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Notices for 26th August 2023 to 7th December 2022

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Saturday, 26th August 2023

Having gone live on Tuesday 26th August 2003, this site is now 20 years old, and I find that I have little to say. For extended periods it was as good as dead, but it’s come back to life in the last few years, first with the massive expansion of the keyboards section and more recently the power section that was introduced on the 26th of July last year. It’s still a lonely pursuit, and maybe it will die again in a while when I run out of pylon material to process.

I am not sure that human society, the climate or my own life will hold up long enough for the site to reach the 30-year mark. There are no provisions to ensure that the site will outlive me, but I am not so sure that this actually matters.

Friday, 2nd June 2023

In another act of madness, I chose to take it upon myself to document British electricity pylons (steel lattice high voltage transmission towers). The scope of this project is far more limited than that of documenting computer keyboards, not least because there is far less information available to work from, and it has reached the point of diminishing returns. However, in less than a year it has still grown to become much more than I was anticipating, especially with the help of pylon veterans Ian McAulay and Jon Bruford. To those among us who find these structures fascinating, there is bound to be something of interest to all of you. I am not an engineer, so it’s not a hugely in-depth treatment of the subject, but hopefully it will make a little piece of life a little less mysterious.

Wednesday, 7th December 2022

A long time ago, there was the Cy/VOS wiki, within which I wrote copious illustrated notes on operating system design. It looks like the server that hosted it died around 2007, although I thought it lasted a bit longer than that. I don’t anticipate ever writing that amount of material again, but I have decided to document a few ideas under the new OS section. No illustrations at present, and no huge amount of detail, but it is nice to have the information out in the open again. I have no pretences that it will ever be used by anyone as it’s just too late now to try to recapture the lost world of the desktop operating system, but maybe the ideas will help someone with something nonetheless.

The existing RISC OS GUI is also an important read with regards interface design.