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Web Site Link #1 (GitHub Pages): | https://moosevalley.github.io/ |
Web Site Link #2 (InfinityFree): | http://MoosesSoftware.epizy.com |
Discussion Forum: Reddit r/MoosesSoftware/ | https://www.reddit.com/r/MoosesSoftware/ |
Moose's YouTube Channel | https://www.youtube.com/user/MoosesValley/videos |
Moose's LBRY / Odysee Channel (like YouTube but much better) | https://odysee.com/@MoosesValley:0 |
Moose's GitHub | https://github.com/MooseValley |
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I am sending you numerous emails and getting no replies or acknowledgements back - a sure sign that you aren't receiving my emails and that your company's email servers are blocking my emails again.
Please also re-contact your company's IT department and ensure my email address and web site are re-added to white lists and remain on these lists so that we can communicate effectively.
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Today I was running out of disk space. Time to remove or archive unwanted files. Among other things, I decided it was time to clear my browser history in FireFox ... and was shocked by what I saw:
Hint: "17 BILLION GB of disk space."
17,179,869,185 GB = 17,179,869 TB = 17,179 PB = 17 EB = a LOT of disk space !!
Looks like the FireFox devs / Mozilla Team need to do a little extension work on their units / conversions.
To help / contribte to Firefox and make the product even better, I submitted a bug report here:
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Record and upload a new YouTube exploring and evaluating how AI / ChatGPT goes when answering questions from an introductory first year university level Java programming course sample exam paper. I walk through and rate the answers ChatGPT gives.
As always, a table of contents is provided in the video description so you can jump straight to items of interest.
Conclusion / SPOILER:
What does this mean for the future of education ? Post your comments below the Youtube video.
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During my time as a university teacher (lecturer, tutor, marker, course coordinator), I won 3 awards:
In 2012, I won the 3rd award - the Vice Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Learning and Teaching. This was a very prestigious award. I was extremely happy to win the award. So thrilled !!!
But when presented with the award, the Vice Chancellor said something to me that shocked the hell out of me and was completely unexpected, and that I will never forget.
You can watch a short clip of the entire award here (03:03):
or jump straight to the key part (with zoom ins) at the 02:18 mark:
Can you guess what the Vice Chancellor said to me that shocked me so much ? I did my best NOT to react to what he said during the presentation.
Post your guess in the comments (below the Youtube video).
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To date, all versions of Sag Calculator have been x86 Windows executables. Sag Calculator runs fine on every x86 and x64 version of Windows from Windows 95 to Windows 11. This inclues Windows (x86 / x64) tablets, such as Microsoft Surface Pro, ASUS Transformer, etc.
I have personally run / tested Sag Calculator on a Microsoft Surface Pro - with and without the clip-on keyboard - in laptop mode and in touch screen tablet mode - and it works great.
And I received feedback from one of Sag Calculator's users back in 2015 that Sag Calculator works great on an ASUS Transformer:
Add this feedback to Sag Calculator's Customer Feedback and Testimonials section of my web page.
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It's always nice to get emails from people who use / appreciate my software. And I recently received some lovely Sag Calculator feedback:
To protect privacy, the names of people and companies are *not* included.
Add this feedback to Sag Calculator's Customer Feedback and Testimonials section of my web page.
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Sag Calculator Help (sag.hlp) in other formats:
Notes:
Specially for Jack H.
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Received some lovely Sag Calculator feedback this morning:
To protect privacy, the names of people and companies are *not* included.
Add this feedback to Sag Calculator's Customer Feedback and Testimonials section of my web page.
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Been watching some George Harrison interviews (and music) .... While My Guitar Gently Weeps, My Sweet Lord, tribute videos, .... awesome songs, and an incredibly down to earth bloke, seeking answers to the BIG questions in life.
In one interview, Ringo Starr tells the story of seeing George Harrison for the last time. George was terribly ill and in the hospital in Switzerland, bedridden, dying from cancer. Ringo said to George:
George replied:
There was no way that George was in any condition to leave his bed, and he certainly could not leave hospital, but he was willing to do anything for his friend, Ringo.
