We're now in the run-down to Christmas and so lots of novelty stuff is popping up on the internet. Something I played with last year is the QEMU Advent Calendat. QEMU is a virtual machine that can model various types of computers to allow you to run all sorts of software in a safe environment on your comupter (Windows, Linux or Mac). It's free and open source so you can just play with it.
The advent calendar gives you a different machine to play with each day, but generally the files you download are fairly small. So far this year we have a Flappy Bird game that was 4.5kb and a somewhat larger image with a text adventure.
Here are both of those running at once. I'm sure my Linux PC could manage many more.
It's just a bit of fun to let you experience some other aspects of computing. I spent a lot of my teens playing with some simple home computers with very limited memory, but they still had some fun games. Not all of the downloads on this calendar are likely to be games. There may be old operating systems you can try out to see how things used to be.
We take our powerful computers for granted these days. Even a Raspberry Pi is way beyond what the teenage me could have dreamed of and our smartphones would have blown our minds. Sometimes it's good to get some perspective and thus appreciate what we have a bit more.
Get your geek on!
I'm Steve, the geeky guitarist.
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