My main publishing announcements for this month are Linux User Developer 117 and Micro Mart 1125. Expect to see quite a lot from me in Linux User and Developer over the next couple of months. For now, issue 117 contains another four page step-by-step tutorial on the subject of self publishing a book using an excellent piece of software called LyX. LyX is the main “word processor” that I use for all my writing, and I seem to end up doing a feature on it every 18 months or so.

I also managed to get in a review of Oracle Linux 6.3. That was a tough one to rate as it’s practically a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and it’s difficult to know how to rate it.

I also did a review of the Nikon L310 bridge camera for Micro Mart. I hadn’t done much work for them of late, and it was nice to get back in touch.

As for moving house… It is proceeding, but rather slowly. Being in limbo in this respect is impacting my ability to work, but I’ve still got some stuff in the pipeline. I’m still not sure if I’m going to Replay in Manchester this year. I’d like to, but it’s beginning to look like it could coincide with the moving date.

Check out issue #116 of Linux User & Developer (August 2012) to see two of my tutorials. Both are step by step features, a format that I’m starting to get the hang of now.

The first four page tutorial deals with with customising the GNOME Shell. Personally, I haven’t been won over by the GNOME 3.0 interface, but to be fair to the developers, they have inserted a considerable framework for customisation by end users.

The second tutorial has a selection of tips for system rescue. Many of these tips can be carried out from standard Linux distributions, and others rely on SystemRescueCD, a live distro with an emphasis on system repair and maintenance.

Both tutorials were tough to write, but enjoyable, and I even learnt the odd new trick as I went along. I’ve got some more stuff coming up in later issues of the mag. In addition, I did a post for the website about the open sourcing of CDE. I got the inside scoop from a guy I met in RISC OS IRC channel. It’s a seedy world that I inhabit.

Anyway, back to the grindstone and another step-by-step.

This month’s Retro Gamer (May/June 2012 #103) contains a four pager from yours truly. This time, the subject is the 1985 BBC Micro/Electron release Citadel. Like most games of the era, it might look a bit primitive by modern standards, but programmer Michael Jakobson squeezed every ounce of storage out of the old Beeb to deliver a colourful gameworld made up of 240 interlinked screens. It’s a wonderful example of a vintage arcade adventure, and it’s also a consummate BBC Micro game. One of the commenters on the forum remarked that when he first played it, the game seemed as big to him as Skyrim does now. This time I was able to get in touch with Michael Jakobson and also Simon Storr, the author of Citadel 2.

I was particularly happy with the layout as the guys managed to cram some decent sized screenshots into the mag to show off the (8 colour) graphics. The BBC Micro had a colour system that was based on primary colours giving it a very bright and distinctive look and Citadel is a fantastic example of that.

Some of the guys that I follow on YouTube have covered the game before. Steve Benway gave it a first impression look, and PsiMan did a more detailed retrospective on it as it was a favourite of his back in the day. There are some more gameplay vids to be found on YouTube and there is a nice video of Darren Jones, the editor of Retro Gamer flicking through the issue here. The article is being discussed on the StarDot (BBC Micro) forums, and the issue itself is being discussed on the RetroGamer forum.

This month’s Retro Gamer (Issue 101, Mar/Apr 2012) features my eight page feature on a favourite retro platform, the BBC Micro. It’s immensely gratifying for me to write about the Beeb as it was my first computer. Some of you may know that it has recently celebrated its 30th birthday. It’s a great platform and I genuinely enjoyed playing some of the old games. It was also nice to get in touch with some BBC Micro developers that I hadn’t spoken to before while re-establishing contact with some that I already knew. I was also able to bring some of the best YouTube retrogamers into the mag (see videos here, here, here and here).

One snag with the way that the feature came together is that I ran out of room and I wasn’t able to use all of the material that I was given. No matter: I plan to spin the extra stuff out into later features, and I’ve already discussed some ideas with the editor. More info when it’s confirmed.

There is a feedback thread for the issue on the forum. As ever, thanks go to all of the people who helped me with the article.

