When it burst onto the scene in 1984, Hydlide really was like nothing else. It possesses arcade-like action combat, similar to the sort that would end up beloved in Falcom’s Ys and then combines this with an open world setting, where players are free to wander wherever their heart desires and their skills allow them to survive. Realising that kind of ambition’s still considered a notable achievement today, never mind decades ago. Examining it today as the product of a specific point in…

Today we’re going to take a look at the Go toolchain, and more specifically at how we can take part in the compilation process with our own code. We won’t patch the compiler. We’ll stand right next to it while it works, watch what it does, and every now and then hand it something it didn’t ask for. Think of it as photobombing the compiler, politely. 📸 The way in is a single flag, and the cheapest experiment I know looks like this:

We are like fishes swimming in the sea of sense, bounded above by the superior element, but unable to breathe it pure or penetrate it. —William James, Pragmatism The many-angled houses of my sight are traced from an elusive diagram beyond compulsion, the intangible. And pieces of my eye are alien to marginal, entreating countrysides eclipsed by focus. New horizons crease the bounding ripples of my plunging stride, entrusting their surroundings to suspense: perspectives radiate integrity. This…

Everyone says they want a chronological feed but the dream of a pure chronological feed breaks as soon as one of your feeds posts 20x more often as the rest. The last few months I've been trying to RSS-ify my life as much as possible. I hit a roadblock when I tried to have news websites mixed in with social networks. News sites are hyper-posters -- ABC News posts 40 times a day. There's no chance of seeing my friends buried under all of that. This applies on small scales and big, ABC News…

Well, here it is: the first pod/blog after my decision to be online less… which, for now, really just means writing less. Like I said in the previous blog, I’ve really become too aware of my need to overanalyze everything I do, distill it into extensive written form, and then share it with those silly enough to want to read it. Even this short paragraph feels both superfluous and necessary— I guess after 10+ years of this thing, I’m just too used to providing as much context to my clothes (and…

table of contents motive, preparation, and driving starting point moving through the rainforest depending on the trees rising difficulty and nearly slipping fog, mist, dripping water rosella watching at bald hill lookout motive, preparation, and drivingOn the first day of August, 2026, I set out to Dharawal country with a need to feel through nature as deeply as I could and try to regain a sense of self again. I would attempt to walk through the Wodi Wodi track, named after the custodians who…

I was on about discarding olde tomes: one in particular Freams Elements of Agriculture (1918) which gives an inviting view of the state of the art of modern Ag 100 years ago. hint: the are no fuck-off big tractors status symbols / icons of conspicuous consumption, diesel division. Carbon hoof-print of a pair of clydesdale plough-horses is much less than our Yaris run-about. Gotta add, though, that when a tractor is not working it is inert, while horses need calories 24/7/52 whether they are…

In my most vulnerable post to date, I am attempting to articulate this state I have been getting into on and off since… probably as long as I’ve been capable of from having anything from a crush to a relationship. My single gripe with this attempt, though, is less about the vulnerability and more that I don't particularly have someone to talk to about this. However, in this effort, I hope it at least isn't a unique experience for me. A shared sorrow is a sorrow halved. If it is not, then…

Are you ready for the 2026 #30DayMapChallenge? It begins on November 1st and this year's daily themes have just been announced.If you’re new to it, the idea of the #30DayMapChallenge is simple: create a map every day for 30 days based on a different theme each day. You can use any data, tools, or styles you like. It’s a great way to experiment, learn new techniques, and connect with the global mapping community.While many participants use traditional desktop GIS software or static graphics…

I am guessing the wallpaper stayed.

A machine learning roadmap for beginners in 2026 I wrote my data science roadmap 8 years ago. Some of its advice is still actual: learn programming, understand statistics, complete projects, and practice working with data. But I would change the emphasis now, especially with AI tools able to write much of the code. For example, in 2018 I wrote that you should develop a skill of formulating thoughts, searching for information, finding it and understanding it. Finding answers is much easier now,…

2026 Week 40 Notes: Sounds like a me problem 🗓️ // 28 September — 4 October 2026 Someone once told me that my disorganized brain really needed a template to write proper weeknotes. (That someone might have been me. It probably was me.) Someone told me everything I post has to have a photo, or no one will want to look at it, and the sosh meeds will not make it look pretty when it posts. And we've got to be pretty. Someone told me the right way to write these was to be clever, make sense, be…

The last essay ended on a concession, and I owe the reader a proper account of it. I had described a sequence of decisions—appoint on the visible signal, buy the training that produces a document, deploy the tool that raises productivity—and treated the deference that followed as an accident nobody intended. That account was, on sober reflection, too generous. Some of the deference is accidental and we should be leery to presume nefarious motives when naïvety is the true cause. However, not all…

Emile cooked us hand-made Pasta alla Norma.

