Personal Log

A couple of days ago we decided to repeat the experience of loading games from tape, but this time with my ZX Spectrum+. It is evidently a different system. Which is a funny thing to say because when I had my ZX Spectrum +2A almost 40 years ago I didn’t really know there were different systems, I just had a “computer”. In this case, the biggest change is that the ZX Spectrum+ doesn’t come with a built-in tape drive, so I had to find one I bought a few years ago and I had misplaced somewhere.…

I am not good at detecting when a piece of text has been produced by a large language model (LLM from now on). Very often I read a post shared on a link aggregator, to later check the comments and learn that it is slop. It is true that there are some stylistic clues that can mean a text was generated (or there was some LLM assistance, at least), but I assume you have to be used to read LLM output to actual spot the more subtle cues. I was reading today in Chris’ Entropic Thoughts: Claude…

That’s how Konstantin Ryabitsev titles his post creepy crawlies, where he explains the scale of the problem of the “AI crawlers” in the kernel.org git repositories website. I have discussed it here a few times: the problem of the LLM crawlers, how I simplified how I self host git repos, and my attempts trying to deal with these crawlers. I haven’t reached a solution and the crawlers are still there –less so, as the blocking and some of the Javascript tricks did work–, although I haven’t tried…

After some time off-line due to a disk failure, the CPCWiki Forum is back online. There is a thread to “show off your Amstrads”, so I used the excuse to do some gaming with the kids and my 464. Also I was talking to one of them the other day about cassettes, how long the games took to load, and how we had “compilation” cassettes with several games on them. So we decided to load the games from tape! Vanity shot: loading The Return of Traxtor My younger son suggested that we should start loading…

After 8 years of love/hate, I decided to leave Hugo and go Haskell.

I have been working lately on “Outpost”, a video adventure for the ZX Spectrum 48K. It is a bit metroidvania in some ways, because some objects unlock abilities that allow access to new areas. I guess we could say it is a bit more like the Dizzy games, if we think about games from back in the day. I wasn’t working on this game, but I got a bit stuck in the project I was working on, so I guess having a few WIPs can also be an advantage. I really wanted to release this game back in 2023, but it…

Paraphrasing the famous American catchphrase, I have noticed a pattern in my gamedev failures. Generally, people get to see the successes –or games that I finish–, but they don’t see all the projects that don’t get anywhere. And I have a few of these in progress that are at risk, and I think I know why. I’m mostly a programmer. I like programming, and it is what I have been doing for the longest time. It is true that I like music, and I can write some tunes, and at this point I have been…

Cepceros Podcast is a podcast in Spanish that started in 2018 and that follows a simple but effective formula: the host has a chat with a different guest every week in which they discuss two Amstrad CPC games proposed by the guest. There is a big nostalgia component and generally it starts with a mini-interview where the guest can explain how they became interested in the Amstrad CPC, to then discuss why they chose those games, what they like (or dislike) about them, etc. I have been invited a…

For the first time since I’ve been a full-time Linux user (25+ years), my machine is hitting some sort of bug –either software or hardware– that makes the PC fans stop working after resuming from suspend. Essentially I may be doing something intensive, like watching a YouTube video –yes, that’s GPU expensive now–, and the fans don’t kick in. Because the speakers are on, you don’t realise that the fans are off and my PC overheats. I had a handful of cases where the CPU/GPU got around 80°C. Not…

I have been struggling a bit lately finding things to write about in this blog, mostly because I don’t want to contribute to the conversation about AI. So when Alex posted about concerts, he got me thinking: have I seen 10 bands live? Apparently this is a meme going around the Fediverse (I’m not there anymore), and the idea is basically: Introduce yourself with 10 bands you have seen. And I had a similar reaction to Alex’s: have I seen 10 bands live? Well, turns out I have! But the…

I haven’t mentioned it here very often, which is a bit surprising considering that I have uploaded over 60 videos already and not all of my sessions end up as “videos on demand” (meaning: I’ve streamed even more than that!). Then again, this is consistent with my general bad habit of not promoting my work enough. Early on I put a website (@reidrac is coding), but other than that, I can only remember writing one post about it. So that is why I’m writing this post: I am back to streaming on my…

I played a lot of tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) at the end of the 90s: a little of AD&D, lots of Middle-earth Role Playing and Rune Quest, some Vampire and Call of Cthulhu, and many others. Not sure if it was popular or not back then, but certainly it wasn’t as mainstream as it is now. For me it all started in high school and continued some years after that. But then, like many others did, I stopped playing. I guess I had a group of friends and we played together, until life took us in…

So we are preparing the plants that we are going to have in our garden in this season (cucumbers, courgettes and tomatoes), but we are going on holidays when we need to take care of the little plants before they are ready to be outside. The easy way of solving the problem would be asking our nice neighbour across the road to take care of the plants, or we could write some code and use an Arduino Uno with a 5v relay and a cheap water pump, which is much more interesting. ...

Recently, Hacker News updated the comments section of their guidelines: Don’t post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans. And increasingly this is turning to be a key point in human interaction online, which also affects workplace dynamics. I’m not referring only to remote work, because in all the companies I have worked for in the last 20 years there has always been a digital component: some sort of internal instant messaging, email, code reviews, ...