matthewpennell.com

A blog of acquiescent temper, miscellaneous opinions, and uncertain vote...

Personal / Site

Ghost, Node 18, and ECONNREFUSED ::1:3306

04 November 2023

An appropriately spooky ghost-related update, since we've just had Halloween; when I tried to update the Ghost installation that this blog runs on, I ran into a succession of problems.

A segment of a program listing in Z80 assembly language

Personal / Retro / Gaming

Learning Z80 assembly is hard

28 October 2023

When I set out to write something I could play on my ZX Spectrum, I was fairly confident in my abilities. Sure, it's been a while since I really did any programming, I'm pretty sure I can understand something that is by its very nature far simpler. I mean how hard could it possibly be?

Life

Nostalgia

21 October 2023

Increasingly frequently, I find myself submerged in overwhelming nostalgia. My YouTube feed is full of reviews of ZX Spectrum games, people painting Warhammer miniatures, obscure histories of comic books, retrospectives of musicians and genres that haven't been big in the last three decades or more. I re-read books that I

Personal / Music

Music making

14 October 2023

Recently I've been making a concerted effort to get back into making music – and a few recent purchases have helped.

Film

John Waters

23 September 2023

Two pieces of John Waters-related media showed up in my feeds this week, and it got me thinking about my own 25-year fascination with the filmmaker.

Books / Personal

On reading

16 September 2023

Last week, motivational writer and bookshop owner Ryan Holiday published a post on his blog titled These 38 Reading Rules Changed My Life. I read it, and several of the points he made definitely chimed with my own observations after forty-odd years as an avid reader.

Photography / Personal / Retro

Zenit EM

17 April 2023

On a whim I recently bought myself a new toy. The Zenit EM is a 35mm SLR, manufactured in the Soviet Union for the 1980 Moscow Olympics. And, after almost 20 years using a smartphone, it's been a bit of a steep learning curve.

Retro / Gaming / Personal

Writing ZX BASIC on your PC

07 March 2023

One of the projects I'm slowly chipping away at in my spare time is a game for the ZX Spectrum. I really don't want to type it in using my actual Spectrum, so I started looking for a method that would let me write BASIC on my PC using a comfortable, familiar IDE.

Books / Personal

My favourite authors

23 February 2023

Now that the office bookshelves were ostensibly mine and mine alone, I decided that I would rearrange them in order to gather together the works of my favourite authors.

About

Hi, my name is Matthew. This is my personal website where I blog about web stuff, writing, music, games, and whatever else captures my interest. It has existed in some form or another since 2004; the current iteration was launched in early 2023.

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