Brendan Alford
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balford.bsky.social
Brendan Alford
@balford.bsky.social
250 followers 200 following 110 posts
Professional Code Monkey, part-time ZX Spectrum tickler. Opinions my own etc.
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balford.bsky.social
Life goals complete, courtesy of a Pac-Man shaped prawn cracker.
A prawn cracker shaped like Pac-Man. Daughter attempting to photobomb him in the background.
October 24, 2025 at 5:29 PM
balford.bsky.social
Hmm. Hit a small snag.

Won’t get a chance to investigate till next week unfortunately (as it happens I’m off on a pilgrimage to Cambridge tomorrow)
A ZX Spectrum +2 screen display, the display is alternating black and white horizontal bars indicating an as yet undiagnosed fault.
July 31, 2025 at 12:37 PM
balford.bsky.social
July 4, 2025 at 1:46 PM
balford.bsky.social
These are the unboxed ones, at least.
A pile of Spectrum 48 and 128’s on some shelving, along with some ZX81’s. Also to be seen are some ram packs and a ZXPand unit.
April 23, 2025 at 10:44 AM
balford.bsky.social
RIP Eddie, you legend.
Eddie Jordan holding the winning constructors trophy on the podium at the 1998 Belgian Grand Prix. Behind him are a happy Damon Hill and a less than ecstatic Ralf Schumacher, who looks like someone shat in his tea.
March 20, 2025 at 9:09 AM
balford.bsky.social
Here’s the board, typically it’s starting up fine this morning. Ray Carlsen’s guide suggests a bad U27 as that screen is close to it, so if it reappears I’ll throw in a new LS08 there first. Cheers dude 🙂
A C64 long board, revision 250407. Screenshot from Ray Carlsen’s pictorial fault finding guide, specifically rubbish characters on screen resulting from a bad U27 IC.
February 18, 2025 at 9:44 AM
balford.bsky.social
Dropped a Tic Tac, accidentally created a Thinkpad.
Picture of a mechanical keyboard with a cherry Tic Tac that fell between the G and H keys, resembling a Thinkpad mouse nubbin if you squint.
February 6, 2025 at 5:14 PM
balford.bsky.social
They're there but video compression has ruined them, along with plenty of video noise.
The ZX Spectrum copyright screen under emulation, with emulated screen noise and jailbars. Yes, I'm that sad.
February 5, 2025 at 9:23 PM
balford.bsky.social
Here's an example of how it can be configured to replicate loading Horizons with a fairly shonky cassette player.
February 5, 2025 at 9:15 PM
balford.bsky.social
I found this while poking around memory :)
Image of a hex/ascii view of memory being examined when Peter Pack Rat is loaded in a Spectrum emulator, identifying Mark Wilson as having worked on graphics for this game.
February 4, 2025 at 7:18 PM
balford.bsky.social
There’s a great story in Alan Sugar’s 1990 biography about how the grey +2 was conceived.
Text from Alan Sugar’s 1990 biography ‘The Amstrad Story’. It reads: Sugar com Dixons. Sugar look charge of the proceedings, winge ling in one of the company s young Chinese designers, Following instructions from Sugar and Warkins, the designer sketched out an improved version of the Spectrum Plus, the latest Sinclair machine, featuring a keyboard with a cassette mechanism tagged on to it. 'Is this the kind of thing you'd want to buy?' Sugar asked Souhami. What kind of price could it sell for?' countered the man from Dixons. 'About £159,' Sugar replied. Dixons were more than interested. Sugar went into overdrive, phoned Amstrad headquarters in Brentwood and told them to have a Sinclair Spectrum delivered from the local Dixons shop immediately. An Amstrad engineer in Brentwood opened up the machine and shouted down the phone to Bob Watkins a list of all the components he found embedded in… Text from Alan Sugar’s 1990 biography ‘The Amstrad Story’. It reads: the printed circuit board; he then faxed through to Hong Kong the Spectrum's circuit diagram. By the next day, Sugar and Watkins had a provisional estimate of how much it would cost Amstrad to make a Spectrum, based on that list of components shouted over the phone. Sugar explains his thinking: 'We knew how much a cassette mechanism cost and we took a flying guess at a few other parts that were in the Sinclair. And we concluded that if we pressed the button, we could tool up for that product, make 400,000 and have them in the U.K. market and all the other markets of the world in time for Christmas 1986.' The Amstrad boss knew he could make a tidy profit from the Sinclair business: that much was clear from the favourable Dixons reaction to the price he had quoted for the enhanced Spectrum…
January 16, 2025 at 3:44 PM
balford.bsky.social
Every single time in the work group chat when our team have to work on DAGs in Apache Airflow
‘Do you like dags’ meme from Snatch, featuring Brad Pitt.
January 11, 2025 at 12:21 AM
balford.bsky.social
From the introductory booklet - @nomenluni.bsky.social is on the money 🙂
January 5, 2025 at 11:20 AM
balford.bsky.social
I’ve got one of those, very handy. Gave mine an appropriate name.
A small bench vice with ‘Miami’ written on one of the jaws. (Crocketts Theme plays in your head)
December 9, 2024 at 5:56 PM
balford.bsky.social
I've duly remixed this classic from the 1982 Horizons ZX Spectrum introductory cassette
June 15, 2024 at 7:47 PM
balford.bsky.social
I’m lucky enough to own this specimen:
December 15, 2023 at 11:36 PM