General

Internet Archive Handheld History Collection

The Internet Archive has launched a Handheld History Collection filled with about 60 emulated versions of retro handheld games to take you back to the long car rides of your childhood. Archived games include Tiger Electronics’ Mortal Kombat, Bandai’s Burger Time, and Parker Brothers’ mini tabletop version of Q*bert, all of which can be played directly from your browser. MAME developers have classified over 200 games as “handheld,” so if you don’t see your favourite game on the list, be patient because more games will be added soon.

Archivist Jason Scott outlined the emulation process of LCD, VFD, and LED-based games to MAME, and the thoughtful consideration that goes on behind determining which games need to be preserved for posterity. Though it’s possible to read the chips of a circuit board without destroying the original machine, some LCD games have to be taken completely apart to extract all the information.

Though the physicality of holding and playing games on the plastic hardware makes for the most authentic experience, destroying one handheld so it can be played by future generations online still a necessary sacrifice in order to preserve gaming history. The Handheld History collection is a welcome addition to the Internet Archive’s already excellent lineup of archived games, including MS-DOS and classic console games from Atari and ColecoVision.

Source: The Verge

My comments

Really excited to see one of my all time favourite handhelds here from when I was a kid. No idea what it was called but the colour screen blew me away when I first saw and I spent all the money I had at the time on it. It seems to be called Heiankyo Alien (Gakken). Played it so much it used to send my brain loopy. Some would say the damage was irreversible. See the first attempt at my own little game development attempt for evidence of the earlier statement.

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42 Douglas Adams Quotes To Live By

“You live and learn. At any rate, you live.”


The author of The Hitch-hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy knew a thing or two about life, the universe and everything.

From potatoes to peer groups, Bach to bullies, here are some of Douglas Adams’s finest words of wisdom…

  1. “A learning experience is one of those things that says, ‘You know that thing you just did? Don’t do that.’”
  2. “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
  3. “Let’s think the unthinkable, let’s do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”
  4. “The quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead.”
  5. “I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don’t know the answer.”
  6. “It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.”
  7. “All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.”
  8. “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
  9. “The idea was fantastically, wildly improbable. But like most fantastically, wildly improbable ideas it was at least as worthy of consideration as a more mundane one to which the facts had been strenuously bent to fit.”
  10. “I’d far rather be happy than right any day.”
  11. “Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn’t developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don’t expect to see.”
  12. “Reality is frequently inaccurate.”
  13. “What I need… is a strong drink and a peer group.”
  14. “It is folly to say you know what is happening to other people. Only they know, if they exist. They have their own Universes of their own eyes and ears.”
  15. “There is no point in using the word ‘impossible’ to describe something that has clearly happened.”
  16. “One is never alone with a rubber duck.”
  17. “Beethoven tells you what it’s like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it’s like to be human. Bach tells you what it’s like to be the universe.”
  18. “Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else that thinks at least as logically as it does.”
  19. “Let the past hold on to itself and let the present move forward into the future.”
  20. “I don’t accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view.”
  21. “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”
  22. “The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.”
  23. “Life is wasted on the living.”
  24. “There are some people you like immediately, some whom you think you might learn to like in the fullness of time, and some that you simply want to push away from you with a sharp stick.”
  25. “I’d take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.”
  26. “All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it’s pretty damn complicated in the first place.”
  27. “Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
  28. “A life that is burdened with expectations is a heavy life. Its fruit is sorrow and disappointment.”
  29. “If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat.”
  30. “People who need to bully you are the easiest to push around.”
  31. “We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem.”
  32. “Beauty doesn’t have to be about anything. What’s a vase about? What’s a sunset or a flower about? What, for that matter, is Mozart’s Twenty-third Piano Concerto about?”
  33. “Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”
  34. “Even a manically depressed robot is better to talk to than nobody.”
  35. “My universe is my eyes and my ears. Anything else is hearsay.”
  36. “If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.”
  37. “A cup of tea would restore my normality.”
  38. “Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.”
  39. “It can be very dangerous to see things from somebody else’s point of view without the proper training.”
  40. “You live and learn. At any rate, you live.”
  41. “Don’t believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose.”
  42. “Don’t Panic.”

