Shucon 2009 is on. Watch the webcam!

Quick pointer to two dates for your diaries:
Artfield has been announced for the 6th and 7th of June. Compos other than the standards include Gigascreen pix, 1k procedural graphics, and ZX General Sound compo (well, it's a .MOD compo).
DiHalt is taking place a month later on the 11th and 12th of July. In addition to the standards there's a TurboSound FM compo, in which I hope a few more people will use the AY as well as just the FM part. Makes it sound a little more "ZX", IMHO.
So. Add them to your PDA's, iPhones, and whatever other technology you use to record upcoming events (a pen and paper, you say?!) and get working.

Hidden among the spam I spot an email from Yerzmyey pointing me to DWD Records, where you can grab an album of his music, titled "Interphase", along with some other 8-bit artists' work. Check it out, and enjoy some aural pleasure.

One of the newest Velesoft's projects is a website with all the information about the well known DivIDE interface. You can find here photos, something about history and first prototypes, firmwares, adapters, docs, DivIDE Plus information, emulators supporting DivIDE and many more.

The new ubiktune release is out now. It's a music mix by various artists - C-jeff, Riskej, Key-Jee, MmcM, Factor6, Klim and Trommler: As the cold and gray of winter ebbs, the majesty of nature changes inexorably to spring. The change in the environment brought about a lightness in the hearts of our musicians, who got together with their Spectrums to craft you 9 new musical pieces to help you celebrate the return of spring.
Go here and download the album in both mp3 or Ay_Emul formats!

Sad news. Michal Ovcarov, known as Triton of his own group Spectravision, author of demos Triton Mix 128, Hypnotic World and Unlimited Dream, as well as a never released (?) unique sample playing routine and some CBM's X-Tracker modifications, has died on 2.5.2009 in a motorbike accident. Our condolences to all who knew him.

This is not exactly ZX news, but one could say it's in close touch with ZX scene. Slovakian Zeroteam released their first demo for Amstrad CPC range computers. It's called CPCTro and has attracted attention of many CPC news portals like this or this one. Mikezt did the coding works and Factor6 the rest: music, picture, and charset design. The CPC scene likes us. So let's like the CPC scene.

About a year ago I reported on the news of a Czech Sintech - Sintech being the lovely people who (many years ago) sold me my delicious MB02+. At that time I hinted that there would be a UK shop coming soon - and now it's here: sintech-shop.co.uk.
Good things: Prices in GBP, another place to buy ZX stuff (and so much more besides).
Bad things: I can't make a clever pun on the name like I did before.

SPC (Spectrum & SAM Profi Club) Cologne was a bit quiet for longer than one year, after Wolfgang was unable to continue to edit the magazine. But now I decided to rebirth it, with regular publishing of the club magazine.
There is a new issue of the club magazine, partly english, mainly german, which was created and put online for free: womoteam.de...

Just going through my emails from the last couple days and I spot one from Newart pointing me to his new site ZXPress.ru - it's a library of e-zines and e-papers for the ZX, generally "made in Russia". The downloads are there for a few hundred issues of a variety of 'zines, along with a big collection of articles (around 2000!), in a slightly easier translatable format... that's to say, the ones I've looked at are text - hoorah!