Hi! I’m Andrew Spode. I spent nearly a decade as a technology journalist specialising in testing and evaluating computer components for some of the UK’s biggest titles. Twenty years later, I’m now working closely with e-waste suppliers to find and refurbish those same items so I can sell them on eBay to support myself and the retro community.

It therefore felt fitting to revive this website and the Spode’s Abode brand, so that I can share my experiences and knowledge with those that might need it, and help archive what I can before it is lost forever.

As such, I regularly contribute photography and BIOS dumps to TheRetroWeb and CD/Floppy images to archive.org.

I’m also known for my time as a mountain bike trials rider, a software engineer, and a singer, with my most popular song unfortunately being “Fluffy Little Dog” with over 30 million streams. However, I won’t be focussing on these topics here.

Me testing graphics cards around 2004 for Computer Shopper Magazine.

As a teenager, Spode’s Abode was run out of my bedroom, but I quickly found myself writing for a number of publications in the UK and had content syndicated around the world.

I cut my teeth at Computer Shopper, the highest selling computer magazine in the UK, before writing for many other titles such as Custom PC (where I also wrote their benchmark suite, aptly dubbed “SpodeMark”), The Inquirer (where I had a regular column) and TrustedReviews, where I was Technical Editor in 2006.

I was extremely fortunate to be in the midst of an incredibly exciting period of computing as the first GPUs made their way to the market and shaped what we see today.

There’s not much to be found of my technology journalism days online anymore, as when I moved my career forward I spent quite some time having content or bylines removed due to the confusion it was causing. I still have some backups of the original site, but for now, that’s where they will stay…