I’ve never understood the sort of fruit machine that sits in the corner of a bar, waiting for some man to pump £10 in coins into it. I used to work as a security guard and sometimes we’d go for beer after work and one of my colleagues would put £20 into the fruity. In my experience the sort of person who plays the fruit machine is the same one who’s asking to borrow twenty quid at the start of the night.
But I’ve never been able to play. Occasionally I think “Ah, I must be old enough to understand these things now.” and put in a few pounds. I just seem to lose my money - either instantly, or within a couple of minutes. And there is zero satisfaction for me. I have no idea what I should hold, or nudge or whatever. It makes almost no sense to me - and then there’s some sort of board with lights. I understand all the underlying tech - the payout ratio (min. 70% in the UK, lowest in places like takeaways,highest in casinos), the bank of payout money that needs to have something in it for a payout to even happen.
It just seems like a game of chance where there’s an illusion of skill. Maybe there is skill involved, but if there is then I obviously don’t have it.
Yesterday I went a couple of miles into the suburbs where I bought some goodies to experiment with. My plan is to build a retro coffee table arcade machine, complete with joysticks and big buttons to mash. I bought:
Raspberry Pi 2. £36
Plastic case. £6
8GB SD card. £8
Micro USB charger. £9 (!)
Micro USB cable. £1
Wifi USB dongle £10
USB keyboard and mouse £6
Setting it up was a breeze, and I’m blown away by how functional this thing is. My last experience with electronics was an Arduino, which could be flashed with C code. This thing is a full PC, complete with a GUI and the ability to play 3D games. I could do 95% of my work on it. It is mindblowing that you can buy a powerful computer for about the same as a medium-sized Lego set.
Sales of the Raspberry Pi are now past four million, up from the 10,000 that were initially predicted. I hope that translates into more interest in programming and electronics among kids.
It was either 1994 or 1995 when I successfully badgered my mum to buy us a PC. A 486 SX 50 which I think had 8mb of RAM and a 250mb hard drive.
I remember going with a family friend to a computer night at a hotel. The room stank of smoke, it was virtually all men with the odd wife here and there. People brought their desktop computers and cabled them together - I think with serial cables. This was piracy in the pre-CD age. I think we got Doom this way, but more exciting… we could plug two computers into each other and play Doom against someone else. It was the first multiplayer game I ever saw (and, with hindsight, the first glimpse of networking which would eventually become the internet.) I think we used floppy discs back here to copy files - I have a memory of disks labelled 1/5. It was a year or two before people had CD ROMS, and another two years until CD-Writers were mainstream. We must have spent a long time swapping disks. I’m sure Windows 3.1 came on like ten discs.
Once CD drives were widespread, there was 650mb of space to fill and this was enough for a LOT of games or applications. Compilations came out - I remember Voodoo, Playdoh, Jurassic and Blobby off the top of my head. Even at about 12 I preferred the applications, but I didn’t have any use for them, nor any manuals. Without the internet, one really just had to click around and hope that the help files hadn’t been deleted to save space.
We’d go to computer fairs, and standing around on the street would be men with holdalls of and printed lists of CDs. Each CD contained a list of previous compilations and their contents so you’d probably have an idea of what you wanted. I think a CD was £10.
A listing
Since no-one had a CD burner, a gold CD was obviously a pirate CD - there was no other use for them. They’d just be handwritten in marker pen “Voodoo 5”. These CDs were the most fun - you’d get 30 games and 15 applications. A complete jumble sale. Things I remember getting on these CDs were Afterdark screensavers with flying toasters, 3D Studio and Visual Basic 6. I’m not sure I remember much in the way of games.
We’d share the CDs with friends, but a lot of the time you would need the CD in the drive to play a game. With only 250mb of hard drive you couldn’t have too much installed at once.
At this point, selling pirate CDs was still the preserve of geeks. It felt nice and illegal as a kid though. I remember even worrying about being caught walking from a friend’s house with a couple of Blobby’s in my rucksack.
I am the fittest I’ve ever been. And I’m just back from my first exercise class in six years. I tackled ‘Hot Iron’ which is basically Body Pump, or sort of cardio weights. But I had to leave the class halfway through (it was full) because I felt like I might faint.
It’s not a new feeling for me - I’ve had it often enough to know that it’s caused by poor breathing leading to a lack of oxygen in my body. The feeling is not one of exhaustion but of sleepiness and a need to yawn.
Part of getting good at an exercise is learning when to breath. When boxing I force out a bit of breath with every punch: pff, pff, pff, rocky-style. Lifting weights I grunt and growl a lot and breathe out on the lift. Today i wasn’t sure what I was doing. It didn’t help that we started with squats and lunges which are my weakest area. I rejoined the class and finished once I’d recovered. I’ll go back because I need knocking out of my comfort zone to get an all round fitness. But tomorrow I won’t be able to walk!
I was just pondering Jordan’s response to ISIS and thinking that the world is going to see a lot more non-state warfare in the future. In the same way that people back causes on Kickstarter and get behind things like SOPA. There are reportedly Dutch motorcycle gang members fighting against ISIS and certainly organized groups of Russian citizens fighting in the Ukraine. European citizens are going to the middle east to fight on both sides.
I googled ‘non-state warfare’ to see if it’s an established term but previous uses seem to refer to private military coups in the style o Simon Mann’s attempt in Equatorial Guinea. Perhaps ‘grassroots war’ or ‘citizen warfare’ are more apt. I don’t know what it will be called, but we’re going to see a lot more of it and technology is going to play a large role for sure.
