(no, this isn't a blog post about Joy Division songs) Last time I wrote about Interzone, I was discussing issue #294, the first published under new management in a paperback-sized format ("JB6"). The format and presentation of the magazine was fantastic: it fit in a lot of my po … | Continue reading
I used to ice skate as a teenager but I stopped at University. I tried to pick it back up in 2024 but had to stop when I got ill. I restarted in 2025, initially with a weekly skate session but last month I started group hockey skate lessons. There's not a lot of pics of me s … | Continue reading
I bought a new synth! Kind-of. I've traded my Minilogue-XD (full-size version with integrated keyboard) for the desktop/modular alternative. Modular Minilogue XD Why? Partly, because it fits on my desk better. Partly, because it changes the way you engage with the instru … | Continue reading
First Light box My youngest daughter and I recently started playing the tabletop game HeroQuest. Specifically, the recently-issued, cut-down variant HeroQuest: First Light. This is quite advanced for her age, and I'm a little surprised she's taken to it, but she's really lovi … | Continue reading
It's been ten years since I configured mount on demand backups to reduce the risk of my backups being zapped by mistake. Way back then I wanted to go one step further and use dedicated mount namespaces for backup jobs, but systemd didn't provide the necessary support (and still d … | Continue reading
HMS Blueberry Royals are my favourite ships in No Man's Sky. The HMS Blueberry is not my first Exotic/Royal ship (that was the Gravity Hirakao XVI, and a story for another time). After years of on-off playing, I recently found my first Royal multitool: Blue, with gold detail … | Continue reading
In or around 2014 I bought an iPad Mini (2), and following the normal lifecycle of iOS devices, a major OS update eventually killed it as a useful, general-purpose device: operating it was just too sluggish. It remained useful as a streaming media player for a little while longer … | Continue reading
In January 2025, as a pre-requisite for something else, I published a minimal neovim plugin called nvim-µwiki. It's essentially just the features from vimwiki that I regularly use, which is a small fraction them. I forgot to blog about it. I recently dusted it off and cleaned it … | Continue reading
I was reading a post on alexwlchan's blog1 that referenced the concept of digital gardens, a concept/analogy for organising information which dates back to the 90s. This old concept is getting new traction today by contrasting the approach with "endless stream" as used and abused … | Continue reading
I saw Ladytron perform in Digital, Newcastle last night. The last time I saw them was, I think, at the same venue, 18 years ago. Time flies! Back in the day (perhaps their heyday, perhaps not!) Ladytron ploughed a particular sonic furrow and did it very well. Going into … | Continue reading
my prints kept turning into gunge View of heatblock, with snapped nozzle Oh dear! I've been suffering print reliability issues on my Prusa Mini+ for quite a while, roughly since they introduced Input Shaping (although that might not be the culprit). Whilst trying dif … | Continue reading
When I wrote about the redhat logo in a shell prompt, a commenter said it would be nice to achieve something similar for Debian, and suggested "🍥" (U+1F365 FISH CAKE WITH SWIRL DESIGN) which, in some renderings, looks to have a red swirl on top. This is not bad, but I tho … | Continue reading
Mathmos had a sale on spare Lava lamp bottles around Christmas, so I bought a couple of new-to-me colour combinations. The lamp I have came with orange wax in purple liquid, which gives a strong red glow in a dark room. I bought blue wax in purple liquid, which I t … | Continue reading
I want to get back into the habit of blogging, but I've struggled. I've had several ideas of topics to try and write about, but I've not managed to put aside the time to do it. I thought I'd try and bash out a one-take, stream-of-conciousness-style post now, to get back into the … | Continue reading
FOSDEM 2026 was great! I hope to blog a proper postmortem in due course. But for now, The video of my talk is up, as are my slides with speaker notes and links. | Continue reading
I'm going to FOSDEM 2026! I'm presenting in the Containers dev room. My talk is Java Memory Management in Containers and it's scheduled as the first talk on the first day. I'm the warm-up act! The Java devroom has been a stalwart at FOSDEM since 2004 (sometimes in other forms), … | Continue reading
