Mustard 953 Endurance Tourer.
A cyclical project more worthwhile than every silicon centric custom build I have undertaken since the 1st of July 1992, when at 13 years old I declared that a 40 megabyte hard drive would be more than anybody could possibly require, a mere month before I had squandered every last byte on Robin Hood Conquests of the Longbow, the Secret of Monkey Island 2, Kings Quest Five and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.
A total of 26 high density 3.5 inch floppy disks, enough in September 2015 to store an extraordinary four 12 mega-pixel “Live Photos” snapped on an iPhone 6 plus. Yes? And? So what. You exclaim. I’ve not visited this page to reminisce about old computer parts or to tear up over how far magnetic storage technology has evolved in roughly two decades. If I cared about those games I root around for an Abandonware app on my tablet or mobile.
The thumbnail and link to this gallery suggested a cutting edge cadence vibe and now I feel misled. Talk about bikes, or I’m off. Ok, firstly, none of those games are officially available on a tablet or a mobile, no matter how historic or comprehensive the library you are browsing.
To have a hope of re-living them whilst curled up in cosy seclusion from frigid autumnal twilight, you’d need the original floppy disks, (CD if it was a “talkie” version) and to know your way around an app entitled Scumm VM.
Second, my reason for loitering longingly in the past is for personal recurrence that comfort, confidence and kudos are not inextricably bound to brands, fashion, cyber status or that sparkling retina screen you stroke to read these words, which then promptly freezes, for the third in a day, causing you to poke, pinch, prod and swipe and progressive annoyance, wondering how on Earth this could have happened to the supposedly stable, sophisticated and intuitively engineered content creation device propped proudly upon your desk.
Bill Bramley, chief editor of Appleimpartial.com claimed in a 20.000 word review that the iPad Pro had transformed his life. That it was capable of professional video editing, advanced desktop publishing and CAD design, and that he had invested in one for mission critical Post Production and to re-kindle his career as a Chinese calligrapher. “The Pencil” he had eulogized “has a super-finely calibrated digitizer located in the tip which, together with the spacious 12.1 inch near 4k display responds to over 2000 levels of pressure”.
What An ironic shame that he didn’t mention the pressure you feel when it fails the task of navigating the very review he’d supposedly used it to create. Leading you to dig a little deeper to discover that the only thing Bill has done for the last for the last fifteen years as an Appalachian Preacher is write 20000 word reviews romanticising the latest incarnation of iGadgetry that one jaded UPS driver delivers to his abode every November and that the only Chinese calligraphy he’s attempted since high school is a handful of exploratory squiggles on the device he’ll soon be using to publish a 22000 word review extolling the virtues of.
Then you remember, you installed an OS update just two days, containing dozens of “optimizations that Apple insisted would enhance your experience as a user. A sure fire guarantee that you will just happen be in the 1% of those who relied on features and applications that these
Insightful; refinements just happen to “upgrade” into festering turds and snot.
No mater, you surmise. I’ll just roll back to iOS 7. No you won’t, at least not without hours of assimilating convoluted step by step guides which, though they might yield success in the short term, will soon as irrelevant as yesterday’s tweets read by last year’s Siri.
Even Microsoft, who used to make patches optional, elected to riddle windows 10 with aggressive background processes that render the prevention of updates virtually impossible and the task of deferring them as difficult as damp proofing a cardboard bungalow in Atlantis.
As with Apple, these updates are touted as improvements, despite a distinguished Microsoft journalists claiming they have irretrievably disabled their email accounts and like floodwater, once they have found a way in, you’ll be swept along in resigned river with all the rest…unless you’ve paid extra for the pro edition, which will buy you several months grace.
Once a corporate giant’s presence and turnover has seemingly transcended any genuine compulsion to assist the common man, they begin to operate on the irrational notion that to fix all that isn’t broken is a well reasoned philosophy and every change is a change for the better..
Thankfully, indeed mercifully, outside the realm of such devious technological profiteering there do exist certain feats of engineering that were too dammed good to “fix”. A case in point, the subject of this all too modest gallery. A mechanical marvel that, barring disaster, shall outlast it’s owner along with the next 30 iPad pros.
A contraption more connected to it’s master than search engines, predictive text and insurance brokers and based on a design well over a century old. No doubt, you’ve got your penny farthings, your recumbents and the crazy masochist who’s pedals from Devon to Dover on a unicycle with a spike in place of a saddle to raise 5 pounds for ring tailed limas, but if cycling fosters an answer to Bill Gates, none can be bolder than one John Kemp Starley.
