Yerzmyey, being a regular news-hound, has probably told most people about this already, but if you haven't heard yet you can read some thoughts from Factor6 of the recent Zlincon 2003 party. Most interestingly, as Yerz points out, we've pretty much achieved SID-sound on a ZX... albeit using up most of the humble CPU-time. Hmm.
There's also news on the X-Board of the release of Wirne by ZeroTeam. Look out on Demotopia in the next few days.

Here you can find the prototype of Lodo's SpeccyBob with only 6 IC!!! It isn't SpeccyBob but it is only a prototype. It is quick and easy to build it.If you want made it write to me.
http://aticatac.altervista.org/

MacBuster (yep, it's a blank site) has announced a ZX coding competition for you to test your programming prowess. The competition starts tomorrow and lasts two weeks (closing date is November 3^rd), and the task is to convert a Floating Point number into an Integer in Z80 assembler, in the smallest code possible. I don't think there's a prize except for some props from the community.
I just wonder if using ZX ROM Routines is against the rules. Hehe.

I'm not sure if I've mentioned this already and I can't be arsed to check... but a new version of Hrust has been released, with v2.5 bringing a few bugfixes. You can grab this new version from Scenergy.

This will mainly be of interest to those who know how to handle a soldering iron without accidentally setting alight to the house (ie. not me). Over on the PCW King homepage there's an offer of a couple cd's (at only 3ukp) containing the entire website plus a heap o' service manuals and "stuff". Of interest to ZX-fans will be service manuals for the +3/+2b, some issues of ZX User magazine, and... well, whatever else tickles your fancy. Incidentally, it's a good place to go for your +3 spares.

I'm not entirely sure what's changed in the small download pack, but if you head over the Baze's 3SC site you can grab a 17k zipfile containing 21 ay-tunes from the group. Included in the pack are tracks from their ZX demos, a few unreleased tracks, and some compo entries.

As if by magic, another version of ZX-Emul is ready for your enjoyment. Actually it's not magic so much 4 whole days since the last release. Want to know what's new?

Working through the translation of Scenergy we can make out some details of a game-coding competition. I've not spotted any details of it before, but it looks like it's set to end in a couple weeks. There's even a prize-fund of nearly 200 usd. Very nice. Pity I found out a little late. Cry Cry.

Just when I thought the site had disappeared for good I notice (thanks OB) that the Open Source ZX site has moved to a new URL. The same content as before, but it'll require your bookmarks be updated.

A few sites are providing the latest version of Bestview for download. You can grab this handy program from ZXFiles and OB among others. Wanna know what's changed? Well according to OB there's quite a few updates. It can now play Pro Tracker 3.6 tunes (including Vortex Tracker II). It should work better with HTML files (or something - the translation is a little dodgy). And, uhm, there's something about extensions and compressors. Well, Babelfish isn't performing too well tonight.