programmer, musician, person
My partner is screaming. There is a centipede in my bed. It's under the covers, safe in the dark. Skittering over the escape I offer – a card that lifts gently to the window. Is the centipede a metaphor? Is it supposed to provoke a sense of wonder? It's worked: I wonder, why is there a centipede in my bed?
It's been days since an excitingly laptop-shaped parcel arrived at my door and I've already performed the biggest redesign of this website in months. I'll fawn over the new laptop and mourn its predecessor in a future article but suffice to say the ability to work untethered has inspired me to work at all. So, what are the changes? Avid readers will surely have spotted them all, but I'll reveal…
feel indulgent. It's so lovely to take a reset halfway through the day. It's like a nap but more invigorating. Night-time showers are good for sleeping. Morning showers are good for waking. Midday showers are good for relaxing. Maybe I should just shower all day.
preamble My theme for this year is completion . Every one of my friends and family has misinterpreted this in their own way, with their readings ranging from sexual gratification to death. What it actually means is far simpler: I'm going to finish what I start. Well that's quite ironic isn't it? In previous years I've published this annual retrospective on the 2nd of January, so why is this one so…
Twelve tracks spanning eight years Listen online or download .
For a 30-minute B-movie this is hilariously good. I wasn't around for the 80s but this captures the spirit of the media of that time perfectly. I only found this film because my colleagues were discussing which Hackerman (Kung Fury's or Mr Robot's) was better. I can thoroughly recommend this for a quick bit of fun.
Would you look at the time? It's already been a month week since I picked up trumpet ! And what a month week it's been. I successfully played a note and even managed to stop playing a note. (I was worried for a moment that I'd die holding a trumpet. I don't know how I'd live with myself after that.) In all seriousness, I've actually made surprisingly good progress. I've got the first two…
I was doing some standard server maintenance, updating packages et cetera, this morning and thought nothing of seeing an SSH update. I logged out. I could not SSH back in. Talk about stressful. Thankfully, Hetzner have direct terminal access via their online console, so I was able to get in and find the issue. To get to the terminal, visit console.hetzner.com , select Servers and open the relevant…
Back in March I declared that I was going to learn to play the trumpet this year. Six months on I've realised that my ambitions far outreach my available time and energy and have forgiven myself for not making any attempt to achieve my goals by buying a trumpet. Actually, I've rented one from Dawkes – a woodwind and brass specialist superstore in Maidenhead – for the poultry amount of £20 per…
To whom it concerns, STOP FUCKING WITH MY FONT SIZE Frustrated reader ~~~ Despite a familial tendency towards needing glasses, nothing like poor sight or dyslexia affects my reading ability. As a result, the default font size of the vast majority of websites is perfectly serviceable for me. I do happen across sites that want to tell me so much they turn the font size all the way down, sometimes as…
Wondrous. Superman is easily the most enjoyable superhero film I've ever had the pleasure of watching. It is hopeful, human and funny, with a sympathetic villain who poses an existential threat. I watched this with my partner at my local cinema and it made for an excellent night out. We were both excited and inspired afterwards and agreed it was up there with our favourite films. I cannot…
caught me by surprise. It's been recommended to me many times with the warning that it's quite heavy, so I was always apprehensive of picking it up. I needn't have been. While dealing with the topics of drug abuse and other addictions, we develop relationships with some troubled characters. Some of them have redeeming moments, though they tend to be few and far between, which makes the book a…
is a Baroque opera by Handel, presenting the life of Bacchus' mother and maid in Jove's household, Semele. My not-uncle had two spare tickets to the Royal Opera House so my partner and I got a wonderful surprise visit. The music was delightful – I much prefer the Baroque style for operas: the base level interest is so much higher than in recitatives – as was the singing and staging. Spoilers…
The Ministry of Time is a fun sci-fi romance that I enjoyed most for its depictions of loving friends. The anachronisms of its characters are playful and the story hangs together nicely. Well it almost does. It's inevitable for there to be holes when time gets involved. I think the decision not to dwell on it too much was the right one.
