournalist. #Author, #Microbit & #RaspberryPi User Guides. Custom PC columnist. Bylines Hackster.io […]

🌉 bridged from ⁂ https://mastodon.social/@ghalfacree, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact
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ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
My full review will be going up on #hackster later in the day, and it's a big 'un - written, because as I've said before I will always commit to the bit, on the Commodore 64 Ultimate itself, in Mini Office II. Got to admit, I haven't used that in a few years […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
A screenshot of Mini Office II running on a Commodore 64. Most of the last three paragraphs of a review detailing the ins and outs of the Commodore 64 Ultimate are visible in white text on a blue background. The status bar at the top says the review totals 2,610 words - with plenty of memory to spare for more. Who needs more than 64kB?
December 15, 2025 at 9:51 AM
ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
And... yeah, it works. The only thing that gave it even the slightest pause was the Sound Expander, and only because I had to manually disable the internal virtual "cartridge" to route the signals properly - a quick flip in the settings menu, no more than […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
A screenshot of the software included with the Commodore SFX FM Sound Expander, which turns the Commodore's keyboard - or an optional full-size external piano-style keyboard - into a synth. Musical staves are visible in the background, while a yellow "Synth Voices" menu provides a list of sounds to pick. A screenshot of Simons' BASIC, a cartridge-based expansion to Commodore BASIC 2.0 which adds 114 new commands. A short program to plot a sine wave in high-resolution mode is visible. The output of a Simons' BASIC program to plot a sine wave, showing a dotted line tracing the wave on a white background with a blue border. The title screen of Mayhem in Monsterland, an impressively high-speed platformer released relatively late in the original Commodore 64's commercial run.
December 15, 2025 at 9:49 AM
ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
And when I say "hands-on," I mean putting the thing through the wringer. You want to tell me it's "99% compatible" with existing hardware? Okay, let's try it...

#technology #retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #commodore #fpga
A photo of the Commodore 64 Ultimate nearly buried under a collection of original Commodore software and hardware. Visible are cassette and cartridge games, a Datasette tape drive, a 1570 floppy drive, a boxed Zip Stik joystick, the SFX FM Sound Expander, a plastic musical keyboard overlay fitted on top of the keyboard, a VIC-1520 plotter, and an Action Replay cartridge, plus a copy of Simons' BASIC.
December 15, 2025 at 9:44 AM
ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
It's a rainy Monday here in Bradford, but a happy one - despite the fact I was working all weekend.

Why? Because I was working on something fun: going hands-on with the #commodore 64 Ultimate, an FPGA-powered recreation of the world's best-selling home […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
A photo of the Commodore 64 Ultimate box, which is designed to mimic the packaging provided with the original Commodore 64 microcomputer. A blue-and-white background is dominated by a picture of the microcomputer itself, with business-coded charts and papers to the left - ironic, given that the machine would see its biggest success as a gaming system. A photograph of the Commodore 64 Ultimate, a wedge-format microcomputer built into a keyboard. It mimics the original "breadbin" model of Commodore 64 to the smallest detail. A photograph of the back of the Commodore 64 Ultimate. The case includes all the same cut-outs as an original Commodore 64, though not everything is the same: the RF video output is missing, as is the high-low frequency switch, and the User Port has been replaced by very modern HDMI, Ethernet, and USB ports.
December 15, 2025 at 9:42 AM
ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Pulling the last of the things I need from storage, including a Commodore Communications Modem. Only to discover... another Commodore Communications Modem.

I have no memory of ever getting a second.
A Commodore Communications Modem box, holding a modem add-on for the Commodore 64. Behind it is a Commodore Communications Modem box, holding another modem add-on for the Commodore 64. The box behind is newer, and lists Commodore 128 compatibility; its cover is a very boring pastel-shaded series of coiled telephone wires with a line-art telephone in the middle; the earlier box is more colourful and shows a telephone handset "zapping" information from a monitor to a bank, some kind of hexagonal shop, an aeroplane, and a woman menacingly holding simplified banknotes in an archway cut through some kind of pressure weather map of the UK and Ireland. Overstuffed shelves are visible in the background.
December 11, 2025 at 3:23 PM
ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
This was actually announced a few days back, but I've been waiting to have one in-hand: the sixth edition of my Official Raspberry Pi Beginner's Guide is now out!

It's freshly expanded for the latest Trixie-based Raspberry Pi OS and for the Raspberry Pi 5 […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
A hand holding a copy of The Official Raspberry Pi User Guide 6th Edition, a paperback book. The cover shows a Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computer with a single USB cable, a single HDMI cable, and a single USB Type-C power cable connected, with a Sense HAT and a Camera Module also visible but not connected.
December 10, 2025 at 5:58 PM
ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Digging out some Commodore stuff I haven't touched in a while, for Reasons.

