Mystery photo

OK it is a 4te computer but can you guess what the switch does. The blue logo may or may not be a clue. The answer may well be in the next issue of Archive.

A mystery indeed: also invisible ;)

I see no photos, blue logos, or anything (using Chromium browser).

The blue logo may or may not be a clue.

Oh my god, it has Intel Inside.
What have you done!!?!

Its for Flux capacitor mode then didn’t they do some Electrons like that with the Slogger Master Turbo board which increased the speed and memory capacity of the Electron.

Oh my god, it has Intel Inside.

Late StrongARM? XScale?

The photo does not contain any invisible artefacts. Your browser may be applying some censorship criteria. It is not flux capacitors – there is no pick up for lightening bolts.

there is no pick up for lightening bolts

So it stays the same weight? :)
“lightening” (less heavy) vs. “lightning” (big atmospheric spark)

“lightening” (less heavy)

Or perhaps less dark. Paint those bolts white!

(Painting lightning bolts is very difficult, I imagine. And they’re not dark anyway. I really don’t know how much they weigh, I’m not even sure the question if meaningful.)

Well, a lightning bolt contains energy. According to the famous equation E=mc² this translates to an – admittedly small – mass, which the Earth’s gravity will act upon to give a weight. I suspect that trying to directly weigh a lightning bolt would present significant difficulties :-)

Probably comparable to the difficulties of trying to paint one in a lighter shade!

A switch for selecting RISC OS or Linux at boot time?

I see no photos, blue logos, or anything (using Chromium browser).

Interestingly, for me the photo shows up when I open the thread, but not when viewed via “Recent Posts”.

Easy. Switch in left position enables the circular saw. Right position is the sandwich toaster.

Pizza oven, surely?

I see no photos

I suspect the problem is down to Chris using http for his site/the address of the photo; your web browser is probably being fussy and not displaying it on an otherwise https page.

(Not sure how that affects Chris, though. I’d expect it to be all or nothing – the picture is either displayed in either case, or not displayed at all.)

I see the logo now (hmm, now that I’m on WiFi and not 4G).

Sorta reminds me of the Meridian Television logo.

It’s clearly a toggle switch for whether to boot RISC OS or some sort of Linux.
Don’t let me anywhere near it. I’d flip it mid boot just to see if it’s correctly implemented as a read-once setting, or if it’s something else. ;-)

(Not sure how that affects Chris, though. I’d expect it to be all or nothing – the picture is either displayed in either case, or not displayed at all.)

Must have been a glitch; it’s showing in both places now.

I did ask my ISP to https my web site but they haven’t done it yet (despite promising that it would be simple to do).

I assure you it is correctly implemented – why read something more than once? (Well it is read twice but in very close succession as the ‘[gpio5=0]’ condition in CONFIG.TXT does not appear to have an ‘[else]’.) But none of the suggestions is yet precisely correct. (Away until Tuesday now.)

I would hazard a guess that the two switch positions should be labelled “MAGIC” and “MORE MAGIC”.

(For those of you too young to remember the original tale, it can be found here)

It is deeply ironic that the hacker dictionary is a set of ISO 8859/1 pages being hosted on a server declaring them as charset=utf-8.

“MAGIC” and “MORE MAGIC”

That’s a nice story, which unfortunately has some resemblance with the behaviour of my lovely 4té: just touching it turns the screen black. No switch even needed. A loose contact is the likely explanation. Did you ever try to restart the computer while the mystery switch was set to “Magic”?

It’s the turbo switch, which when off runs RISC OS at normal Pi4B speeds, but when switched to turbo mode, runs at Archimedes 310 speeds, for a certain septic that complains a Pi1B is too fast, and you really need to be running like an 8MHz ARM2 to appreciate each saved cycle.

to appreciate each saved cycle.

😂🤣😂

for a certain septic that complains

:)

Infected with what?

It’s cockney rhyming slang; septic tank => y…