The personal blog of Antony F.
My Silly Handheld Computer So I found myself with a 16GB Raspberry Pi CM5 Lite in search of a purpose. I’d been looking for something ultraportable that I could take to work, get a little writing done on the train and during breaks. Up to now I’ve been using my phone with a compact Bluetooth keyboard for this purpose, but frankly the experience left a lot to be desired. Enter the Clockwork Pi…
One Album for each Year of my Life I saw a bloke I follow on Mastodon, Jake, do this and decided it was far too good an idea to leave unstolen. In fairness, he also nicked the idea off someone else. This took me a while to put together. I primarily listen to music that came out before I was born, so I had to really go digging through some online lists and listen to a lot of new-to-me music to fill…
The Slump It’s been a minute since I posted here. Sorry about that, been busy with a few things. Largely good things. But time consuming. I’ve now shuffled a few bits around and should be able to squeeze more writing and drawing in, so I’ll be further polluting the internet with my ramblings in short order. I’ve got a post almost ready to go, in fact. In case anyone is wondering what I’ve been up…
A Simple Rofi Script to Control Cmus Just a short one. I found this useful, so I’m putting it here for when I inevitably forget about it. Perhaps someone else will get some value out of it. I use cmus as my music player on my OpenBSD laptop. One irksome habit I’ve developed is throwing the terminal in which it’s playing into the shadow realm and struggling to find it to pause my music when my…
Gemini Takes Flight I finally got around to putting a version of this site on the Gemini protocol. I’ve had my other site on there for some time, but with this one I was concerned about all the images and such. Still, it was altogether pretty quick once I actually sat down to do it. I’m not sure how well-known the Gemini protocol is these days. I think Google releasing a chat bot under that name…
I’ve Been Reading: Straw World and Other Echoes From The Void, by Erik McHatton Have you ever looked around at the world and thought, this all feels so fake? Have you ever felt as though the plotline of your life is a sick game being played by a compassionless cretin? Have you ever learned something that’s shaken the foundations of your view on reality, an idea that you wish you could forget? Oh…
Site Updates (January 2026) Hello lovelies. Just a quick one from me today, little updates on the site and some ideas for moving forwards. So I finally got around to finishing the link previews . I’d started doing them with Folie À 00000010 but had been too lazy to go back and add them to older posts and the various other pages like links and home. That’s done now. I also changed the buttons…
Glimpsing The Black Shuck My son is now three. He’s taken to staging little traffic accidents with his toy cars. I’m sure this is typical of toddler lads, but I can’t help but feel a twinge of sadness whenever it happens. There’s a part of me that wonders if his preoccupation is a product of how central my accident was to his first few years. One thing I’m quite certain of is that the accident is…
I’ve Been Reading: Shoot Me In The Face On A Beautiful Day, by Emma E. Murray I finally got around to finishing this one after taking a break while my brain adjusted to working without antipsychotics (I got properly weaned off under medical supervision, nothing to worry about). My ability to focus was just not there at all for a period of almost two months, which has resulted in me falling far…
My CWM Config on OpenBSD In the latest entry in my series where I answer questions nobody asked, here I’ll explain my cwm configuration for my OpenBSD machine. For those unfamiliar, cwm is the Calm Window Manager. It’s part of the OpenBSD base distribution as one of the native window managers, along with an old version of fvwm and the venerable twm. It’s pretty simple but surprisingly powerful, a…
Blog Tags! I have realised that I didn’t put up a post letting my dear hypothetical readers know about a shiny new feature I bodged into existence for this site last month. Please forgive me. I’ve added tags to the blog index page. This means if you want to just see my posts about books/reading, click that tag and everything else will disappear. It’s JavaScript dependent, so I’m afraid it won’t…