Issue 111 of Linux User & Developer (March 2012) contains my four page tutorial on LTSP, a system to distribute Linux desktops to clients. Basically, a server runs LTSP and the clients (which could be old PCs, for example) boot over the network. Subsequently, a small version of Linux runs on the client, from a RAM disk. Like a lot of the LU&D content, it’s one for the techies.

I’ve had a fair bit of stuff in the mag of late and some of it ends up on the website (such as these reviews of EyeOS and Gentoo). Other than that, I’ve got another mag related announcement in the next few days.

I had a nice surprise, a few weeks ago, when I noticed an article that I did for Den of Geek last year (one of the best SciFi sites on the net, IMO) at the top of my Facebook newsfeed. The article was about the Kevin Costner movie The Postman (which rules), and at first I couldn’t work out why it was at the top of the page after so long. Then I noticed it had been linked to by David Brin, the author of the source novel (which also rules). It was quite an honour as his remarks were mostly complimentary and he’s a very well known SciFi author and a fascinating essayist.

Take care, all. Another magazine article in the next few days and I’ve got a couple of other irons in the fire in terms of article ideas.

It’s that time again. This month’s Retro Gamer contains my six page feature on Teque/Krisalis Software. It’s my fifth article for the publication. Between 1987 and 2001, working as both a developer of original games and conversions power house, Krisalis produced hundreds of games. As ever, putting the feature together was fun but a lot of hard work.

This time around, I was able to contact and interview quite a few of the people who were originally involved in the company. Krisalis was particularly close to my heart because they converted a lot of mainstream hits to the Acorn Archimedes series of computers, which was the system that I ran as a teenager. As ever, it was great to interact with people whose names I’d seen come up on the screen so often over the years. I doubt I could have imagined this sort of contact when I was a spotty teen, admiring their efforts. Thanks go to Shaun Hollingworth, Tony Kavanagh, Neil Adamson, Keith Birkett, Nigel Little and Matt Furniss for all of their help.

I don’t have my copy of the magazine yet, but you can watch the editor of the magazine, Darran Jones, flicking through the latest issue on YouTube. There is a feedback thread for the issue on the Retro Gamer forum.

Issue 98 of Linux User and Developer (March 2011) features my four page article on productivity applications for Linux. It’s basically a collection of tips and application recommendations. There are more details about the issue as a whole on the LU&D website. There should be a distro review from me in next month’s issue, and hopefully, you’ll see more from in the mag in the future. [Update: Actually, Russel has posted up the review, of Tiny Core Linux, in advance. Update #2: The mag, issue 99 has now been released.]

Recently, I did another guest post on my other main writing interest, gender politics. This article appears on A Voice For Men, the website of Paul Elam. The article is called OMG – Our Gender Is Being Oppressed By Language!, and it’s an attack on a technique that is commonly used in text books. It’s a good one for people interested in language, gender politics and/or men’s rights.

The article was written quite quickly by making use of some of my notes for the book that I’m writing. However, I still haven’t yet reached my goal of placing any paid writing work on the subject of men’s issues. If you’re in publishing and you hear of any publications that might need some men’s rights or feminist critical content, let me know.

Paul’s also the editor of Men’s News Daily which has taken some of my posts in the past. Paul even has a ground-breaking Men’s Movement call-in internet radio show. As some of you will know, I’m not a very active participant in the Men’s Movement at large, as I prefer to work on my ideas for my book in isolation, but I’ve listened into the show and it sounds amazing.

All my musical equipment is set up at the moment. From time to time, I seem to take a year or so away from it, and when I was very poorly, pre 2005, I found it particularly difficult to stay involved with music. At the moment, I’m just getting back into practice. When I’ve produced a few instrumental electronica tracks that I’m happy with (probably via YouTube and maybe Soundclick). Following that, the first thing I want to do is to revisit some older material, yet I don’t want to touch it while I’m still out of practice. The older material consists of guitar based acoustic prog rock that stretches back to 1999 and some other, mostly incomplete electro-pop material that was written in 2003-2005. Given the amount of work that I put into it, I really ought to try and make some sort of release out of it. I’m trying to fit in a bit of time for music each day.

