A little while ago, I tried out an Android eInk tablet . That one didn’t quite work out, and I returned it, but I still had the feeling that something along those lines would be useful. As I ruminated on it, I realised that the need I want to cover was very specific: reading. I’m not looking for handwritten notes 1 , or yet another way to read my email or browse the web. I want something to…
After more than a decade, my friend and colleague Cal Bryant has moved on from Cydar , and has written a long piece about the his time with the company . Cal started at the company not long after I did, and it’s great to have a look back at the journey we’ve been on. We’ll definitely miss him at Cydar, but I have no doubt he’ll continue to do great things at his new company. Aw, snap.
Reading OpenAI’s recent announcement of GPT 5.5 , I was struck by the following pull-quote: One engineer at NVIDIA who had early access to the model went as far as to say: “Losing access to GPT‑5.5 feels like I’ve had a limb amputated.” They presumably intended this to be taken as an endorsement, but I read it as a warning. I don’t want to come to rely on a tool from a single vendor to such an…
It’s been a bit quiet here of late; I’ve not put anything up anything since my now-annual New Year’s Eve book post . At time of writing, that’s ninety-five days ago, which is the longest gap I’ve had since 2022 into 2023 . The reason is prosaic — there’s been a lot going on both at work and at home, and I’ve simply not been able to carve out the time. I don’t plan to go into either on here, but I…
In the same way that two points make a line, I’m going to say that two posts make a tradition. This time last year I wrote about the books I read in 2024 , and suggested it might become an annual thing. Making good on that threat, here’s my reading in 2025: (The yellow bars indicate when I started and finished each book; the open ones are for books I was reading when the year started, or still…
A year ago, I got a 3D printer . A year later, is it gathering dust, or am I still using it? I’m happy to report, while it’s not quite as busy as it was for the first few weeks, it is still in regular use. While I’ve made quite a few posts over the year (collected at the end of this one), I thought it might be interesting to look back and see what kinds of things I’ve been using it for. One…
I have a bit of a confession to make. I don’t get Forth . It’s a language I’ve admired from afar, and its approach is genuinely novel and intuitively appealing. However, every time I try to dig deeper, I just… don’t get it. It’s not that I don’t like different languages; on the contrary, I’m fascinated by them. You’re unlikely to come across Forth these days if you’re not. Nor is my experience…
As mentioned in my last post , I recently purchased an eSun eBox Lite filament drier. All was good at first, and it performed well drying out a roll of PETG, but the next time I came to use it I noticed that the fan wasn’t running. It was still within the return window, but as it’s both pretty bulky and pretty cheap, I decided to have a go at fixing the problem instead. This proved…
Since getting a 3D printer almost a year ago, I’ve stuck to PLA . This is the default material for FDM printers, and for good reason. It’s produced from starch rather than petrochemicals, it prints at low temperatures, and it has decent aesthetic and mechanical properties. It’s a great all-rounder. But it’s not all there is. My Bambu A1 isn’t enclosed, which rules out higher temperature filaments…
John McCarthy is credited with two major contributions to Computer Science. The first is the term “Artificial Intelligence”, and the second is the programming language LISP. In part due to this entwined history, and in part due to its particular strength, LISP was long though of as the language of AI, but it’s more than that — it’s not an exaggeration to say that pretty much every programming…
This design came about because I wanted a clip to attach a car-charging cable to the wall. You can, of course, easily buy these, but I only needed one, and for an unusually thick cable. 3D printing means I can get exactly the part I want, in the quantity I want, and saves a trip to a DIY store or a wait for the postman. As this is probably not the last time I’ll want to secure a cable somewhere, I…
I’ve been running a traditional Dungeons & Dragons game with my daughters 1 . The fundamentals of table-top roleplaying haven’t changed very much since I was doing it at their age, but we came across one thing that definitely wasn’t available back then: HeroForge . It’s a website (we didn’t have those in the 80s) where you can create a 3D model of your character (would be a push on the Electron )…
In a recent post , I alluded to my “newly tricked-out Electron”, and promised more detail in a future post. This is that post, and pictured above is the Electron in question, with its new friend the Plus 1 Mini . While of course dear to my heart, the Acorn Electron was never what you’d call a powerhouse. Its 32K of RAM wasn’t terrible on paper, but the lack of a true text mode meant that much of…
I’ve just got round to uploading a quick model I made a few weeks ago: sleeves for reusable coffee cups. We have a couple of these basic cups in the car for when we get coffee on long journeys, but they can get a bit hot, and it’s not always clear whose drink is whose. Printing a couple of these in different colours makes them both easier to identify and more comfortable to hold. Not exactly…
I’m having an unexpectedly parentheses-heavy weekend. As well as experimenting with Acornsoft LISP on my newly-tricked-out Electron (more on that in a future post), I had a minor itch at work, and I decided to turn to Emacs to scratch it. I wanted a quick tool to track what I’m working on, to get a clearer picture of where my time is going. Specifically, I wanted a list of tasks and time spent…
The Aerial screensaver has always been one of my favourite quality-of-life details of the Apple TV box, and I was happy to see it arrive on macOS, with the bonus touch of slowing and becoming the desktop background when you unlock the computer. For a long while I stuck with the default Sequoia forest video, but recently I fancied a change, and opening up Settings I came across an absolute gem that…
When they first came along, I was sceptical about the merits of using an AI (specifically, a Large Language Model) to help you code. However, the world doesn’t stand still, especially the world of technology, and it’s been a busy two and a half years. Coding assistants have become more sophisticated and widespread, and for a while I’ve been dipping my toe into the water and trying them out myself.…
One of the things I’m enjoying about dipping my toe into CAD is the chance to approach something as a beginner. I rarely get — or perhaps make — the opportunity to do something that’s both unfamiliar, and low enough stakes that I can take risks and take my time. I’m making a conscious effort to not bring my preconceptions from adjacent fields, and not rush towards the first thing that will achieve…
Most keys on most keyboards are labelled in some way. Usually, these labels (“legends”) are just printed on top of the keycap, the bit of the key you actually touch. But because you’re actually touching it, the legend wears off over time. As you move into fancier keyboards, there are various ways to remedy this. The most indestructible are double-shot keycaps, where the legend is actually a…
A quick, tongue-in-cheek joke about the current absurdity surrounding the licensing of 3DBenchy , the until recently beloved de facto mascot of 3D printing. Available on MakerWorld ( CC BY-NC-SA , of course).
