When all my friends were rocking sexy Amiga 500s and Atari STs, I was keeping it real on my beloved Spectrum +3.

Recently someone presented a Twitter client for the ZX Spectrum +3 at the Bletchley Park Vintage Computing Festival. I'm gutted I missed this, will definitely be attending next year! The event was hosted by The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC).

A recent family wedding triggered my idea for this post, my uncle was getting married and when there’s a Swain family do and because there’s a lot of muso’s in the family, we always have live music. My unc’ passed down his 1976 vintage Fender Telecaster, to me about 13 years ago so I took it along to let the old chap have a burn on it again.

Anyway, I was setting up my dad’s Vox amp and realised what a bad interface existed compared to my other amp: an Orange. This post covers two of my favourite topics: user-experience and guitar amps.

Social media, well mainly Facebook, has allowed people from various stages of your life to get in touch. Not all of them welcome, there is no need to accept them, however out of a sense of politeness you do. An unfortunate side effect of this is that they may start irritating you again and in new ways too. There’s some things that I regularly see on Facebook that really grinds my gears. Not identifying anyone in particular, this is a quick post about some things that really annoy me on Facebook.

The second of my gaming posts, this time its Ion Storm’s 2000 RPG, FPS, adventure game: Deus Ex.

Let’s start with part of their description of Deus Ex:

Now, that text is pretty spot on and it would be because they're the creators but it fails to mention the Gray Death: a virus that’s rapidly killing a large percentage of the population. And of course Bob Page, your boss and the shit that’s making the plague and holding the country’s President to ransom with it. He also has a whole armada of shit-lings too

In the office we enjoy comparing adverts: by this I mean the adverts Facebook chooses to show us. Sometimes it can be bang on and other times only just miss the mark. Of course it’s all driven by semantics but the profiling is so good that it’s scary and it also seems to hang on a few key pieces of personal information. I’m not certain but I think these are age, gender and relationship status.

Now it's definitely more complicated than the three terms I’ve identified above, semantics is built on countless connections between information all over the place but these three denominators seem to stand out. Take my colleagues for example, we share many similarities age, tastes etc but there are subtle differences and FB knows this.

I have recently mentioned on my twitter feed my love for the current HBO series ‘The Pacific’. I find WW2 particularly interesting, such extraordinary times; so I try to learn as much as I can. It was after I posted under the #pacific tag that I discovered a tweet about the site ‘Letters from World War II’, a brilliant example of past and present combining to create a fascinating resource.