Mr Speaker

Category: Wide world

There’s more going on than just computers and noise. I’ve been told.

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 […]

Monads for Babies

Monads for Babies is the first in a series that teaches computer science to toddlers. It’s only available in digital form at the moment (png format, embedded below), so I suggest `right-click -> print` so you can read it to the lil’ tigers at bed time: Support my Patreon if you’d like to see more.

It Just Works ™

My favourite marketing phrase in all of computers is “It Just Works”. It unwittingly represents nearly all of software engineering. It just works. Only just. The absolute minimum. (Side note: my favourite marketing phrase in sports and fashion is “Just Do It”. If you have to do it, only just do it.)

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 […]

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. […]

Horizontal Rulez! for your terminal

A handy script for your image-enabled (I’m looking at you, iTerm 3) shell. hr will spit out a random horizontal rule, straight from the depths of a GeoCities page. Good times.

CyberVision Lite

Indie Game: the movie was filled with inspirational things. The least of which was probably Phil Fish’s self-air-quoted childhood “software” creation: CyberVision. When I watched this a few years ago I thought it was too good to be lost to the ages, so I recreated it. Choose between 150, 300, 600, and 1200 flash. There […]

British Pathé random video viewer

British Pathé recently released 90,000 videos on to YouTube (though I could only find 82058 of them) – I wanted to make some kind of mashup art with it, but was not creative enough to think of anything interesting. So, instead I present: Random video player! Randomly (and pretty-much-endlessly) play through the collection, marveling at […]