Archive.

A brief update to certain posts, not that anyone reads them.  Coda For Sara had its explanation of Huckleberry friends mysteriously omitted, and our synopsis on the Neo Geo handheld has had more information added thanks to Andriasang printing up more info.

Archive.
I am an inveterate packrat, and am currently digitising select bits of Edge hoarded from the Mid 2000's, normally looking for obscure and niche stuff, oh and trying to collate together all the Biffoworld columns, the corpulent output from Digi's Mr Biffo.  Its not easy when the magazine does not fit into the scanner meaning you'll grab about 95% of the page you want and hope and pray that there is nothing on the remaining 5% that is of any use.
 We also used to have some archives up on Mediafire not so long ago of promo tat from American magazines, (Shining force and some Xfile scans now removed due to SOPA panic) that I'm pretty sure do not exist anywhere. 

What we are desperately trying to say is this, archival, even casually its time consuming work.  It was brought home to me on Monday at our cactus club meeting, they had a display table that our speaker had brought and displayed on it, a massive array of cactus magazines (it was a talk on Haworthia but covered other species too), leafing through this vast amount of technical journals it remained clear, few if any, have any sort of archival back up.  Only Asklepios the International Asclepiad Society had any sort of scan in service (a CD ROM of old issues being advertised) the others had nothing.  

What happens to gaming mags can also represent what happens to other niche magazines too. In other words, preservation is required unless valuable information is lost.  Thanks to project Gutenberg I can read Curtis botanical magazine from the late 1700's, I don't see gaming media reaching the same levels of archival yet.

Its not all bad though, there are places where you can read reviews of games, bits from old Amiga Format, Crash and Zzap 64 magazines.  Maybe the future isn't so bad!.

Cameraphone 2004 style.

Our scan of the week returns with an ad for Sony Ericsson's S700i cameraphone.  Unlike our other scans of the week this isn't humourous or weird, its just something that doesn't really exist now.  Every phone now has a camera but this was both a dedicated phone and a dedicated camera, a sort of chimera between the two.  I kinda miss those days, maybe some of the camera companies could get together with Android say and revive this feature.