I love the curved roof of the British Museum, which is why I thought that this would make a good entry for this weeks PhotoFriday challenge, which is “Curvature.”

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Gold.” I’m entry 149.

• The IBM PC is 30 today – Look how far we’ve come in thirty years…
• photoshoplooter – I think this is a typically British response to the rioting currently going on around the UK this week.

I’ve been busy and not had the time to enter the last few PhotoFriday’s, but here I am with an image for the theme “Gold” (always believe in your soul). I have quite a few pictures with bits of gold (you’ve got the power to know) in them, but here, in Kyoto, we have a whole pavilion that’s made of the shiny stuff.

I have just moved ZX81.org.uk to a new web server for reasons that are too dull to explain here. The good news is that it should be faster and, hopefully, more reliable than before. The bad news is that there are still a few things that I need to do before we’re 100% whole again.

The main gap is where you’d normally expect to see a picture you might see the word “photopress.” This is because a WordPress plugin that I used to use no longer works on my new server. I’ll gradually move everything over to… something that works. Unfortunately there is a deadline and there was no way that I was going to get everything ready in time.

• Social Media Propaganda Posters – “Be brief! The enemy might be listening in!”
• Norway attacks: Oslo hit by bomb explosion and youths shot at camp – Shocking. Both because it’s Norway and because it’s a city that I’ve spent a lot of time in.

This weeks PhotoFriday theme is “Enormous,” which is kind of a difficult word to get across. A lot of people have just gone for big things or small things at high magnifications. I thought I’d go for a 3.5″ floppy disk, as I remember 1.44Mb being enormous, way more than anyone could reasonably use — and far more than the 100K per side that my BBC Micro managed on its 5.25″ disks. Of course, a single raw image from my 50D would need fourteen of them…

If you look at the sales reports from iTunes Connect, it seems that Apple are taking nearly 40% of the sale price for downloads made in Europe. Of course they claim to take 30% and, indeed, that’s exactly what you see in the US store.

So what’s going on?

The good news is that Apple are not screwing you over. The numbers do add up. The difference is that prices in the US App Store do not include sales tax (VAT) but those in Europe do. This means that before Apple take their 30% cut, they first take off the tax that needs to be paid. If that’s not clear, let’s work through an example.

• The Rise and Fall of the Independent Developer – “My fear is that It’s only a matter of time before developers find the risks and expenses prohibitive and retreat to the safety of a larger organization. We’ll be going back to square one.”
• The Equality and Human Rights Commission’s choice is beyond belief – “But what these cases illustrate is that in certain areas compromise is not possible because the rights of different minorities are mutually exclusive. When one group refuses to fulfil its job description because it disapproves of another group, there is no middle ground, no give and take.”

This weeks PhotoFriday, “Seashore,” was pretty straightforward since I only got back from Rhodes, with its famous beaches, a couple of months ago.

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Gloomy.” I’m entry number 149.

As soon as I saw the theme for this weeks challenge, “Gloomy,” I knew which image I needed to use. I took it only a couple of weeks ago on the way to work and is a great representation of the kind of summer we’ve been having so far. Pretty gloomy, eh?

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Sharp Focus.” I’m entry 151.