Source: BBC Radio 4

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Gary Numan With Gang of Four – Liverpool 27th July – Update

New UK Concert

As I listen to Gary Numan (nearly) all the time, his recent stuff as well as his old, I thought it was about time I went to see him in concert. What makes this concert extra special is the inclusion of John Foxx (with The Maths) playing as well. Not to be missed at all. Got my ticket as soon as the fans were allowed to by them, which was a couple of days before general sale. Had to make sure I got mine.

Check out Gary Numan’s Pledge Music – New Album Experience & garynuman.com

Savage

The new Gary Numan album, entitled Savage, is due for release in August through the BMG label. Gary is once again working with Ade Fenton as producer. For those of you interested in after the progress of the album more intimately you can subscribe to Gary’s Pledge Music campaign which gives you unique, inside access to progress at every level, via text updates, audio updates and video updates and the chance to hear new music from early piano demo’s, through early production and guide vocals to the fully produced but pre mixed versions prior to the mastered versions that will be on the finished album.

Song titles confirmed so far are: ‘Bed Of Thorns’, ‘I Heard A Voice’, ‘Mercy’, ‘If I Said’ and ‘My name Is Ruin’ but there is still a great deal of work to do.

The main album recording is due to be completed in April, with the extra tracks required for giveaways and potential single B-Sides are due to be finished in May, with mixing and mastering also taking place in May.

The sleeve design and photography will, again, be taking place in May at some point.

This is an interesting time for Gary Numan fans as he been more open about his life and his music in the past few years which in my opinion has brought him closer to his fans and it certainly didn’t hurt that his last album “Splinter” has a been a great success and one of his best.

Update

Due to family illness John Foxx will not be able to play at this event. A great shame. I hope they get better soon.

Further Update

It seems that a new support band will playing in the place of John Foxx. They are The Gang of Four.

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Beefburgers – Taste The Rainbow

The next time you bite into a burger, do not be surprised if you taste the rainbow. American farmers have been secretly feeding rejected Skittles to their cows as an alternative to grass or corn. The great Skittles cowspiracy was brought to light after thousands of Red Skittles, bereft of their signature S, were found scattered across a rural road in Wisconsin. The X File was closed relatively quickly as experts asserted that these Skittles were likely en route to a cattle troth.

Although Skittles are packed with high fructose corn syrup, as so many foods are, they are nonetheless cheaper than the real thing and surprisingly more nutritious, at least according to some experts. Joseph Watson, owner of United Livestock Commodities, said that sweets like Skittles have “a higher ratio of fat [than] actually feeding them straight corn.” Skittles also may be a greener feed product than corn, simply because they would have otherwise ended up in a landfill. Instead, these candies, edible but not nearly up to the mass production standards of a multinational corporation, are converted into animal mass, meat and fat.

These particular Red Skittles, at first perplexing, were investigated and explained by local authorities. “The Skittles were confirmed to have fallen off the back of a truck,” wrote the Dodge County Sheriff’s Office. “The truck was a flatbed pickup and the Skittles were in a large box. Due to it raining at the time, the box got wet and gave way allowing the Skittles to spill out on the roadway.” While the average consumer has no idea that they may be eating candy-fed sirloin, this practice has been ongoing for several years. The use of this diet is believed to increased in 2012, when corn prices increased dramatically. This particular absurdity of growing corn to make the candy to feed the cows to make the burgers, while entertaining, is another sign that our food system has become disconnected from natural cycles.

Source: Why American ranchers are feeding Skittles to their cattle | Inhabitat – Green Design, Innovation, Architecture, Green Building

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