Alan Pope

Love that book. It enabled me to have one of my favourite flights of all time. Sat next to Chris Turner, chatting about his time at Acorn for about 9 hours. I blogged about something related and included this anecdote part way through. https://popey.com/blog/2023/09/a-virus-for-the-bbc-micro/ - under "A short aside"

> I don’t have any quick fixes or easy answers. Oh but there are - and if we're being honest with ourselves we already know it. If you can't defeat it head on (and you can't) you have to take extreme actions - ditch your smartphone for something dumber, block the sites using something like nextdns. Maybe you could go even further, see Popey's brilliant blog entry on his command line only laptop - https://popey.com/blog/2021/02/command-line-only-laptop/ Good luck to anyone reading this! You can do it!

Mycroft.ai has a quest to produce a 'local' speaking and listening AI assistant that is free of the constant tyranny of cloud access and the present push to tie functionality to Internet access. Its platform contains elements (like Mimic3 TTS) that are functional in their own right. If you can, you should attempt to build a configuration that is useable by your mother and can have cheap equipment spares, works on and off the net. It does not have to be a standalone widget and could be a suite of software you and your mother develop. Eventually it will have to be a menu driven voice steering system that delivers her into existing media (like commercial audiobooks), can speak from her library of text-only sources and keep her place, and can read off the screen on websites (such as news) for which the format is completely predictable. The Cloud is host to many smooth voices for which the mechanics will never be known to you or hosted on your machine, but I found Alan Pope's voice as reconstructed by mimic3 ( https://popey.com/blog/2022/10/setting-up-mimic3/ ) to be a fantastically understandable and versatile one. I've produced hours-long listenable audio files from it.

Gnarly like this? “Steals your crypto wallet” but the snap is marked as “safe”. https://popey.com/blog/2024/03/exodus-wallet-part-three/

With the AUR and PPAs, random members of the community that weren't involved with developing the original software can submit software. This means you can't go off of the software's reputation alone, as someone may have uploaded a malicious version of existing software (i.e. what happened around a month ago on the Ubuntu Snap store with a malicious Bitcoin wallet: https://popey.com/blog/2024/02/exodus-bitcoin-wallet-490k-swindle/). I do agree that themes don't sound like they could execute code, and KDE should be doing more to restrict what they can do to a user's computer.

I mean there are plenty of 8-bit emulators out there which come with BASIC roms, and plenty of Basic interpreters for generic current machines - I'd suggest BBC Basic for SDL [1] if you're after an "old-style" basic that is still structured, or there's quitebasic as linked by SonOfKyuss. You can even get a raspberry Pi (if you have one, getting hold of a new one is harder these days) to boot directly into BASIC [2]. I guess some (all?) of that might not have been true in 2006, but then again, the price of a C64 / A8 is now significantly more than $25 :) [1]: https://www.bbcbasic.co.uk/bbcsdl/ [2]: https://popey.com/blog/2021/01/raspberry-pi-boot-to-basic/

There's a whole cottage industry springing up around these. https://popey.com/blog/2020/12/keyboards-old-and-new/ In future I might pair one with a thinkcentre nano, e-ink or touchscreen and a big lithium battery.