Technology

Back to the future.. the white ZX Spectrum

by

Having grown up mainly around the ZX Spectrum (the ZX81, the 48K, 48K+ and the +2A), it makes me happy to see companies releasing authorised modern equivalents of these 8-bit masterpieces (we have the Commodore 64 Ultimate and 64C Ultimate, the Amgia A1200, and the ZX Spectrum Next).

I must admit I like the idea of this white ZX Spectrum based on the rubber key variety. It’s been fully updated with HDMI and modern inputs including USB-A ports. £129. I’d also like to own the Amiga A1200 (£169) as there was no possible way of owning one back when I was a kid – it was far too expensive (as was the BBC Micro which had the best keyboard of any of the 8-bit computers).

However, even if I had the budget for them, I don’t have the space as it is. I’ve also feel that I’ve moved on quite a bit from the 8-bit retro gaming scene (though I occasionally yearn for a quick go at Chuckie Egg). Things got really interesting when I moved up to an Amstrad PC3086. It didn’t have a hard drive, but it did have two types of floppy drive and you could easily play decent games thanks to its VGA graphics (which was fancy at the time – especially at that price point) even if you had to keep swapping disks out every so often.

Ah, the memories.. but it was a right bugger to type on

But it’s great that there are companies out there that cater to those who are nostalgic for the good old days of gaming and programming. It makes us appreciate what we had before all the nonsense that we have now (Windows 11, I’m looking at you).

The Atari ST or the Amiga A1200 was THE ultimate gaming machine back in my day

So long, and thanks for all the fish, Tim Cook

by

I must admit that I am rather sad that Tim Cook is stepping down as CEO of Apple. During his tenure, he’s seen the launch of what I would consider to be three of Apple’s greatest achievements in the past 20 years: the Apple Watch, and Apple Silicon Macs (e.g. the M series).

The Apple Watch has played a vital role in my health (its sleep apnea detection forced me to go and see a doctor, and I now have a CPAP machine) and continues to do so by monitoring my steps and other vital signs to improve my overall fitness and health.

The Apple Silicon Mac, when it first launched, proved that moving away from Intel was a very smart move despite launching in the middle of the COVID pandemic. I personally thought it was strange timing, but thankfully, I was proven wrong. The M1 series proved to be an absolute powerhouse of a computer, which is still going strong 5 years later – many people are still perfectly happy with the performance of their machine despite the M5 series potentially being three times (or more) as fast. I will always try to get a Mac for work – to give you an example, my current work M4 Pro MacBook Pro allows me to work completely untethered all day and still have enough juice for the evening. It’s extremely power-efficient and fits in well with the university’s energy policies – probably more so than the standard Windows laptops.

And I’ve always seen Apple gear as a good investment; it’s excellent value for money in both the hardware, software and services. I’ve got fair and decent pricing whenever I’ve sold Apple kit (unlike my Windows laptops). In terms of services, under Cook’s management, we’ve seen the launch of Apple TV, which has given us some of the best science fiction (For All Mankind, Severance, Silo, Pluribus) and drama (Slow Horses) and factual content (Long Way Up, and Long Way Home) I’ve seen anywhere. News+ is a great aggregation of newspapers and magazines, and Apple Music provides me with a quality music service where I can upload my own music library across all my Apple devices easily and without fuss – all in excellent quality.

Apple hasn’t always gotten it right, and they can be quite stubborn at times, but ultimately, the whole experience has been far more positive than with other technology providers. The most recent annoyance was having to prove to Apple that my 83-year-old dad, who only has an iPad, is old enough to browse the web. For me, my Apple account was old enough to immediately pass, but there was a lot of kerfuffle with credit cards, which I wanted to ensure did not end up on the account (which, thankfully, it didn’t). However, I blame the UK government for this more than I do Apple, which I suspect was ordered to implement it sooner rather than later.

You’ve got mail!

by

Bit of a strange week for postal mail. As we head towards the local council elections in May, I’ve been bombarded with letters from candidates. I’m sure the independent candidate tried to call the other day, but I was in the middle of a Teams work call. He left a leaflet. Then there were handwritten letters addressed to either me personally or “the resident” from the Lib Dems and the Conservatives, and a leaflet from Reform, which was torn up and thrown away immediately.

What amused me was a handwritten letter from a religious group – possibly THAT group that usually calls around when you least expect it (no, not the Spanish Inquisition – they’d be 192 years too late). I only knew it was some religious thing from an enclosed pamphlet about Jesus and God and things of that nature. The letter itself was indecipherable. The handwriting was so illegible I suspect it might have been written in ancient Aramaic (as opposed to aromatic, which conjures the images of delicious duck in hoi sin sauce).

