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(no, this isn't a blog post about Joy Division songs) Last time I wrote about Interzone, I was discussing issue #294, the first published under new management in a paperback-sized format ("JB6"). The format and presentation of the magazine was fantastic: it fit in a lot of my pockets, and was packed with 15 stories as well as the regular columns, in full colour with fantastic layouts and illustrations. Sadly there was only one more physical issue before Interzone was forced to become a…
I used to ice skate as a teenager but I stopped at University. I tried to pick it back up in 2024 but had to stop when I got ill. I restarted in 2025, initially with a weekly skate session but last month I started group hockey skate lessons. There's not a lot of pics of me skating… this one from an IR camera I've been skating in a pair of Bauer1 Nexus N77s that I bought 7 years ago on a work trip to Toronto. These did a great job of getting me back into the hobby for 6 years but recently I felt…
I bought a new synth! Kind-of. I've traded my Minilogue-XD (full-size version with integrated keyboard) for the desktop/modular alternative. Modular Minilogue XD Why? Partly, because it fits on my desk better. Partly, because it changes the way you engage with the instrument. It makes a huge difference: the ivory keys come with so much cultural precedent. The module version of the synth gains a switch that lets you use the 16 sequencer step buttons as note inputs, so you can still play the…
First Light box My youngest daughter and I recently started playing the tabletop game HeroQuest. Specifically, the recently-issued, cut-down variant HeroQuest: First Light. This is quite advanced for her age, and I'm a little surprised she's taken to it, but she's really loving it, It's pushed her to read bits of lore on cards and quest books that is way above her expected reading level, and we've been exercising her maths by adding up the gold we find on our quests and calculating what the…
It's been ten years since I configured ?mount on demand backups to reduce the risk of my backups being zapped by mistake. Way back then I wanted to go one step further and use dedicated ?mount namespaces for backup jobs, but systemd didn't provide the necessary support (and still doesn't, despite the promisingly-named JoinsNameSpaceOf= configuration option.) I recently updated my setup to achieve this by hand. All backup jobs now have an extra pre-start instruction ExecStartPre=mkbackupns which…
HMS Blueberry Royals are my favourite ships in No Man's Sky. The HMS Blueberry is not my first Exotic/Royal ship (that was the Gravity Hirakao XVI, and a story for another time). After years of on-off playing, I recently found my first Royal multitool: Blue, with gold detailing. I have a Royal-style jetpack (I don't remember where I got that). I thought I'd try and colour-match my multitool, ship, jetpack and outfit. Since I only had one multitool, I matched the others to it. And the HMS…
In or around 2014 I bought an iPad Mini (2), and following the normal lifecycle of iOS devices, a major OS update eventually killed it as a useful, general-purpose device: operating it was just too sluggish. It remained useful as a streaming media player for a little while longer until eventually the big streamers (BBC iPlayer, Netflix, etc.) stopped supporting the version of their app which the iPad could install: the last officially supported iOS was 12.4.8 in July 2020, and by November it…
I blog about nvim-µwiki, a neovim plugin I wrote over a year ago but forgot about.
Where I ponder the notion of a digital garden, versus a blog, and point at some recent changes I've made to my homepage which are not blog posts.
