I wrote about 30 years of tech. This was to celebrate Stuff magazine’s 30th, which is on the way. It’s a properly long read (although bite-sized, so you can snack on it in chunks), covering everything from DVDs to iPhone to ChatGPT. How many of these do you remember?

What do I want to see from Apple? Two pieces on the subject this week, one on the September 2026 iPhone event and one on the upcoming Home Hub.

Should you buy an iPod? I’ve written about them for a couple of publications recently, and I’m torn. So I wrote a piece about what people who are more mindful about music ownership and playback might do instead.

Echo chambers aren’t ideal. So I rummaged through the App Store to find iPhone news apps that help you discover every side of a story.

C64 vs ZX Spectrum! Yes, I waded into that battle. Again. But this was through the lens of limited-edition remakes. So it’s TheC64 Mini Black vs The Spectrum White Edition. Which comes out on top? Read the piece to find out. And, er, don’t @ me if you don’t like the result.

Iris is great. I mean the Mac app, although I’m sure if you have a great pal called Iris that they are lovely too. Anyway, Iris is now part of my best Mac apps roundup. Which you can read. Here.

Laura Kidd (Penfriend) rocks. And it turns out she’s also a wonderful interviewee. I chatted with her this week and the results will be in an upcoming issue of Stuff, looking into her background, her thoughts on music and tech, and more.

40 years ago, Transformers the Movie was released. And traumatised a bunch of kids. We’d all grown up on the cartoon, where Decepticons (the baddies) couldn’t hit a barn door from ten paces. In the movie, they suddenly became sharpshooters, wiping out the original cast of Autobots (the goodies) in grim, abrupt battles that probably made parents wonder if they’d accidentally taken their kids into the wrong film. Ryan Lambie digs up long-buried memories about the horror for Den of Geek.

I Zzap!ed back this week. In the sense my copy of Legacy Volume 2 rocked up, featuring the second half of the C64 mag’s famous cover art. This one was particularly special for me, because I was one of the nutcases who first resurrected Zzap!64, back in 2002. Roger Kean (launch editor) and Oliver Frey (artist and sometimes editor) gave their blessing, but we couldn’t afford to commission a new cover. So I made one from an existing piece of Oli Frey art that I heavily edited in Photoshop.

Chris Wilkins of Fusion Retro Books owns the full rights to Zzap!64 and (ZX Spectrum mag) Crash now, and both of those publications have new bimonthly print editions. But Chris is a good egg and never wrote our 2002 tribute (and the next one, edited by Rob De Voogd and bundled with Retro Gamer #18) out of the picture. I appreciate that and, if only briefly, also being a part of the Zzap!64 story.

I ate some bread. Yeah, I know. An odd note to end on. But something went very wrong with my innards years ago and my diet has gradually shrunk to an alarming degree. Fortunately, I now have a wonderful dietician who’s helping me (along with angrily wondering why lots of procedures were never done and lots of advice was never followed by specialists and GPs I saw). Having given me ways to help repair my gut, I’m now onto the exciting but scary prospect of reintroducing gluten. Here’s what I ate today. It had been in the fridge for a week (because I was terrified to start), yet it still tasted better than most gluten-free rubbish. Here’s hoping this goes well, because I’d bloody love it if I could eat at least some normal bread again. And if you have no problems with gluten yourself, don’t wipe it out of your own diet, because reintroducing it isn’t always a given.