The Adventures of Arganoid and Bongle Twonker

Not only are there scams going round, there are also fake scams - i.e.  faked images of made-up scams. The image shown here appears to be fake.  It looks like the iOS text app but it's on a Samsung device. The heading at the top is not centred. And the second message, the one which is  apparently the scam, links to a (non-existent) gov.uk  URL, rather than a third-party domain. If this were an email, the link  could take you somewhere other than the address shown - but there is no  such mechanism for an SMS. In other words, clicking on this link cannot do anything other than take you to the government's official website, and therefore is not a security risk.

As for why someone would do this, maybe they wanted to raise awareness of scams (but then why not use a real scam as an example). Or maybe it was to get views and likes.

Radio 4's Money Box Live had an episode the other day about the difficulties the 1.3 million UK citizens living in the EU are about be faced with. These people, along with the over 3 million EU citizens living in the UK, have been almost completely ignored in the Brexit debate. People who called into the programme included:

Yvonne - lives in France, travels to Switzerland every day to work: "Companies will look at me and say 'If you're not an EU citizen, I don't want to hire you, because the paperwork is complicated and I can get anybody who's an EU citizen to do the same job. I have two kids who are studying, and my family relies on my salary, so I really don't know what would happen."

Delia, 71, has lived in Italy for six years: "The healthcare, I think, is a really, really big problem. If there is no deal, then we have no rights to anything, and at our age it is a really major issue. We can't get health insurance, the cost of having to deal with everything privately is prohibitive.

Anne, 68, lives in Italy: "I came over to the UK with my husband because we became grandparents yesterday. While we've been here we've been thinking 'how can we be grandparents to this lovely granddaughter, and so we put in an offer on a house, and the offer was accepted, we got very excited, and then we thought about it and thought that – we don't know if (husband) Mario is going to be able to live here after March – on Brexit day all our rights cease, and we may not be able to live together in the UK. So we've had to cancel that plan. Our dreams have collapsed."

Later in the programme we hear from:

Zoe, who lives in Italy and provides translation services to customers in Germany, France and Italy. As things stand, after Brexit she will not have the right to provide services to companies outside Italy – as that would count as exporting services. Getting Italian citizenship would take four years. She wouldn't be able to return to the UK with her Italian husband unless she met a certain income threshold. As she's self-employed she would have to be established in the UK for two years to prove she could earn enough money to bring her husband over. They have a newborn baby.

Listen to the full programme here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00010yt

Many years ago, when it came time to choose my A-level subjects, I chose Physics, Chemistry, Computer Science and AS-level Maths. Science had been my strongest subject at GCSE, but I didn't have any particular vision of wanting to be a scientist. Unfortunately I found Chemistry so hard that I quit the course after two weeks – and Physics wasn't much better. Meanwhile, the school had no Computer Science teacher so I was given a copy of the syllabus and was meant to learn it myself – something I didn't at the time have the motivation or self-reliance to do.

My main reason for choosing Physics and Chemistry had been that I wanted to understand how the universe worked. About halfway through the year I read A Brief History of Time, and that explained everything to my satisfaction. I left that school at the end of year and went to a different one that actually taught computer science. So I have Stephen Hawking to thank for scratching that itch and making it easier to make the decision to do the thing I should have been doing all along.

I did feel sorry for my AS-level maths teacher who started the year with six students and ended it with two, both of whom then dropped out. The main thing I have to show for that year is an unfinished science-fiction novel that I wrote during my study periods.

(The headline of this post is clickbait – there was no chance of me becoming a scientist, but by taking the wrong path I could have sleepwalked into total career failure)

Hardcore was a game being developed by legendary game developer Jeff Minter (aka Yak) of Llamasoft in 1992, following the success of Llamatron and Revenge of the Mutant Camels. It was never finished, because he was hired by Atari to work on games such as Tempest 2000 for the forthcoming Jaguar console. Hardcore was therefore only released as a five-level demo. When I played it aged about 14, I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I noticed recently that there was only one video of it on YouTube, and the quality of that video was terrible. So I've produced two high-quality videos of the game, one running at the default refresh rate of 50 Hz, the other running at 60 Hz (which my 14 inch TV couldn't even display at the time).

In these videos, I'm playing the game on an emulated Atari ST running at 32MHz, rather than the 8MHz that the standard models of the ST ran at – this is to ensure a perfectly smooth frame rate. For the 50Hz video, the difference between 8MHz and 32MHz is very minor, but the 60Hz version benefits much more.






In the late 90s, aged about 19, I did some work on a game of my own which was inspired by Hardcore, named "DEATH". This was also never finished, but I have recently made some tweaks to it and put it online – it can be downloaded from http://argnet.fatal-design.com/pilsbry/death.htm

My goal with this game wasn't to make an exact clone of Hardcore – and at the time I was writing it, I wouldn't have had the programming and game design experience to achieve that anyway. I definitely wouldn't say it's a great game, but with 20 years more experience, it's interesting to look back at my game vs Hardcore, and have gained a greater appreciation for the design of the latter.