Humble, thoughtful, and always ready to put other people`s needs ahead of his own. What a fucking top bloke !!!
The world needs more people like George.
Now more than ever.
Ref:
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I have updated Sag Calculator's Registration form (Excel spreadsheet) to v2.44.
Numerous small changes: add notes about checking my web page, remove Training Videos (they are now FREE), update my web site URL at the bottom of the form, and so on.
But the main change is that I will no longer be accepting Credit Card payments from today onwards.
The acceptable payment methods are now only:
Why no more Credit Cards ?
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In my latest video, I celebrate reaching 100,000+ YouTube Views during the 11.5 year history of my YouTube channel, and take a trip down memory lane and quickly run though the videos that make up my channel, and discuss the highs and lows of working to produce useful, educational content in today's world.
Milestones:
Click this link to open YouTube in a new browser tab and watch the video there:
Hope someone out there enjoys this.
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Move all web page updates prior to Oct-2020 (older than 1 year) from this main page to the Prior Updates section of my web page.
Also update the ancient Registration Form that comes with the Trial version of Overhead Cable Sag Calculator. This contained woefully out of date contact information, web links, etc. The Registration Form that comes with the Trial version now simply refers you to download the Registration Form available here: Registration: How, Why, Pricing, etc
This fixes the "out of date Registration Form" issue for the Trial version of Sag Calculator that I host here on my web site.
Special thanks to Leonard for bringing this issue to my attention.
However, the trouble is that the Trial version of Sag Calculator is hosted on many other web sites across the internet - and these web site are not under my control and have never been under my control. Various people have just copied the Sag Calculator trial version ZIP file and hosted it on their web site without telling or asking me or giving me anyway to contact them if things need updating. So I cannot update Registration Form that they contain.
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Two of my favourite YouTube channels are:
I really enjoy watching these videos and writing my own code to explore / solve the problems.
If the problems or their solutions are particularly interesting or fun, my source code often ends up in one of my private or public GitHub Repos: https://github.com/MooseValley
If anyone is interested, one of my favourite Numberphile videos is:
which featured Dr Neil Sloane's enthusiastic, whispering walkthrough of an interesting chess related number sequence based on a Knight's moves on a large chess board. (The Knight becomes trapped after 2,016 moves, on square number 2,084 !)
Dr Neil Sloane also founded and runs the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences® (OEIS®) https://oeis.org/, which, is an repository / database of 100,000's of integer sequences.
I have recently started trying to submit sequences to this repository. My first 2 submissions failed because they were already in the OEIS. However, my 3rd submission is currently being reviewed for acceptance. Pretty exciting !
The OEIS has a soft limit of 3 submissions, so I am going to work hard to try and find some really unusual sequences over the coming months and submit those (if they aren't in the database already).
Anyway, if you are interested in problem solving, prime numbers, random numbers, Pi, E, encrytion, compression, Artificial Intelligence (AI), maze solving algorithms, chess, poker, card games, graphs, charts, and many other related topics, I encourage you to check out: Numberphile (https://www.youtube.com/user/numberphile/videos) and Computerphile (https://www.youtube.com/user/computerphile/videos) YouTube channels.
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There are now 150 Java programming tutorial videos in my Java Software Development YouTube Channel:
These videos took 100's of hours of work to create. And I'm regularly adding more ...
Over the last 2 days, I have been very busy creating, recording, editing, uploading a series of tutorial videos that should be very useful for anyone who has basic (or better) programming experience in Java and wants to come up to speed on JavaFX, NetBeans, and SceneBuilder.
You can access a list of the Tutorial Videos and a list of my Github Repos containing the source code here:
So far there are 8 parts to the JavaFX, NetBeans, and SceneBuilder tutorial series, but I will probably add more in the future ...
These resources are extremely useful for my students, but maybe they are useful to others out there as well.
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I have now moved the downloads for Sag Calculator's Registration Form and the Trial Version of Sag Calculator from MediaFire to my GitHub:
and have updated all of my Sag Calculator web pages to use these new GitHub links instead of the MediaFire links.