Nefarious Narratives on the Net 'Tis the season for horror lit Once again, Spooky Season is upon us. This is my favourite time of year, the temperatures are low enough for me to wear lots of heavy clothes and the sky is much less bright which means I don’t need sunglasses. And also, scary stories. Whether film, audio, or text, I’m a horror freak. I’m currently re-listening to The Magnus Archives…
Daily Driving OpenBSD I first tried OpenBSD when 7.4 was the newest version, about a year and a half ago. It didn’t immediately take, but I found myself back there with version 7.5 and it’s been my main OS ever since. It’s a bit of a niche choice, so I thought it’d be fun to write a little about my thoughts on this fishy little operating system now that it’s been about a year of using it. Bloop...…
Am I Autistic? This is the second entry in a series of blog posts where I answer personal questions that nobody actually asked. This time around, I’m failing before I start by answering a question that I have actually been asked of me many, many times. Are you autistic? Yep. Specifically, I’m the proud bearer of a diagnosis of Autistic Spectrum Disorder (without cognitive impairment or speech…
I’ve Been Reading: Pushing Daisy by Christopher O’Halloran Published by Lethe Press I’ve been busy as of late, so I’m writing this a few weeks after finishing the book in question. Though I must assure you, hypothetical reader, that this has nothing to do with the book itself. I really quite enjoyed it and it’s great to see Chris’ long-form work. He’s written a few shorts that really struck me.…
Moving to Codeberg Felt like scribbling today Recently I moved my active repositories from Github to Codeberg. It’s been a pretty smooth process. The migration tool works a treat. For the time being, I’m still pushing to both copies of the repos in question, not sure whether I’ll keep that up long-term. You can take a look at my Codeberg profile here. Right now there’s just the html and gemtext…
Folie À 00000010 Recently, I’ve found myself quite interested in the phenomenon known as AI psychosis. It’s gaining a little steam in the collective consciousness as more and more people fall prey to the madness resident within a voice that lacks a soul. While I’m not an expert in either tech or insanity, I am an enthusiastic hobbyist in both domains. I’m aiming to lay out my thoughts on the…
Adding a Theme Switcher I’ve written a few lines of JavaScript in order to allow people who like light themes (for some reason) to view this site in their preferred (caustic, blinding) way. There’s a button right at the top of the page, press it and you’ll see a much lighter version of my humble blog. While far from the most complex code I’ve written, I’m not a developer of any sort so I’m gonna…
Why Are There Doodles In Every Blog Post? In the first of a series of posts answering questions nobody has actually asked, I thought I’d address the fact that I put my incredibly amateurish drawings in every post. This’ll be a short one, there’s really not much to it. Once upon a time, I was in a pretty bad road accident. I’ll leave the gory details for another time but I was messed up in many…
Web Wanderings 1: A Few Cool Pages I've Found The Online Safety Act in action. We're living in Interesting Times. This is hardly news, but it's at the forefront of my mind. The UK government seems intent on hiding everything even slightly controversial (far from being just porn, anything 'mature' can be age gated – including news about the Israel-Gaza conflict, for example) from its citizens…
Farewell to the Prince of Darkness On the 22nd of this month, Ozzy Osbourne died at home, surrounded by his family. He got 76 years, which is a pretty good run for a guy who used to bite the heads off animals while performing heavy metal music off his tits on coke. If I sound irreverent, please excuse me. I’m more impressed than anything. Ozzy had a special place in my life. When I was a kid, old…
I’ve Been Reading: Portraits of Decay by Carson Winter This was a fun one (insofar as bleak, nihilistic weird horror can really be said to be ‘fun,’ anyway). While reading Portraits, I was concurrently working my way through Corpsemouth and Other Autobiographies by the esteemed (deservedly so) John Langan, and it’s my humble opinion that the two books make a lovely pair of bedfellows. After…
I’ve made the decision to relaunch my blog. This time around, I’m doing plain static pages rather than a Django application. I don’t need the extra features and I’m on a bit of a simplicity kick right now. So why am I remaking the thing from scratch rather than use the one I already had? Basically just because I needed something to get excited about and building it up from scratch sounds like more…