One of the best technical events of the whole year. Exhibition of old machines in the Museum of Old Machines in Ε½amberk. Every year there is a large number of steam cars, locomotives and other machines on display, as well as other technical uniquenesses, the vast majority of which are in working order, and others are constantly being added and put into operation.
After a few years of missing the date or clashing with something else, I finally made it to this event again, and enjoyed it as much as ever. The museum has grown again since my last visit, many of the exhibits have gotten a better location, and there are some brand new displays.
There was also a cavalcade of six steam locomotives, one of which was not fully operational until the day of the show.
The event also included a vintage car race with a steam train, which I unfortunately missed.
Below I offer at least a few photos from the event
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Yes, it works !
It wasn't as hard as I expected. It was just really annoying having to reinstall the OS. However, I then just used the Windows XP driver, which had failed before because of a conflict with a newer driver that had been previously installed.
Now, as you can see on the dxdiag screen, acceleration works. However, another issue has been found. The screen has a very unusual resolution of 1024x600, so most full-screen games require a bit of tinkering to work.
Another interesting fact is that the battery is still in perfect condition after 15 years. I did all the reinstalling, installing software and playing games on battery power alone, without an adapter. Of course, I plugged it in and fully charged it before this, but since the first run it has just been on battery. So far, it has worked for around 5 hours of hard use, and I am still on 40%, which is unbelievable.
So, the next step was to look for software and games. I guess I'll need some freeware titles and small games because of the slow processor and limited RAM. I remembered one really old but significant game ...
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A few weeks ago, my colleague asked me to reinstall his wife's Ultrabook, which had become sluggish and unstable. It took a few tries, as I initially attempted to perform a recovery from the recovery partition, but this failed and resulted in a BSOD bootloop. Then I had to set up BIOS to boot from USB, which was also tricky. However, I managed it in the end and returned the ultrabook to my colleague.
In return, he gave me his old Samsung N210 netbook.
It has a single-core Atom processor and 1 GB of RAM. Despite my obsession with installing the original OS on the notebooks in my collection, I can't do that in this case as it was shipped with Windows 7 Starter,which is terrible and unusable.
After a while, I decided to try installing Windows XP. The installation went surprisingly well and everything seemed to work. However, as I expected, driver problems arose soon afterwards.
I was easily able to get the battery driver working, and after some time, the sound worked too. However, the 3D acceleration is bugged. I found some drivers and ...
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During an online discussion about typing on a touchscreen phone, I discovered something very interesting. It's a function that everyone probably knows about, but I had no idea it existed. It's a Swype keyboard. To be clear, I am familiar with the Swype keyboard on Symbian phones, but I was not aware that it was available on the GBoard keyboard.
But let's start from the beginning. The discussion on the Discord channel was about us geeks and our decreasing ability to type on a touchscreen. And yes. I get very angry when I have to try three or four times to type every second word correctly. My wife says I literally cannot type on a phone. However, after the aforementioned discussion and receiving advice about the Swype keyboard, I tried it and found that it is a built-in function of the default Android keyboard. When I tried it, memories came back.
It was many years ago that I tried that geeky input method on Symbian. It was really cool at the time and I had to learn it perfectly to show everyone how perfect the method was.
And now... Perhaps it's time to dust off my old ...
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The 3D graphics of this game have aged really well and it still looks really nice. And the game is still absolutely addictive.
So I still play it and I still enjoy it. The only thing I have found problematic is the power-up system. As the touch controls are not really great for a racing game, it is even more of a problem there as the steering is also 'aiming' and the 'launch' button for powerups is operated with the same finger as the steering. However, I did discover one option that I did not know about, and that is the ability to completely disable powerups in-game. And that was something I needed to know when I played the games twenty years ago.
Now the game is absolutely brilliant. I enjoy every single race, which is now pure racing and not just the random luck of not getting hit by a rocket or splash ball.
For the first time I am going through the whole career and unlocking the cars, races and championships. Without the power-ups, it is a real racing experience and I am really enjoying it. So no more "CARNIVAL" and "TRACKER" cheats. Just progress.