What is the problem with MediaFire ?? None for me. I run FireFox web browser with uBlock, No-Script, and other security add-ons / enhancements, so I've never had a problem with MediaFire. I click the download link on my web page, MediaFire opens and I click the big "Download" button, and the download occurs instantly. So, I have never had a problem with my MediaFire experiences. However, occasionally people email me (like this morning) and tell me that MediaFire does not work like that for them. They get pop-ups, ads, offers to download special MediaFire installers, etc. And it is for these reasons - for the people who visit my web page and use my software - that I am moving away from MediaFire.
Why did I use MediaFire ?? Until recently, I was forced to use MediaFire for my ZIP downloads, because the web hosts I was using did not allow the upload of ZIP, RAR, 7z, MPG, MP4, WMV, AVI, etc files. Also, MediaFire maintains a download counter for each file, so I could easily see which of my software titles and versions of each were the most popular. MediaFire has also been around for ages and always seemed very reliable to me.
But now my web site is permanently on GitHub, which allows all of my files ... sure wish I had moved to GitHub years ago ...
Will probably move all of my other MediFire downloads to Github soon ... i.e. all of the download ZIP files for each of my applications. Going to be a lot of work updating / checking links ...
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On 29-Jul-1996, my web page, then called "Moose's $5 Shareware and Emulation Valley" went live. It was my first "proper" web page (more than some simple HTML and images).
I LOVE developing software. At this time, I was a full-time professional freelance computer analyst programmer, but I hadn't done much HTML or any Delphi or published any of my own software as shareware (try before you buy, trialware, donationware) before. Almost all of the software I had created and worked on was for clients and employers, running on powerful computers locked deep inside the buildings of large companies.
Suddenly, the time was right, the stars had aligned, and I had a strong yearning to create my own WEB page, learn HTML and Delphi, and write some programs purely for the sheer joy of being creative and the challenge of bending the computer to my will ! And publish my software as shareware to try and cover the costs of running my PC and hosting a web page, and maybe make a little money on the side.
It's hardly surprising that I had tons of ideas (and still do !) for a wide range of novel and innovative software projects that had been percolating around in my head for many years, I had pages of notebooks full of ideas and designs, and now was the time to finally turn them into reality.
And, I was (and still am !) also very interested in emulation - where some clever software could effectively turn your PC (or Mac, etc) into an coin-op arcade machine, an Apple ][, a ZX Spectrum, a Commodore 64, or may others. These emulators were exploding onto the scene at this time, and my web page also contained these as they were released and a other emulation news. DASCade (Dave Spicer's Arcade) and the Cinematronics Emulator were 2 of the coin-op arcade machine that had already been out for a couple of years, and more were coming. MAME (Multi-Arcade Machine Emulator) was still a few years away from it's first release (in 1999, if I recall correctly).
So I was coiled like a spring, and put everything into my web page and developing my new software projects - working 60-100+ hours per week.
Most of my software would be released as $5 Shareware - where people could download and use my software for free, and, if they choose, they could pay me $5 if they liked my software, wanted to unlock features that might have only been available to those who had paid $5, and/or wanted to support further development. This was a really insane idea at the time, because almost all other shareware was $20 or more. $5 was a crazy low price. No-one was selling software or shareware for $5. My hope was that at $5, no-one would bother pirating / cracking my software, and no-one would dare risk downloading and using cracked copies of my software (which might contain nasty surprises, put there by the crackers and pirates) to unlock features that were otherwise only available to those who had paid $5.
And for a while there, this was true. My software became very popular and started selling like hot cakes almost immediately after my web page went live. Things were off to a great start ...
But success brings problems. Pretty soon, cracked versions of my software were all over the internet. I remember doing a search for "CPU Monitor Crack" in the late 1990's, and found more than 6,500 pirated / cracked copies of my "CPU Monitor" software on the internet. Clearly, some people were prepared to download and use cracked copies of software (perhaps containing nasty surprises left by the crackers, thereby putting their computers at risk) even just to save $5 lousy dollars.
