Software development. Tech punditry. Retro gaming.
We have a new Mac service out for free download. But before we get to that, let’s talk a little about Services on the Mac.
Newcomers to the Mac may not be aware of Services – a powerful and extremely useful feature of macOS.
Services allow you to use features of other apps without opening that app, or in …
Early arcade games used CRTs (Cathode Ray Tubes – think old TVs before flat screens). Colour CRTs were quite expensive, so early games used black-and-white screens. It was also expensive to manufacture chips and circuits that output colour, so this was another way to save money.
This use of black-and-white CRTs is why, if you ever saw the original …
Ed Riley, known as winkdot on the AtariAge forums, was a homebrew developer for the Atari 2600. Over the years he produced a wide range of fun games that he released for free to the Atari community.
Sadly, Ed Riley passed away in 2019. A great loss to the Atari community and the world.
Forum member Brian Matherne (Arenafoot…
The Atari 2600 (originally called the Atari VCS) is a video game system that launched in the US in 1977; one of the oldest home video game systems, and certainly one of the most well known and fondly remembered. In fact, the Atari 2600 was re-released by Atari in 2023 as the Atari 2600+, a system that can take …
At some point in high school students are taught about factorials. A fairly simple concept, the factorial of a non-negative whole number is written as n! and defined as the product (that means you multiply the numbers) of all the positive whole numbers less than or equal to that number. So 5! = 5 × 4 × 3 ×…
This article was originally published on the 15th February 2025, and updated on the 16th July 2026 with additional information and a final conclusion.
Back in the late ’70s and early ’80s most households did not have a computer. Computers were very expensive by today’s standards. There was, of course, no internet. Software you’d associate with office work today didn’t …
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) regulates advertising on social media, including Facebook – their guidelines require businesses to make true and accurate claims, and to be able to prove them. Facebook claim to have advertising standards and to follow them. In fact, here is what they say on Fraud, Scams and Deceptive Practices:
If you regularly use Facebook …
Chocolate means a lot to me. I always have chocolate in the cupboard, I make chocolate cakes, I eat chocolate ice cream, I drink chocolate, I have been paid in chocolate for some projects. Chocolate is life. So it may not surprise you to learn I sometimes have ideas about chocolate.
I talked about one of these ideas in a …
Those who know me know that I am a big fan of chocolate. There is always chocolate in the cupboard at home, I drink hot chocolates at cafes, my friends give me chocolates as gifts, and I’ve even been paid in chocolate for certain projects in the past. I think about chocolate a lot.
So perhaps it isn’t a huge …
The Game & Watch are handheld electronic video game units created by Nintendo in the 1980s, consisting of a video game on an LCD display, and a clock (the “watch” part in the name). The first game, Ball, was introduced in 1980, and the last original Game & Watch was Mario the Juggler in 1991. These handheld games were …
Thinking back to high school you may remember being taught about pi and using it in maths classes to calculate perimeters and areas of circles. You may remember being told a good approximation of pi is 3.14, or 22/7. But you may also recall that pi is irrational (meaning, in maths, that it cannot be expressed exactly as …
News of the day is that a new Atari 2600 prototype game has been found. It is being referred to as Fish (that was the filename) and little is known about its origins apart from the fact it was created in 1983 and never released. You can read all about the discovery at AtariProtos.com.
Here’s a video of the …