I have a problematic relationship with keys. Well, that's not true. I have a problematic relationship with key rings. For some reason, my pockets are a violently hostile environment for things I put in them. I don't really understand why this is, but it's true. Keyrings bend out … | Continue reading
In a land far away, there were two brothers, two plumbers. To preserve their anonymity, we'll call them... Mario and Luigi. Their mother, a kind and friendly woman, and their father, a man with (by the laws of averages and genetics) a truly gargantuan moustache, raised them both … | Continue reading
There’s a YouTube channel called Clickspring, run by an Australian bloke called Chris who is a machinist: a mechanical engineer with a lathe and a mill and all manner of little tools. I am not a machinist — at school I was fairly inept at what we called CDT, for Craft Design and … | Continue reading
Discord have changed the way bots work quite a few times. Recently, though, they built a system that lets you create and register “slash commands” — commands that you can type into the Discord chat and which do things, like /hello — and which are powered by “webhooks”. That is: w … | Continue reading
What’s-a matter you? Hey! Gotta no respect? What-a you t’ink you do, why you look-a so sad? It’s-a not so bad, it’s-a nice-a place Shaddap Your Face, Joe Dolce (If you just want to know about how to make your own Matter device in software and don’t want to read a whole story t … | Continue reading
A few days ago I had an interesting maths thought which I dropped on Mastodon: Today’s interesting maths problem to think about: what is the largest total from a correct maths equation which uses any number of +*- symbols, one =, and the digits from 0-9 once each? For example, if … | Continue reading
So, Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves, which I have just watched. I have some thoughts. Spoilers from here on out! Up front I shall say: that was OK. Not amazing, but not bad either. It could have been cringy, or worthy, and it was not. It struck a reasonable balance betwe … | Continue reading
In 1701, Asano Naganori, a feudal lord in Japan, was summoned to the shogun’s court in Edo, the town now called Tokyo. He was a provincial chieftain, and knew little about court etiquette, and the etiquette master of the court, Kira Kozuke-no-Suke, took offence. It’s not exactly … | Continue reading
Hotlinking, in the context I want to discuss here, is the act of using a resource on your website by linking to it on someone else’s website. This might be any resource: a script, an image, anything that is referenced by URL. It’s a bit of an anti-social practice, to be honest. E … | Continue reading
Twitter currently has problems. Well, one specific problem, which is the bloke who bought it. My solution to this problem has been to move to Mastodon (@sil@mastodon.social if you want to do the same), but I’ve invested fifteen years of my life providing twitter.com with free con … | Continue reading
Some posts are written so there’s an audience. Some are written to be informative, or amusing. And some are literally just documentation for me which nobody else will care about. This is one of those. I’ve moved phone network. I’ve been with Three for years, but they came up with … | Continue reading
Friends and enemies, attendees of Tech Mids 2022. Don’t read off the screen. If I could offer you only one piece of advice for why and how you should speak in public, don’t read off the screen would be it. Reading your slides out is guaranteed to make your talk boring, whereas th … | Continue reading
So, I made a game. It’s called Farmbound. It’s a puzzle; you get a sequence of farm things — seeds, crops, knives, water — and they combine to make better items and to give you points. Knives next to crops and fields continually harvest them for points; seeds combine to make crop … | Continue reading
As has been mentioned here before the UK regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority, are conducting an investigation into mobile phone software ecosystems, and they recently published the results of that investigation in the mobile ecosystems market study. They’re also focu … | Continue reading
I invented a solitaire card game. I was thinking about solo roleplaying, and the Carta SRD stuff I did for Borealis, and I was thinking about the idea of the cards forming the board you’re playing on and also being the randomness tool. Then I came up with the central mechanic of … | Continue reading