Favourite photos of 2025
2025 is a story about travel around Southern England and Wales, from the Jurassic coast of Dorset to the south west of Devon and Cornwall, and the Pembrokeshire coast. Beaches, Castles, Cliffs, Industry.
ManiacalRobot / VAR
Variable length data from the Maniacal Robot
Latest posts
A Tmux config walk through
Tmux is a tool that I depend on daily. It is a cornerstone of my development environment. But it was not always like that, for years I only scratched the surface in what it could do. Recently I've invested some time sharpening the touch points. If I'm going to be critical of tmux, the out-of-the-box experience with the default configuration presents a challenge. keyboard bindings are far from…
Release: Tmux-Lattice
Tmux is an amazing productivity tool. Tmux has powerful session/window/pane management. You know what tmux has been missing from the start … a command to equalise the pane layout pf the current window! Vim has ctrl w + = to automatically resize all the open buffers, and now tmux has tmux-lattice . Mapped to prefix + = , the command recursively loops through all the panes, and auto resizes them to…
Developer Happiness
Does a programming language built around the idea of developer happiness, work in a world of AI coding agents, especially if the developer is not the primary writer of the code anymore? The Ruby Programming language was first released by Matz in the 1990s with the primary goal of developer happiness. My first interaction with Ruby came around 2006, I was interviewing with a company that had…
3x10k challenge
For 2026, I'll be attempting the 3x10k challenge, that is: 1 Year 10,000 Push Ups 10,000 Sit Ups 10,000 Squats This averages to around 28 reps of each exercise every day. Sounds easy right? Push ups are probably my strongest exercise, provided I can eke up the will power to do the reps everyday, I'm not expecting too many issues here, and should hopefully be able to complete the 10k reps and many…
Building my own window manager with Raycast
Window managers seem to be a hot topic again, but as Mac users, we always get to miss out on the latest innovations from the linux world. For those of us on Mac or Windows, managing windows has stayed consistent for many years. Apple has tried to bring innovation withe Stage Manager in 2022, but for me, this is not an effective tool for my workflow. Tiling window managers are currently the goto…
Leveling up productivity
Being productive with the tools we use everyday takes time, a lot of time. At first, just learning about all the features is overwhelming, but as we spend more time, we can start to progress our skills from manually performing actions, to being able to quickly search , and finally having muscle memory to use shortcuts . 1: Manual When starting, everything will be manual. Manually doing anything is…
Release: Tmux Devcontainers plugin
After a few months in development and local testing, it's now time to formally go live with a Tmux plugin that I have been building in my spare time. tmux-devcontainers is a Tmux plugin to: Show the status of the devcontainers for the current workspace A menu that provides quick access to common commands like starting/restarting/removing devcontainers A key binding to open a new window and execute…
When performance isn’t obvious
I was writing some Ruby code recently, and although it didn't need to be optimised, I found myself using both x * 0.5 and x / 2 in the same method, which got me thinking, which way is quickest? It's not like either is any easier/harder to read, so it kind of made sense to see which operation is actually fastest. My test code is a very simple benchmark of applying each operation 100,000,000 times…
From Tmux+Vim to VSCode … and back again
Over the course of my 20 year career in software development, I've used many different code editors and development environments to build everything from desktop apps to web apps. Everything from Visual Studio 6 to Xcode to Textmate to Notepad, has been installed at some point. As I started to focus on web app development, specifically using Ruby-on-Rails, my day-to-day setup involved using Tmux…