No man’s Sky (or as it’s known in our house, "spaceship game") is a space exploration/sandbox game that was originally released 10 years ago. Back then I tried it on my brother‘s PS4 but I couldn’t get into it. In 2022 it launched for the Nintendo Switch1 and the game finally cli … | Continue reading
Via (I think) @mcc on the Fediverse, I learned of GetMusic: a sort-of "clearing house" for Free Bandcamp codes. I think the way it works is, some artists release a limited set of download codes for their albums in order to promote them, and GetMusic help them to keep track of tha … | Continue reading
We’re currently thinking of renovating our study/home office. I’ll likely write more about that project. Embarking on it reminded me that I’d taken a photo of the state of it nearly a year ago and forgot to post it, so here it is. Home workspace, January 2025 When I too … | Continue reading
My Remarkable tablet, displaying my 2025 planner. During my PhD, on a sunny summer’s day, I copied some papers to read onto an iPad and cycled down to an outdoor cafe next to the beach. armed with a coffee and an ice cream, I sat and enjoyed the warmth. The only problem was t … | Continue reading
It's done! It's over! I've graduated, I have the scroll, I'm staring at the eye-watering prices for the official photographer snap, I'm adjusting to post-thesis life. My PhD thesis revisions have been accepted and my thesis is now available from Newcastle University Library's eT … | Continue reading
When I started looking at synths again, I had a feeling I would want to record from them, and ideally not with a computer. To that end, I also bought a second-hand standalone multitrack recorder, the Zoom R8. It's a little desktop console with two inputs, a built-in mic … | Continue reading
It occurred to me recently that one of the attractions of vinyl, or more generally physical media, could be that it's inert, safe: the music is a groove cut into some plastic. That's it. The record can't do anything unexpected to you1: it just contains music. Safe. Ther … | Continue reading
Since it's spooky season, let me present to you the FrankenKeyboard! 8bitdo retro keyboard For some reason I can't fathom, I was persuaded into buying an 8bitdo retro mechanical keyboard. It was very reasonably priced, and has a few nice fun features: built-in bluetooth … | Continue reading
There's a new Nine Inch Nails album! That doesn't happen very often. There's a new Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross soundtrack! That happens all the time! For the first time, they're the same thing. The new one, Tron: Ares, is very deliberately presented as a Nine Inch Nails album, a … | Continue reading
Life can sometimes be tricky, and it's useful to know that there are some simple things to take pleasure from. Amongst them for me are lava lamps. At some point in the late 90s, my brother and I somehow had 6 lavalamps between us. I'm not sure what happened to them (and the gal … | Continue reading
For my birthday I was gifted copies of Eno's last two albums, Luminal and Lateral, both of which are collaborations with Beatie Wolfe. Let's start with the art. I love this semi-minimalist, bold style, and how the LP itself (in their coloured, bio-vinyl variants) feels l … | Continue reading
Matthew blogged about his Amiga CDTV project, a truly unique Amiga hack which also manages to be a novel Doom project (no mean feat: it's a crowded space) This re-awakened my dormant wish to muck around with my childhood Amiga some more. When I last wrote about it (four years ago … | Continue reading
(You wait ages for an archiving blog post and two come along at once!) Between 1969-2019, the Newcastle University School of Computing published a Technical Reports Series. Until 2017-ish, the full list of individually-numbered reports was available on the School's website, as we … | Continue reading
I recently learned that, about 6 months ago, the Debian webteam deleted all news articles from the main website older than 2022. There have been several complaints from people in and outside of Debian, notably Joe Brockmeier of LWN, and this really sad one from the nephew of a de … | Continue reading
On July 7th I did a quick one-day trip to Paris to watch Nine Inch Nails, who were performing one of their last shows for the European leg of the tour. I'd missed all the UK dates, which were announced after I was committed to a family holiday. The setup for these shows differs a … | Continue reading
On Monday I had my Viva Voce (PhD defence), and passed (with minor corrections). Post-viva refreshment It's a relief to have passed after 8 years of work. I'm not quite done of course, as I have the corrections to make! Once those are accepted I'll upload my thesis here. | Continue reading
