Something I still miss about the old, Ghost-powered version of this blog is the ease of adding images to posts. My favourite thing about Ghost was its two-paned markdown editor, which handled image uploads like this: In the editor pane, type the Markdown syntax for displaying an … | Continue reading
After my previous post, I got to wondering if there were any other ways I could use Markdown render hooks to improve this blog’s appearance and editing experience. One thing that immediately came to mind was syntax highlighting for obscure languages. Hugo uses Chroma for syntax h … | Continue reading
When I moved this blog to Hugo, one of the features that most impressed me was shortcodes. These are little snippets that can be used to add complex formatting and content to posts without having to use raw HTML. For example, instead of pasting in the embed code for a Xweet or Yo … | Continue reading
Recently, I found myself scrolling through a catalogue of in-flight films when the name Bezos caught my eye. Surely enough, it was a biopic about Jeff Bezos and Amazon’s founding. Having greatly enjoyed the recent BlackBerry as well as older films about tech startups such as The … | Continue reading
I published this blog’s first post on 7 April 2014.1 It’s mostly about the different tech stacks I considered and discarded before setting up the initial iteration of the blog on a pre-1.0 version of Ghost.2 Writing that post, I hoped to continue writing additional posts and make … | Continue reading
Substack is platform for creating email newsletters that people pay money to read. The platform was inspired by Ben Thompson’s Stratechery and has largely supplanted Medium as the modern, trendy place to publish. Unlike Medium, it has a clear funding model that doesn’t change eve … | Continue reading
If you’re reading this on a device with a keyboard, press Ctrl+P now. | Continue reading
I first wrote about Stable Diffusion last August, shortly after its initial public release, when Stability AI transformed LLM-based image generation from a black-box gimmick behind a paywall into something that could be used and built on by anyone with a Github account. | Continue reading
The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow is a British folk horror point-and-click adventure game from Cloak and Dagger, published by Wadjet Eye. | Continue reading
The Lost Room is a television miniseries that ran on the Sci-Fi Channel in late 2006 to low ratings and mixed reviews. | Continue reading
Netflix is developing a new adaptation of CS Lewis’s classic children’s fantasy series, The Chronicles of Narnia. | Continue reading
This is a postmortem for Causality Couriers, my entry into Ludum Dare 53. | Continue reading
Now that Causality Couriers has been out for a week or so, it’s time to release the official walkthrough. | Continue reading
After an eight year break, I’ve written another text adventure game for Ludum Dare 53. | Continue reading
It’s been a dry year since my last blogiversary post. I’ve beaten the previous record of only four posts by publishing only two. | Continue reading
I recently took advantage of a Black Friday sale1 to buy myself a new smartphone. This had been a while coming, as my previous phone was on permanent battery saver, had stopped receiving Android updates or even security patches, and was never quite the same since I had to replace … | Continue reading
On the 22nd of this month, Stability.ai released Stable Diffusion, a free, open-source AI tool for generating images from text prompts (and other images). Previously, access to this technology was available through Open AI’s commercial, invite-only DALL-E 2 platform, Midjourney’s … | Continue reading
Between this retrospective and the last one, I’ve published exactly four posts on this blog. Suffice it to say, my attention over the past year has been devoted to other projects. I don’t think that’s a bad thing – my attitude towards blogging has long been to eschew any kind of … | Continue reading
I first discovered Yahtzee Croshaw’s work through his highly acclaimed freeware point-and-click adventure game, 5 Days a Stranger. Being a teenager with an insatiable hunger for freeware adventure games, I soon played through the rest of his catalogue. Having a parallel insatiabl … | Continue reading
Impostor Factory is the third major entry in Freebird Games’s series about helping people with terminal illnesses die happily by altering their memories. I’ve been very positive about the first two entries in previous reviews, and this one continues the trend, though it has a few … | Continue reading
I’ve quoted the story of Master Wq and the Markdown acolyte before on this blog:A Markdown acolyte came to Master Wq to demonstrate his Vim plugin.“See, master,” he said, “I have nearly finished the Vim macros that translate Markdown into HTML. My functions interweave, my parser … | Continue reading
