Recent content on drisc.io
Spent a wonderful week in Spain with my Uncle and his family on my first proper holiday outside the UK in years. I have been wanting to travel more and this was a good first trip. There was another purpose to the trip though, for years I’ve wanted to see a total solar eclipse, it’s been on my bucket list forever and today I finally checked it off. Absolutely incredible.
It’s too damn hot again, if this is Spring then I’m dreading Summer this year. I have a portable air-con unit at least but that restricts me to one room. My cycle commute has also suffered since we don’t have access to the showers at work and riding in for the afternoon shift would leave me a stinky goblin for the duration.
After over a month of waiting for the voucher to appear in my email I finally have my new bike. I took it out for a test ride on Friday and ended up going all the way to the nearest town in a 15.5 KM loop. I was not expecting to go so far but the assist on the bike made it a much easier ride. On Saturday I decided to see how long it would take to get to work. That ended up at about 30 minutes…
Due to world events petrol has become a pricy proposition recently, I don’t really go anywhere other than work and it still is hitting my pocket. I live about 6 miles from my workplace and have been meaning to get back on my bike for a while now. A 12 mile round trip doesn’t sound that bad but I am woefully out of shape since I sit behind a desk most of the day so I’ll need to…
Over the past 6 months I haven’t really used my iPad Pro for anything, trying to do any coding tasks on it was a chore and required external services or hardware. It is great for media consumption and playing iOS games but not great for sitting in a coffee shop to work on code (yes, I know this is a cliché). So, when the MacBook Neo was announced I decided to price out what a trade-in would…
Today I fulfilled a childhood dream, I got to see a rocket launch in person and go to Kennedy Space Centre. Woke up at 4am and drove an hour from my hotel over to Port Canaveral and saw Crew-12 lift off, the sound was unlike anything I’ve ever heard. I couldn’t stop smiling when I saw the gas halo when the stages separated. Didn’t get to see Core B1101 (the Falcon 9 booster)…
It’s been a while since I started moving my site to Hugo. I didn’t want to change my sites style so I recreated it as a Hugo theme. There is also a little web editor for it as well, written in Go. It’s basic but it really works well and I learned a lot putting it together. I didn’t want to deal with databases for user management though so I set it up with pocket-id which…
I like using my iPad on the go. If I’m going into town for the afternoon then I don’t want to lug my 16" laptop in a big bag, I prefer my over the shoulder sling with just a couple of things to keep it as light as possible. To that end I finally saved up and got the Magic Keyboard case for my model. It has effectively transformed my iPad into a laptop, right down to the track pad and…
I’ve hosted my site on Linode for years at this point and haven’t updated Ubuntu from 18.04 in all that time. Since I’m hosting very small simple apps I decided to give Alpine Linux a try since all I need is something docker containers. A friend of mine also convinced me to give Ansible a go rather than setting it all up manually which is probably a good idea since it gives me a…
Did a lot of work on my site redesign today, after going way to far in the minimal direction I have added CSS Grid back to the site to display images and my wiki entries in a much nicer way on supported browsers. I have worked to setup the Hugo template in such a way that the generated HTML is formatted well for older browsers to view the content without any issues.
I recently started participating in the Peak Streak event on RetroAchievements. It involves obtaining a game “Mastery” every day for as long as you can, with event badges that can be earned at 30 days and 100 days. I’m a pretty forgetful person especially when it comes to gaming each day so I wanted to make something to help me keep track and show me what I have done that day to…
I had ideas about creating a new static site generator in C a few years ago and got decently far into it but it eventually fell by the wayside. Eventually I just stopped updating my site at all and it’s been sat in the same state for a couple of years. Well no longer! I moved the entire thing over into Hugo and I am working on expanding it now that I have a better base to build on.
Today was the final test of my apprenticeship. After an intense 3 months of report writing to get everything in on time I had a Teams meeting with an assessor which drew from the reports to make sure that I could articulate the criteria they were looking for. I feel like I did very well at hitting all the points on the questions that were asked and that I was able to relate all the information…
I didn’t manage my health very well and ended up in hospital this past week. High blood sugar mixed with exhaustion caused me a ride in an ambulance which lead to a week laid up with things stuck in my arms. I’ve set up better monitoring on my phone for my sugar levels as well as sharing the data with other people so they can check in occasionally and kick me if I start falling off my…
Yesterday was my last day of college. After four years of day-release from my job as part of my apprenticeship I’ve achieved all the units and will receive my Level 3 qualification. I still have apprenticeship coursework to complete so this isn’t the final stop on this journey but I can see the station from here.
