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Domain: joel.co.uk

Stories and comments across the archive that link to joel.co.uk.

Comments · 6

  1. Re:ahem.... are you sure? by Joel+Rowbottom · · Score: 1 · on Retailer Refuses Hardware Repair Due To Linux

    http://blog.joel.co.uk/index.php?itemid=235

    My T42p went back to them lots++ of times over the three years I had it. Eventually they gave me a refund.

    (..putting the 'NO' in Lenovo.)

  2. I've Got All The Rejected Ones! by Joel+Rowbottom · · Score: 1 · on Lenovo Tops Eco-Friendly Ranking
    Basically, they're "recycling" them by sending me busted ones.

    Blog entries passim starting here, with pretty much all the posts here.

    (in short, 15 repair tickets so far and counting, replacement's arrived and is bust...)

  3. I've Got All The Rejected Ones! by Joel+Rowbottom · · Score: 1 · on Lenovo Tops Eco-Friendly Ranking
    Basically, they're "recycling" them by sending me busted ones.

    Blog entries passim starting here, with pretty much all the posts here.

    (in short, 15 repair tickets so far and counting, replacement's arrived and is bust...)

  4. BBC Micro Online Again After 15 years by Joel+Rowbottom · · Score: 1 · on Tales from a BBS Junkie
    Well, this is timely - I put together a revival of a bulletin board I ran in the late 1980s which can be dialled into, running on a 32kbyte Acorn BBC Microcomputer Model B.

    You can find out more about my 'efforts' here, and some photos of the efforts here.

  5. What about in the UK? by Joel+Rowbottom · · Score: 1 · on Flat Panel Linux Box for $99?
    A coupla questions:
    • Can I get my hands on one in the UK? I just took a look and you have to subscribe to their ISP thingy to get one, and that's only in the US. I was about to buy one to play with when I saw that they won't ship out of the US.

    • At $99, it's worth it just for the LCD screen to attach up to rackmount machines. Anyone managed to rip the head off one of these things yet?

    • And a thought: these things would make excellent cheap EPOS machines by the look of it. And certainly a lot cheaper than NCR's offerings.
    If anyone succeeds in getting one to the UK, drop us a line will you? Ta.

  6. The Viewdata community by Joel+Rowbottom · · Score: 2 · on Are BBS-Like Communities Dead?
    Here in the UK I used to fondly use Viewdata bulletin boards such as Cyclone, The Cellar, CCl4, Optix, Chipboard and the suchlike. Based upon the Teletext character set (think Prestel) and populated for the most part by BBC Micro users, the community was great and to a certain extent was killed off when ANSI boards came round. Indeed, the infamous Steve Gold/Robert Schifreen "Prince Phillip" hack was carried out on a Viewdata system in 1984 - as detailed in Hugo Cornwall's Hackers Handbook (now out of print) and Approaching Zero: Data Crime And The Computer Underworld (still in print, published by Faber&Faber).

    Now, as James Lawson puts it on the CCl4 web site, the ANSI board is all but dead. Most boards have been surpassed by the Internet and indeed FTP sites and websites as you rightly state; Fido feeds have been surpassed by Usenet; message areas by maillists. It's back to information provision and suchlike.

    There has been, for some years now, a Viewdata Revival going on, which puts forward many of the arguments. Unfortunately the website is a bit stale but it does give you a sort-of hail back to the days of CARBBS, XFS+ and EBBS board hosts running on 32k BBC Micros with (if you were lucky) 20Mb Winchester hard disks - none of this 24Gb filespace and 18 CDs online rubbish.

    There are several Viewdata bulletin boards now online on the Internet, run from Acorn Archimedes machines using Gareth Babb's excellent VHost software. Mine is called Haven and you can get to it without even a Viewdata emulator, by using the online Java-based client. Alternatively there are bits of software you can use to access them.

    Of course, there are still ANSI boards available via telnet - the UserFriendly one immediately springs to mind. But you still won't get back the sort of thing which you had with Viewdata.

    Hope this enlightens at least some ;)

    Joel.