The weather has begun to improve, so hopefully, I’ll be able to get back into shape for cycling. In addition, carbooty season is getting back into full swing.

Subscribers are starting to get hold of issue #86 of RetroGamer as I write this. This month features my six page article on 3D arcade adventure games. The article has an emphasis on early pioneers in open world gaming.

I managed to cover one of my favourite genres and talk to some of the desingers. The games mentioned include Cholo, Damocles, Midwinter, Hunter, Cybercon III and loads of other utter classics. I just hope that the readers enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed creating it.

There is a feedback thread for the issue here.

I don’t have my copy yet, but you can watch Darren flicking through the issue on his YouTube channel. Incidentally, the issue itself looks absolutely amazing this month. It has a strong home computer and 3D bias, for one thing.

Issue 79 of Retro Gamer magazine contains my six page feature on Superior Software, the most prolific BBC Micro games company back in the 80s and 90s. The company is still in business today selling remakes of the classic back catalogue and can apparently even supply original copies of BBC Micro games.

I don’t have my copy yet but you can watch Darran, the editor of Retro Gamer flicking through the issue on Youtube. As you may know, this is my third feature for this magazine. If you read it, I hope you enjoy it, and I hope I’ve done justice to such a great company. There is a feedback thread for the issue on the RG website.

[Update: I've got it and it looks great. I forgot to add my name to the introduction and I'm not credited elsewhere, but I did write it, I promise!]

Thanks are due to Richard Hanson, Peter Irvin, Tony Oakden and Gary Partis for allowing me to interview them.

This month’s Linux User & Developer magazine, Issue #88, features my four page tutorial on performing unattended Ubuntu installations. [Update: It's now mirrored on the website, minus the images and boxouts.]I cover creating a modified installation CDROM and installing over the network. I enjoyed doing it, but it ended up being a LOT of work as things started to get quite technical towards the. It didn’t help that most of the the online information turned out to be out-of-date or incorrect in some way.

In addition, there were a few approaches that I simply couldn’t write up because the results were inconsistent or unreliable. Anyway, I hope the readers find it useful, every line was carefully researched, checked and double checked. And then tested and then checked again…

The Linux Journal website has my blog post about the Parallel Realities website, a site that offers some original, retro-themed Linux games.

A little bit of party politics (shudder) and gender politics in this article I’ve just written for Men’s News Daily. I hope I didn’t make it too pro-Conservative as I’m not that big of a supporter. Maybe some positive comments (or constructive negative comments) will make me get on with the book.

Last week I finished off another article for a print magazine. I’ll let you know more when it’s closer to publication date.

Quite an amusing site that I keep an eye on these days is Cathy Relf’s subediting blog in its new location. One for fellow grammar nerds only though.

My first post for the website of Linux Journal magazine is an op-ed about the initially rocky history of KDE4.

[update: It's been posted around a bit on Redit, LXer, Raiden and Linux Today amongst others.]

[update #2: I'm not going to blog about every post that I make on the site now as it would quickly fill up the site and push other stories off the bottom. There is now a sidebar about my LJ posts. I'm my third month of working for them, and so far, everything's going great.]

Expect to see about four posts from me each month for the site. It’s a bit of extra cash and a chance to work with a great team. I’m looking forward to having a platform to discuss Linux, and the magazine has a great community surrounding it. Check out the site if you’re not already familiar with the magazine. It reminds me of Micro Mart in a way because the content is fairly eclectic and the target group is more hobbyist and end-user orientated than the other Linux mags. This makes it a perfect fit for me, as I’m more of a desktop user than a corporate admin sort of guy.

I’m really looking forward to getting stuck into this new position. I might cobble together some sort of side bar keep people informed about my posts to the site.

I’ve just had an article published over on Men’s News Daily. It’s a great publication for people interested in gender politics and the growing men’s rights movement. Some of you will know that I have been working on a book on gender politics (see the gender equivalence subsite site for more info)for the past few years. It’s also the first time that I’ve written for a website rather than a print mag in over a year, and it’s a funny feeling to get back into the fast paced dynamic of web publishing. I hope that I’ll be working with MND a lot in the future.