This is an eye-opening read as a newcomer to the world of work. It's got me thinking about what I value and how I interact with my colleagues and bosses. I can thoroughly recommend taking on board what it has to say – you're worth it. From a literary perspective, it's clearly written by and for computer nerds. My favourite element is the citations are printed out as short links that take you…
This is an article I wrote for my school's yearly magazine back in 2021, painstakingly transcribed for you. As a music scholar, I remember my brief being write something about music , which is rather broad. I often try to blur the lines between my passions, and this article was no exception, addressing the state of the art in generative music. I clearly tried to keep politics out of my discussion,…
The Phoenix Project comes heavily recommended by my colleagues and is a fun, if preachy, look at what the tech sector can learn from manufacturing. I gobbled this up in a day, finding that many of its mantras I agreed with easily. There's only so much I can take from this into the working world, as someone with negligible power, but attaching vague concepts to strong anecdotes was helpful to…
has been advertised as the most talked of show of 2025 and that's for good reason. My partner introduced this to me, which she immediately regretted when I made her wait to watch each Season 2 episode until I was visiting. I prefer the first season but both take you into a beautiful dystopia that brings a nice twist to some of the more classic tacklings of work-life balance in the genre. It's an…
I was working on an update to the Monument to Stupidity , adding a moderation system to stem the slow ebb of spam, and time came to update the deployed system. I'd set the server up wrong so was having trouble with folder permissions, and a few cheeky chown s weren't doing the trick, so I deleted the repository and recloned it. I performed the necessary setup steps, started the server, loaded up…
To my ever-wonderful partner. It's been over a year since the last check in so I think now is a good time (read: you're bullying me into writing this). You asked me a couple of nights ago how 2025 has been so far and I think the answer is overwhelmingly positive. Work has been rewarding and challenging, with a good dose of learning. It's not quite saving the whales, but helping people watch Peppa…
I leave few footprints. Or, perhaps, I leave few physical footprints. All of my energy currently goes into non-physical creation: music is transient and you can't touch code. I'd like to leave more of an impression upon the world. A beautiful impression, if possible. Not for any reason of legacy because, even if I were interested in that, 22 is too young to care about such a distant future. I just…
This weekend I rented a cloud server from Hetzner for about a fiver a month. The aim is to move to self-hosting wherever I can. I've started off strong by moving (almost) all of my websites to an nginx instance on that server. [to the audience] Does anyone else struggle to remember the intended pronunciation of nginx: engine ex ? I always catch myself saying en jinx . Nginx was surprisingly easy…
This was my first ever visit to Kew Gardens' annual orchid festival , despite being a (semi) regular at the gardens. There were colours everywhere and some very fun animal statues. I can thoroughly recommend for a nice day out :)
Julia is a wonderful retelling of George Orwell's 1984 . It maintains the same plot and world, but adds a new layer of intrigue by approaching the events from a woman's perspective. Most importantly, it gives the women of Airstrip One humanity that is so often lacking in the genre. They gain drive and humour that is overlooked in the original novel.
My partner is currently working towards a BA in music. As someone who enjoyed my music A level and considers themselves a musician, I delight in hearing about what she's been studying and trying to contextualise it with what little I've picked up. It so often enriches my music making with new context, history or analytical understanding. One day we were talking about classical music's difficulties…
Picture the scene: it's just turned 2025 and you've noticed that you've graduated from university, you're four months deep into your first career and you're moving away from your family home of twelve years in just over a day. That all happened fast. 2024 First, a brief retrospective. Last year held many challenges. My final semester of my computer science degree was a tough one, but I stuck it…
minimal notes for minimal people try it out · read the code I take short-form notes all the time. Shopping lists, todos, important dates, ideas, etc. Simple thoughts. Unfortunately, every note app I've ever used has been far too complex. They offer folders, tags, rich text and more and more and more and more. I find all these things get in the way, so I made my own notes app. There are only two…
I've been working on a website called Cassettes : a music player with a twist (I'll pop a link here when I release it). At its core it reads and plays the user's local music collection. All the user has to do is point the site at their music folder and they're off to the races. There's one problem with this though: it's impossible. There are three methods to get access to a directory from a…
I care about writing good, correct code so when tools like Prettier refuse to output spec-compliant code , I get quite annoyed. Especially when the resource I point all new web developers to for learning HTML, MDN , has incorrect code scattered all over it as a result. If you want to know more, I recommend Jake Archibald's article against self-closing tags in HTML . It was this irritation that…
I'm on a train from London to Manchester. I've rewritten my entire portfolio . The lack of an internet connection on my laptop (and my wired earphones that have finally given up after 8 years of service) enabled me to write without worrying about anything else. It was a lovely feeling. I thoroughly recommend.