All of my programs were developed using the "80 / 20 principle", which says that 80% of the work can be done with 20% of the effort, and that the last 20% of work takes 80% of the effort. I developed programs and released them onto my web page to see if people were interested, see if anyone used them or gave me some nice feedback. If people liked / used my programs, I would work on them to make them better, add features, make them prettier, and so on. So, my more polished programs (the ones where I have invested a great deal of extra effort for a comparatively small result) are the programs that people have supported and registered / paid for, and/or the ones I regularly use.
My software won many awards and much of my software has been featured on the companion CD's for many magazine and even some books - see the text files that accompany my programs for brief details, where they are known. People would often email me and ask "can we include your software on our magazine CD", and I would say "YES". But, far more often, people would just download and include my software on their magazine CDs without asking, and this was perfectly OK with me as well (as long as the everything was intact and the ZIP file included my readme text file).
Some of my software, especially Solar System Simulator and Robot Simulator, were used at my University's Open Days, where I worked as a lecturer and tutor. Indeed, my one of my primary aims for teaching computer science at university was to encourage students to learn to love developing software and exploring technology as much as I do, and to inspire students to become a "life long learner", like me.
Needless to say, I had a lot of fun creating and developing my software - now well over 100 applications, games, utilities - and seeing my ideas finally become a reality. My software has not made me rich or famous - but it was never ever about getting rich or becoming famous. Over the years, many 100's of people have emailed me and thanked me for my software, and this has been wonderful and greatly appreciated. Within the first 10 years, my web site had well over 500,000 visitors, and that is without page counters for almost half of that time, and with faulty or non-functional page counters a lot of the remaining time.
There aren't many software titles where an application (let alone the same executable !!) works across generations of Windows (Windows 95, 98, NT, ME, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10, etc), across generations of computer hardware, and across generations of monitors (640x480 --> 4K+). Very happy to say that all of my software does this.
Since 18-Sep-2007, all of my software has been FREE apart from Sag Calculator. See my web page update: 18-Sep-2007 :: It's ALL Free Baby !!
My web page is now just a quiet backwater, in distant corner of the internet where few people visit. The days of lone software developers releasing software directly onto their web pages are pretty well gone. It's all about App Stores and similar non-sense nowadays.
Anyway, my web page will always be my "HAPPY PLACE" on the internet. When I visit the Main Page and/or click Prior Updates and scroll down and read for hours and reminisce about happier times, when the sun shone a little less harshly and the breeze was not quite so cold.
Sure, why not. As long as I'm still alive and not too senile, my web page will keep going. I'll always love developing software, and I've still got a ton of ideas for interesting, new, unique software that does not exist anywhere outside of my head ... so I'm not hanging up my debugger and dev tools anytime soon. And any software I create, that others might find useful, then I will release it here - almost certainly for FREE, like 99+% of my existing software. If someone else finds my software useful, then that's great.
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Thanks to the WayBack Machine, https://archive.org/web/ there are 100's of snapshots of my web site going back as far as 28-Jan-1999.
Here are some screen shots of my web page to show its evolution over time: frames => no frames, animated GIFs everywhere => few animated GIFs, menus, colour changes, etc. Note: you can click on the images to open a full sized version if a new tab.
25-Nov-2001 |
11-Jun-2008 |
24-Sep-2018 |
If you would like to see and explore my web site from the past, I have included links to a bunch of my web site snapshots below. Some are missing images, some are incomplete, and some are for web sites that were purely mirrors to my main web site. e.g. in the earliest days of Moose's Software Valley, my main web host was Rocknet, but I had web site mirrors with Tripod, Geocites, XOOM, and various other web hosts, just incase one or more web site hosts closed down without warning (something that happened quite a lot back then and still happens today).
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Upload a new version of Oblotteration (Game) (v1.1f) to my Freeware cross-platform software for Java Virtual Machine (JVM) page which contains software for desktop, laptop, and tablet computers running Windows, Linux, Unix, and Mac OS.
Oblotteration is a simple game - my clone of a game called Flood It.
Changes for v1.1f:
For anyone who may be interested, here's the VirusTotal Virus Scan report which gives this software a 100% clean bill of health against all 58 virus and malware scanners (as I fully expected).