On the electronic mail front, I had to sigh when the latest news of Directive 8020 from Supermassive Games, for whom I worked up until September of last year, had ended up in my Google Workspace spam folder. Given that I had set up the infrastructure for the marketing department to ensure maximum delivery (ensuring DKIM, SPF, and DMARC were all correct, etc.) for this sort of thing, it was hugely frustrating to find that Gmail decided to throw it in the junk because other people had been reporting those kinds of emails as spam. You can do everything in your power, technically, to get mail delivered, but you’re still at the mercy of a mail provider’s anti-spam/anti-phishing/anti-malware heuristics as to whether it will get seen by anybody. I signed up for the mailing list. It’s double opt-in (e.g. you get an email to confirm that you want to subscribe), but Google knows best. Anyhow, I’ve had to mess up my contacts list by whitelisting a no-reply email address because of Gmail’s design….

Anyway, Directive 8020 is due for release on the 12th May. I’m still undecided whether I’m going for the PC version (RTX 5070 Ti with 12Gb VRAM with Ultra 9 275Hx CPU) or the PS5 Pro (which apparently the game is optimised for).

The Apple MacBook Neo: A potential game changer

by

I’m so excited to start the new job that I’m up at 4:45 am writing this blog post. I’m certainly going to feel it at the end of the day (though, to be fair, I did go to bed early and have had a good 6 hours of continuous, uninterrupted sleep)…

Anyway, the point of this post is to say that Apple’s new entry-level laptop, the MacBook Neo, is rather spiffy. For £599 (or £699 for double the storage and Touch ID), you get a MacBook powered by last year’s iPhone 16 Pro (and Pro Max) mobile processor (which, although sadly limited to 8Gb, will be more than enough for less demanding tasks). The chassis is aluminium (and comes in a variety of different colours), and the keyboard is full-size and sturdy. The display, while not as good as the MacBook Air or Pro models, is certainly good enough for most people. It hasn’t been calibrated to the many colour spaces that the more expensive MacBook range, for example. It doesn’t have MagSafe charging, but instead comes with two USB-C ports – albeit with one running at 10Gb/s thanks to USB 3 and the other at a much slower 480Mbs thanks to USB 2. Only the USB 3 port can be used to connect to an external monitor, if required. Therefore, a dongle that can drive Ethernet, video display, and multiple USB-A or USB-C ports will be part of the Neo owner’s arsenal.

But despite these limitations, this is a full, macOS-powered laptop for less than £700. It joins the Mac Mini (starting price of £599) as being one of the most affordable Macs ever made – and given the shitshow that is the AI industry is allegedly buying up all the RAM and NAND (SSD) chips for data centre use, this is an absolute bargain. Especially for the education sector.

I had intended to give one of my nephews my former SMG M2 MacBook Air, but alas, I was forced to sell it to keep things ticking along until I got the new job. But, given the price point of the Neo, when my finances are in a better position, I’d be more than happy to buy a MacBook Neo for him, as I know he wants to get into the computing field. While the Neo has neural processing built into the A18 Pro chip, I wouldn’t want to try running any LLMs on it. With the Swift programming language (all the tools are included), he could certainly learn to build his own Mac and iOS apps, for example. Then there’s Terminal. He could learn Unix (well, the BSD equivalent), too, which is a handy skill in today’s IT market (along with Bash, Python, etc.). As a result, it wouldn’t take him long to get used to Linux. There is huge potential here.

The Neo has a lot of potential. There are a lot of naysayers that say that 8Gb is not going to be enough – especially in five years’ time and it’ll just lead to e-waste – but as somebody who ran a 13″ MacBook Pro with the base M1 chip when they first launched with just 8Gb RAM and 256Gb SSD, it worked well enough for this sysadmin – though 16Gb or 24Gb are much more preferable for those going beyond word processing and light video editing work. Also, remember that Apple generally supports its products for at least 5-6 years, including OS updates. It will have to support 8Gb RAM on these models for that length of time. I have no doubt they may switch out the A18 Pro chip for the A19 Pro chip, which has 12 GB of onboard RAM at some point, but that won’t happen for at least a year or two.

I think the MacBook Neo will take off and do spectacularly well, given the current economic climate, and I look forward to seeing the first batch of reviews as they come in this week.