partial_accumen

For AB I’m thinking its more “I can’t afford to live in Banff, but that’s where work is so a place in Canmore is where I call home with a 30 min commute each way.”

Or “Yeah I like living in Red Deer, but it means a 1.5 hour drive one way if I want to see the Flames beat the skates off the Leafs when they’re in town.”

Long ago I ran a Windows Media Center PC in the living room and used the hell out of it. When WMC finally went EOL, I look for alternatives and found Plex. I never got around to setting up a Plex box, and now I see it too is ready for the scrap heap. I think this is what getting old is. You plan on doing something and never get around to it. Time passes much faster up here in age.

Does that mean that Canadians in Alberta, Quebec, and Ontario simply don’t drive long distances inside their provinces? That doesn’t track with what I’ve seen when visiting all three provinces.

(And, yes, unless apocalypse, and unless battery dies, I know.)

Simple batteries can be made from readily available materials post apocalypse such as potatoes or citrus fruits like lemons. You’d need a fair amount of them for any appreciable time. After the fall of civilization, such required foods would be considered offerings to the gods to grant the knowledge stored on your Kindle long after its Lithium battery bit the dust. This would be until humans are able to make lead acid gravity cells, which again, isn’t that difficult. They aren’t very portable, but if you are just needing to run the device you don’t need it to be.

It makes sense to me, but they could have put the “£2.50 total” instead of just “£2.50” to make it more clear.

assuming I’m worried about a smash and grab

For your specific use case, how about this:

Get a cheap USB thumb drive and a long USB cable. Put your disk unlock password on that thumb drive, and semi-permanently affix the USB drive to your building. You said you’re in a basement. Put it on top of a rafter with a metal fitting that would keep the drive from being taken without removing the screws. Run the long USB cable from the thumb driving in your rafter to the USB port on the machine. Alter your startup script to mount the thumb drive read the password from the thumb drive to unlock your main disk. Don’t forget to immediately unmount the thumbdrive in the OS after the disk is unlocked for extra safety.

If someone is doing a smash and grab, they’ll unplug all the cables (including this USB cable going to the thumb drive) and take your machine leaving the disk encryption password behind on the USB thumb drive.

I don’t have a recommendation for you, but if you exhaust your leads there is a large comparrison table with all kinds (and ages) of remote access solutions that you could search against for your criteria (open source, supported, etc) here:

Comparison of remote desktop software on wikipedia

If you’re looking for an honest-to-goodness running on C64 hardware FPS experience that is as close to Wolfenstein 3D/Doom that we’ve seen so far, there is a really impressive demo from jimi9757 where he made a ray casting engine for c64. You can see that here.

Perhaps even more impressive is he made a version for the Commodore PET too.

If you’re into computing history, it isn’t even so much the power of the CPU (but that was certainly one bit). It had to do with how different computer architectures wrote to the screen. We take it for granted today with modern computing, but back then computer designers had to make trade off decisions to improve one area while sacrificing functionality in another. It was the age of sprites and many features were put in to handle more sprites, or more on the screen at once, or how fast you could cycle between them, or their color palette depth, or resolution. Not a single bit of that helped Wolfenstein 3D (Doom’s predecessor). 3D graphics FPV like Wolfenstein and Doom changed computing forever, and many systems (like Commodore) were left behind. Even early Macintosh computers struggled with 3D FPV games.

So even Amiga and early Macs were far more powerful than c65 CPUs, but still struggled in 3D FPV.

Having recently started doing lightweight programming on my c64 this was very questionable to me, especially considering the Amiga (the much more powerful followon to c64 couldn’t even get close to this level of performance).

Following the mastadon link revealed the secret:

“@electron_greg This is incredibly impressive! What kind of wizardry is this? There’s no way this is running on a stock C64. I assume it’s using an accelerator of some kind but I don’t see anything sticking out of the cartridge port…”

“Correct. It is equipped with a “RAD” cartridge which is effectively a co-pro in the form of a RaspberryPi Zero.”

So the heavy lifting is being done by the Raspberry Pi’s ARM CPU, not the c64, which is I’m guessing is essentially being used as a fancy frame buffer to display the Raspberry Pi’s output.

This is still REALLY impressive though to be able to interface the two this way, and I’m glad to see this. Well done electron_greg!