It's a shame Amazon doesn't run Consumer Reports-esque mini-sites for popular product lines. Now you've inspired me to contribute more reviews to the UK site!

I spent my adolescence staying up all night throughout the summer watching The Twilight Zone on WPIX Channel 11 from New York City (after Star Trek at midnight) and ticking off the episodes in my Twilight Zone Companion.

Although the narrative twists became a wee bit predictable when watched night after night, the humour and humanism of Serling's own scripts and choice of material from others kept the show fresh.

So many poignant moments that showed me what it meant to grow up and grow old, revealed the motivations of others in the adult world. I'm thinking of "A Stop at Willoughby", "Nothing in the Dark" with Robert Redford and Gladys Cooper, and "A Passage for Trumpet" with Jack Klugman - amongst all the other famous episodes.

Bernard Herrmann's music also thrilled me with the evocations of his work with Hitchcock and his own personal projects from the 1930's and 40's. And I was introduced to the work of Richard Matheson through The Twilight Zone and eventually found an old cheap edition of I Am Legend and wondered why it wasn't known more widely.

How I love this show. I need to order the complete series now!

I'm now in the latter half of my thirties and my girlfriend is in her mid-twenties and I was just rambling on about text adventure games. She looked at me like I had three heads and never heard of such a thing.

I distinctly remember a trip to a business with computers (and data stored on punch cards) when I was 10-ish and seeing the opening lines from Zork

A year or two later we bought a TRS-80 Colour Computer (with Extended Basic!) and I learnt to type by spending days and days and days with Pyramid 2000, Madness and the Minotaur, Raaka-Tu, Bedlam ... and went on to enjoy those early "graphical" adventures like the Dallas Quest. I didn't actually play Zork until much, much later.

It's a shame these sort of interactive fictions passed away after the advent of the CD-ROM and Myst.

Here's a link to my favourite, Pyramid 2000: http://www.figmentfly.com/pyramid2000/pyramid.html

My adult life has primarily been spent using various permutations of Apple's Macintosh computers for fun and (quite often) for profit and (always) to further my artistic goals. By day for the past couple of years though, I'm usually forced to interact with a Windows PC running the latest flavour of Win XP.

I really can't imagine why I would ever want to upgrade that PC and why oh why I would ever need anything more than Word/Excel/PPT 2003 on Windows. I really don't. I'm a geek and believe in giving Windows a go now and again and didn't think Vista all THAT horrible at PC World. It just looked like a very fiddly version of OS X Leopard. It isn't for me, but that's ok.

But in ALL of this, I cannot think of one compelling feature that will make my life more rich or work easier in Windows 7. Will Word create my letters? Oh no, that insane .docx file format already makes exchanging files a living hell. Will Excel becoming more comprehensible? Probably not (and forgive this slight troll, but I recently gave Numbers a try and was exceedingly surprised at how well it works - Pages remains a bit lame, though).

I would really love to see Microsoft innovate something that would make interacting with these boxes more pleasing, the manipulation of complex information more straightforward ... but I just don't understand why I would want to upgrade that older Windows PC.

So this will cost me £80 to install on my iMac? That's not all that bad, really.

Surely this is a way for government to clip the wings of a struggling section of the fourth estate? Governments - anyone in power - generally does not look all that kindly on aggressive newspapers that speak truth to power and hold governments to account. I'm sure someone thinks this an ideal way to neuter domestic media by hooking it on public subsidy.

Why not tax paper and create a print equivalent of the BBC? One could call it "Truth" or simply "News". Hmmm.

It is exceptionally contrasty and doesn't really like overexposure - but that's why shooting it on an overcast day with even lighting really brings out the otherworldly quality of this emulsion.

Now I really should give Efke a try ...

Good luck!

I always used to think that Fuji's Velvia 50 and Ilford's Pan F+ to be too slow to shoot outdoors on a dark afternoon. A recent journey to Whitby in May taught me that both of those films look absolutely luscious on a dark, moody afternoon.

I used a tripod once or twice, but for the most part I shot handheld with a Pentax 645 and a Hexar AF and a shutter speed of 1/125 or 1/60. Don't be afraid of using slower films - and if you're in a pinch, just prop the camera on a rock/branch/bit of wood/etc! If you don't use a support of some kind, you'll have to shoot wide-open, but there's a certain beauty in that look, too.

I never really thought I'd be so saddened by the loss of any film stock, but I reconnected with Kodachrome through a massive effort to scan over a thousand slides from my family's life in 2008 - 75% of which were Kodachrome.

The two most beautiful pictures of myself and my sister were made on 35mm Kodachrome using my father's Pentax K1000.

30-something years later I made a picture of my Mum and the image felt dreamy and at the same time the level of detail was unflinching. I wish I had used the whole roll making pictures of my family.

Perhaps I'll use those last three rolls in my fridge for pictures of people I love. A fitting end to this way of interpreting the world.

The Kodachrome look now firmly passes into the realm of nostalgia.

The Carter Report is a fatally compromised blueprint for subversion that attempts to extend government control into a surprisingly vast array of areas.

1. Television. The existing licence fee is an outrage when the BBC via BBC Worldwide make heaps of money and yet refuse to make available their back catalogue for the benefit of the entire nation (well, they do but for a steep price). The report suggests we preserve the licence fee but siphon more off to commercial and quasi-commercial broadcasters?! Insane. Cut the licence fee in half, force the BBC to sell off some channels, let the broadcasters who can't afford to broadcast go out of business forthwith, open the iPlayer to ANY AND ALL who wish to broadcast through it (or just give it up to iTunes and Apple).

2. Broadband. Universal broadband is a terrific notion, but a telephone tax seems grossly unfair when there are MANY ways to extend high-ish speed internet access to the masses outside the M25. Why not refund the spectrum auction billions to wireless providers and compel them to build-out LTE so that it covers the entire nation? Is that any less insane than the current proposal?

3. Internet privacy. I well understand the government sucking up to Big Content, but surely we have learnt from Sarkosy's defeat in France that a three strikes law would be nearly impossible to enforce without some serious violations of one's privacy. But it's ok if ISP's snoop and not the government? Disgusting and typical of the Labour government that brought us nearly indefinite detention without charge, a national identity register and ID cards, etc.