I was telling Nick about this on Friday night, The Luther Burger:
one beef patty, two strips of bacon, and one slice of sharp cheddar cheese sandwiched between-wait for it-a glazed doughnut. Online reports claim this heavyweight tops out at 1,500 calories.
Wow, I can’t believe it has been a quarter of a century since the first Commodore Amiga was released. I’m going to be a bit of a techno fan boy here and say that out of the many many computers I have used over my life, the Amiga was by far my favourite. I have studied the machine and the history of the development of it for years, been in awe of Jay Miner, the original developer of the amazing ahead of its time chipset. I remember seeing a picture of the original development machine, it was a number of breadboards with chips covering all the surfaces, they were able to condense that down into the custom chipset that we knew and loved back then.
The above picture is of the Lorraine prototype, it would eventually be condensed into this:
Coming up from a Commodore 64 this machine as well, unbelievable. To say that the graphics were arcade quality at that time was an understatement, 4096 compared to the 64’s 16. 4 channel 16 bit stereo sound compared to the 64’s fantastic 3 channel mono sound. 512kb of ram, which we upgraded to 1 meg for about £200 back then. These days the price of a sodimm module for a laptop is £18 (inc vat ) for 1gb. Oh how the times have changed.
There was something about the disk swapping, not as annoying as using a Mac at the time but still, when using XCopy to make copies of games, pd disks or what ever, it could take a good 6 disk swaps if you didn’t have the 1/2 meg upgrade. More if you used nibble copy on a particularly ropey disk. I remember the tic tic tic of the disk sensor eagerly awaiting a fresh disk to be inserted, the way you could tell at which point during the boot process you were just by listening to the drive head moving. Oh and the whirr crunch if the disk couldn’t be read.
Then there were the demos. How the coders and hackers of the time could put all that stuff onto a single 800k floppy disk still astounds me, here is one of the first demos I remember seeing, the Red Sector Mega Demo.
It is in four parts though, so you should continue on through You Tube.
One of the last demos we ever had for our Amiga 1200 was one called 9 Fingers by Spaceballs. You should remember that this was running on a 16 bit machine when it was released in 1993
I later found this video on YouTube which shows the original video footage from 9 Fingers, I thought it was pretty cool
There has been much talk over the years about really resurecting the Amiga properly but I sadly think this isn’t going to happen in anyway which could relive the days of old. I don’t think any computer since has had the same feeling as the Amiga. Oh yeah, and this is coming from the guy with Workbench 2.0 mouse pointers on his windows machine.
Well I’ve hit the first landmark, 271 days in, two years to go. It is exactly two years today when my list of tasks is scheduled to finish. Unfortunately the past four weeks or so I’ve spent most of my time in the office and not enough time trying to strike items off my list. Hopefully now that things have calmed down again I can concentrate on the list once more. I’ve not even had anytime to catch up on films, although I did managed to see the Third Man in a small cinema in Glasgow recently and that brought me up nicely to 60 films..
So while I was still stuck in the office late one night last week, I put together this little infographic. The idea and style are borrowed from Nicholas Felton and his wonderfully designed and densely packed Feltron Reports.
So here we go, 2 years, 730 days, 17520 hours.. It can be done.. Ad astra per aspera..
This is the new BAe Taranis, a stealth drone developed as the first ever autonomous, stealth Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle.
To me it looks like something from the original War of The Worlds and sounds like it is named after a baddie from Dr Who. I keep expecting to see the death ray firing out of the front of this thing.
I quite like it though.
The last ever fuel tank for the last ever Space Shuttle mission rolled out to begin the long journey to join the shuttle. Sad times.
Jul 5 2010In Honor Of The 4th: Pizza, The American Way
MORE: america, american, cheese, cheeseburger, deliciousness, hello who is this? my heart? what do you mean you’re attacking?, om nom nom, pizza, sure why not, this is why you’re fat
In honor of celebrating America’s independence yesterday and my being released from jail without having to spend the entire night (4 AM), here’s a pizza made the American way. What’s the American way? Try two McDonalds cheeseburgers, an order of nuggets and a box of fries, all covered in a delicious layer of melted cheese. Pfft, and you thought the hotdogs you grilled yesterday were good. Your taste buds don’t know shit about deliciousness! Hello? Who is this? My heart? Haha, what do you mean you’re attacking? Attacking wha– GAAAH!!
Hit the jump for a photo-tutorial of the pizza-making process, along with a mandatory shot of the pizza with a firearm (U-S-A!).
America: Fuck Yeah (Food Edition) [pbh3]
Thanks to nilbog, which is actually goblin backwards. YOU CAN’T TRICK ME YOU LITTLE IMP!
