What is 'extreme computing'? It's putting the DIY punk-rock attitude back into a hobby that's gone a bit corporate and dull. It's encouraging people to do things technology wasn't intended to do. To be honest, it's largely a load of the interesting people that we've linked to in Need to Know but never met in person - and now you can too.

Part of the festival is a salute to 20 years of the ZX Spectrum - was that your first computer? Well, before that I had a flat-keyboard, no audio, black and white 1K ZX81, which made the Spectrum something of a revelation. The Spectrum was the So Solid Crew of its day - it was cheap, it was street, and made you cooler than all the posh kids with their BBC Micros.

Did you have a favourite Speccy game? We've got the authors of some of the greats - Chuckie Egg, Meteor Storm, 3D Ant Attack, Wild West Hero - coming to the event, so I can't really pick favourites. But I was always a sucker for anything where you had to jump around the screen collecting arbitrary items.

So is the festival going to be mostly about nostalgia? It is forward-looking too, but focusing on innovative uses of existing technologies instead of just "buy another upgrade and your life will be better". As Orwell put it, "he who controls the past, controls the future" - clearly a big fan of the Terminator films.

What particularly excites you, or disheartens you, about the vision we have at the moment? The folks behind the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and European Union Copyright Directive want to outlaw anything other than officially approved music in controlled formats. Who do they think they are - the Taliban? On the plus side, we've nearly got rid of all those idiot dotcoms - just a few more to go now, and they know who they are.

What's the state of net comedy? The Onion is influential - almost too influential, argues Area Man. And photo manipulation is big with the kids - Shakespeare once classified grades of satirical comment from "the quip modest" to "the reply churlish", to which we must now add "having your head crudely superimposed on the body of an animal".

Anything else you're working on? Possible UK version of Electronic Frontier Foundation. Album of acoustic cover versions of synth-pop classics. Book explaining what the hell NTK was on about for the last five years.

· This event will be at the Camden Centre, London, this Sunday 11am to 7pm.