I spent the last few days in Dungarvan, staying in the Park Hotel with my family. It’s a really nice town, small enough that you can walk around it in half an hour but plenty of places to eat and drink.

I took my camera of course and almost always shot in b/w mode with my Canon f1.8 50mm lens. I cheated a little as I used RAW+Jpeg mode but I’m happy with the results. RAW lets me recover the colour information while the Jpeg records a useful b/w image I can check against during post processing.

I love that 50mm lens but rarely use it so a whole holiday was a challenge. With such a short depth of field it’s really important getting the focus point right. I usually used the center point or a side point rather than trust the matrix to pick out the right one!

Here’s a 39 minute podcast about Witchcraft (mp3) from the RTÉ Documentary on One series. It was first broadcast in 1976. The first half of the documentary is enlightening, explaining what and how witches worship, but the discussion on black magic is disturbing. The guy who was confident he had killed people with magic was really creepy.

The comments from the Catholic priest at the end are comical, saying witchcraft is incompatible with “true religion” as they don’t worship “all mighty god”. Ah yes. I bet she would have something to say about that!

My post on this forum thread was my first one on WordPress.org apparently.

It was 8 years ago and WordPress didn’t have a plugin system and wouldn’t have until later. I had integrated Smarty into the b2++ project, with a nifty versioned template editor and even looked at doing the same with WordPress. Smarty had a plugin system that could be used in theory but nothing came of it.

What was your first post on the WordPress.org forum? Look in your profile to find out!

[ http://www.youtube.com/embed/HkSDDc9oJ5g?fs=1

Oh well, Darwinia was one of my favourite purchases of 2011 but Introversion are done with Darwinia however. Thanks Gnomeslair for the link.

I never spell the word “alcohol” right. Ever. It’s a shame that word never came up in spelling competitions at school. There were chocolate bars at stake then… Will spell for chocolate.

I’m amazed that FidoNet is still going. I’m embarrassed to say I don’t remember my FidoNet address and my BBS isn’t listed anywhere. Must look harder I guess. Meanwhile, if you had a modem in the 90′s (in Ireland) you’ll recognise the names here!

It makes me happy that images like this can blow my mind and give me pause for thought.

Batman Forever is an amazing looking Amstrad CPC demo made last year and won first place in the CPC Demo compo at Forever 2011.

Stunning artwork, great effects but perhaps a little bit of the old school yard “my computer is better than your one” in there too. Not too fond of the Commodore 64 are they?

Also check out pushnpop.net, an Amstrad demoscene website! It even has an article on cross-platform development using Linux and Vim!

Thanks Keith for leaving a comment in my last post about this demo. Well worth watching!

In related news, the 1541-II I ordered last week arrived this morning. I’m waiting on the zoomfloppy USB interface to connect it to my laptop now. Fingers crossed it’ll work and it’s not too late for my 20 year old Commodore 64 5 1/4 discs. I tend to agree that if it wasn’t for piracy ancient games would be lost to history now ..

Computers have always been home to amazing artwork. The C64 has so many graphics modes that artists were spoiled for choice near the end of the machine’s life. Luckily, artists are still working on the machine and releasing stuff even now!

You can find some amazing Commodore 64 artwork on c64pixels.com and it’s even sorted by graphics format like hires, FLI and others.

There’s also a comprehensive and detailed collection at CSDB of course but it does have a gallery. You’ll have to click through to each image to view it.

Here’s a wonderful ZX Spectrum gallery. The Speccy was known for attribute clash but despite this you can create really amazing work if you know what you’re doing. Check out this Binary Zone tribute to Speccy artist David Thorpe. You will recognise the loading screens!

I just reported my first Chrome bug but it looks like it’s been known for quite some time, unfortunately.

When Chrome is configured to open the home page on startup it forgets any recently opened tabs if you don’t open those pages before you close the browser again. I’m fairly certain it used to do the right thing before and remember those pages but I’m not sure when that behaviour changed.

Unfortunately Firefox does the same thing. Go to History->Restore Previous Session and it will restore the home page in the same circumstances. I’m almost certain that browser did the right thing in a previous release.

If one were pedantic, the previous session was the single homepage tab and not the dozen tabs I had open before my browser was closed but it’s not what I expect. I’ll close my browser down when I’m doing something intensive but then click on a link in Tweetdeck, laugh at a rage comic and close the browser again before I realise my mistake.

The other thing Chrome has changed is when you have multiple windows open. It only shows the recently closed tabs for one of those windows. Open the home page again and you’ll see the “recently closed” link again where you can open tabs from other windows. You can also press ctrl-shift-t to restore closed windows.

If you hadn’t closed many pages before you shut your browser down you can also use the History page to open previously closed pages selectively. Unfortunately that won’t help if you had pages open for days that you just meant to read when you had time but never found the time. I find myself shoving pages into Read It Later just so I can get back to them at my leisure.

I’ve tried a few Chrome extensions that promised to save my browsing sessions but none worked in the way I’ve described. Does such an extension exist?