Jasp's Blog

Please excuse any temporary glitches with the website. It is currently undergoing a period of renovation as I migrate all my content into the blog system. This will be accompanied with a minor redesign to take into account the new organisation. While this takes place there are likely to be a few minor issues with [...]

One of the problems with having grown up on-line is that you have your history packaged away and archived across the internet. If you know what took look for on Google Groups, you can find comments I made almost twelve years ago back in 1997. I was thirteen at the time, naive, and at times [...]

@PC_Gamer Excellent! You always manage to time your podcasts with when I have a long train journey coming up. #
About to head home, and tomorrow will head home-home. #
Ahhh. Westbro Baptists Church coming to protest in Basingstoke. They really are an obnoxious bunch of farts aren’t they? #
@andyvglnt This Friday apparently: http://tinyurl.com/beukp8 #
Okay, where have [...]

With the third part of this series we move away from the more chronological approach, to considering styles, techniques and more overarching concepts.
Games on Tour
While computer and video games have a huge, global market, it is not a homogeneous one. Regions differ in terms of platform popularity and genre preference, as well as far more [...]

Phone, iRiver, DS, Wind; the number of pieces of technology I travel with is a bit silly, or would be if I didn’t forget to pack things. Yesterday I synched my iRiver, downloaded a couple of podcasts, and got it charged up. I then left it on my desk. Even more annoying I also left [...]

Sent a fax today. Who still uses fax? Especially as I was faxing a form printed from their website. #
@JonStrickland For that joke, I am sorely tempted to stop following you. #
@VickieWire That’s great! Feminist makes a huge appearence in mine as well http://tinyurl.com/dx9dc5 but so does 22? #
@rockpapershot Features are good, but I also [...]

The third part of the ‘On art and Games’ series won’t be appearing this week, but instead will be up once its done. That’s not to say I’ve been ignoring it, but these things can take a while to put together, and I don’t want to fling the whole thing together in a rush. I’ve [...]

Shocked that the Radio 1 presenter didn’t seem to know how long it took for the Earth to go round the sun. #
@stephenfry #frylift seems to have attracted 36 new articles on Google News. http://tinyurl.com/adp929 #
@stephenfry Oh, well it appears that Google’s news algorithm was off and it has grouped any mention of you and [...]

My browser of choice is Opera, but recently it has been crashing with alarming regularity. It tends to be on page loads, and some pages do it more frequently than others, such as facebook, The Wall Street Journal, and, erm, Opera.com.
The latter really tipped me off that something was up. At first it wasn’t too [...]

Feeling slightly worse for wear this weekend, so hopefully part 2 will not be affected too much.
Early Home Computers
As the home computing revolution began in the 80’s, systems were getting into peoples homes through two different routes. While Atari, and later Nintendo and Sega were making the first games consoles, the likes of Sinclair and [...]