Once upon a time, Ohio University student Alan Schaaf looked out at the state of free image hosting on the internet and saw that it was lacking. The scene was awash with usability disasters like the overcomplicated Photobucket and the steadily deteriorating, ad-infested ImageShac … | Continue reading
And so we mark the seventh year of this blog. Since my last retrospective, I’ve written 14 posts, which seems to be a roughly average pace for this blog and what I basically aim for: very slightly more than one post per month on no particular schedule. I’d prefer to more consiste … | Continue reading
You’re trapped in a prison cell. The walls are concrete, the floor is concrete, and the light comes in through a single small window, which is both barred and completely out of reach. This prison cell, for the sake of the hypothetical, does not have a door. The only furniture in … | Continue reading
“Will the slides be made available?” Such is the cry of the precocious student to the lecturer, intent on studying diligently for their exams.“Does anyone have the slides for that talk?” Such is the plea of the poor unfortunate who missed the talk in question.Both of these petiti … | Continue reading
To call Minecraft the game of the last decade is, if anything, an understatement. Through its sublime combination of an endless box of Lego with a survival game in a procgen world, it has birthed a multiple new genres, inspiring broadly similar games like Terraria and Starbound a … | Continue reading
Long-time readers will notice something different about the footnotes1 in this post. If you’re reading this in fullscreen on a PC, you should see footnotes pop up on the left-hand side of the main text when you click on their references. If you’re reading this in a smaller window … | Continue reading
The attractive cover of Dale Bailey’s In the Night Wood caught my eye in a bookshop, and the blurb on the back prevented me from putting it back on the shelf. This review will contain some spoilers, so if you feel similarly about the cover, go read the book first. It’s quite shor … | Continue reading
When I started this series of posts, I didn’t expect to take a five year break between the second and third entry. In the first article, I covered Vim, which had at that time been my primary editor for about two years. In the second article, I looked at Acme, a fascinating editor … | Continue reading
Between October 2017 and November 2018, I experimented with monetising this website using an opt-in JavaScript cryptominer. The miner code was provided by the now-defunct Coinhive, which managed to attract an enormous amount of negative coverage after it was used to mine cryptocu … | Continue reading
Long-time readers will know that I’m a big fan of RSS feeds. An RSS reader has been essential to my web experience since I first came online, and I’ve doggedly stuck to using them even as the web has centralised onto a few platforms and much digital ink spilt about the “death of … | Continue reading
Scattered around the filesystem of every computer I’ve ever owned, in /home/david and /media/hdd and in C:\ and C:\User\David, I have a number of folders with the following names: Misc Other Stuff Inside each of these folders is a large assortment of files that I’ve either creat … | Continue reading
Most computer keyboards have about 128 keys, which puts some restrictions on the what characters you can directly input. You can’t enter the whole ASCII range using single keys on your keyboard, let alone any of the trillion emoticons in the Unicode standard. There are OS-specifi … | Continue reading
Everyone who’s used a computer operating system (whether Windows, Mac or the more popular desktop Linux distributions) knows what windows are. When your computer starts up, you’re greeted with a blank desktop, and in order to do something with it, you open up one or more applicat … | Continue reading
FaceApp, a phone application that people use to transform photographs of themselves in amusing ways, was recently in the news over various privacy concerns. The story boiled down to this: in order to use an application that edits your photos, you have to give that application acc … | Continue reading
Twitter has recently unveiled a new design for the desktop internet, to widespread condemnation. This is the usual response to website redesigns – see also reddit, Facebook and digg (RIP). In addition to an eye-searingly white new aesthetic, they’ve significantly reduced the func … | Continue reading
I’ve been peripherally aware of the IndieWeb movement for a few years now – mostly because they seem to like RSS almost as much as I do – but I’ve only recently dug into it. In a nutshell, IndieWeb is about using the World Wide Web itself as a social network, through a set of ope … | Continue reading
Google has a proud tradition of shutting down services that become cult classics rather than smash hits. Examples include Google Reader, the Orkut social network and (to a much lesser extent) Google Plus. The latest addition to this hall of fame is Inbox, the app that revolutioni … | Continue reading