Recently updated blogs

I just had surgery to repair an incisional hernia near where my appendix used to be. By “just” I mean Thursday week ago. I am recovering well, thank you, though it did knock me for six for several days, as abdominal surgery does. I’m tapering off the painkillers now, back home, moving around, and even gingerly doing things that don’t involve heavy objects. Or medium weight objects. Everything is fine. …

I have a few providers which initialize state, shove it in a context, and then ensure that the state is synchronized with AsyncStorage so that if the app is quit and restarted, the context’s state is rehydrated from AsyncStorage. A few examples of the types of state I tend to treat this way are API tokens and user IDs. When I realized that I’d been doing this a lot in …

The Secret to Coffee Shop Success: Choosing the Perfect Location Opening a coffee shop is a dream for many aspiring entrepreneurs. A place where people come together, work, and enjoy good coffee—what could be better? The truth ist, running a thriving coffee shop is much more complicated than one might imagine. While a few factors, like the menu you offer, the interior design, and customer service, are important, there is …

In 1974 National Semiconductor introduced what is arguably the first 16-bit microprocessor (it had a 8-bit mode as well which was more efficient but could run 16-bits as well). This chip was made on a PMOS process and ran at 1.3MHz. In some ways it was ahead of its time, there wasn’t a ton of demand for a 16-bit processor at the time and interfacing to its PMOS architecture was…tricky. …

This article was updated. Jump to Update 1. Hey lovely people! I’m working on a small game and here are some techniques I used to create sprites and effects. Play Demo & Buy on Steam Play Demo in Browser DevLog PressKit This Breakdown on Artstation Big Sprites I tried to use the most efficient workflow depending on the use case. The pixel art style allowed me to create assets fast, …

Why, when I have a perfectly good one available right here? Because change is healthy. It’s nothing dramatic, just a change of scenery and a simpler outlook. You can read more about why on the new site—I hope you’ll join me there. It’s a new RSS feed too, so if you want to keep seeing stuff from me you’ll want to add the new link to your feed reader. This …

Thank you to everyone who liked, reblogged, or made a witty comment on this tumblr over the years. This is the last post.

I will be part of a panel discussion titled “Folk Around & Find Out IV: Folklore of the Future,” on Sunday (3/24), the final event of this year’s Salem Witchcraft & Folklore Festival. A panel of professional conjure doctors, astrologers, cunning-folk, artists, and witches talk about the place of folk magic in modern life around the world. Come join our discussions of how traditional folk magics do and don’t have …

Adding 70ft of N-scale layout and some overview picturesKanata Rail overview pictures Feb 2024:

A week ago I returned from a week’s trip to central New South Wales in Australia, driving from Sydney down to (almost!) Batemans Bay, then up again to Newcastle and then back to Sydney. The aim was to spend a bit more time exploring places I’d skipped / missed when I motored through quickly on my trips passing through NSW in 2018 and 2019 - which I did end up …

Over the last three years of maintaining this blog, there’s been a conspicuous absence in the acoustic index toolkit presented so far. Whilst the Bioacoustic Index (BI), Acoustic Complexity Index (ACI) and Normalised Difference Soundscape Index (NDSI) have been introduced and demonstrated across given case studies, the Acoustic Diversity Index (ADI) hasn’t been covered to date. Why is this? When I first started applying acoustic indices a few years ago, …

By Tshidiso Masopha Source: Facebook For three years there have been ongoing talks about uniting informal waste pickers with the City of Johannesburg’s waste management program. These talks have since hit a dead-end. Reclaimers are particularly important to the recycling value chain. They contribute to the economy by collecting recyclable waste which they sell to buy-back centres. However, they go without support from the government. The African Reclaimers Organization (ARO) …

On the Eve of Valentines Day, I was sat scrolling Mastodon and a post from the @playdate account popped up on my Home Timeline to announce they had just shipped over 70,000 pre-orders of the console, followed with the news that they expanded the list of countries they ship to by another 20 – including Norway. I have been keeping an eye on the progress of the cute yellow little …

Working at pace often means you need to work on assumptions. The current team I’m leading. I’ve had to make some assumptions clear that we would have to work to. Some about our users. Most though, about the organisation. We had to believe certain things will be true to unblock our focus. As you define what feature, service or product you need to build. A team will have assumptions about …

A short introduction to the rdbg/debugger extension for VS Code, plus a guide on how to set it up correctly to debug your Ruby on Rails applications, as well as your RSpec specs. The VS Code extension takes 5 minutes to setup and it's great!