Everyone outside the US will be familiar with the standard paper size used in offices around the world, known as A4. You may also be aware that there are other A-series paper sizes, such as the larger A3. Perhaps you have also heard of the B-series sizes.

Have you ever wondered why A4 is the size and shape …

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For many of us, we are entering the holiday season. Whether you celebrate Christmas or not, we wish you all the best for the holidays and the New Year.

The Christmas tree has its origins in medieval and pagan traditions going back centuries. Today, the tree is, as the name suggests, associated with Christmas. Here in Australia, it is not …

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The Sierpiński triangle is what is known as a fractal – a geometric shape that shows structure at arbitrarily small scale, often with a similar appearance as the scale changes. The Sierpiński triangle is basically an equilateral triangle, subdivided recursively into smaller equilateral triangles, ad infinitum. It is named after the Polish mathematician Wacław Sierpiński, although the pattern …

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The PC Engine was a home video game console developed through a joint venture between Hudson Soft and NEC. Released in Japan in 1987, it was a commercial success, competing favourably with the well-known Nintendo Famicom/NES console of the era. Though technically an 8-bit console (having an 8-bit CPU), it included a 16-bit graphics processor, making it a remarkably …

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If you’ve been wondering why Curmi the Blog has been so quiet of late, the staff at curmi.com have been hard at work over the last few months updating all their apps to work with the latest version of iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS and macOS.

Apple released iOS 26, iPadOS 26, watchOS 26, tvOS 26 and macOS 26 (Tahoe) on …

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The Taito Egret II was an arcade cabinet that first appeared in Japanese video game arcades in the 1990s. It’s a cabinet style affectionately known as a “candy cab”, most likely because of the bright, often neon, colours associated with the cabinets. What made the Egret II stand out was the fact the monitor inside could be easily rotated for …

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The Taito Egret II was an arcade cabinet that first appeared in Japanese video game arcades in the 1990s. It’s a cabinet style affectionately known as a “candy cab”, most likely because of the bright, often neon, colours associated with the cabinets. What made the Egret II stand out was the fact the monitor inside could be easily rotated for …

The post Egret II Mini Arcade Collection Part 1 appeared first on curmi.com.

In a previous article we took a look at menu bars in iPadOS and macOS 26. The new operating systems bring some big changes – of particular interest here is menu bars for the first time on the iPad. We outlined new features and differences between the two systems, and some of the issues apps may encounter when using menu …

The post SwiftUI and Menu Bars appeared first on curmi.com.

The next version of iPadOS and macOS is version 26 – based on the year 2026, though due toward the end of 2025. The updates (including iOS and tvOS) bring many changes already discussed on other websites. Briefly discussed by others is the inclusion of menu bars in iPadOS for the first time, though there are also changes to …

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In 1990, the Intelligent Controller Cyber Stick was introduced to the world – an analog/digital controller for the Sharp Corporation X68000 series of computers. Considered by many as the ultimate analog controller, it was compatible with a number of Japanese computers and consoles of the era: X68000, PC98 series, FM Towns, SEGA Mega Drive/Genesis and the PC Engine (using an …

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The World Expo has run in some form or another for the last century or more. The modern World Expo occurs every 5 years, and in 2025 it is being held in Osaka Japan. I was fortunate enough to be in Japan during the expo, and had two days to look around and write this brief account on some …

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We have a new Mac service out for free download. But before we get to that, let’s talk a little about Services on the Mac.

Newcomers to the Mac may not be aware of Services – a powerful and extremely useful feature of macOS.

Services allow you to use features of other apps without opening that app, or in …

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Early arcade games used CRTs (Cathode Ray Tubes – think old TVs before flat screens). Colour CRTs were quite expensive, so early games used black-and-white screens. It was also expensive to manufacture chips and circuits that output colour, so this was another way to save money.

This use of black-and-white CRTs is why, if you ever saw the original …

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Ed Riley, known as winkdot on the AtariAge forums, was a homebrew developer for the Atari 2600. Over the years he produced a wide range of fun games that he released for free to the Atari community.

Sadly, Ed Riley passed away in 2019. A great loss to the Atari community and the world.

Forum member Brian Matherne (Arenafoot…

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The Atari 2600 (originally called the Atari VCS) is a video game system that launched in the US in 1977; one of the oldest home video game systems, and certainly one of the most well known and fondly remembered. In fact, the Atari 2600 was re-released by Atari in 2023 as the Atari 2600+, a system that can take …

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At some point in high school students are taught about factorials. A fairly simple concept, the factorial of a non-negative whole number is written as n! and defined as the product (that means you multiply the numbers) of all the positive whole numbers less than or equal to that number. So 5! = 5 × 4 × 3 ×…

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Back in the late ’70s and early ’80s most households did not have a computer. Computers were very expensive by today’s standards. There was, of course, no internet. Software you’d associate with office work today didn’t exist – Word, Excel and Photoshop had yet to be created.

At the time the three most popular personal computers were the Apple II…

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The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) regulates advertising on social media, including Facebook – their guidelines require businesses to make true and accurate claims, and to be able to prove them. Facebook claim to have advertising standards and to follow them. In fact, here is what they say on Fraud, Scams and Deceptive Practices:

If you regularly use Facebook …

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Chocolate means a lot to me. I always have chocolate in the cupboard, I make chocolate cakes, I eat chocolate ice cream, I drink chocolate, I have been paid in chocolate for some projects. Chocolate is life. So it may not surprise you to learn I sometimes have ideas about chocolate.

I talked about one of these ideas in a …

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Those who know me know that I am a big fan of chocolate. There is always chocolate in the cupboard at home, I drink hot chocolates at cafes, my friends give me chocolates as gifts, and I’ve even been paid in chocolate for certain projects in the past. I think about chocolate a lot.

So perhaps it isn’t a huge …

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