General – Page 2 – The Unusually Named Blog

SQIJ! – Worst video game ever?

Posted onNovember 6, 2014February 6, 20233 Comments

Recently, I’ve been sorting my retro-gaming collection a bit. Specifically, I’ve gone through all my ZX Spectrum games, seeing if all the tapes/inlays/boxes/etc. match up. Also, I’ve been checking the games against the comprehensive World Of Spectrum online database, just to see if I have anything interesting or as-yet undocumented.

As it turns out, I do have something of interest: I happen to own a copy of the lowest-rated game in the entire database. You might think that in order for a game to be the lowest-rated – especially from an era when there were some really terrifyingly crap games released – it would have to be something a bit special.

And you’d be right.

MPO to JPG converter

Posted onNovember 3, 2014February 6, 2023Leave a comment

It’s funny what interests people on the internet. One of the most popular things on my website is my program for extracting JPG files from MPO files. I originally wrote it when I heard about the release of Fuji’s first 3D digital camera – more as a programming exercise than anything else. I just bashed it out without too much thought, and no optimisation, assuming that there were probably other, better, programs out there.

Hacking the Yamaha PSR-300

Posted onMay 22, 2014February 6, 2023Leave a comment

For one of my projects, I needed something to generate notes from MIDI data. I looked at eBay, and there were MIDI sound modules on there, but they were going for £40 upwards. I thought that there must be a way of doing it more cheaply.

Key Bottle Opener

Posted onMay 19, 2014February 6, 2023Leave a comment

I wondered if it was possible to make a bottle opener out of a key, and it still be usable as a key. It turns out it is. Kinda.

Books and Guns

Posted onJuly 11, 2013

Ever since I was a small child, I’ve been interested in book-safes – those hollowed out books you see in films and on telly, where spies hide secret things like government intelligence, or sweeties. I’ve made a couple in the past which were a bit of a bodge job; they worked fine, but they just looked a bit scrappy.

Manchester History: ABC Television

Posted onApril 16, 2013Leave a comment

On the western corner of the junction between School Lane and Parrs Wood Road in Didsbury, there is a block of flats called Capitol Court. Before these were built in 1999, there stood a building which started life in 1931 as the Capitol Cinema. Within a year the building was completely gutted in a fire, but after extensive rebuilding work it opened again in 1933.

Why you should vote ‘yes’ to AV.

Posted onMay 4, 2011Leave a comment

Tomorrow we get to vote on whether to reform the voting system. Obviously this is a contentious issue, and the arguing has been heated, but a lot of the arguments seem to be completely missing the point, which is – Why do we vote?

2-4-6-8 Motorway

Posted onJune 11, 20087 Comments

One of the consequences of having a job is that I frequently have to cross the Pennines on that wonder of modern congestion, the M62. If I’m honest, then I suppose it’s not such a bad drive – unless you have to go between junctions 24 and 27 during rush hour, or it’s raining, or both, in which case it’s really quite indescribably grim.
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Sweet essence of giraffe

Posted onMay 21, 2008Leave a comment

That great pillar of British broadcasting, Terry Wogan, used to have a running joke on his radio show in which his producer, the late Paul Walters, claimed to have eaten all manner of exotic animals, and that they all “tasted like chicken”.
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Beyond Lies The Blog

Posted onMay 14, 20081 Comment

‘Blog’. Ugh! What an ugly word, created by the unholy conjoining of the word Log to the orphaned B from the word Web, thus ‘Web-Log’ becomes ‘Blog’. In today’s high-tech high-speed world, two syllables is just one syllable too many.
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