[update: a bit of discussion about the article here on the antimisandry.com]

The subject  of the article is the rather unpleasant practice of rich middle aged women travelling to third world countries in order to have paid-for sex with young men. In case you’re wondering, yes, Haiti is a top destination for these women, or was until recently. The most infuriating aspect? Feminist writers have long condoned this in newspaper articles that spin things around so that the women are the victims in the situation.

Excerpts:

…consider the growing number of middle-class young women in places like the UK and Japan who are reportedly paying their way through college by doing sex work. Most people would agree that there is a qualitative difference between that and the lot of a crack-addicted street hooker.

…

However, astonishingly, there are sympathetic voices to be found, and in mainstream publications too. Try it yourself, do a search for “female sexual tourism” and prepare for some Olympic-class mental gymnastics.

…

The hypocrisy of this double standard is aggravated by the fact that the group that write the articles, feminist journalists, typically espouse a disparaging and zero tolerance view of prostitution.

This month’s RetroGamer* magazine (issue #71) features my six page article on the history of DOS (PC) gaming, my second article for that magazine. Hopefully this is the beginning of a productive relationship between the mag and myself.

I don’t have  a copy of the article myself as I don’t yet have a subscription to RetroGamer. Subscribers should have it by the weekend and it should be on the high street by the middle of next week. However, for an early look at the issue, check out Darren Jones’ Youtube video in which he flicks through it while giving some background info. My article appears at about 3:00. The feedback thread for the issue is here.  Hopefully, by tomorrow night, there should be some feedback on my article. Why do I get the feeling that I’m going to get savaged over my choice of eight important DOS games?

In my research I found loads of interesting early games such as Atarisoft conversions of Defender and Digdug that they did back in 1983. I also managed to get a few words with the founders of SSI and Apogee in order to beef up the article. You never know what editors are going to cut out but it looks like they’ve inlcuded:

• Main essay: history of DOS gaming 1981 to around 1997
• Soundcards
• graphics standards (CGA, EGA, VGA)
• 8 important DOS games side feature

Even if I didn’t have an article in this issue, I’d have to say it looks like a good one. I’m particularly interested in looking at the SID (Commodore 64 music) article and the Peter Molyneux and Jeff Minter interviews. Personally, I would have made the Playstation feature the cover feature as I’m not much of a fan of Afterburner.

If you do see the mag, note the photos of my boxed copy of Elite+ and my Soundblaster Pro 2 and Gravis Ultrasound sound cards. The cards were in the bottom of a drawer in anti-static bags as I don’t currently have a vintage PC to put them in.

Also, if you’re in the US and baulk at the high cost of the mag, search around the RetroGamer site for a deal on subscriptions that they’re running at the moment.

More updates when I have a copy myself…

*for fellow language nerds, check out Thom Holwerda’s article on camel case in technology proper nouns on OS News.

This week’s Micro Mart (issue #1079) features my latest op-ed article that asks if the UK needs its own official Linux distribution. It’s another six pager and fairly off the wall, but hopefully it will get people thinking.

The core idea behind having a national Linux distribution is that it would form part of a simultaneous push towards open source software in education, government offices and businesses. In my opinion, open source initiatives are bound to struggle unless they are carried out on every level of education and industry at the same time, and “UK Linux” would be a way of doing this. I also take a look at other national Linux distributions such as the Russian and Chinese ones. Available for the rest of the week.

[update: there's a bit of chat about the article on the forum]

This week’s Micro Mart (Issue #1075, two pounds as usual) features my 6 page overview of Ubuntu Studio. Hats off to the layout guy as it’s another great looking article. Along with my assessment of the distribution itself and the included software, I get into some details about MIDI and Audio in general. Just in case you’ve not come across it before, Ubuntu Studio is a Linux distribution optimised for audio work. Can a simple free download, when burnt to a blank disk, turn your computer into a fully fledged home studio? Find out by reading the article.

The next article to appear in MM will feature one of Mike’s Brilliant Ideas!, much like the stuff that I got started with, back in the OS News days. It’s another six pager and full of radical and strange thoughts about a scheme that might just save the world.

