Mr Speaker

Category: The common man

The human side of Mr Speaker

Your Last Ever Computer

I gaze across the calm morning ocean as I sip my coffee. The computer takes a while to boot, and watching the ocean is more relaxing than the torrent of kernel messages that (hopefully) say things are loading nominally. I wonder if there will be any deliveries today. It’s been a while, and recent weather […]

NBA Jam, um, tank-mode?

Eight minutes ago I had a flashback. The following is my stream-of-consciousness account of those eight minutes. I refuse to google it to see if it’s true, or if I imagined the whole thing. The year was… 1992? 1993? I was playing the hit arcade game NBA Jam. A lot. I remember playing NBA Jam […]

USB Mini Shawarma

Years ago I had a genius idea of making a USB-powered mini shawarma machine that you could have on your desk, and shave off bits of meat during the day. Sometimes I still lay awake at night, wondering if that would have worked.

Graybeard

Thanks to a decreased demand in shaving recently, I discovered several grey facial hairs. It’s happening – I’m becoming a graybeard! The timing is suspicious: I start using Emacs, I turn into a graybeard. But did Emacs cause me to get grey hairs, or did the hairs coerce me into to using Emacs?

Deleted my twi**er account

12 years it took me, but I finally got there. 12 years is a long time, and I feel like I’ve lost an old neighbour who I hated, but I refused to move just because of them. Expect more ramblings, now that I have nowhere else to post them.

De-bloating my piece of the web

While tackling a TODO task on a client’s mobile web app, I noticed it was loading nearly 15Mb of non-app scripts. This included several third-party marketing/user assistance/analytics scripts, CDN hosted libraries, some ad scripts, and their embedded videos where also loading their own cornucopia of scripts, cookies, and trackers. FIFTEEN MEGABYTES! I sighed as I […]

These are my Emacs days

I’ve been using Atom as my primary editor for several years now. But recently there’s been a tidal wave of support for VS Code. It swept through the tech industry and washed away Atom and Sublime and friends. I figured it was fruitless to fight the trend, so I switched to Emacs. Now that I […]

Popcorn kernel bread ™

It is, with no doubt, the greatest idea I have ever had: bake bread with a bunch of popcorn kernels in it. This idea… it’s just… it’s by far better than any other idea on this blog. It’s better than my Kentucky Fried Chicken Feen from 2005. It’s better than my BASIC revelation from 2015. […]

A better phonetic alphabet

I found this in a txt document that myself & the missus wrote, possibly when drunk, in 2002. Seems important. Aquaman Barometer Chicken Dress-ups Eatery Fedora Goal Posts Heliotrope Irksome Jalepeno Kraftwerk Limp Moisten Nice Oblong Pancake Quincy Restrooms Satay Tanktop Uppity Voltimeter Wafting Xtreme Yurt ZZ Top