1500 Games

That’s a lot of games, isn’t it? With the purchase of Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo HD for Xbox Live Arcade today, I’ve reached 1500 games in my collection. Actually, I’ve got more than that. Lots more. Something in the region of 200 more, in fact, but they’re piles of Spectrum and C64 cassettes and I’m yet to begin the daunting task of cataloguing them all, so they don’t yet count. Lets look at some fun facts: If the games …

Returning to speed cameras

A few months ago, I posted a couple of rants about speed cameras, specifically the new average-speed cameras being installed on a stretch of dual carriageway on my way to work. Well, they’re in and the road has been extensively resurfaced and finally fully reopened. Reopened to MORONS. And me, of course. You see, they’re average-speed cameras. So there are two cameras, about two miles apart, and they calculate how long you’ve taken to travel that distance and so determine …

Too many games!

It’s that time of year again. Well, actually, it’s not, which is the problem. Traditionally, there’s slim pickings for new games around this time of year. The busiest times for releasing new titles (especially big titles) is normally around Christmas and often over Easter too, but the July-October period is like release death in the UK. Except this year. As well having Bioshock released this week already, there’s fahsands more out between now and the end of November. Before the …

Emails from the Dawn of Time #1

Today, I decided that having a 1GB Outlook .pst file with all my emails in was a bit of overkill, and decided to archive some. I’ve kept virtually all of my emails ever since I left Uni in 1999, and even forwarded on some from there, so I’ve got a few from 1997. Anyway. In the process of doing the backing up, archiving, and then checking the archive, I had a read through some old messages, and here, for your …

My other blog

You know, even though there’s a link over there on the left, many of my readers don’t seem to realise I have a second blog. One which is some two years older than this one, and is updated more frequently. It’s my Gaming Diary. Since I’m what you could call an, uh, avid player of games, I set up a diary to track my progress through what I play, and to try and encourage me to stop buying so many …

ZX81 Webserver

OK, so I’m having a Geek Day today. Sorry about that. But “Siggi”, from the newsgroup comp.sys.sinclair has done something quite amazing. Whilst the rest of us on the group have often giggled about the possibility of creating a webserver that runs on a Sinclair Spectrum, this guy has gone one better – by creating one for the ZX81. Amazing. Assuming the thing is still running (and Siggi says it could go down at any time), you can see it …

Jpeg support for PHP5 on Ubuntu Feisty

This is perhaps the most geeky blog post I’ve done yet. Basically, I ran into a problem this morning. A couple of weeks ago I installed Ubuntu on a virtual server to replace the aging physical server running SuSE 7.3 that powers the intranet pages at work. Everything was fine, until today… I also use the install of PHP on that server to create thumbnail images as part of a photo gallery creation system I have for work’s website. As …

Bargainlicious Bioshock

It would seem that Bioshock for the Xbox 360 has been confirmed as region free by one of the programmers over on the 2K Games forums. This means you get get hold of the Asian version (which is in English) for just under ¬¨¬£25. Where from? Play Asia of course! While you’re there, why not pick up Phoenix Wright 3 for the DS for ¬¨¬£15 too? That’s what I did!

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy via IM

Amazing. You can now play the classic text adventure (or “interactive fiction” as they seem to be called these days) game version of Douglas Adams’ book via an instant messenger client. It uses the Jabber network, but Google Talk is compatible so if you have that (or even just the Google homepage gadget, as shown below) you can play! Just send a message to “prakbot [at] jabber.org”, and once connected, type !startgame to, uh, well, you can guess. See here …