Since going remote at the start of the pandemic, I’ve had a standing desk setup at home. Rather than an adjustable height desk, I kept my existing desk and put the monitor on a tall VESA mounting arm. Combined with this, I’ve used a variety of stands to sit on the desk and raise the keyboard and trackball to elbow height. These work fine, are a bit cumbersome to move out of the way when you want…
I’ve always enjoyed reading, both fiction and non-fiction, and try to make time for it as much as I can. A few years ago I thought it would be nice to keep a record of what I’ve read, but I’ve never got on with reading-based social services such as GoodReads and BookWyrm . Hence, I decided to go for something more basic: for a while now, I’ve recorded what I’m reading, and when, in a simple Jekyll…
A little while ago, I came across a video that combines three of my current nerdish interests, namely retro computers, mechanical keyboards and 3D printing: If you’re not already seen it, I highly recommend giving it the time. The sheer amount of effort and attention to detail that goes into the project is incredible. Note that this isn’t a restoration of an old machine, or a recreation of a…
I was listening to the youngest practice Christmas songs on the piano, and I had a terrible idea. In any case, Merry Christmas.
The cat needs to be fed. The cat is very insistent on this point. The cat can’t believe that you think someone else might have already fed her. THE CAT IS LYING TO YOU. Get one step ahead of feline deception with this handy print-in-place marker; attach it to the cat food canister, or mount it near the food bowl, and it will be clear at a glance if it’s time to feed. I’ve published my first model…
On a recent episode of ATP , Casey mentioned that one of the issues with an ultrawide Mac display, such as the one now provided by the Vision Pro, is the long trek to the left side of the screen to access the menu bar. This wasn’t an issue in 1984 when the screen was only 9”, but as displays have grown it’s become more and more of a factor. This apparently lodged somewhere in the back of the…
Back in July, I encountered a bit of weirdness in the way that the ZX81 addresses RAM when it only has a single kilobyte. I was reminded of this listening to the latest episode of Risky Business , which reported on an interesting and decidedly 21st-century attack. AMD’s recent processors offer SEV , a suite of features to protect Virtual Machines from compromise even when the attacker (say, a…
About the same time as my educational foray into multicolour printing 1 , I decided to put the printer to work doing something useful: my first functional print. I had an almost-complete design already, that I’d produced while getting started with OpenSCAD , so it was just a matter of turning it into reality. Regular readers may recall my project at the start of the year to revive a Mac SE in…
When I took the plunge and bought a Bambu A1 , I got the AMS Lite multi-material system that allows you to load four different filaments at once and automatically switch between them. I decided to go for this as it’s significantly cheaper to get it bundled that buy it at a later date, and it seemed like a big step up in quality-of-life in terms of not having to swap spools all the time, and…
Back in the early 2000s, when I first bought this domain and started this site, self-hosting your own email was common. If you were running a personal web server, it was just something you did. Over the years, though, things got more complicated. An arms race developed between spammers and anti-spam technology, and for your email to be useful you needed to keep up. Encryption became an increasing…
3D printing has, for a few years now, been something that I’ve watched with interest from a distance, but never quite felt compelled to plunge into. This began to change when the girls found some cute articulated dragons in a souvenir shop. When they learned that these had been made by a machine that you could actually have in your house, they were immediately hooked on the concept. This turned…
As part of my recent host move , I decided it was time to review my web server situation. Specifically, I decided to move on from Apache . It’s served me well over twenty years, and adapted to all of the changes I’ve thrown at it (most notably HTTPS), but my configuration was a tangle of two decade’s of cruft, and since I started other options have emerged that would be more directly applicable to…