I saw this film at an afternoon showing one summer. I was the only one there. Sitting in the middle of the front row of an empty cinema, I saw Sam Neill sitting in the front row of an empty cinema watching himself on the screen, going mad and laughing hysterically. I almost did the same.

Interesting development! Btw, I had to use a VPN to read the linked article because they block EU visitors (due to not wanting to follow data protection regulations).

The good news is that it works now (the sticky keyboard just needed lubing). The automatic division is awesome. It is a state machine and the little window shows 2, 1, or 0 to represent its current state. Needs some more lubing and cleaning so next I must figure out how to remove the carriage

Some close-up pictures. It will be a while before this makes it to my website

Here you go. It was a properly produced thing, but I don’t know by whom. Here it is on a piece of A4 paper. It was just transparent enough to pencil trace over pictures, and the pencil could be washed off. As you can see, I was into maps.

Somewhere I probably still have a plastic overlay sheet for making Sinclair ZX81 graphics. It was semi transparent, and had a 24x32 grid for characters, each subdivided in 2x2. It allowed you to pixelize any picture for the machine. It was still useful when I had a Spectrum for making sprites.

For me it is mostly that Bond film with the Faberge eggs

Thanks for the scan. Burt Harrison & Co provided learning materials for schools and home schooling, but I don't know how this reissue came to be.

archive.org/details/find...

There seems to be no trace of this machine to be found anywhere on the internet, except for its patent:
worldwide.espacenet.com/patent/searc...

I'm not sure. I suppose they were novelty giveaways at office fairs and such. I've even seen a large one for sale, standing two or three feet high, which must have been used as a shop display.

@chrisstaecker.bsky.social It even came in the *original* box.

The instruction manual for the Facit NTK mechanical calculator included many pictures of the Facit Wizard.

Maybe I'll be lucky and be the only bidder...
But seriously, that thing is valued at 500 times my whole collection, but does not function as well as a 5 dollar plastic one

Neat. Another tape measure that I like is one with markings in Pi*cm, with which you can easily measure the diameter of a tree or any other round object you can wrap it around

Yep. A relatively simple mechanism that could be made cheaply, so they were somewhat affordable - cost about the equivalent of an iPad

I can’t think of the right negations of words like admire and respect that don’t trivialise the impact that horrible man has