There's a bee in my Simons' BASIC cartridge.
A photograph of the edge connector of a black plastic cartridge. You can't see the label, but it's Simons' BASIC for the Commodore 64. A small, very dessicated bee is nestled between the PCB edge connector and the plastic housing.
December 9, 2025 at 10:14 PM
ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Getting some interesting messages from Newswise this morning...
A Firefox dialogue box displaying an alert from the website www.newswise.com. The text of the alert reads "dfsfsf".
December 3, 2025 at 10:12 AM
ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
That's okay, cat, I didn't need to breathe right now...
A photograph of a brown and grey haired man in glasses. A white cat is sitting on his chest, pushing against the man's face. A chair and an Xmas tree are visible in the background.
December 2, 2025 at 8:58 PM
ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Found another great use for that old original-model Microsoft Surface Pro I threw Linux on: my e-book reader doesn't do Adobe Digital Editions, but Borrowbox - the service my library uses for e-books - works perfectly in Firefox. I don't have to squint at my […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
A hand holding a Microsoft Surface Pro tablet, in front of a desk with a keyboard and a monitor showing a browser open to Mastodon, another browser window open to the Hackster News page, and a terminal session. The tablet is showing a page from the book Solo full-screen; the backlighting is somewhat uneven, but it's very readable.
December 1, 2025 at 3:02 PM
ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Got kicked out of the office so my eldest could co-opt the desktop to play some seizure-inducing twitch shooter thing, so I've been on the laptop for the last bit of the day - with a couple of accessories to try to make it feel a bit less cramped!
A photograph of a Dell laptop sat, open and facing the viewer, on a white table with dark windows, a framed picture of a tree and flowers, and books in the background. Balanced on the front of the laptop is a beige, grey, and orange Durgod mechanical keyboard, and next to it is a Kensington trackball. The screen is showing two terminal windows, a Gemini browser open to a page titled "Gareth Halfacree's Hobby Tech," and the Firefox browser open to the Hackster news page.
November 26, 2025 at 4:49 PM
ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Getting real deja-vu from the news that Valve's launching a mini-PC dubbed the Steam Machine... having done a group-test of the *original* Steam Machines for Linux User & Developer back in 2016.

(They weren't great. Hopefully the new one's better!)

#valve #steammachine #linux #gaming
The cover of Linux User & Developer Issue 161, published in January 2016. In addition to the main cover feature of a guide to building your own Linux PC (which I also wrote), there's a callout for a "supertest" of Steam Machines - compact PCs running Valve's shiny new SteamOS Linux distribution.
November 12, 2025 at 9:11 PM
ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
I've had a #gemini capsule - as part of my Tilde Club account - for ages now, and never did anything with it.

It will sit empty no longer! Instead, it'll serve as a home for text-only article copies - ad-free, graphics-free, HTML-free. No cookies, no […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
A screenshot of Lagrange, a browser for the Gemini protocol - a simple Gopher-inspired "small web" protocol which stands as an alternative to HTTP. It is open to a Gemini capsule hosted on Tilde Club, titled "ghalfacree," and a news page covering the announcement of Prusa's OpenPrintTag initiative. No imagery is visible in the page.
November 9, 2025 at 8:29 PM
ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
It's pretty good for reading stuff from @internetarchive too - or it was, until the battery ran out...
A hand holding an original Microsoft Surface Pro tablet computer, running Ubuntu Linux, in portrait mode. A Firefox window is open to the Internet Archive, viewing a stream of pages from a Computer Shopper magazine published in June 1988. The main page shows three Apple computers and a single Apple CD-ROM drive, and discusses Apple's foray into the optical storage and early multimedia market. Part of an advert for QIC Research IBM clones is visible on the page below.
November 9, 2025 at 8:18 PM
ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Found a long-forgotten Surface Pro in the corner of the office. Despite being a Microsoft in-house design, it doesn't support Windows 11(!)... so it's now running Ubuntu.

Battery life isn't fantastic after all these years, but it'll make a great reader for […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
An original-model Microsoft Surface Pro two-in-one tablet computer, propped up in portrait position. The glossy black front has a 10" colour display in the middle, showing a GNOME Shell session and the Firefox browser open to the Libby magazine-reading web app. The front cover of National Geographic for November 2025 is displayed, with a photograph showing the ITER fusion reactor.
November 9, 2025 at 3:15 PM
ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Had a trip to the local #library to renew my card, and snagged this '90s wonder from the withdrawn stock shelves for a donation.

