Recent blog posts on This is ZX81.org.uk
Well, it’s been over a year since I migrated from WordPress to Hugo but – you know – life. What I’m saying is that I never fully managed to move everything over. The main things missing from the current version are photographs. But there are also a bunch of other details, such as SEO optimisation, and other general i-dotting and t-crossing. tl;dr, I’ve made a bunch of…
“Move fast and break things” has gone from a cool phrase to believe in to the process boogie-man. It’s become so mainstream that it’s used to describe politics . It’s now the underlying problem to many of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies. Except… is it? The phrase is originally attributed to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook , and the fact that I appear to be defending him hurts me deeply.…
Many American commentators have a very particular view of the EU and regulation. Usually the view is that the EU are wrong but in many ways it’s just different from regulation in the US. This is on daringfireball : Apple is getting away what some describe as “malicious compliance” because they’re under no popular demand from their actual customers to comply in any other way. I don’t mean to single…
This piece is inspired by this post on daringfireball , which, in turn, was inspired by AP’s style guide on phone numbers. Their post is about where parenthesis goes in phone numbers. I don’t care much about that. What I care about is the fact that there is an international standard for phone numbers that they’re not using. For international numbers use 011 (from the United States), the country…
Another John Scalzi book, and another good one. This one is (arguably) his first novel . Quite military based, which tends not to be my favourite. The premise is that a bunch of old people – hence the title – join the military for, effectively, a new life. Their bodies get some upgrades to make it worthwhile. Skipping a lot of detail there because much of the fun is finding out…
Has the company that you work for just announced that they are being acquired? Are you anxious? Are you wondering what comes next? Obviously I can’t respond to all the specifics about your particular situation, but I do I have a track record of the companies I work for being acquired. Once, the company that acquired us was itself acquired. I’ve even started making a joke of it interviews: if your…
Last week Apple launched a new low-cost laptop called the MacBook Neo . Much of the commentary about it focuses on the fact that it was built to a price and the compromises that entailed. These commentators know nothing of compromise. Let me tell you about the ZX81 , the early eighties computer that inspired the name of this site 1 . Disappointed that the Neo has sRGB rather than P3 Wide Colour?…
Another year , another William Boyd book [affiliate link]. I make that sound like a bad thing, but really it isn’t. This one won’t go down as a classic, but it’s thoroughly entertaining and fast-paced, zipping between Guatemala, London and Berlin in the early sixties. It has the usual Boyd mix of well-researched historical details and character moments. He makes it seem effortless. Maybe it is…
I forgot this in my roundup of 2025 , party because it’s not the first time I’ve read it, and partly because I read it at the very end of the year. I reread some Douglas Adams every couple of years, and every time I come away impressed. I discover details or a clever turn of phrase that I’d missed previously. I almost expect to be disappointed but it hasn’t happened yet 1 . This is likely the…
Eight books last year , against my target of twelve. By my historical standards, not bad! Four fiction and four non-fiction is not a bad split, either. Unusually there were a couple of books that just weren’t for me. Not objectively bad, by any means, but it turns out that comic books are really not my thing. On the other hand, William Boyd continues to entertain, and Mick Herron ’s books are as…
A few years ago, I read “ Crisis? What crisis? ”, which is about Britain in the 1970s. This is the follow-up book about the 1980s [affiliate link], though, as its author Alwyn W. Turner points out, the timelines are never quite that precise. It’s more accurate to say that this book follows Thatcher’s election as Prime Minister in 1979 to her downfall eleven years later. Despite living through the…
I got a new iPad to replace my 2018 iPad Pro. Let me complain about it first. It bothers me that it’s a computer, yet I can’t easily write my own software on it 1 . Sure, there is Swift Playgrounds , but I don’t really want to use Swift. And even if I did, it’s not a proper IDE, it doesn’t support basic features like a debugger. It’s not 1985 any more . There are other languages ( Pythonista looks…
I am late to the party. I’m not a purist who is going to tell you that the books are way better than the TV series, that I read the books when they first came out. Well actually, before they came out because I know somebody who knows somebody. No. I watched the “ Slow Horses ” show on Apple TV+, enjoyed it, and belatedly thought that I should read the book [affiliate link] to see…
I’ve lived in London for thirty years 1 . Somehow. I’m not entirely sure how it happened. It was never the plan . Not that I had a plan. If you’d asked me where I wanted to live, I probably wouldn’t have picked London. I applied to a handful of jobs at the tail-end of my stint at university 2 . The one job offer I received 3 was in London. That’s how it started. To give you an idea of how…
For my first job after university, I worked for a company with a ISO9001 certification . This meant that every project had a complete, documented process for every aspect, from reporting, to finance, to bug tracking, to code formatting. There was even a team whose sole job was to define the template standards and enforce them across all projects. Most people thought they were busy-bodies, meddling…
I hear John Elledge a lot on podcasts , so when his new book came out I was immediately interested. I saw it in a bookstore, almost bought it, and then realised that I have more than enough books at home. (Un)fortunately, Amazon were selling it cheap and I caved. The good news is that “ A History of the World in 47 Borders ” 1 is an entertaining read. No regrets. It’s well…
I’ve gone through a number of RSS clients over the years. I used to be a big Google Reader user. I used Reeder on my iPad a lot, and now I use NetNewsWire . To ensure that my feeds are shared between devices, I’ve used Feedly . I’ve paid for it, as I use it a lot and I don’t want it to go away like Google Reader did. But they keep adding stuff that I have no interest in, including jumping on the…
In a world where everything is owned by a gargantuan commercial entity, RSS is subversive , an act of rebellion. It harks back to the early days of the Internet where freedom and open standards were the future, rather than Big Data, Big Tech, and Big Lock-in. RSS is a newsfeed than you define. You subscribe to websites and they give you a list of stories to read. How is that different from social…
Brent Simmons : I had a bias about engineers that worked for large corporations. I assumed that they weren’t as good as indies and engineers at small companies I work for a small company and my clients are usually big companies, so I have some perspective here 1 . From my experience, the difference between working for large and small companies is bureaucracy and focus. A tolerance or affinity for…
Some of the clients I work with have a very collaborative culture. Decisions are always run past all interested parties and buy-in is required from everyone. The people in charge set the general direction but not how to do it. I prefer to work for (and with) companies that are like that because, well, my opinion counts! Having the people who know the work the best make the decisions makes the most…