Talking of consoles I could have course have written a review of Fallout 4, which has taken up an inordinate amount of my time of late. However as it stills feels like I've only just scratched the surface of the game, I could hardly begin to do it justice. Although sadly as the open sequence reminds us “War. War never changes.”
Talking of war there's also the final instalment of the Hunger Games Mockingjay Part 2 I could have reviewed having seen it yesterday. An enthralling series of films that has got progressively darker (a pretty impressive feat when you consider how brutal the opening of the 74th Hunger Games was) and from which few characters emerge unscathed. Another topic I would struggle to do justice as the books are still on the to-read section of my bucket list.
Returning to the theme of anniversaries my weekly blog turns two in a couple of weeks. Although to wax lyrical about how I've been blogging for the last couple of years seems a little self-indulgent? Maybe in a couple of weeks when the blog actually turns two, I'll give myself a slap on the back.
I could of course blog for hours/pages about the 8-bit era of computing, have owned most of the better known machines of that era and one or two lesser know ones. A 'simpler' age of computing when a car racing game could be condensed into a single kilobyte of machine code and stored on a cassette tape. A top down, vertical stroller, (whose names eludes me for now) for the Dragon32 in case your wondering. An era when children learned to code by spending hours typing in lines of BASIC code out of magazines and, if their typing skills were anything like mine, days decoding them.
There are those who predict were about to witness a revival of 8-bit computing, thanks to the internet of things. Which will see silicon chips embedded in everything. The argument goes that the power hungry chips of modern computers, smartphones, tablets, et al. and resource hogging software they run are to energy intensive for the task. That what's needed are low level, energy efficient, systems that dispense with O/S's altogether and do everything at the machine code level.
I touched briefly on this in last weeks blog when I mentioned the Raspberry Pi foundation and its efforts to get children coding again. Part of its mission being to ensure we have the skills needed to help build the internet of things and reap the benefits of it. Little did I know that when I wrote that it was about to launch the Raspberry Pi Zero. A £4 computer on a chip designed to be embedded in wide range of projects, that instantly sold out.
At the other end of the scale while we don't yet have computers that programme themselves, we do have self-modifying code. That is computer code that alters its own instructions while it is executing, usually to improve performance and simply maintenance. But I wanted to do a less 'technical' blog this week.
So as I wrap this up three things spring to mind. First I've managed to write a blog about all the things I decided not to blog about. Two if it were a computer programme, I've probably created more potential processing paths that it would be physically possible to test. Third if you subscribe to the theory of the multiverse I shudder to think how may parallel universes deciding what not to blog about this week has created.