Blog Archive
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May 2024It was 20 years ago today
Just over twenty years ago, I published my first ever blog post. It was short, self-absorbed, and served little purpose beyond a "Hello world!" introduction, but it kickstarted a semi-regular writing habit that I have maintained, on and off, ever since.
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February 202440 years of gaming
I've been playing video games of one kind or another for more than forty years now.
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January 20242023 retrospective / 2024 resolutions
Happy New Year!
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December 20232023: My year in books, film, and music
For the seventeenth year in a row – probably the longest I've stuck at any habit, although the fact that I only have to do this once a year does make it slightly easier to sustain – it's time to collate and rate my media consumption during the last twelve months.
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December 2023To riff or not to riff
I'm still struggling to figure out exactly what sort of music I want to make.
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November 2023Ghost, Node 18, and ECONNREFUSED ::1:3306
An appropriately spooky ghost-related update, since we've just had Halloween; when I tried to update the Ghost installation that this blog runs on, I ran into a succession of problems.
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October 2023Learning Z80 assembly is hard
When I set out to write something I could play on my ZX Spectrum, I was fairly confident in my abilities. Sure, it's been a while since I really did any programming, I'm pretty sure I can understand something that is by its very nature far simpler. I mean how hard could it possibly be?
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October 2023Nostalgia
Increasingly frequently, I find myself submerged in overwhelming nostalgia. My YouTube feed is full of reviews of ZX Spectrum games, people painting Warhammer miniatures, obscure histories of comic books, retrospectives of musicians and genres that haven't been big in the last three decades or more. I re-read books
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October 2023Music making
Recently I've been making a concerted effort to get back into making music – and a few recent purchases have helped.
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September 2023John Waters
Two pieces of John Waters-related media showed up in my feeds this week, and it got me thinking about my own 25-year fascination with the filmmaker.
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September 2023On reading
Last week, motivational writer and bookshop owner Ryan Holiday published a post on his blog titled These 38 Reading Rules Changed My Life. I read it, and several of the points he made definitely chimed with my own observations after forty-odd years as an avid reader.
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April 2023Zenit EM
On a whim I recently bought myself a new toy. The Zenit EM is a 35mm SLR, manufactured in the Soviet Union for the 1980 Moscow Olympics. And, after almost 20 years using a smartphone, it's been a bit of a steep learning curve.
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March 2023Writing ZX BASIC on your PC
One of the projects I'm slowly chipping away at in my spare time is a game for the ZX Spectrum. I really don't want to type it in using my actual Spectrum, so I started looking for a method that would let me write BASIC on my PC using a comfortable, familiar IDE.
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February 2023My favourite authors
Now that the office bookshelves were ostensibly mine and mine alone, I decided that I would rearrange them in order to gather together the works of my favourite authors.
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February 2023Metric @ The Roundhouse, Feb 1st 2023
If you're a fan of Metric, it's a little surprising to come across them playing in such a relatively intimate venue. The multiple Juno winners seem like they should be selling out stadiums. Perhaps back home in Canada they are – but here in Europe the stops are decidedly on the smaller side.
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January 2023Meditation
I find meditation to be similar to exercising or writing: you never really want to do it, but you always feel better after you have.
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December 2022My 2022 in books, films and music
Year sixteen of sitting myself down in front of the computer on New Year's Eve and totting up (almost) everything I read, watched or listened to over the previous twelve months. I'm not even sure whether I enjoy this exercise any more, but it's been a thing for too long to give it up now.
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January 2018How I Get Things Done
Over the years, I’ve experimented with many different techniques for time- and task-management; here’s how I do it, 2018 edition.
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January 2017Personal Productivity Hacking
When I look back over the last year, one area in particular stands out as needing improvement. Towards the end of the year, I resolved to address this petering out of productivity.
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November 2016How I became a web designer
As I grow older, I increasingly often find myself indulging in nostalgic reminiscences, reliving periods of my life and reflecting on the multitude of decisions that led me to my present situation. One such recent reflection struck me as sufficiently interesting to share.
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September 2016Some Observations On Visiting Edinburgh, By A Visitor From The Low Countries
When one arrives into Edinburgh from the west, the city slowly grows out of the ground before you. Squat houses with flat roofs cluster in ones and twos along the roadway, numbers nailed to their lintels, as if they aspire to one day grow taller.
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March 2016The End of the World As We Know It
It started with an earthquake.