I've tried all the suggestions made so far by other commenters, and they are solid options IMO. One of my personal requirements has been that the writing tip is either smooth/rounded, retractable, or covered in some way, because I use my pencil a lot every day, and I prefer to keep it in my hip pocket. If a fine tip is exposed, it gets caught in the fabric and/or bent.

For a long time the GraphGear 1000 was my favourite because the tip retracts and it has a sturdy metal body. But it's quite long and heavy, and I had to use the clip, which has a somewhat flimsy hinge joint. If the clip gets ripped off (happens to me) it renders the pencil useless because the clip holds the tip out for writing. I also used Orenz pencils for a while because I like the lead-protecting sleeve, but the tip doesn't seem to be designed to be repeatedly pushed back into the body, because they always start jamming on me pretty quickly.

A few months ago I discovered the Pentel Kerry and it's my new favourite. It has a removeable cap to protect the lead when closed, and to use it you remove the cap (friction/snap fit) and put it on the other end of the pencil like you would with a regular pen. The tip of the cap has a spring-loaded button which connects with the lead advance button on the main pencil body, so you can click on the rear end to advance the lead as normal. Unfortunately I don't think there's a metal body version, but the plastic feels quite sturdy to me.

I've never had one myself, but a few of my friends have had Crumpler bags for years and they swear by them.

Crumpler is an Australian company started by some bicycle couriers who couldn't find really sturdy bags that suited them. I believe that the story goes that one of them was trying to carry a slab of beer (24 cans packed in one flat layer) to a friend's party when his bag broke apart, and that was when they started making bags for themselves.

They've been around since 1995, and have quite a range of bags and backpacks now.

• You want to make a technically simple game, and want it actually to be able to run on a potato instead of just looking like it should, and you already have the skills or aren't afraid to take the time to learn.

The classic adage of "The first 90% of the work takes 90% of the time, and the last 10% takes the other 90% of the time" comes to mind.

Its always all those "little touches" that eat up so much time, because you know that your audience will expect them, and you yourself feel that they should be there; a smoothly-moving cursor for menu selections, playing little sounds when selecting or cancelling, a puff of dust that jumps up when the player character lands (but keeps animating in place rather than sticking to the player), text sliding or fading in and out instead of just appearing and disappearing... All the individual "little" things that add up to quite a lot of work.

I also sympathize with you on a lot of the points you raised about "family-friendly" games. I'm a teacher, and when I make activities and games for my students, I face a similar set of constraints (must be enjoyable for the weakest students but still engaging for the most advanced students, little to no player elimination, high replayability/reusability, has to actually reinforce the target knowledge/skill and not just be fun with the material tacked on as an afterthought).

I would also probably try to plug USB drives in once a year or so if I were being diligent, but in reality I recently found a handful of USB flash drives that I'd stored in a box in my parents' unattached garage, and every one of them could be read completely without any issues. They ran the gamut of build quality from expensive, name-brand drives to no-name dollar-store keychains. They'd been sitting in that box, untouched, for a little over nine years, and I'm pretty sure that some of them hadn't been used for several years even before that.

I wouldn't rely on it for critical data, but USB flash might not be so terrible.

Who else remembers seeing images like this -- that would've taken a few seconds to a few minutes to render even on high-end graphics workstations of the time -- presented in gaming rags as examples of what PS1/N64/Saturn and later PS2/GameCube/DreamCast/XBox were "going to be capable of producing"?

These "home pong" consoles were very common at the time. They don't really do much, so their main value is historical interest, and this isn't a particularly famous model. A quick eBay search seems to indicate it might go for GBP 80 at most, but probably more like GBP 20-40. So OP got a good deal, but they didn't find a lost Vermeer. :)

Also, the battery life was hideously short. It would suck down a set of 6 AAs in less than 3 hours. I suspect that the CCFL backlight on the LCD screen was the culprit. And the console was huge. I have the official belt pouch and as a teen it reached most of the way down to my knee. The redesign was a bit smaller, but not much.

A lot of the games sucked, but there were some pretty good ones too. Just not enough games overall, I think.

If you have a relatively powerful computer or phone, and your library only contains games from the console's top 100 or so, you're probably right.

According to the author, the giveaway is in support of World Suicide Prevention Day. Also, at least for me, it looks like it actually runs until the 12th, even though the author just said the 10th.

I bought this back in the day, and played it through to the end. I vaguely recall somewhat enjoying it overall, but the strongest impression that I have now is of frequently being bombarded with unrepeatable, dense, plot-critical dialogue (usually from teammates via radio) during intense action scenes when I was busy trying to sneak around, evade, beat up, or have a shootout with multiple enemies simultaneously. This often seemed to be by design, with enemies spawning at the same time the dialogue begins. As a passive viewer watching a show, it's cool when the characters have intense philosophical debates during fights, but as an active player I found it extremely difficult to follow both at the same time. I don't even remember what the story of the game actually was, because I missed so much vital information that I gave up trying to follow it. That was a real disappoment for a big GitS fan.

Also, many of the missions can seem very open initially in terms of how the player can approach them, but quite soon I got the feeling that there's exactly one "right" way through each challenge, and it's up to the player to find it, sometimes with very few hints.

I've tried several times over the years to give it another go, but somehow I never seem to make it past even the first mission before I put it away again.

To flip that around, if you wanted to do a thing just for the sake of doing it, what does it matter if you don't get an achievement for it?