I’m close to the end of my apprenticeship now, just a couple of months and I will be free from exams and coursework, back to simply doing my job and being able to work on side projects without a school deadline of some kind poking my brain. It has been a long way to get here, 4 years, but I have a job at the end of it. I’m planning to visit my friends oversees for the first time in 5…
I’m still kicking, been busy with work and playing video games. In my final year of college as well which means the home stretch for my apprenticeship, once it is done I have a job lined up with the place as they want to keep me on after my training is completed. It is a major relief as otherwise I would have had to find another place to take me on and that would have involved me moving…
Been a while since I updated my journal. Since the last entry I have stopped work on my retro PC until I can find Low Density RAM for it, it also need the ISA expansion card which I was not able to win on eBay. Work has picked up again and college is tougher this time around thanks to the A-level Maths course that accompanies the engineering units, I was always bad at indices and sequential…
Had a bit of a break from working on programming things to sort out my house. DIY takes a while, especially when you are doing it in between going to work. I had a week off in the middle of August but spent the time doing almost nothing as I needed some to time to just sit down and relax after the first half of the year. I start my next college year in about a week which is exciting, after 2 years…
I stumbled across this video several days ago and have been consumed with the idea of learning how to write my own PlayStation games ever since. I’ve got a Windows 98 VM set up and some basic written but now I’m looking at finding the DTL-H2000 ISA cards and a system to put them into so that I have what would have actually been used in 1999 to create and test PS1 code. Aside from being…
My static site generator written in C is coming along finally. I have a way to build pages from files that contain content and a way to insert dynamic information such as edit times into those pages. The next hurdle is building a dynamic index page. I want the index to build itself from a mix of pages such as the latest journal page and updated wiki entries. It should also have a link to the…
I hadn’t played RuneScape for a good 13 years until yesterday when I decided to try out Old School RuneScape to scratch a nostalgia itch in my brain. It’s like I’m in primary school again working my way up to being able to fight the dragon in the last free quest…except this time I have my own money and can actually pay for a membership. There is so much of OSRS that I…
Ghost, my dwarf hamster, passed away today. I got him just after I started my apprenticeship as a companion, I’d always wanted to take care of a hamster and he was amazing. Such a little character, you can read more about him here. Night night, hammy boy. An image of a white hamster, Ghost, asleep in in a white and green wheel
Spent a couple of hours sticking acoustic dampening tiles to the ceiling of the workshop, it has helped reduce the echo a lot in there which is good because I plan to record readings of short stories. I’ve also stuck a few behind the monitors to stop reflective echo from that direction.
I’ve had a near constant stream of coursework and questions to complete for the past 2 years so it will be nice to have a couple of weeks of not needing to worry about it before I start the next 2 year course. Slowly adding more pages to my site and wiki, I need to redesign the index page for both the home page and the wiki. The blog index page follows the HTML Blog format and looks fine for…
Yesterday I got to meet the cat that I will be adopting. Her name is Wump, named for a sidekick to my Tabaxi D&D character. It took around an hour but she got used to me and felt comfortable enough to fall asleep while I was holding her. She is the biggest of the litter but still tiny, around 5 weeks old. Wump at 5 weeks old, standing on a hardwood floor In other news, I have been having…
I’m not good with heat. Spent the past couple of days in a tired stupor, I haven’t been able to sleep at night due to the heat in the UK hitting 40°C. Hitting the hay as soon as I get back from work helps since it’s not the hottest part of the day yet but by the time I get to work the next day I’ve already been awake for 9 hours. I prefer the cold since you can bundle up to…
I’ve been at my new house almost two years now and while I have my own space again after several years not being able to fully unpack, it is only one room. My hobbies such as books, video games and building electronics couldn’t all occupy the same space without getting in the way of each other. So I decided to change that. I built a room for myself in the garage. The plan was simple,…
I finally wrote a blog post, I’ve been meaning to start writing stuff for years now but always put it off. Well not anymore! It’s about the build of my office/workshop in my garage . I’m pretty proud of how it has turned out so far, still more to do though. Next I need to build shelving and storage.
Found a box of cables in the back of a closet today, it contained gems such as Parallel cables, VGA to S-Video adapters and an actual FireWire 800 DV-Cam cable. These will be useful in a couple of upcoming Arduino projects I have planned and it means that I don’t have to trawl eBay for old cables. Another box contained a bunch of old tapes that I made when I was 11 with a friend of mine. He…
Spent today on the late shift at work, not much to do since everything my team is responsible for had the courtesy to not break so I got on with some of my outstanding college work. Should be done with it by the end of next week, only 64 questions to go… On a related note, I’m so used to using :wq to save and exit documents that I find myself using it in programs like Sublime Text and…
I love the weekend, it means I can sleep until midday if I want. After catching some good ZZZ I moved some furniture around since the gerbil tank is no longer taking up space. The hallway looks more open now that it’s not sitting on the dresser. Wrote and submitted a very short story to the Fantomes zine . It has elements of a larger story I would like to tell at some point but what I…
I picked up my copy of The C Programming Language for the first time in a year, cloned Alchemists git repo and sat down to look at it again. Within 20 minutes I had the index page built. I want to keep using Stylus for my CSS pre-processing so I’ll have to either find a library for that or write one to parse it. I don’t think I can keep using Pug for templates though and I didn’t…
Spent some time going through the CSS of the Merveilles Town theme and adding to it, will probably push the changes tomorrow or this weekend after I’ve finished more college work. Said goodbye to my sisters gerbils today, I’ve been looking after them for about one and a half years while she worked at a resort, they didn’t allow pets in the on site accommodation so I took them in.…
Started writing up a blog post on a project that I’ve been working on for the last month. If I’d known about Neon Kiosk earlier I probably would have journald it, but as it stands a full post is both more practical for linking purposes and so that I don’t dump a wall of text and images on the Kiosk. I’ve finished College for another year, yet the work continues as I have…
I found out about The Neon Kiosk today and decided to restructure and publish some of my journal entries in the correct format for it. I’ll slowly go back though my physical journal and fill out the archive. The included info will probably change over time but I plan to add the books I’m reading and the games I’m playing at each entry after this. My website is still running on…