So we've had 2 months of 2024 already. They really flew by. It's been such a tumultuous time for me that I wanted to do a little check in and think about how I think it's gone. So, that's what I'm doing. 2024 is my Year of Commitment , so I'm trying to balance my energy more effectively between everything I do. In some ways I'm happy with my progress so far, in other ways I'm disappointed. My uni…
Wikipedia lists the pronunciation of "et cetera" and "etc." (and "&c.") as / ɛ t ˈ s ɛ t ə r ə / , which, for those like me who don't know how to read IPA, means the first word, "et", ends in a "t" sound. Why, then, do we encounter / ɛ k ˈ s ɛ t ə r ə / so often in the wild, where the "et" is pronounced "ek"? I don't know – I'm not a linguist. And, let's be real, caring about so-called incorrect…
Next up in my series of things I need to know but always forget is the difference between JavaScript's Element.innerText and Node.textContent . The fundamental difference when reading is textContent rips the text out of anything, no matter what, while innerText is more careful. It returns text as it's visible to the user, so no scripts, styles or stuff hidden by CSS, and with whitespace collapsed.…
Not that 2023 wasn't good – I actually had a whale of a time. Milestones include finishing my second year at uni (and starting my third), asking out my partner and working an internship at Softwire (and being lucky enough to receive a graduate job offer from them). This time last year I decided 2023 would be a "Year of Character", inspired by the video Your Theme by CGP Grey. This meant that…
As noted in my thought New-New-New-Blog , this is the third incarnation of my blog / portfolio space and I've never been more pleased with it. It does justice to everything I hold dear about the web. Well, that's not quite true. This website, despite its simplicity, houses a slew of compromises. As such, it's my mission to continue to test the assumptions on which I base my decisions. The most…
I've never fully understood the difference between the :where and :is CSS selectors so, in the spirit of a random article I read online, I'm sharing my discovery here. :is allows you to represent an or-condition: :is(.class, #id) * selects all elements that are children of .class or #id . :where allows you to represent an or-condition: :where(.class, #id) * selects all elements that are children…
Glowing compliments for daily achievements Try it out · Read the code Why Sometimes I find myself overwhelmed by responsibilities. I find it hard to feel good about myself and the work I'm doing since there's always something left on the list. Celebrate aims to act as a reassuring voice, complimenting you for all the little things you achieve in a day. What Celebrate is the simplest website…
A new music notation system for digital composition with string instruments Try it out Why When music producers write string music, they use the piano roll editor that comes standard with all digital audio workstations (DAWs). While this is good for most music, it leaves something to be desired for strings, so composers often turn to techniques like key-switching that rely on the digital…
I like crosswords. My mum likes crosswords. My mum and I like to complete crosswords together. My mum and I live in different cities. Enter: Colluder – a realtime collaborative crossword website that allows you to complete puzzles with friends all over the world! Create a puzzle, share the link and get solving! interactive crossword clue lists current clue highlights live chat anagram helper This…
Whew. Blog #3. Looks an awful lot like blog #2 doesn't it? I promise you though – it's much better. I started my blogging journey with Jekyll, though I quickly found that too restrictive and clumsy, so I moved to Astro. Astro worked well and gave me complete control but I always spent more time fiddling with the tech than actually writing. As a result, this blog has been elevated to the incredible…