I also ...
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While installing games on the tablet mentioned in the previous article, I remembered an interesting project. And a very interesting game too. It is called Re-Volt! One of the very first good looking 3D games I ever played. Even though it is from 1999, the graphics still look amazing. We can remember many early 3D games that look relatively ugly, but this is an absolute gem.
I think everyone knows this game, but for those who don't, it's an RC car racing arcade, in different tracks and environments, with collectable bonuses/weapons. You can race on the street between the houses, in the toy shop, in the Wild West village or on the boat. The tracks are very varied and so are the cars.
The game is so popular, and the modding community is so big, that you can download hundreds of interesting cars and dozens of very good and well-made tracks, just copy them to the folder with the game, and enjoy.
And here comes the RVGL project, an open source re-implementation of this great game, bringing it to Android devices. I tried the "official" build about a year ago. It required the files from the original game ...
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I have a new tablet! It is 7.0 inches, 600 x 1024 pixels, Galaxy Tab 3 Lite. Even though it is old, it is really nice and comes with a quad-core CPU and 1GB RAM, which is quite enough for the release date 2015. And it is also surprisingly fast, compared to many other older tablets that are absolutely laggy, this one is absolutely smooth.
So, as usual, I started looking for games and software to install on the device, and remembered my favourite, slightly Trackmania-like game, Jet car stunts, and also Jet car stunts2. I remember it was a really good game, and it still is, and runs very smoothly. Of course I had to download .apks as the tablet runs on the old Android 4.4.4. But for such an old device that does not access the internet and is not used to store sensitive data, this is not a problem.
I am still going to find some more games, but i have also downloaded some interesting yet, such as some traditional bomberman clone, Plants vs. Zombies which i do not really ...
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I took out one of two identical Lenovo laptops I had. The other came with Windows 7 pre-installed and full of games, and this one was waiting for a "project".
So the time came and I took it and decided to install one of the worst operating systems, Windows 8. So I started the installation, encountered some problems during the installation and discovered that the problem was caused by using the original partition table, so I solved it by deleting all the partitions and creating new ones.
So the rest of the installation was no problem, so after a while I was looking at that stupid "Metro" UI. I also remembered how "intuitive" shutting down was. I mean, the way to shut down the PC is to click on "Settings", "Power", "Shut down" .... funny.
So I downloaded and installed some old games, and one of them came with a special "gift". After decompressing the rar archive, the real fun began. The PC started to install various programs, such as some "pastebin editors" (LOL), but mainly many Avast products, such as VPN, secure browser, antivirus, etc.
Of course, I know there is a risk of getting a virus, so I do not really care ...
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I have come back to the programming of my "Dailies" Android app and realised that I am still stuck in the same place. I am trying to implement notifications for the events scheduled in the app.
The notifications work when the app is in the foreground or when it is "minimised". However, when you close the app, the notification never arrives, even though I have tried many approaches to make it work.
I have read dozens of articles and documentation pages about this problem, but I am still unable to make any improvements.
Now I have no idea what to do. Debugging is not possible in this case as it works when the main application is running. However, I am absolutely unable to log the background registered processes that should be handling the notification.
Have you encountered this problem before? How did you solve it? Please help as I have no idea what to do with this and move on.
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My friend brought me a bunch of old PC stuff. The thing I like the most is a really large amount of 5.25 inch floppy disks. I always wanted to have some for my archive of old media, and maybe make some nice displays out of them. However, I have much more than I really need, so I will give some of them to fellow collectors. So if you need some, feel free to send me an email and ask for them.
The collection contains about half DD and half HD pieces, and also five or six QD which I did not know about, so I had to do some research.
I also have some 486 mainboards, some expansion cards, power supplies and HDDs. As I do not collect the desktop stuff in the first place, I would also give it to someone who does.
You can also see the old monochromatic CRT, which I have no use for, but I already have someone who would like it, so I will find a way to send it now.
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