Recent content in Personal Log at usebox.net
I have been working lately on “Outpost”, a video adventure for the ZX Spectrum 48K. It is a bit metroidvania in some ways, because some objects unlock abilities that allow access to new areas. I guess we could say it is a bit more like the Dizzy games, if we think about games from back in the day. I wasn’t working on this game, but I got a bit stuck in the project I was working…
Paraphrasing the famous American catchphrase, I have noticed a pattern in my gamedev failures . Generally, people get to see the successes –or games that I finish–, but they don’t see all the projects that don’t get anywhere. And I have a few of these in progress that are at risk, and I think I know why. I’m mostly a programmer. I like programming, and it is what I…
Cepceros Podcast is a podcast in Spanish that started in 2018 and that follows a simple but effective formula: the host has a chat with a different guest every week in which they discuss two Amstrad CPC games proposed by the guest. There is a big nostalgia component and generally it starts with a mini-interview where the guest can explain how they became interested in the Amstrad CPC, to then…
For the first time since I’ve been a full-time Linux user (25+ years), my machine is hitting some sort of bug –either software or hardware– that randomly makes the PC fans stop working after resuming from suspend. Essentially I may be doing something intensive , like watching a YouTube video –yes, that’s GPU expensive now–, and the fans don’t kick in.…
I have been struggling a bit lately finding things to write about in this blog, mostly because I don’t want to contribute to the conversation about AI. So when Alex posted about concerts , he got me thinking: have I seen 10 bands live? Apparently this is a meme going around the Fediverse (I’m not there anymore), and the idea is basically: Introduce yourself with 10 bands you have seen.…
I haven’t mentioned it here very often, which is a bit surprising considering that I have uploaded over 60 videos already and not all of my sessions end up as “videos on demand” (meaning: I’ve streamed even more than that!). Then again, this is consistent with my general bad habit of not promoting my work enough. Early on I put a website ( @reidrac is coding ), but other…
I played a lot of tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) at the end of the 90s: a little of AD&D, lots of Middle-earth Role Playing and Rune Quest, some Vampire and Call of Cthulhu, and many others. Not sure if it was popular or not back then, but certainly it wasn’t as mainstream as it is now. For me it all started in high school and continued some years after that. But then, like many others…
So we are preparing the plants that we are going to have in our garden in this season (cucumbers, courgettes and tomatoes), but we are going on holidays when we need to take care of the little plants before they are ready to be outside. The easy way of solving the problem would be asking our nice neighbour across the road to take care of the plants, or we could write some code and use an Arduino…
Recently, Hacker News updated the comments section of their guidelines : Don’t post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans. And increasingly this is turning to be a key point in human interaction online, which also affects workplace dynamics. I’m not referring only to remote work, because in all the companies I have worked for in the last 20…
I’m still enjoying programming in OCaml , but because most of the code I have written to date is a toy compiler that may not go anywhere at the end, I realised I didn’t have anything to show my progress. I wrote a CLI Pomodoro tool when I was learning Haskell; so I asked myself: why not making a new Tomato tool, this time in OCaml? And that’s what I did last weekend: Tomato, yet…