Jasp’s Blog

Good old games is a games download service that allows gamers to buy older titles, especially those which may be a bit difficult to find without trawling the depths of eBay. Like all the best download services, its titles are free of DRM, which means that they aren’t suddenly going to break on you should [...]

Arthur C. Clarke provided one of my first forays into science fiction, although I forget which book I read first. However, I do not forget the books themselves.
My favourite Clarke novel was, “The City and The Stars,” a story about Alvin, the first human ‘born’ in the last city on Earth — Diaspar — for [...]

The resignation of Sir Menzies Campbell has been inevitable for some time now, given the Lib Dem’s recent poll performance. While as the Britain’s third party the Lib Dems have always attracted a smaller share of the media coverage, under Ming Campbell this presence has all but disappeared. This hasn’t been helped by his characterisation [...]

DOI stands for Digital Object Identifier, and in short is a permanent ‘address’ (like a URL) which will always point at a particular document. In particular DOI’s are used to make it easy to find academic papers, and saves one having to find the journal’s webpage, navigate to its archives, pick up the volume in [...]

BBC News
The software giant said it would make ad-supported copies of the Works package available within “months”.
As a way of competing with OpenOffice.org I cannot help but see this as doomed to failiure. For one, slight performance hits excluded, OpenOffice.org is a superior package to Microsoft Works, having a feature set which for most people [...]

Well it appears all is not lost and HMV have brought six Fopp stores, which they will continue to run independently under the Fopp brand. Strangely this covers almost every Fopp I’ve visited, Cambridge, Edinburgh and Glasgow. The Tottenham Court Road store is closing however, although another in London (Covent Garden) will be re-opening, but [...]

I’ve always been attracted by MOO, the flickr buisness card company, but have never had the need for buisness cards. While they are designed for personal use, I would feel slightly self concious handing out a mini-card, even if they are as sexy as the ones MOO make. I’m sure I could find some other [...]

Fopp was probably my favourite high-street store, and I was saddened to here that the company has gone into administration. I was first introduced to the company in Cambridge, where I walked past the store pretty much every day, both on my way into lectures, whilst heading to Sainsbury’s or into town in general. On [...]

Oh dear. I like Wikipedia, its a lot of fun and usually reasonably accurate, but I just stumbled across an article which was almost entirely false. I can understand a few misconceptions sneaking in, but what possesses someone to write about a topic on which they clearly have no idea; especially when its something that [...]

FT.com / World / Europe - Germany to crack down on violent video games
Virtual hit men in Europe’s largest video games market could soon find themselves behind real bars if German regional politicians have their way.
Under new legislation drawn up in reaction to a shooting at a school last month, developers, retailers and players [...]