Busy, that is, not working – but looking for work. Last September, my main client (i.e. my main source of income) let me go after 22 years service. This was inevitable; I anticipated it after the company was taken over at the end of 2020, and was even planning to leave under my own steam, but at a slightly later point – so they beat me to the punch.
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Although VinceH’s Miscellany was set up as a blog, using popular blogging software, I don’t tend to use it as much as I probably should. I do have a bunch of partly written text/html files that could be finished off and turned into posts (including more possible entries in the Tales from the Pandumbic series), and I should do that, as that’s why I started writing them in the first place – but the truth is, I tend to concentrate on other things.
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On Christmas Day (such a long time ago now), Rick Murray posted a video on his blog in which he opened up and tried some Cadbury chocolates – specifically, Double Deckers, Picnics, and Twirls. The first two of those are, in my book, adequate bars of chocolate, and not something I buy or eat very often. Twirls, on the other hand, I buy regularly. Probably a bit too regularly to be honest – along with a few others. I like Twirls.
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This post has been prompted by an email I’ve received – I’ve replied directly, but it’s worth commenting here as well in case anybody else is wondering the same thing. The question was what on Earth is going on with this site, because it keeps changing appearance? It’s been happening a lot over the last week or two – sometimes quite a few times in rapid succession in a short space of time, then staying as is for ages, then another round of changes, and so on. And the short…
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TL;DR: Two rubbish text adventures I wrote as a teenager are online My business, Soft Rock Software, has existed for just over thirty years, but my programming – and my very first games – date back further still; all the way to my school days. Two games from that period before Soft Rock Software, and which for reasons below I consider my first two games, are now available to play in your favourite BBC Micro emulator. I therefore thought it might be fun to look at the history of those…
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A couple of weeks ago, the statue of Edward Colston in central Bristol was pulled down and it reminded me of a local grave – that of (possibly freed) slave Scipio Africanus, which I first learnt about at school. I couldn’t remember very much about it, so I paid it a visit to grab a photograph, and then set about a little armchair research to remind myself of the detail and/or improve on what I may have been taught at school. I then wrote about it on this blog.
Read MoreBack in February, at the RISC OS Southwest Show, I purchased the new ARMX6 computer from R-Comp, which was seeing its official launch at the show. Once I got the machine home and set it up, my initial impression was basically “Wow!” – the speed improvement it shows over previous RISC OS computers is fantastic.
Read MoreThis morning, I booked some flights with Ryanair on behalf of my parents, who don’t feel confident enough with computers and the internet to do this sort of thing themselves. This is something I’ve done many, many times for them (and I’ve occasionally booked flights for myself with Ryanair, as well) so I’ve been using their website for donkey’s years. I’ve seen it change from time to time, and I’ve often cursed at it (and the company themselves) for making it so damned annoying, insisting that I say at the…
Read MoreThis post is a follow up to the first, second and third rules of the Virgin Media forum moderators. The title of this post are the words spoken to me today towards the end of a twenty three minute call I received from a chap called Pete, from Virgin Media‘s complaints department: You can blog about it all you like, we’ll allow you to do that. The call was the result of a convergence of my complaints, sent in multiple directions, concerning the two main issues I’ve been having with…
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