Where I write down my geeky stuff to share with others...
I finally finished my BC-250 project, or at least I have declared it finished and started playing some Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s taken me two months of spare evenings and a couple of late nights to get to this point. What on earth is a BC-250? For those who aren’t into this rather obscure upcycled/hacked [ ]
I’ve been thinking about this idea for a while now, here are my thoughts and some slightly wonky Gemini generated infographics. It was partly prompted by a spectacular substack post from Andrew Cote, where he explored some of the larger engineering challenges around building infrastructure in space—particularly the idea of megastructures or vast constellations. That [ ]
Dear Kim, It s surprisingly difficult to write to you directly, so I thought I d write a message in a bottle and see if it eventually washes up in the right place! The idea came to me a few months ago to share my profound appreciation of your excellent work and, if you will indulge me, [ ]
Building giant space mirrors will not solve global warming. It will enable us to reduce solar insolation, reducing the inputs to the warming of the planet. At best it can slow this process down, buying us time to undo the damage we ve done to the atmosphere over the last 200 years. I m an engineer not [ ]
A few weeks ago I got a very exciting email, asking me what I thought about building a quantum computer out of Lego. Needless to say, it got my full attention, especially as I was very impressed with the Lego Atomic Force Microscope from back in 2012. As with all big ideas, I ended up [ ]
There are elections everywhere you look, the UK, France, the USA. As many people have already pointed out, it s a big year for democracy. But the most important things aren t on the ticket. In the interests of transparency I m a member of the Green party back in the UK, but I don t do anything other [ ]
Last week, one of my closest childhood (or at least teenage-hood) friends sadly passed away. He s the first close friend in my generation to die. It seems fitting to share a few memories of our good times together. It would also be remiss of me not to name check my other close school friends: Xuan, [ ]
Disclaimer: It s been a while since I worked on an active data centre project (6, 7 years? Which is an eternity in such a fast moving field) so there are probably be areas below where industry practice has moved on, if you spot any errors or questionable assumptions please let me know and I ll happily [ ]
Some thoughts on why we're still in the COVID-19 pandemic mess, despite everyone's best efforts to ignore their way out of it.
For the last few weeks I have been thinking about an exchange with the ever dynamic Francois Grey about citizen science, and what it would take to get to an actual significant discovery. This is in the context of my involvement with the long running Cosmic Pi project, an attempt to produce open source cosmic [ ]