Author Retrocosm

The A To Z Of Red Dwarf

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A to Z of Red Dwarf

As I increasingly seem to find myself doing these days I was sorting through a cupboard that had become another ‘throw in’ cupboard when I found hidden at the back my A to Z of Red Dwarf.

This is a genuine prop that I purchased several years ago and promptly tucked away and forgot about.  Seen throughout the early series as set dressing in various parts of Red Dwarf the A to Z featured heavily in the first series episode Me 2 (squared.)

Scene From Red Dwarf

The book, which is in reality a copy of ‘Lecture Notes on Pathology’ with a false cover presumably printed by the props department has a cut out section inside in which according to Red Dwarf legend Rimmer hid his diary.

A new series of Red Dwarf is currently scheduled for release in 2012.  I am a huge fan of the programme, and although the later series’ were a tad disappointing the early classics are well worth revisiting.

The images below show the book in detail and also some more stills of it on set.



I don’t know what the text on the back refers to, or if I’m honest even what language it is.  Below you can see where the book pages have been cut out so that Rimmer’s diary can be concealed inside, although of course Lister knew it was there and takes great delight in reading it.

Hot gazpacho soup anyone?

Retrocosm.net – New Name Same Old Stuff

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I’ve decided it’s time to upgrade to my own super cool domain to reflect the fact that my blog has pretty much become almost solely retro-computing based.

Traffic seems to be building consistently and more visitors are leaving comments which is fantastic.  So I’m going to try and document more of my tinkering with retro gear as it seems to be a hobby that is gaining popularity right now.

Atari Portfolio

Atari Portfolio

I have a couple of projects on the go at the moment, both involving the Atari Portfolio.  Firstly I’m trying to hook up a parallel Zip Drive to it for storage and easy file transfer.  I also want to get hold of a serial interface and try and get it talking to a modem and hopefully my BBS – Nostromo.

I shall therefore document my success/failures in these endeavours in due course.

Tweeting From The Epson PX-8

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Today was spent fiddling with the configuration of Nostromo, the BBS I’m setting up for testing retro machines.  After a considerable amount of time (much of which was spent trying to remember my mail server passwords) I managed to get the mail forwarding working so I could send e-mail from the BBS.

It then occurred to me it must be possible to Tweet via e-mail.  A quick internet search later and I found Tweety Mail and duly signed up.  At this stage I was only able to get mail out into the wild from the BBS by sending it to another user who had their account set to forward internal mail.  I therefore set up a user account with tweet@tweetymail.com as their e-mail address and logged on with the PX-8.

I’m still experiencing some problems with errant text even when connecting at 300 baud but I can still navigate around and I soon managed to send an e-mail to the tweetymail user account.  Much to my surprise and excitement it duly popped up on Twitter almost immediately.

I decided to shoot some video of the process.  I apologise in advance for the shoddy standards, particularly the bit at the end where I hadn’t planned for moving the camera from the PX-8 to the Mac display and helpfully the camera decided to go on strike when it came to finding focus.  Still it does rather sum up my Retrochallenge, unfocussed but with a clear result in the end.