Category Other

Qwak is a fast-paced platformer developed by an indie game developer called Jamie Woodhouse. The first version of the game appeared over 20 years ago on the BBC Micro, and over the years it has appeared on a number of different platforms. About 10 years ago I purchased 2 copies for the Nintendo Game Boy Advance – one for me and one “just in case”. They weren’t expensive yet I knew the run would be limited so why not?

A few weeks back I came across the games while cleaning out so...

There has been a lot of coverage in the media in recent times about the rise of “superbugs”: bacteria that has become immune to even our strongest antibiotics.

Sensationalist headlines predict the end of the world as killer bacteria wipe out the human race, unstoppable in their march thanks to resistance acquired from exposure to antibiotics that are flippantly over-used by hypercondriacs.

The theory that is used to justify these headlines is that more we use antibiotics, the more quickly bacteria evolve to resist them, and the faster the drugs stop working. Basically, an arms race where biology is pitted against technology, and where biology will be the inevitable winner as technology eventually runs out of ideas.

But is this really the case?

This is just a quick post to state that I am no longer the owner of Visit Dolgellau as the website has been sold.

I was finding it difficult to balance my time between work, this website, a number of other projects and having a life. With neither project receiving the attention that it deserved, it was clear that something had to change. So I decided to sell some projects in order to free up time for the others and I’m afraid that Visit Dolgellau was among the former.

The new owner, Kyle, is keen to run the website in the same manner so users shouldn’t notice much of a difference. He’s also keen to continue to grow it with more content and a larger directory, making the website even more of a useful resource for visitors.

I’d like to wish Kyle all the best with his endeavour.

Around once a month or so I receive an email or a message on Facebook asking me why Visit Dolgellau is written in English and not Welsh. It’s a tourist-focused website that I set up last year to promote my home town and the surrounding area.

Some seem to think that it’s an Assembly-backed website (which I take as a compliment, given the website’s humble background!) and are curious as to why it isn’t bilingual as a matter of course like the others. But others are clearly nationalists who simply hate anything that isn’t Welsh and this post is intended for them.

1) The role of Visit Dolgellau is to promote Dolgellau and the wider area as a tourist destination. In general, people who visit Wales tend not to be Welsh (because Welsh people already live here).

2) The website’s analytics da...

Although I live in Manchester now, originally I’m from a little town in Wales called Dolgellau. Dolgellau is a market town in Gwynedd, north-west Wales, and is set in the southern part of
the Snowdonia National Park at the foot of the Cadair Idris mountain range. It’s a beautiful place – a fact that is only made all the more apparent now that I live in a city – and whenever I show anyone any photos I am always told how lucky I was to have grown up with such surroundings.

Back in 2004, a graphic designer colleague and I were asked by the Partnership – a guild of local businesses basically – to develop a website for the town. We enthusiastically accepted the challenge but soon discovered that politics and conflicting ideas within the Partnership made any kind of progress extremely difficult...