Nicholas Blachford's Home Page

Hello,

Good morning, good evening, good whatever, and you are most welcome to my home page and web site. Feel free to look around, there's all sorts of sometimes strange stuff which has been building up for years.

My name is Nicholas Blachford, or (apparently) Николас Блэхфорд. I live in Cambridge, England.

I was born in Singapore to English parents, grew up in Northern Ireland and have a British passport issued in the Netherlands and I used to live in Paris. There's probably a wee bit of Ulster-Scots thrown in for good measure as my Grandmother is from Northern Ireland. I think I am probably best described as foreign.

I used to live in Amsterdam which is the capital of Holland except the country is actually called the Netherlands and it apparently has two capitals (The Dutch love to confuse people). I also lived in Amersfoort, and briefly in the North of England near Yarm in a hamlet called Aislaby (I never did figure out how to pronounce it).

As you may notice I am an inventive sort of bloke with varied interests and yes I am a computer geek (or Kook as one web site once called me). I'm into the "alternative" computer scene (i.e. not Windows), mainly because I like using computers, not fighting them. I'm currently using a 13" MacBook and have a dinky litte Acer Aspire One netbook running Haiku, before it I had a dinky little 12" Apple PowerBook. I've previously used BeOS, Amiga, Linux and even Windows the odd time.

I'm also into Photography, Music (various artists), Movies (anything really but especially SciFi) and various other things at whim.

My PCs once had their own logos, firstly     then   but I haven't given the others names / logos for years.

More? - you can find out more about me here (needs updating).

Blog - I gave in and have added a blog (last entry 08/10/06). [Note: Fixed link]

The Gallery Paris is a very good place to live if you are into photography.

The Amiga Walker pages are about a very rare prototype computer I managed to get hold of.

Articles:

Added an article on the PhysX physics chip.

A full list of articles can now be found in the appropriately titled Articles section.

Could you really build The Matrix? Yes, I think you can not only build The Matrix, but you could do better, here is my idea for a virtual world called The ADEX that I dreamt up in 2001.

The badly titled Neviong is some musings about how to develop a Linux based media centre.

For the Geeks...

Have your chips and eat them in the Computer section with Open source Amiga and BeOS software..

There is an installer mock-up I did for the Linux distro Yoper. This can be found in a section called The Source.

Dug out from my hard disc is the 1999 Super Palm idea.

OSNews Show reports (all with pics):

NEW! - BeGeistert 019
BeGeistert 008
Amiga Expo 2002
BeGeistert 010
CES 2003
LinuxTag 2003
BeGeistert012
Apple Expo Paris 2004

Most computer sits on it's arse doing mostly nothing all day so I thought I'd do something useful with it: It's now looking for Aliens...
I joined the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project and am contributing units to it.

Weird Science:

Sorted! Time travel solved - (actually just the father-son paradox).

What's all this UFO nonsense?

If you want to know about real Physics (and UFOs!) I've written some short reviews of the Books I've read along with other stuff I like (incudes TV & Films).

Other:

The humour section, and a new (2003) XMAS card, the old (1998?) card is there to.

What happened when Kosh met Hal.

Can you Hearit ? - The Music section, with Lyrics.

Are you a Blachford ? - with Coat of Arms.

Who's Looking ? - This site gets all sorts of interesting visitors.

Going somewhere? Keep Surfing at my 1997 "vintage" Links page.

Contact:

Walking up to me in the street and saying hello usually works but failing that try e-mailing me at:
Note: You might not get a reply but I do read them all:

Stats:

Ever been on an ego trip? I have...

Slashdotted!In 2005 I got a nice birthday present when the site record was set. A phenomenal 84,521 users read my article on the Cell architecture. At it's height pages went out 5.5 times per second, despite this only 7.5 GB went out. It subsequently had the (dubious) honour of a Slashdot dupe - or 2. At time of writing (22/02/09) it has been read by over 600 000 people in more than 158 countries.

Thank you for visiting, please come again.

Last change - 22th February 2009

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