Venice has been quite gorgeous. I’ve largely been following paths trodden by Jude and Cheathco, which makes for an A++ city break. weather has been glorious, the biennale E X T R E M E L Y M U C H A R T. On that, I took Cheathco’s advice and essentially powered through the sites. To paraphrase: there is too much to give everything the time it deserves, so go at a pace that allows the things you’ll like to snag you and let the rest wash over you. Pavilions and project I loved: Slovenia, Poland,…

Regular readers will be aware of my ‘non-Thomas face’ policy but I do enjoy creating custom liveries and felt this latest example sat as much in that latter category as the former - so let me introduce North Western 401…This began life as a Bachmann Jinty. I carefully stripped the model down to its component parts and removed the markings, primed and painted in a bright mid blue Humbrol enamel. After detail painting the black, red and metal fittings I applied some gloss lacquer to allow me to…

Status pages have forever baffled me as products in software engineering. Most of the FAANG mafia use Atlassian Statuspage, which inevitably costs tens of thousands of dollars while providing almost nothing except a single HTML page. Then you have other solutions like UptimeRobot and the "indiehacker" ilk of products. I was on the hunt for a status page, largely so I could keep an eye on my own services that I run in a Kubernetes cluster. A hit of Ballmer's peak one evening led me to create my…

Apparently, it's of neurological good to walk through your house backwards with your clothes on inside out. It makes the brain fire in different ways and this is uplifting. I've done the clothes thing at times purely by accident (been out in the streets wearing a sweater or coat inside out) though never on purpose. Flixy has delayed coming back from London because the Tits on Tour experience has 'done for her lallies'. Yes, dear. Sitting in a bus and walking about on a stage while stripping…

At some point when I wasn’t looking Apple Music Replay got good. Admittedly, 90% of that assessment is based on the fact it no longer kicks you out to a website. But seriously, it seems pretty decent now.

What song makes you feel like you’re in a different country? The first time I went abroad I was 15, a three week camping holiday in France. My main packing priority was my Walkman and a good selection of tapes (cassettes) I was still mostly in my parents musical realm but was delighted to have borrowed two tapes from the library to take with me. So, alongside Soull II Soul, Bomb the Bass, and Queen, I had an old album from Dire Straits, Love Over Gold. Thinking back, and checking the timelines,…

If you’ll remember from last time, after unpacking my new 2005 IBM ThinkCenter S50, I was without a keyboard or a way to connect a monitor. So the only things that I knew worked, were opening the DVD-ROM tray, the power and hard disk LEDs and the CPU fans. But there was another problem. While having, until now, focused my retro computing activities to the eighties and very early nineties, with PCs, I’ve always just kept with the time. Never did I have to bridge the decades by trying to make old…

Paints to clean up and brushes to wash. The roof is now so wet, that any more paint is going to cause colours to start blending where want I was is layers. Brushes down and I tease myself for uncharacteristically... Read More ›

I am one week into two weeks off and I am bored out of my mind. I wrote in Never Satisfied that I don't know how to be a person who isn't in training, that I am just a bloke who is tired and I don't like him much. I have now spent a week with him and I was right.I was looking forward to a couple of weeks to relax a little and recoup, as my body was really tired after the 70.3 and then the Robin Hood Half. Every plan I have ever followed has rest in it and I never want to do it. There are no…

The website Players, based in Kyiv, recently posted an anniversary retrospective of Prince of Persia 3D — the game published by Red Orb in 1999. I thought I'd contribute a bit of the back story behind this often-overlooked POP title. In the summer and fall of 1993, with Prince of Persia 2 on store shelves and selling well, Broderbund was eager for another 2D sequel. This fit my plans: I was launching my own game studio, Smoking Car Productions, to make The Last Express, and having a development…

I wasn't overly bothered about going fishing, but Sam had got his fishing mojo back and fancied a trip to the syndicate stretch in search of a chub or barbel, with the added bonus of perhaps catching a pike or zander. Naturally, this meant we were going fishing, and naturally, all the gear needed sorting out by me because, well, it always bloody is! After dinner, with everything packed and the Jimny fired up, we headed off to the river. The jungle drums had been beating for a while, as Neil…

There's something wonderfully nostalgic about a classic Boston Cream Pie - that beautifully moist vanilla layer cake filled with thick silky homemade custard and finished with a glossy semi-sweet chocolate glaze.Despite it's name, it's not a pie at all, but a timeless dessert that's been loved for generations and still feels special every time you make it. This version inspired by the trusted Fannie Farmer Cooking School Cookbook is one I have relied on for decades. Its simple, reliable and…

The more I look into little unknown women photographers that have risked or lost their lives to show what was happening in the world, the more I’m in awe of them. One such photographer was Camille Lepage. She worked as a photojournalist for about three years. In those three short years, she made about sixty thousand photos. Mainly from Sudan, South Sudan and the Central African Republic. Of those sixty thousands, she curated herself about a thousand before she was killed in May 2014 at…

By the time we realised, it was obvious that we were too late. For decades at least, philosophers — and scientists, latterly — had been warning us. You can’t have one thing without the other, they said; no upside without downside. They were of the opinion that there was a single trajectory, inevitable due to the nature of human beings and by extension their work, that would lead inexorably to a single outcome. They were wrong. About the outcome, but not the process. We ought to have seen it…

Preorder Rise of the Lazy Gamemaster! Session zeros help you and your players get on track to play a great adventure or campaign together. They help your players understand the specific game they're playing in, how their characters are involved, and help you all agree about the content you're all bringing to the game. The topics covered in session zeros may be even more important for convention games or one-off games with players you don't necessarily know because you may never have played…

This is the King's Road, Chelsea's classic cultural artery. Here are ten mini-posts about the famous street and what I saw there yesterday. 1) The King in question was Charles II who had it built as a private road to speed his passage to Kew Palace. Access was later extended to the nobility but only if they were in possession of a special token, with plebs forced to travel via the parallel Fulham Road instead. Only in 1830 was the King's Road fully opened up to allcomers, kickstarting wider…