Recently updated blogs

My new (mini) miniatures game Deathship One, is now available as a PDF or print-on-demand through DriveThruRPG.com. In this solo or co-operative game, you play a squad of soldiers that has been pulled out of time and dumped into an alien deathtrap. So, whether you are … Continue reading →

Yesterday (June 2nd 2024) we lost one of our great sporting heroes. Of course I’m talking about Rob Burrow CBE who played scrum-half for Leeds Rhinos. He was the tender age of 41. He lost his life to Motor Neurone Disease, a cruel and devastating disease affecting up to 5000 adults in the UK at any one time. Rob fought an incredible battle with MND right up to the end. …

Some notes on freedom of speech TL; DR – To unlock the promise of freedom of speech, we need to pair it with the duty to be constructive. Without thoughtfulness, we have a less free, less flourishing life and world. Freedom of speech has been on my mind recently for two reasons. In Sweden and Denmark last year, people burnt copies of the Holy Qu’ran. The most prominent Qu’ran burning …

Based in SingaporeOr more accurately, wherever the intersection of my girlfriend & tourist visa requirements are. She's from here and likely staying until ~August 2025. Singapore is amazing, modern, hot. Good food abounds. Local language is English. I can do 90-day stints, possibly with a month in Malaysia between, still figuring that part out.My sister introduced us. They were besties in SF for the last couple years. We began dating …

Trying to avoid the whole thing where the posting here on the pier withers away around April or earlier, only to return in fits and starts as the year once more draws close, but I’m also trying to finish my fourth book already, and you can see how the two efforts might conflict. But here’s a moment where the two might work in harness: you can now support the epic …

The Dragon in the Sea The Santaroga Barrier Frank Herbert About a year ago my brother lent me an old copy of Frank Herbert's first novel, The Dragon in the Sea, and I hadn't got around to reading it, but after watching the second of the new Dune films I decided that rather than join the rest of the nerds re-reading the Dune series, I'd investigate some of his other …

Blank screen on boot and external monitors not detectedI recently installed Kubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat) on a laptop and all was well. I had been using flavours of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, but when I was creating a new boot media this time round, the default Ubuntu download was 24.04 so I went with that. Maybe it would have been wiser to wait for 24.04.4. The first and second boots …

All words written by Tom, the latest owner of a TSG.For the guitar enthusiast, it is a good time to be alive. There are plenty of talented luthiers nowadays, and this healthy emulation drives them to keep pushing the envelope of guitar building.This will be my first custom built guitar, so the excitement is paramount after a wait of almost 2 yearsFor the guitar enthusiast, it is a good time …

IntroductionIn March, the official Elixir client for Google APIs received an accidental commit for internal non-public APIs. The commit added support for Google’s Content Warehouse API, which includes Google’s 14,000+ search ranking factors. Oops! Some people noticed this after its redaction earlier this month, and the news broke on May 28. You can read through the Content Warehouse API reference on HexDocs. I skimmed through these and read some blog …

Outlook and Dimensions, a pair of UK-run festivals which used to temporarily takeover Pula in Croatia each summer, are famous for putting on a boat party series across each festival. Each party sees a hundred-ish punters emerge from the campsite, amble down to the harbour and hop aboard a dinky vessel with their pre-booked tickets in hand. The boat chugs out into the open waters of the Adriatic Sea and …

Well then. At the end of the last article I promised to write about the stations on HS2 phase 1 assuming that I hadn’t been too enraged by the political fallout from hopefully soon-to-be-ex-prime minister Rishi Sunak’s cancellation of phase 2 of HS2. Reader, I have been enraged. I have had to have a very […]

The new Kino app recording ProRes Log with a custom preview LUT. Yes we’re still talking about shooting video on iPhones. But I also want to talk about digital cinema shooting in general, in a world where top camera makers are battling to give filmmakers everything we want in a small, affordable package.How does the DV Rebel spirit — born of camcorders and skateboard dollies — live on in a …

⤳ A pretty busy Bank Holiday week. Went to see Jez Butterworth’s new play, The Hills of California on Thursday evening and really enjoyed it, even though the last ten minutes left me a little emotionally destroyed. ⤳ On Sunday I met my friend Mike to go see Mad Max Furiosa at the IMAX in Waterloo (with filthy dinner at Passyunk Avenue first). The film was a lot of fun …

Part of what excites me about generative AI LLMs and GANs is the back-and-forth between language and representation. I’ve lately been playing more with MidJourney and Deep Dream Generator and a local install of Stable Diffusion, and using them to extend my art-hobby tinkering with Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter. I enjoy abstract and non-figurative art, and I find thinking through the links between language and representation and abstraction—how to …