In North America in 1982 there were a limited number of companies fighting for the home computer market, and with 20-20 hindsight it is obvious that Apple was the winner of that battle. But my own system of choice that year had the same overall computing power, plus a few dedicated chip sets that meant superior 8 bit graphics and sound processing. Plus it had a built-in programming language that made it easy to create your own audio/visual sequence complete with text overlays. This is the state of the art Christmas demo sequence from Commodore that year, and if you remember what any of the other systems available at the time could do, it will be obvious why I thought this one was the way to go. Merry Christmas!
As anyone who has stood at the bottom of the Earth’s gravity well and pointed their camera up can tell you, the kind of pictures an Astronaut can take from orbit will far surpass that. In this video, Astronaut Don Pettit gives you an idea of what is involved, and what you might be able to achieve. Knowing this, all you have to do now is achieve orbit, making sure to bring your camera with you.
This week the Disney film Into The Woods is going to corner the musical comedy fantasy market I suspect, and I will no doubt be in the theater to check it out on the big screen. Also, The Imitation Game finally goes into wide release. Starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley, this telling of the life of mathematical genius Alan Turing has been nominated for 5 Golden Globes, on top of the 23 awards it has already won.
7 Assassins is the movie this week, about a group of assassins who have banded together to rid the government of corruption. This movie is quite good, even if it does have a death toll that could rival a Shakespearean tragedy adapted by George R.R. Martin, as the reviewer linked here said.
TV has Continuum: Season Three, with another roll of the time-travel dice pushing Kiera still farther from her original timeline. If you live in Canada you can get the Enhanced Video experience by watching it online, with original bonus webisodes, extended scenes, and behind-the-scenes content in each Continuum Season 3 episode. You can get a lot of that from Continuum on Syfy, but not all of it, and not as nicely integrated. US viewers should go for the discs to get the full effect. We also get Dominion: Season One this time around, about the war between the angels and humanity. I am sure you won’t be too surprised to learn Humanity is in trouble.
The Anime stand out this week is Sword Art Online: Extra Edition, the bit that came between the first and second season, an OVA that comes in at just 100 minutes. It sets the stage nicely for what comes next, and brings its own context and development. There is also One Piece; Season 6 Part 3, which may not sound like much but is 11 full episodes. What Japan calls a TV season is everything produced in a year, and since they go around the calendar with this series, each actual season ends up being 10 to 12 episodes long.
Dave Koz, Sergio Flores and Bob Saget surprised quite a few folks this year when they went along in a Lyft and made some holiday memories. The music was excellent and the attitude was world class; happy holidays, one and all!
The new release of LinuxConsole 2.3 is good news for those with older computers who still want to get some entertainment or work out of them. This Live Disc build started life as a way to turn an old computer into a working games console, and it will still do that. But what it has really gotten good at is making old computers with few resources work properly. That means a box with as little as 256Meg of RAM and running an old Intel, NVIDIA, or ATI graphics cards can run just fine with a fast boot, and it also supports newer graphics cards as well. They have also built some scripts to help you update packages into local RAM while running the base Live Disc, connect to printers, and so forth. They also support installing it to a LiveUSB stick, or installing it to duel-boot with Windows. They have downloads to make both of those tasks fairly easy, so you don’t have to be a Linux guru to get them running.