Tim Holyoake

Anyone going on BBC this month should order one of these beforehand and let them sweat www.poppyshop.org.uk/products/pri...

Yes, but your two big ideas so far have been police and crime commissioners and Brexit. Shall we check on them first?

Looking at some of the replies to US political accounts, it would appear that their equivalent of the UKs "use pens" conspiracy theory is "ask for a paper ballot".

'When Roobarb Made a Spike', the first episode of Roobarb, was originally broadcast on this day in 1974. Thirty episodes were made - all were written by Grange Calveley, directed by Bob Godfrey and narrated by Richard Briers.

New from me: Hacking the Pico RomWBW #RetroComputing z80.timholyoake.uk/hacking-the-...

If high street banks don't want to be hit with higher taxes in the budget, maybe the chancellor should use the threat to incentivise them not to keep shutting down their branches (and even reopen some) instead. It would certainly help small town economies if he did.

Happy birthday to Alan Garner. I'm inclined to think that Elidor is an undervalued book.

Ottery St Mary evening

This afternoon I met the Water Minister, Emma Hardy, on the day the Government declared severe drought across our area, and other areas supplied by Wimbleball reservoir. Severe drought is the highest level there is, and our part of Devon sits in the eye of it.

Liberal England... "A little heaven here on earth": Launde Abbey in Leicestershire Remember Thomas Cromwell's final words in Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light? "There is an abbey, Launde, in the heart of England. The air is always sweet there and it's quiet. A little heaven here on earth."

My personal position? I don't ever use generative AI. It offers me nothing useful creatively and nothing trustworthy as research. The environmental impact is appalling and the companies who developed it stole copyright intellectual property knowing that is illegal. GenAI is dishonest at every level.

Labelling every new thing in computing as ' #AI ' is as tiresome as reading articles from the 1950s/60s that gushingly fawn over what the new-fangled 'electronic brains' will do for us. Neither term helps explain what the tech can do, how it does it and whether it's a good idea in the first place!

For this year's #RetroChallenge I am looking at using the SPI protocol from a #RC2014 computer. In this post, I show how I was able to control a MAX7219 LED Matrix using Z80 assembly language. www.robertprice.co.uk/robblog/rc20...

By contrast, here is something the BBC isn't doing, fully reporting on this councillor story. The BBC has reported on it, yes, but the coverage is very much he said/she said rather than investigating the details and so giving us their best effort at the truth. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

For too long, successive governments have turned a blind eye to the huge damage caused by the Johnson-Farage Brexit deal. I really hope this marks a real turning point. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

The CCC’s most recent analysis puts the expected cost of achieving net zero by 2050 at about £110bn, or about £4bn a year, 0.2% of GDP. We can afford it and must do it. If this goal was really undeliverable the Conservatives would not need to make the up numbers. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

I'm sorry if this is obvious but the Tory proposal to exempt family homes completely from IHT will lead to 1] pensioners buying the biggest houses they possibly can 2] pensioners refusing to downsize which can only be bad news for younger families trying to buy family homes

I’m an RNLI volunteer crew member and I invite her to get on a plane from her hideout in Dubai and say that to my face here in the UK

Long-distance runner Brendan Foster training for the then-upcoming 1978 Commonwealth Games on the streets of Tyneside, by Tony Duffy. A quite wonderful snapshot of Seventies Britain.

Long tribute from Kemi Badenoch in her conference speech to Jeffrey Archer, complete with round of applause. The world is a "less colourful" place without him, she says, which is one way to describe a serial fraudster, fantasist and liar who wrecked several lives in the process.

the tech industry is about to invent books

Counterpoint: he deserved less.

This gets said constantly, but it worth reiterating: Games Workshop being bigger than fishing is important to shout about because you wouldn't know it from government talking points, which are rarely about anything creative or artistic. Growth won't involve fish or steel, it will involve goblins.

Historic England vanishing archive - details of why it is broken : www.sarsen.org/2026/09/hist...

After all Labour's previous dalliances with PR for the Commons, let's hope they see this through - first past the post cannot cope with the modern state of politics.

Fracking should be subject to a complete ban in England and Wales. Richard Tice called fracked shale gas 'treasure', in a debate on banning fracking. He reminds me of a character from Stevenson's "Treasure Island".

The government, banks, utilities and similar services MUST make it easier for those with Power of Attorney to manage stuff online. I find I'm having to do a lot of stuff by phone. It's like being back in the 90s except without the 90s infrastructure to help.

Finally back in Devon after the #RC2014 Assembly 2.0 yesterday. Thank you to Spencer & @tnmoc.bsky.social for hosting & organising, all the speakers & exhibitors, as well as everyone I talked with. I hope you had as much fun as I did and that the #PicoMZ was of interest! #RetroComputing #RetroGaming

I'm old enough to remember when we called our poorly written code bugs, fixed them, and didn't attempt to shift blame onto the inanimate code for any problems we'd caused. The whole discourse around "rogue AI agents" is ridiculous.

Josh Babarinde MP "So many of our businesses who used to have thriving trade with European Union countries, now just struggle." "There are so many barriers in place, so many bits of paperwork that you've got to navigate, so much red tape to try and cross."

Protest is one thing. Intimidating volunteer lifeboat crews is another. These volunteers risk their lives to save others. Targeting them isn’t patriotic. It’s un-British. @joshbabarinde.bsky.social

Looking for someone to debate whether it's a castle or "technically a house" with...

Are *any* of our current 650 MPs fellows or members of the British Computer Society and/or Chartered IT Professionals? If so, I'd be very interested to know their views on #AI

I'd buy the MZ-700 over all of the other machines on that page (I have them all apart from the Dragon), & I'd take the Sharp pocket computer over the ZX81!

New from me: Transplant +2,932: Devon Life. mcl.timholyoake.uk/2026/09/22/t... #MCL #Lymphoma #Cancer

🚨 ONLY 4 DAYS LEFT TO BOOK! 🚨 We’re thrilled to collaborate with Spencer - RC2014 Assembly v2.0 at TNMOC on Sat, Sept 26! 💻 Z80 & retro kit demos 🔌 Trader/exhibitor tables Full museum aceess 🎟️ Secure your slot: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1992559683652?aff=oddtdtcreator #RetroComputing #RC2014

#PicoMZ release 3.1.1 is now available. It fixes a couple of keyboard handling problems that were stopping some games from working properly. z80.timholyoake.uk/pico-mz-rele... #RetroComputing

#PicoMZ release 3.1.1 is now available. It fixes a couple of keyboard handling problems that were stopping some games from working properly. z80.timholyoake.uk/pico-mz-rele... #RetroComputing

I see that someone has used #AI to create a Sharp MZ-700/MZ-80A emulator. Sigh. I can guarantee that my #PicoMZ emulator for the MZ-700, MZ-80K and MZ-80A is completely AI free, so all of the bugs are of my own devising 🤪