That's going in the office, that is!
A hardback copy of Philip's Science & Technology Encyclopedia, standing on a white table. Drawings of the water cycle, thermal currents, the Earth's crust, a cathode-ray tube TV set, a monkey, bees, birds, boats, the Space Shuttle, and other sciency, techy, naturey things appear beneath the title.
November 5, 2025 at 5:42 PM
ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Well, it's official: it's too hot to work.
A photo of a hand holding a Remarkable Pro, an E Ink tablet, above a picnic table with grass and a path visible in the background. The sun is beating down, and the tablet is showing a warning about "sunlight and heat" and that it will start to refresh the display more frequently owing to the high environmental temperature.
August 15, 2025 at 10:11 AM
ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Hah, it does *real* ASCII art too. Neat!
Another screenshot of the kew music playback tool in a terminal, this time on a later track of the Byte Driver Original Soundtrack album. This time the block-based album art has been replaced by coloured characters found in the standard ASCII set.
August 4, 2025 at 10:39 AM
ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
I've been using Music on Console (MOC) for years now, but have been tempted to try something else for background playback while I work: kew.

https://github.com/ravachol/kew

Advantages over MOC: neat live visualisation, ASCII-rendered cover art (or actual […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
A screenshot of kew, a terminal-based music player, playing the first track from the Byte Driver Original Soundtrack album by Rainbow Gitten in a small console window. The album art is rendered as blocky ASCII art to the left, in colour, while the right has the song information plus a live spectrum visualisation.
August 4, 2025 at 10:31 AM
ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Now the web is full to the brim with #ai slop, I'm turning to... other, more reliable information sources.

Now, if you'll excuse me, Mind Maze awaits.

#vintagecomputing #encarta #microsoftmultimedia
A hand holding a boxed copy of Microsoft Encarta '96 Encylopedia. The somewhat battered box shows a head turning to a ribbon, revealing a range of pictures of historical events, animals, and more. A globe at the bottom-left says it is the World English Edition, while an insert at the top says it is "Designed for Microsoft Windows 95" but "Requires Windows 95 or Windows 3.1." A Windows for Workgroups Program Manager window is visible on a monitor in the background, with the Microsoft Multimedia program group open; an icon for Encarta '96 is visible.
June 18, 2025 at 1:48 PM
ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
What the actual...

We all know the tricks with the "serving suggestion" photos on #food packaging, right? Same ingredients, but prepared by a professional chef - and then often coated in something to make 'em shiny, cotton pad dipped in boiling water for […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
A photograph of a package of Ben's Original Street Food Spicy Indonesian Style noodles, sold in the UK. The package is dominated by a picture of a bowl of noodles, with vegetable-looking things in them. A tiny, tiny note to the bottom-right reads "Serving suggestion. Image generated with AI." A close-up of the note reading "Serving Suggestion. Image generated with AI."
June 17, 2025 at 10:01 AM
ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
I now have a workflow to produce PostScript or PDF presentations from Lotus Freelance Graphics 2.1 on Windows for Workgroups, for export to and use on more modern machines.

...now if I could only remember why I wanted that.

#vintagecomputing #retrocomputing
A screenshot, looking as though it was physically captured with a camera pointing at an old CRT monitor, of Lotus Freelance Graphics 2.1 running in Windows for Workgroups. A slide is visible, titled "Test Presentation," with the text "I have no idea if this will work" and a clipart image of a businesswoman against a gradient background. The background and imagery are dithered, as the machine is set to display only 256 colours. The same slide from the first image, but this time displayed on a modern computer. The clipart is noticeably more detailed than before, and the gradient background is smooth. The colours are noticeably different, too.
June 14, 2025 at 9:44 AM
ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Honestly, sometimes I marvel at the things I get paid to do...

#retrocomputing #z80 #programming
A screenshot of a Terminator terminal window. The font and colourscheme have been adjusted to mimic a CLI window in later versions of Amiga Workbench. A single-line BASIC program is showing at the top: 10 PRINT CHR$(47+(INT(RND(1)*2)*45)); : GOTO 10 This is a variant of a famous BASIC one-liner, originally written for the eight-bit Commodore family of home computers, which prints randomly-chosen diagonal lines to the screen to generate a maze-like pattern. The pattern can be seen underneath the program, along with the instruction to run it.
March 28, 2025 at 1:37 PM
ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
That should speed up the scanning stage (fewer rescans due to misfeeds, faster scanning) and the processing stage (no, or at least less, manual deskewing).

But what about the cutting stage? That's a very manual process right now, involving a Stanley knife […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
A stock image of a black paper guillotine. A flat surface is marked with a measurement grid, and a tall thin box sits at the end. To the left of the box is a large handle; to the right a smaller spinning handle, which compresses the sheets so that they don't move when the larger handle activates the blade. A number of Allen keys and two spare parts are visible floating at the top-left, below a Vevor logo.
March 16, 2025 at 10:41 AM
ghalfacree.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Right, after the disappointment of that last scanner arriving broken (and filthy), it's time to get serious.

I've found a more reputable seller and ordered a Fujitsu Fi-7160. No flatbed, but I'll keep my current SP-1425 for that, but it's got intelligent […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
A stock photo of a Fujitsu Fi-7160 document scanner, sometimes sold under the Ricoh brand. It looks like a black and grey inkjet printer, except the paper being fed into the top already has printing on it.
March 16, 2025 at 10:33 AM