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14th November 2023 @ 21:22

i'm a few days late, but a year ago this month was when I first published this website!! quite a lot has happened in the year since, but one thing's for sure, I'm really happy to have my own personal home page on the internet, even with the amount of work it takes to put it together.

I know there haven't been a whole load of updates here in the last few months. I've been back in uni again, but was unfortunately also ill for almost all of October, so I wasn't able to do a whole lot :(

regardless, I have been (very slowly) working on reworking this site a bit and implementing (some very basic) PHP to help make things like modifying the page layout a lot easier using include functions, whilst still keeping the site compatible with older browsers. as I've mentioned a few times on here (lol), I definitely want to move to self-hosting this website very soon (probably with a VPS or something). I do have a couple of hosting services in mind to use now and a domain name TLD as well.

So yeah, at this point I've nearly finished reworking this site in basic PHP and, when I do move this over from Github Pages to hosting it myself, I'll probably make a full blog post talking about the updates I've done a bit more.



Photo of the HP Omnibook 5700CT displaying it's BIOS setup screen, listing some general system information in three separate boxes. Notable info shown include the following: Floppy Drive A = 1.44 MB Hard Drive = 2067 MB (which is 2 GB) CPU Type = Pentium Bus Clock = 150 MHz Total RAM = 32768 KB (which would be 32 MB) The laptop itself has some stickers on the screen bezel, showing this actually has a Pentium MMX CPU and was originally designed to run Windows 95.

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one other thing I thought I'd talk about in this mini-blog, is about this old HP Omnibook 5700CT laptop I got working a couple of months ago! I've had it for a few years, having got it from a car boot sale back in February 2020, but was never able to get it working since I didn't get it with a power adapter and couldn't find a universal one that worked. I randomly came across a listing for the original power adapter a few months ago on eBay, so I brought it. I was very happy to find that the computer turned on and works just fine for the most part!!


Picture of the Omnibook loaded into a DOS shell from it's original install of Windows 95. Here, it was unable to properly boot; displaying a message saying: "Cannot find WIN.COM, unable to continue loading Windows", with a DOS prompt below it. Above those are some output from the BIOS and Windows; listing the CPU type/speed, external cache (512K) along with some stuff loaded from the AUTOEXEC.BAT (like a Power Management time correction driver)

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the funny thing about it, is that the hard drive had what looked like an original install of Windows 95 that ended up being broken. like, the entire \WINDOWS\SYSTEM directory was missing??? luckily, it did have the original drivers on the hard drive with some other OEM stuff also, and I will definitely be archiving those for sure.


Screenshot of OpenOffice.org version 1.0.3 running under Windows 95D Lite on the Omnibook 5700CT. In the screenshot, the OpenOffice window is displaying the draft for this blog post (which was saved in the .sxw format), along with the System Properties window of Windows 95. The latter displays the custom version ID of 4.00.950 D, with user and computer info below that (showing that it identifies the CPU as a Pentium and the total RAM as 32 MB).

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Right now, I have this laptop installed with the excellent custom version of Windows 95 called 95D Lite, which is working very well. in fact, I'm using the omnibook to write the draft of this blog post using an old version of OpenOffice.org!! so yeah, it has been really cool to tinker around with this, especially since I haven't really had any working mid/late 90s PCs before (most of what I have in the collection from that era are Macs).


Photo of Impulse Tracker version 2.14p5 running on the Omnibook running in MS-DOS mode (I think). One of the sample module files (Blue Flame by Chris Jarvis) is playing, which has 18 channels and a total order number of 41
Impulse Tracker 2.14 running on the Omnibook

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so yeah, that's all the updates I've got for now at least!! the only other thing to mention is two things I've added for the website anniversary; one of which is adding some older photos to the gallery of some WIP stuff from when I was initially putting this website together, if you're interested in seeing that (I've linked to the ones I've added so far below).

the second thing is I've added a basic test page I made way back in 2021, whilst I was still experimenting with HTML before properly making this site. you can find that in the 'Other' section :D

Photo of a Compaq Mini netbook displaying a work in progress version of the about page on this site, under the Geany text editor in antiX Linux. In particular, I took this before writing the "facts about me" section, so the page only had the image and basic bio Photo of an original Playstation Vita (PCH-1000) displaying an earlier version of the index page, using the built-in web browser. The Vita itself is placed on the corner of a Mid 2009 polycarbonate MacBook, which was locally hosting the page Picture of my iMac G4 setup in the corner of a desk with purple strip lighting behind it, and two IKEA desk plants to the left of it. The iMac is displaying the first article from my website, using the InterWebPPC web browser under Mac OS X Tiger.

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