Stay tuned for details.

This week’s Micro Mart (issue 1074) features my review of the Canon PIXMA iP2600 printer. It’s just a quicky, but I’ll have some more writing orientated announcements in the next couple of weeks.

In other news, I was sad to see the end of Drobe as a news source. I submitted the news to OS News. Thanks are due to Chris for all of his hard work over the years. In its day, Drobe was one of the best niche platform news sites around. Chris was also one of the first editors to link to one of my web articles on OS News, which really boosted by confidence when I first started. However, it must have been a huge amount of work, and like most people, I fully understand why he had to give it up now that the scene has started to slow down. I just hope that we can keep the old community together to some extent.

I was sorry not to be able to go to the Retro Reunited show. Unfortunately, time and money issues got in the way. Next time, I’ll try to move hell and high water to get there as it looked absolutely excellent.

Take care all.

This month’s RetroGamer (issue #65, with the shiny red cover) features my six page feature on the Acorn Archimedes, a computer system that I used to run when I was teenager. The article is split between the main feature and a “Perfect 10” summary of some of the classic games. I have the magazine now and the layout looks great.

Note that this content won’t be included in my future article compilation books as the Imagine Publishing contract does not allow it. The Arc A310 in the photograph is my very own well loved machine, and hopefully it’ll be back with me in the next few days. Oops, it seems that I forgot to put the drive eject button back in when I put the machine back together! The issue is being discussed on the RetroGamer forum here, and the comments about my article seem quite positive. Hopefully, I’ll do something else for the mag in the future.

Read on for some more about the article including some content that had to be cut for length.

As you can imagine, as the article was for RetroGamer, I have focused on the Arc as a classic gaming platform, although I did manage to include some details about the hardware and the operating system. You might remember that I did a feature on the machine for Micro Mart in February, but that article didn’t dwell on the games as much as the history of the machine itself. Although Arcs weren’t that common, I was very lucky as I was able to attend a local Acorn computer club. I enjoy drawing attention to the legacy of the platform as I feel it is often overlooked. Hopefully, I’ve done my job and a few new people will be interested in the Arc. By the way, ArcEm, Arculator and RPCEmu are all good emulators and there are a few others.

When choosing the games, I tried to make a representative selection that balanced original games with conversions. Conversions had a special part to play on the Arc but I didn’t want to give the impression (or reinforce the myth) that we didn’t have many decent original games.

When covering the history of the machine, I fired off a few questions to Sophie Wilson, one of the designers of the Arc and the BBC Micro. She was very helpful but I had to cut some of her answers for space. Here is some of the cut content, for fellow Acorn obsessives:

Is it true that you first simulated the ARM chip in BBC BASIC?

Yes, the first simulator was written by Steve [Furber] in BBC BASIC – he implemented an event based simulator which modelled all the ARM’s datapaths.

I wrote an instruction set emulator of the ARM – once for the 6502, and again for the NS32016. We ran a lot of software on these until we had real ARM chips.

An anecdote about the power requirements that I hadn’t heard before…

[...]the biggest surprise on ARM1 was when we tried to measure the power it took and discovered it wasn’t taking any at all… (the PCB didn’t connect the power pins, it was running entirely through the power coming in from its I/O pins via the protection diodes)

A few tidbits about ARX…

Of course we wished we had different things – the operating system project to produce ARX hadn’t given us anything saleable, so causing us to rush out an interim OS (since the hardware was certainly ready). The system really only became what we had desired with the release of RISC OS 2 (arguably with the release of RISC OS 3 when the applications support was much better). And it took until the RiscPC with VIDC20 before the basic display capability was what I’d wanted…

Thanks also go to Chris of Drobe for answering some of my questions. Hope you enjoy the article. If you have any questions feel free to contact me or post to the RetroGamer forums.

The excellent site Self Publishing Review is now hosting my interview with self published author Darryl Sloan, a writer that I’ve been following for a couple of years. The article is entitled Chionophobia and Other Sticky Problems: The Darryl Sloan Interview. The focus of the interview is his current project, the post apocalyptic short novel Chion, but we get into all kinds of interesting stuff about both the author’s inspirations and views on life.

