PRINT HEAD » Non-techie stuff

80s computer games I remember

tim — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 14:08:37 +0000

When I think about it, I can remember more games I used to play on my Commodore 64 than I expect to. Here’s what I’ve managed to recall.

Monty On The Run
Crazy Comets
Attack of the Mutant Camels (weird!)
Hovver Bovver (brilliantly English)
Outrun
Pod — I’m sure that’s what it was called but can’t find any reference to it anywhere. Little man with big feet who had to jump across streams and walls and things. If he fell in he would turn white, grow angel wings, and fly up to heaven while music played. And I think maybe there a Welsh connection?
Paperboy
Nebulus
International Karate+
Little Computer People
Winter Games
Toy Bizarre
Ghostbusters
Falcon Patrol
Blade Runner
There was some kind of football game, don’t remember what it was called. Actually I think the copy I had was translated into German… looking around it must have been a version of Emlyn Hughes International Soccer.
Cauldron
Booty was the first one I had, a pirate treasure platform game with colour-coded keys and doors. At the time I had it plugged into a black and white TV set so that made it a bit more challenging!
Haunted Mansion or something with a similar name. Don’t remember a lot about it except that it was quite a simple game, but enjoyable.
Orpheus and the Underworld (but don’t remember much about it)

Britain’s only large-scale wind turbine manufacturer to close

tim — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 13:48:37 +0000

Vestas, the wind turbine manufacturing plant in Newport on the Isle of Wight is set to close this week despite a government pledge only hours earlier to build a green economy. There is a Friends of the Earth campaign about it here, urging the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills to save the UK’s wind power industry.

All of this comes at a time when the UK govenment has been accused of having an energy policy that’s too focused on wind power, and when companies trying to increase the UK’s supply of wind power such as Ecotricity are fighting years-long planning battles with local councils to install any. Dorset, the county where I live, has no wind turbines at all and one planning proposal was recently turned down by the council despite having been recommended by their own planning officers.

It’s a mad world.

Hustle: back on form

tim — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 11:51:55 +0000

The fifth series of Hustle is definitely back on form. Glad that Mickey Bricks is back from “Australia” (oh, I thought he’d been off making films), and that the writing has got its edge back. It’s much improved from before. It’s a pity Jaime Murray is no longer in it, but you can’t have everything. Kelly Adams is nearly as good in the same/similar role. Not warming so quickly to Matt Di Angelo but, then again, it was the same with Marc Warren to start with.

Episode 4 is on this Thursday.

Some of our electricity is missing

tim — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 15:05:07 +0000

We use Ecotricity for electricity supply in our household, as they use the money we pay them to build new wind turbines. Annoyingly, aliens are wrecking them. One early report said that a blade had been torn off and — ominously — was nowhere to be found (perhaps implying it had been abducted). A later report said that it was found at the foot of the wind turbine. Probably should have checked there first.

Now the county councillor for the area has piped up with a report of seeing a “round, white light” with a “slight red edge” hovering near the wind turbines. So was it aliens, or mechanical failure? Either way, it mightn’t be a bad idea to start installing cameras at turbine sites.

If it is indeed aliens, perhaps it is because we are sending them the wrong message. Honestly, two months after Greenpeace creates a crop circle depicting a wind turbine, a turbine is taken out by aliens — can that really be coincidence?

While I’m writing about this, I’d like to pick up on something that Russ Kellett, of the Flying Saucer Bureau, was quoted by the BBC as saying:

To hit two of the blades, any object must have been about 170ft long.

Couldn’t it have been travelling along the plane of the blades rather than directly face-on?

Automatic photo tagging

tim — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 13:54:28 +0000

MyHeritage, a genealogy web site, claims it can automatically tag photos of people. It uses face recognition to find faces in uploaded photos, then gets you to identify them. The idea is that you only identify each person once, and it can automatically tag other photos of that person for you.

MyHeritage organizes photos based on who appears in them.
MyHeritage is able to identify and tag people you’ve already told it about, in all your other photos, and in any new photos you’ll upload, automatically.

I’ve only tested it very slightly, but it does seem to work to some degree. It’s fairly slow to complete the facial recognition step, understandably, but it really does seem to be trying to recognise individual people.

Only a matter of time before it becomes more wide-spread, I’m sure.

Streetview-style maps seeing inside buildings

tim — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 19:19:00 +0000

This Finnish mapping service has a mode that works like Google’s Street View, but it can let you look around inside buildings! Take a look. Try clicking on one of the buildings with a rectangle around it.

You can click and drag to pan around, but unfortunately they’ve got the movement backwards (click-drag-left moves left etc).

Queues

tim — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 18:37:42 +0000

While I was waiting in a queue at the Post Office, I was remembered something I thought while waiting in a queue on the phone to BT. If there are fewer people serving at the desks or answering the phones and more people in the queues, and this becomes the norm, the people queueing will come to think of their time speaking with a cashier/representative as extremely valuable indeed. No-one wants to have to re-join the queue and start again. Having spent all that time waiting they now want to get everything off their chest and sorted out in this exchange and be done with it.

It leads to a slowing down of the entire queue because what could easily be a simple “I’d like to post this please” into very lengthy discussion on the merits of various postage services, with double-checks of postcodes, prices, weights and so on. I saw someone from the queue today phone up their friend to check the address was correct on their parcel while they were at the desk.

Is there a point at which things start moving more efficiently because people aren’t expecting a long wait in the queue next time? Someone should find out.

Ecofont

tim — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 10:20:43 +0000

This is a font called Spranq Eco Sans, based on Vera Sans. The idea is that the little circular holes in the lines making up the letters can save up to 20% of the ink used for printing it out.

I think the idea is to get people to think about how much ink they use, rather than to get everyone to switch over to this font.

Found via EcoGeek.

Super-8 cine film conversion methods

tim — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 17:39:14 +0000

We have some old Super-8 cine film reels and have been looking around at places that will convert it to something newer e.g. DVD. It looks like there are two main methods:

Frame-by-frame conversion, where each frame is scanned separately and the frame rate adjusted by occasionally doubling frames. This seems to be quite expensive!
Filming a projected image. This sort of conversion is done at (for example) Aarchive. This is much cheaper of course and there is a shop within walking distance that can convert it like this, so that’s most likely what we’ll do.

Anyone have positive/negative experiences about either method?

dawdlr

tim — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 11:56:10 +0000

My first dawdlr postcard has finally been scanned in and published. Seems like absolutely ages ago that I posted it… and THAT’S THE POINT.