Category: Main

An Affectionate Look Back at the Sinclair ZX Spectrum

DISCLAIMER: This is an old post from my previous geeky technology blog. It is reposted here for hysterical raisins (it was popular at the time).

People from about Generation X or so today cut their milk teeth on these classic platforms, and today they’ll be all too ready to shake their cane at you and tell you about how it was in the good old days. Their memories of their first BASIC program or first addictive game are tied in with their first love and first beer. Amiga, Apple ][, NeXTSTEP, and the ZX Sinclair still have their cult following going strong today. But it is the ZX Sinclair Spectrum that is particularly remarkable, and foreign to the rest of the English-speaking world.

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What is Internet Filtering?

DISCLAIMER: This is an old post taken from my previous geeky technology blog. It is preserved here for hysterical raisins (it was popular at the time).

What with the concern over the proposed Internet filtering policy that is supposed to be put into place in Australia, we thought this would be a good time to bring this subject up. Our point here is not to enable people to commit crimes, nor to say that they should commit crimes. Our point is that (a) filtering doesn’t work, and (b) if honest, law-abiding citizens find Internet filtering interfering with a legitimate task, it should not only be their right, but their duty, to subvert the faulty measure.

This information will also prove valuable to those within schools, businesses, and other organizations that filter Internet usage. Although, we of course can’t be held responsible if you get fired or expelled for using this information. And we can’t believe we just had to write that, but not everybody reading this is living in a free country.

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A Homage to the Typo Fairy

As texting on mobile devices continues to take the world by storm, more and more people are confronted with the complications of using an interface to communicate. And of course, cursing themselves for the mistakes they make.

Is this typed correctly so far? Let’s run a spellcheck: No, the word “texting” hasn’t made it into the dictionary yet, nor has the word “speelcheck” for that matter. Whoops, we mean “spellcheck”. See, now how do we tell the difference between an omission in the dictionary and a fumble on the part of our fat, clumsy fingers? Continue reading “A Homage to the Typo Fairy”

Entertainment you might have missed at Geeky Domain

I’ve been a busy little penguin, inspired by this early spring.

First off, it’s the 100th anniversary of the coining of the word “robot,” in a Czechoslovakian stage play called “Rossum’s Universal Robots” written in 1920, in which robots take over the world.

To mark the anniversary, I pick out the villain AIs from film, gaming, and one Harlan Ellison short story that nobody’s forgetting anytime soon. While I am still rolling my eyes at predictions of AI taking over and shaking my fist at Ray Kurzweil and Peter Thiel for leading doomsday cults, I have to acknowledge that when evil AI is done right in fiction, it makes for an especially chilling villain.

And then…

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The Black Market For THC Vape Cartridges Is Getting NASTY!

I’ve mentioned before my current pet gig, writing within the burgeoning cannabis market. To my surprise, it became 1% writing about how much fun it is to smoke pot and 99% screaming and swearing at the black market. Remember two decades ago when I started to blog about the joys of Linux and ended up fighting street gang wars against tech industry thugs? Kind of like that.

The “thug” part is coming literal now. Recently we have started to run across black market vape brands that fake their lab results.

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A Look Back at the History Behind the Firefox Web Browser

Today, Chrome is the web browser that dominates the online market, by virtue of being the home browser for Android, which dominates the mobile market. Hooray. #AnyoneButMicrosoft.

But before that, the web’s browser was Firefox, which is still pretty solid on the desktop. Firefox is the progeny of Mozilla, and the story of Mozilla’s most successful product, the Firefox web browser, goes even further back into the history of the web itself. Interestingly, Firefox’s lineage brings it surprisingly close to other web browsers that it competed with – especially the web browser with a big, blue ‘e’ for its logo…

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Why Is SEO Marketing For Media Topics So Hard?

Hi, I’m “Penguin” Pete Trbovich… and you overthink SEO!

You have a great idea for a moneymaking website: You’re going to write a fandom blog for your favorite media, be it movies, TV shows, music, video games, books, comics, manga, anime, whatever. And then you’re going to post affiliate links from your site to Amazon, etc., so that fans will read about this stuff and hopefully buy some of it with a commission for you.

What a “passive-income” prospect! All we need is some content marketing, and the rest takes care of itself. People Google for this stuff all the time, so you know it’s a popular topic space.

What fandom do we pick to write about first?

Star Wars is popular, we can cash in on that fandom! Let’s see how competitive writing about Star Wars is:

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New at GeekyDomain: Geek Nostalgia

Had a heck of a week over at my GeekyDomain gig.

First there was 80s action figures. All the top action figure franchises launched with their own cartoon, back when toys were cool. I dunno what happened to toys now. Tell me something named “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” would have made it if they came out in the 2010s. Most people never even know that they were originally done as a parody of comic book franchises. To see more of the action figure 80s including the really arcane stuff, see my IMGUR gallery.

But then, as if that weren’t enough geek nostalgia, I noticed that Radio Shack / Tandy post-mortems were all over the web… but they only told half the story. As a Generation Xer, I have a duty to document my unique observation point of view in history, so I made the most definitive retrospective on Radio Shack’s rise and fall you’ll ever see online. With a gallery of Tandy handheld electronic games!

I got around to ramblin’ about the legendary Trash-80 as part of that, so for those of you looking for a broader gallery of computer nostalgia, I also did an IMGUR dump of computing history focusing on the home desktop revolution.

You see, we Gen-Xers are a sparse lot, wedged in between the teeming masses of the Boomers on one end and the Mills on the other. Gen X is the only generation with a point of view bridging the period in between. Historians decades from now are going to be pawing through records trying to find Gen-Xers, who aren’t always marked by their appreciation of prosperity.