I only discovered SPR recently and I heartily recommend it to anyone with an interest in self publishing or writing in general. I’m gradually working through the articles on subjects such as using merchandise for personal brand building and putting a DIY book tour.

This week, Micro Mart is carrying my feature about four brands that lived on beyond the demise of the companies that established them. The article is entitled “And the Brand Played On: Four brands that died… and then lived again.” I delve into the history and subsequent resurection of the Acorn Computers, Apricot, Atari and Commodore brands. Naturally, due to the subject matter it’s an article with a bit of a retro flavour. It’s in issue 1050, and I hope you enjoy it if you read it.

Checkout this week’s Micro Mart (issue 1048, bought today) for my review of the Iomega Prestige external Hard Drive. This is a drive that I actually bought for myself when I spotted it in Tesco!

MM have some more of my stuff in the pipeline and I’ll announce it here when I can.

I’m a bit late with the announcement, but this week’s Micro Mart contains my six page feature on the Arc. It’s in issue 1043. If you want a copy, you’ll have to hurry as it will be replaced by the latest issue on Thursday the 26th of Feb.

The article details the history of the machine with a buyers’ guide, a guide to emulators, and some other details about the platform. In addition, it’s accompanied by some near pornographic pictures of my beloved old Archimedes A310, inside and out. The focus of the article on the Arc as a retro platform rather than the current RISC OS scene.

Getting the old machine out of storage to photograph it evoked waves of nostalgia. After a quick hoover, the machine powered up. I don’t have a monitor for it these days, but it made the familiar beeping sound. The fan was very noisy, but for most of its life, I ran it with the fan disconnected anyway. In addition, it made the characteristic “Acorn squeal” through the built in speaker. I wonder how many hours I sat at that machine as a geeky teenager, mucking about with PD disks, games and ARM programming?

For the screen shots, I used Arculator. For the GUI shots, I pushed it up to Mode 21, to increase the quality. Freelance writing is hard, thankless work and I had to play Twin World through to completion (for the first time in more than a decade and a half) just to fully immerse myself. In fact, I don’t think that I was completely successful, so a play through of Mad Professor Mariarty may now be necessary.

I feel that the platform, and its importance, is sometimes overlooked in retrospective computer features. It’s particularly annoying when it receives only scant mention in computer history features on British outlets such as the BBC. I’m keeping an eye out for further opportunities to write about the platform.

It’s in issue 1043, and unfortunately, Micro Mart doesn’t mirror its content on the web. If you want a copy, you’ll have to hurry as it will be replaced by the latest issue on Thursday the 26th of Feb.

British weekly print magazine Micro Mart has accepted one of my operating system themed articles. The article is entitled “2009, Year of the independent OS?” and it should appear in the Thursday 15th of January issue. As the title suggests, the premise is that some of the less-known freely available OSes might achieve sufficient maturity to enter into relatively widespread use over the course of 2009. The operating systems that I evaluate are AROS, Syllable, Haiku, and ReactOS. It’s a three thousand word article, so I’ve been able to go into a quite a bit of detail on the relative approach and progress of each OS project.

If it sounds like your kind of thing, look out for it in the newsagents on Thursday 15th.

Update: I now have a copy. It’s a shame that MM don’t mirror their content online.

Price £4.49 inc postage, see dedicated page for information on worldwide pricing. ISBN 978-0-9560813-1-5

Yay! After a very long wait, the hard copy of Tech Book 1 is now available. To buy a copy or for more information, click go to the book page. Update: Now available as a free e-book download.

For a cheap and cheerful side-project, this project certainly began to spiral out of control. Although it has taken months rather than weeks to complete, the experience wasn’t wasted as I’ve learnt a great deal at every stage. Hopefully, Tech Book 2, which I have already begun to compile, will be a much easier release.

Linux.com have published my latest article. It’s an overview of the latest version of LyX, the document editor that I use for most of my writing. As 1.6 is such a bumper release, I decided to focus on the new features, rather than introducing LyX. There are plenty of other articles that do that. Hope people enjoy it.