I've been refreshing myself on the low-level guts of Linux container technology. Here's some notes on mount namespaces. In the below examples, I will use more than one root shell simultaneously. To disambiguate them, the examples will feature a numbered shell prompt: 1# for the f … | Continue reading
Orbital at NX, Newcastle in 2023 I'm on a bit of an Orbital kick at the moment. Last year they re-issued their 1991 debut album with 43 extra tracks. Later this month they're doing the same for their 1993 sophomore album. I thought I'd try to narrow down some tracks to recommend. … | Continue reading
I’ve been using Procmail to filter mail for a long time. Reading Antoine’s blog post procmail considered harmful, I felt motivated (and shamed) into migrating to something else. Luckily, Enrico's shared a detailed roadmap for moving to Sieve, in particular Dovecot's Sieve impleme … | Continue reading
I didn't buy the Arturia Microfreak or the Behringer Model-D; I bought a Korg Minilogue XD. Korg Minilogue XD, and Zoom R8 I wanted an all-in-one unit which meant a built-in keyboard. I was keen on analogue oscillators, partly for the sound, but mostly to ensure that most of the … | Continue reading
Last year I intended to write an update on my use of hledger, but that was waylaid for various reasons and I need to revisit how (if) I'm using it, so that's put off for longer. I do want to mention one contribution I made upstream: a dark theme for the UI, and some unfinished wo … | Continue reading
Today I submitted my PhD thesis, 8 years since I started (give or take). Next step, Viva. Normal service may resume shortly… | Continue reading
For my PhD, my colleagues/collaborators and I built a distributed stream-processing system using Haskell. There are several other Haskell stream-processing systems. How do they compare? First, let's briefly discuss and define streaming in this context. Structure and Interpretatio … | Continue reading
I wanted to follow new content posted to Printables.com with a feed reader, but Printables.com doesn't provide one. Neither do the other obvious 3d model catalogues. So, I started building one. I have something that spits out an Atom feed and a couple of beta testers gave me some … | Continue reading
I've just passed my 10th anniversary of starting at Red Hat! As a personal milestone, this is the longest I've stayed in a job: I managed 10 years at Newcastle University, although not in one continuous role. I haven't exactly worked in one continuous role at Red Hat either, but … | Continue reading
I'm going to FOSDEM 2025! As usual, I'll be in the Java Devroom for most of that day, which this time around is Saturday. Please recommend me any talks! This is my shortlist so far: no more boot loader: boot using the Linux kernel aerc, an email client for the discerning hacker S … | Continue reading
Happy 20th birthday, dsafilter! dsafilter is a mail filter I wrote two decades ago to solve a problem I had: I was dutifully subscribed to debian-security-announce to learn of new security package updates, but most were not relevant to me. The filter creates a new, summarizing ma … | Continue reading
I thought it had been a full year since I last shared a playlist, but it's been two! I had a plan to produce more, but it seems I haven't. Instead here's a few tracks I've discovered recently which share a common theme. In August I stumbled across a Sound on Sound video interview … | Continue reading
I was interested in learning about htmx, so I used it to improve the experience of posting comments on my blog. It seems much of modern web development is structured around having a JavaScript program on the front-end (browser) which exchanges data encoded in JSON asynchronously … | Continue reading
A gift from my brother. Coincidentally I’ve had John Carpenter’s “Halloween” echoing around my my head for weeks: I’ve been deconstructing it and trying to learn to play it. | Continue reading
Whilst researching what synth to buy, I learned of the Behringer1 Model-D2: a 2018 clone of the 1970 Moog Minimoog, in a desktop form factor. Behringer Model-D In common with the original Minimoog, it's a monophonic analogue synth, featuring three audible oscillators3 , Moog's fa … | Continue reading
Russell wrote a great comment on my last post (thanks!): What benefits do these things offer when a general purpose computer can do so many things nowadays? Is there a USB keyboard that you can connect to a laptop or phone to do these things? I presume that all recent phones have … | Continue reading