To download the program or see screen shots or view the readme file for more information, see the Oblotteration (Game) section of my web page. Hope someone (in addition to me) enjoys playing this cool game ...
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I have been using computers since the very early 1980's, and have used tons of software that was "hard to use" and not "user friendly" over the years. Software was "hard to use" and not "user friendly" back then because the machines were so primitive. When you've got 48 KB of RAM for everything including the OS, the application, and the data, you can only do so much.
But some software - even today - seems to go out of its way to frustrate and annoy users.
Microsoft Windows is a prime candidate here for so many reasons, one of which for removing WinHLP support (the help file format Windows used for 25+ years and which would add a paltry 1 MB to the total install size of Windows, which on my laptop tips the scales at 26 GB !). In addition, for users like me who still value WinHLP support, and go out of my way to install it on modern Windows, Windows routinely and automatically deletes the WinHLP support I specifically installed - without notifying or asking me - when major updates are installed. Every few months, I have to reinstall WinHLP support on my machines. There are many other frustrations with Windows - like why Windows Explorer has to keep changing and messing with my default view all the damned time. Shame on you Microsoft ! Shame !
The latest software to really frustrate and annoy me is Firefox v89. For me, Firefox has become very crash prone lately, crashing multiple times per day. This is very frustrating. But Firefox v89 takes this frustration to another level, because it adds extra spacing between tabs, menus, and bookmarks, and does not provide a simple way to reset it back to how it was in all prior versions of Firefox. Bookmarks menus that used to fit neatly on a screen, now extend way beyond the bounds of the screen. Shame on you Mozilla ! Shame !
Anyway, to restore the menu, bookmark, and tab spacing in Firefox v89:
In Firefox type this in the address bar: about:config -> click Accept Risk and Continue search for: browser.compactmode.show - double click it until is says "true". search browser.proton.enabled - double click it until is says "false". search browser.proton.contextmenus.enabled - double click it until is says "false". (This last option fixes the huge spaces between Bookmarks in the Bookmarks menu) Right click on Title bar -> Customize Toolbar -> right at the bottom (middle), click the Density combobox and select "Compact (not supported)". Your tabs and bookmarks, spacing, etc will be back to normal.
Hopefully other people out there will find this useful. FireFox users almost certainly will.
TAGS: Firefox, Firefox 89, Firefox 89.0, Firefox v89, Firefox v89.0, menu density, menu spacing, tab density, tab spacing, bookmark density, bookmark spacing
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Here are the BLOOPERS I made when making the Sag Calculator's 20th Anniversary video.
Normally I just delete these BLOOPERS, but today I thought it might be fun to keep them and make an extra video of them.
Also add both videos - the Sag Calculator 20th Anniversary video and the BLOOPERs video - to the Sag Calculator Training Videos web page:
Special thanks once again to my 311 licensed users !
Update 21-Aug-2021: Add "Sag Calculator 20th Anniversary - Celebrating 20 years" image on right.
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To ensure everyone knows about Sag Calculator's 20th Anniversary and associated video, I have just emailed ALL of Sag Calculator's Licensed Users (221 email addresses):
----- Forwarded message ----- From: Moose OMalleyTo: Moose BCC: <221 unique email addresses> Sent: Tuesday, 8 June 2021, 2:18:05 pm AEST Subject: Sag Calculator news - 25th anniversary, Free Training Videos, etc See my web page for details: https://rebrand.ly/MoosesSoftware Have a nice day. :) Mike "Moose" OMalley ____________________________________________________ Moose's Software Valley - Established July, 1996. * Email: Moose_Software _AT_ yahoo.com.au * WEB Site: https://rebrand.ly/MoosesSoftware * Reddit Forum: https://www.reddit.com/r/MoosesSoftware/ * LBRY Channel #1 MoosesValley: https://lbry.tv/@MoosesValley:0 * LBRY Channel #2 LBRY_Tutor_Helper: https://lbry.tv/@LBRY_Tutor_Helper:e * YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/MoosesValley/playlists * GitHub Projects: https://github.com/MooseValley?tab=repositories ___________________________________________________
Already I can see that the results aren't terrific. So far, 40 of the 221 (18.1%) of the emails bounced because the email addresses are no longer valid or because the company servers reject emails from external sources. Perfectly understandable ... some of these email addresses were used over 10 years ago, and companies are becoming increasingly paranoid about external emails (and rightly so).
