A little story here for anybody who has ever struggled with the T9 predictive text facility on their mobile phone. Whereas some people struggle with it, an Italian commuter has, over the course of seventeen weeks of commuting used his Nokia 6630 to write a 384 page novel! The result of his labours is now available on Lulu.com – sadly only in Italian.
Tag Archives: Mobile Phone
Who Needs a PS3?
Who needs a PS3… when you’ve got a Spectrum Emulator to keep you occupied?
In addition to being St George’s Day and the day we remember Shakespeare’s Birth and Death, April 23rd this week also marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the launch of the Sinclair Spectrum. Whilst Sir Clive had produced computers before – the ZX80 and ZX81, and produced computers afterwards such as the QL and the Cambridge Z88 after the Sinclair brand name was sold along with the computer to Amstrad, it was the Spectrum that effectively brought home computing to the mainstream, and is certainly the best remembered of the Sinclair Research computers.
Also, like many in the UK computer industry, I am one of the people who had my interest in computers started by messing around with a Sinclair Spectrum hooked up to the TV, typing in listings from Sinclair Programs (sister magazine to Sinclair User) and reading the pages of Your Sinclair. I also got quite used to the vagaries of loading and saving to cassette tape, although later on I used a Rotronics Wafadrive too. It’s easy to forget now, when you’re grumbling about how long some multi-megabyte application takes to load that twenty-five years ago you’d be waiting several minutes for a Spectrum to load 48k – and the cutting edge of graphics was eight colours at two levels of brightness, with a black and white image at 256×192 pixels with the colours set it blocks on an overlaid 32×24 grid. Whilst the attribute clashes caused by the graphics scheme were a source of derision from advocates of competing systems, the fact remains that the Spectrum sold in it’s millions in the UK, and was the number 1 computer of the era.
So if all the nostalgia has left you hankering after a bit of Spectrum gaming, what do you do? Whilst you might be able to pick up an old one on eBay, and retro-computing specialists will sell you one for £15 if they have any in stock, the best way is through emulation. The World of Spectrum site has a list of emulators for all the major platforms – but you don’t even need that, their extensive software archive includes a Java based emulator to allow you to play games within your web browser. The emulators even include the multi-coloured psychedelic loading routines from tape!
Having said that, perhaps the ultimate example of quite how far things have come is that even a mobile phone now has the power to run a full Spectrum emulation. Check out this picture of Speccy 1.2 emulator running Manic Miner on my phone.
ZX Spectrum 48k originally uploaded by EdgeM.
When Smart Ideas Backfire
You may remember last year the news that a company was marketing a device to combat anti-social behaviour that emitted a noise that only teenagers could hear. However whilst the box has now been turned off thanks to it’s indiscriminate effect, Ian over at Youthblog has reported that a sound only audible to teenagers has other uses, giving a phone a ringtone that is inaudible to adults. Indeed, the manufacturers of the device even have it available to download, and are really quite proud of it. As this article on the subject points out the ringtone will probably make more money for them than the device itself, just pity the teachers and youth workers who will be at the sharp end trying to deal with inaudible ringtones in classes, exams and discussion groups.