One of the most important justifications for Brexit was meant to be that we would be able to negotiate our own trade deals. What Leave campaigners didn't tell the voters is that if we leave the single market and customs union, we not only lose frictionless access to the EU (by far our largest trading partner) - we also lose trade deals that the EU has signed with around 60 other countries. Together, the EU and these other countries receive over half of our exports. Already countries with which we would like to sign or replace trade deals are seeking to take advantage of our weakened state by pushing for concessions, knowing that we’re desperate for trade deals. South Korea is a recent example. And even in the unlikely event that we were able to sign trade deals with every non-EU country, a no deal Brexit - which due to this incompetent and divided government is looking increasingly likely - would still leave our exporters worse off. Besides, we don't need to leave the EU to boost our trade outside of it. Germany exports far more to China than we do.

Before June 2016, the UK had the fastest-growing economy in the G7. Now, while the US and European economies are booming, the UK has now dropped to become the slowest-growing in the G7, and this is projected to continue for years. We’ve only avoided recession because we’ve been lifted by the global boom. Due to our ageing population, the NHS is struggling to cope with demand - it needs more money, but Brexit will leave it with less.

Sources:
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-trade-partners-object-to-brexit-transition-roll-over/
https://twitter.com/open_britpress/status/963020212093276160

The news has just come out that 80s and 90s game designer Paul Woakes died last summer. The only game of his I played was Mercenary III: The Dion Crisis from 1992 – a unique game with a brilliant sense of humour, that managed to fit an entire 3D solar system into a computer with only half a megabyte of RAM. You could land on any planet or moon and explore (admittedly sparsely populated) cities.

To begin with you get around using taxis and buses – this must be the only game that came with a printed bus timetable. Sometimes you would come out of a building just in time to see the bus pull away, and have to wait a few minutes for the next one – all part of the game's slightly evil sense of humour. You can free yourself from the drudgery of public transport by buying a spaceship, but they can be very expensive. One brilliantly cruel trick the game plays on you is that after a few hours of the laboriously getting from one side of the solar system to the other, you enter a building and find a note that tells you "we left your ship behind the building we started". That was also a brilliant piece of game design, because it means the next time the player starts the game they can just go round the back of the building, climb into their free ship and start exploring the solar system without being constrained by public transport – but by the time they found that note, the player would have had plenty of time to familiarise themselves with the locations of the major planets and cities. If they'd been given their ship from the very beginning, they would have just got hopelessly lost.

The plot is that a billionaire named PC Bil wants to begin open-cast mining on the planet Dion, which would be an environmental catastrophe. You have three days to stop him – but that's going to be hard, partly because he's about to be elected President. One way to win the game is to run against and beat him in the election. You have to go to all the TV stations and newspapers (and spend a lot of money) to make sure your campaign is well-advertised. One of the game's most memorable moments is when you come across a father and son standing outside a spaceport. If you briefly pick up the child, it's good publicity – but if you leave without putting the child back down, the headlines become "Mercenary kidnaps child" and the poll ratings drop.

There are six ways to win the game in total (including bankrupting PC Bil by cheating at his casino) – the other one that springs to mind is the one where you find evidence of PC Bil being involved in some kind of criminal activity. You then have to get authorisation to be some kind deputy sheriff or something, so that you can arrest him. But before you do that, you have to sort out somewhere for him to be imprisoned. First you have to buy the deeds to an empty plot of land, then you buy an inflatable prison (I'm not making this up) and place it on that plot. Finally you had to find a special glove that allows you to carry heavy things (such as people), and find the key to PC Bil's room. The final step of this solution, as you carry him to the prison, is very funny as he continually insists that you put him down and that you have no right to do this.

Here is a series of videos where someone plays through the opening parts of Mercenary 3:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHvlNYDPEmU&list=PL0537E0F6A3427964

And here is a site with a lot more information about all three Mercenary games, and a download of MDDClone, which allows you to play all three games on a PC:
http://mercenarysite.free.fr/mercframes_graphic.htm

Update - 10th February 2018:
Thanks to Simon from the Mercenary site, I have the stuff that PC Bil says as you apprehend him and carry him to prison -

On approaching PC BIL
"HOW DID YOU GET IN HERE - GO AWAY"
"DON'T YOU COME NEAR ME - I'M WARNING YOU"

Triggered when player picks up PCB
"PUT ME DOWN - THIS INSTANT"
"I'M P C BIL - YOU'VE NO RIGHT TO DO THIS"
"I DEMAND TO SEE MY LAWYER IMMEDIATELY"
"- - - - - - HELP! - - - - - -"

Update - Jan 2020:
PC Bil stands for Palyar Commander's Brother-In-Law - a reference to a character in the first Mercenary game.