In other news, I’m just about to send off for the final proof copy of Tech Book 1. I’ll spend a week or so going over that with a pencil, and then it’s time to purchase the ISBN numbers and send it off to the printer.

A bit more Tech Book 1 news. Basically, it’s 90% finished and I’ve sent off for a proof copy. I’ve frozen the contents and anything that I write and retain the copyright on, from now on, will be added to Tech Book 2.

Tech Book 1 is a compilation of my published articles written in 2006, 2007 and the first half of 2008. It’s part vanity project, part promotional exercise and part self-publishing experiment. One of the downsides of being a freelancer is that it can be difficult to get the attention of commissioning editors. I’m hoping that a hard copy may work in situations in which email enquiries have proved ineffective.

As a test, I sent off for a proof copy from Lulu.com. It looks great and I’m happy with it, although I wont be using Lulu for the main print run. I might go for a more exciting cover for the finished copy. However, I think that trying to do too much is the common mistake of the amateur. An online buddy of mine, Darryl Sloan, did quite an elaborate cover for his self-published novel Chion. However, he has the benefits of an artistic background to begin with, and I don’t.

All of the articles are available for free on the web. For people who have already read the articles, there is some value in the book as these are slightly improved versions. In addition, many of the articles were very long and will probably work better as a chapter in a printed book than they did as an article on a website. By investing in a ISBN number and by dealing with a print-on-demand printer directly, I’m hoping that I’m going to be able to offer it at a really low price. I’m not intending to directly make any money out of the project. It might bring in some other work and it has been a useful learning experience for me.

Linux.com have published my current article. I hope the community find it an enjoyable read. I never know how people are going to take articles like this one. I said in my RISC OS article, “I hold the opinion that if you are truly a fan of something, you can accept criticism of it. You don’t have to be loyal to something that is genuinely good.” I wonder where platforms like Amiga and OS/2 would be now if a few more people had complained?

From the article:
These problems span the entire Ubuntu experience but they all have two things in common: they are all solvable and they are all serious enough to evoke the dreaded, “I tried Linux but it didn’t work”.

At the moment I’m working on a little side project. It’s a not-for-profit, print-on-demand book that re-bundles some of my old technology articles. I plan to use the book as a promotional device for my skills as a writer. For that reason, I’m editing the the articles to bring them up to my current standard. The working title for the book is Tech Book 1. Although it’s turning out to be a time consuming job, it has also been a great learning experience. It should be finished and ready in a couple of weeks.

All of the content is available on the Internet (see links on side menu) but these are slightly updated versions.

Please note, I’ll add a bit of older gender politics material from my other site but this isn’t the Gender Equivalence book that I have been working on for the last two and a half years. Work on that book is still in progress. Apart from anything else, the new project will serve as a dry run for the GE book as might still be doing that as a self-published project.

For a bit of fun, I popped a spoof article onto the UK news satire site, The Spoof. I added it to the “magazine” section of the site as it’s not really a news piece. Click here to read it. [link updated and correct as of Nov 2011]

It’s not a paying gig, but as well as being a neat writing exercise, it’s a chance to get some comedy writing out in front of an audience. The standard of the contributions to that site is very high, but if my article gets a good reception, I might have a go at another one.

I hope that I’ve not made the mistake of making it too dry for a spoof news site, but that’s what satire is, a balance of seriousness with comedy. It’s also going to be a hard sell due to its length, but I think it’s worth it to properly spoof the genre while giving the ideas full expression.

I hope you enjoy the article.

Free Software Magazine have published my DOSBox review. DOSBox is an PC emulator that is optimsed for accurately running vintage games. From the article:

“Let’s be clear: not every old game is worth revisiting. As a general rule, about eighty percent of everything, in all media, is rubbish. If not actually rubbish, entertainment media can be so tied to the time in which it was made that it cannot survive the transition into a later era.

An old game might employ a gameplay style that has no modern equivalent, or a much-loved old game might have a nostalgic attachment for a gamer. Sometimes, the gamer wishes to try out a game that they passed over at the time of release. Finally, some old games are simply great games and are worth playing in their own right.”

Click here to go the article on the FSM website.