Update 21-Aug-2021: Add "Sag Calculator 20th Anniversary - Celebrating 20 years" image on right.
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To help celebrate Sag Calculator's 20th Anniversary, Sag Calculator Training Videos are now FREE, and are now available: here:
and in the "Sag Calculator" drop down menu above.
If anyone tries to pay for these on any future purchases (Registration Forms), then the training videos will not be charged.
Special thanks once again to my 311 licensed users !
UPDATE Tue, 08-Jun-2021, 01:39 PM: Change all training videos to PUBLIC on YouTube, and use the latest YouTube embed code in my web page to make sure the videos embed correctly. Update the YouTube-DL download commands to include all 5 videos.
Update 21-Aug-2021: Add "Sag Calculator 20th Anniversary - Celebrating 20 years" image on right.
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v1.0 of Sag Calculator was released on 1-Sep-2001, and here we are 20 years later. In this special 20th anniversary video I discuss:
Special thanks to my 311 licensed users !
Also add my GitHub Pages link to the links at the top of my main web page:
Web Site Link #2 (GitHub Pages): | https://moosevalley.github.io/ |
Update 21-Aug-2021: Add "Sag Calculator 20th Anniversary - Celebrating 20 years" image on right.
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Featuring 2 lovely mothers, a bunch of beautiful doggies, and 2 sons, enjoying a delicious lunch in the park for Mother's Day. Photos and silent video clips with music overlay.
Special thanks to Freddie Mercury and Queen for a great song. (One of my favorite songs of all time).
Song / Music:
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I've made lots of mistakes in my life ... but this was one of the doozies:
This is pretty shocking, I had never taken the share price history which included stock splits and done the calculations before today. I thought the total would be maybe $500K ... not $25 million !! Oh boy !
Yes, I'm an idiot. But my friends are much bigger idiots. I'm an idiot because I let even bigger idiots talk me out of something that I knew was a golden opportunity. I could see the massive potential ... But they could not see it. They were completely clueless about how big Microsoft was going to become. If they were History or English Literature or whatever majors, this would be excusable. But they were all Computer Science majors ... they all had IBM-PC clones at home, they had all been using MS-DOS for several years, they had used Microsoft's software and compilers for several years, and they had seen / used Microsoft Windows 1 ... But they could not see the big picture or how personal computers and software were going to grow.
These are the same guys who started calling me "Moose" as well ... (because I looked like Moose from the Archie comic books).
Anyway ... special "thanks" to Tom S, John P, Rowan, and others for keeping me poor. (I am soooo tempted to give your full names here so everyone knows who you are).
And I'd bet $1 MILLION that if I confronted these guys about this today, they would suddenly have selective amnesia and would have very conveniently forgotten all about this !
With "friends" like these, who needs enemies ...
A similar thing happened when I really started looking into Bitcoin in early 2010 (about a year after it started) ... but that's a story for another time ... different guys, but just as idiotic ...
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Recently created and released these 2 #APPriLE videos onto YouTube:
Or watch these same videos embedded below:
Long live the Apple ][ !
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I love Marchintosh and DOSember for celebrating and highlighting Macintosh and PC/DOS computers and software. In the video below, I propose special months for Apple 1/2/GS and Commodore 64/Pet/Vic-20 computers: APPriLE and comMAYdore. What do you think ?
Support this idea by publishing content - videos, reviews, articles, blog posts using the appropriate tags: APPriLE and/or comMAYdore.
Long live the Apple and related computers ][ !
Long live the Commodore 64 and related computers !
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Upload a very slightly modified version of my Java source code for my Have I Been Owned ? / Have I Been Pwned ? (v0.004f) project, with the following changes:
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Upload a demonstration video for another of my freeware programs:
and link to this YouTube video in the Nixie Clock section of my web page.