Recently updated blogs

I’ve been in a few places where there’s been talk about justifying the cost of UCD and similar roles. At first glance it’s a fair point. What impact do we have? How are we helping? How do we ensure we’re doing the best we can? But the question rarely gets asked in that spirit. It’s one of the ways I note the health of an organisation or profession. If the …

A bug in Chromium and Safari makes support of proper superscript and subscript characters problematic. See exactly why, and what you might be able to do about it. Read more.

In November of last year, I wrote Richard Stallman’s political discourse on sex, which argues that Richard Stallman, the founder of and present-day voting member of the board of directors of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), endorses and advocates for a harmful political agenda which legitimizes adult attraction to minors, consistently defends adults accused of and convicted of sexual crimes with respect to minors, and more generally erodes norms of …

When this blog was in its prime it was a reasonably common occurrence to feature artists that had yet to release any ‘official’ recorded music, instead relying on shaky live You Tube clips or dodgy Soundcloud demos. The last band that featured here in that way was The Dinner Party, who a few months on had changed their name (for the better) to The Last Dinner Party and became a …

I wanted my old life back... but it was going to take time. And I faced the dreaded post-treatment tests. Continue reading →

warmbru curiosity explored why, after centuries of wearing hats, the trend fell out of favor in the middle of the 20th century. He explained that while both men and women wore hats for practical reasons, such as to keep the elements at bay, hats were also indicative of society and class. Why did hats suddenly almost die out? Not completely but to a large extent. Let’s first consider why people …

This is a talk I gave for the Toulouse Game Dev Master Class. I talk about my methods of discovering cool game art tricks (which I then document on this blog) by asking around, doing research, using mod tools or injecting into the rendering process with Intel GPA, RenderDoc or NVIDIA NSight. I didn’t embed the video directly to avoid any tracking from Google and complications with the DSGVO. I …

BlueSCSI Wi-Fi Desk Accessory 1.2 has been released: wifi_da-1.2.sit (StuffIt 3 archive) SHA256: 984935cc5e3e25102849cd41c52764cb08060d183d48cfb49f9da3eead49aea8SHA1: 980b17f58babb839977b7d714f8556a82bf33c7e Changes in this version: Added an "(Other Network)" option to the SSID list to manually enter a hidden SSID

Hello You. Been a while since I wrote anything on these pages, but certainly not for lack of incident round these parts. I’ve been beavering away behind the scenes, mostly on mixing and editing audio in more formal environments for the delight and edification of various media empires, while simultaneously trying not to use my powers to fuel the forces of darkness (which in our current political and economic landscape …

Where does all this content belong? Most of the content on this site is an aggregate view of my work in other venues. How do I want to manage that process going forward? It’s 2024, and I’m including this post in a series called redesign 2022. That’s when I ripped out all the styles on my site, and declared my intent to renovate with a light touch. How much can …

Now that all electronic issues are resolved, it’s time to update the PCB for my expansion board that adds a W65C22S Versatile Interface Adapter (VIA) to my Commodore 64....

It would take an intensive study to determine all the differences in totes among the various models and sizes of Sargent hand planes.

Over on my Substack, I’ve published a lengthy appreciation and defense of Alain Delon. I hope you’ll join me there! It’s accessible to anyone but please consider becoming a paying subscriber. Supporting me on Substack helps keep Cinebeats and its archives online. Your support also allows me to write more. An excerpt from Remembering the […]

by John Cook Conventionally it is accepted that Play for Today died forty years ago, in 1984. In the spring of that year, the recently appointed Head of BBC TV Plays, Peter Goodchild, decided to ‘rest’ it, believing it had become ‘slightly tired’.[1] A final few single dramas badged as Play for Today aired during July and August of that year on primetime BBC1. In August, Goodchild announced a new …

Recently I ran a session of the tabletop RPG Trophy Gold for my gaming group, and because one of us had already read all the introductory adventures, I decided to make my own one, called The Everbarrow. And since it seemed to go pretty OK, I thought I’d make it public here. Grab The Everbarrow, an adventure for Trophy Gold set in an eerie burial chamber. Trophy Gold and its …