Posts

If you know me well in person, or online, you’ll almost certainly have heard me evangelise about the best toaster you can buy. If so, you are excused from reading any further. However, I may test you on this text at some point. So skip reading it at your peril!

There are no affiliate links in this post. I do not seek to financially benefit from your enjoyment of deliciously toasted bread. The satisfaction that you might do so though, is reward enough.

Three years ago I bought a Magewell USB HDMI capture device (affiliate link). It’s a neat, reliable and well made, if expensive device. I use it to capture the output of computers, mostly to get pixel perfect bug reports, and to make some videos for YouTube. I prefer these hardware solutions over the software screencasting counterparts, as they tend to be more reliable, and don’t consume resources on the computer being recorded.

This is an early PSA aimed at developers who publish snaps in the Snap Store. They can probably skip this preamble, but for anyone else here’s some backstory in case you’re bored interested.

Preamble

Snaps are confined software packages for Linux. They were originally designed / intended for IoT use cases so are optimised for size, bundling dependencies, are compressed on disk and auto update. They can also be used to package server software, like NextCloud, and desktop software like Signal Desktop. There’s millions of desktops, routers, servers and other interesting devices with snaps installed.

10 REM TL;DR

My Raspberry Pi 400 boots from this:

To this.

BBC BASIC!

This blog post is what parts I smashed together to make this work and why.

20 PRINT “HELLO”

40 years ago this Christmas, I got my first “personal computer”. It was a Sinclair ZX81 with 1KiB of RAM and a tape deck for storage. Every time I powered it on, like all ‘81 owners, I was greeted with this.

I originally titled this post “Don’t be afraid of the command line”, but decided “Black Oblong of Monospace Mystery” was more fun. Is the command line really scary? It doesn’t feel like that to me, but I grew up with an interface which looks like this on first boot.

Not exactly friendly, but I was 9 at the time, and this was normal. Typing things using the keyboard was pretty much a daily activity. I used books like this one, to learn how to program and understand the computer better.

Last week I posted about my guilty collection of unplayed games in Digital Hoarding: Gaming Edition. In short, I have a ton of games I’ve bought over the years and never played, even once. I set myself an internal goal to play more of the games I already have, and reign in my game purchasing.

I used the dynamic collection feature of Steam to show me the unplayed games, sorted by their steam review score. The idea being I want to play games that are actually likely to be fun. I don’t doubt I have very many good games, but I bet I have the odd stinker in there too. Might as well start at the top.

I don’t read anywhere near enough books. Since The Event though, I’ve been walking more, and as I mentioned in my AirDots review, I enjoy reading listening to books as I walk. I’m a massive time travel fiction fan. There’s rarely a film with a time travel element that I’m not a fan of. The whole concept of re-writing history, broken timelines, butterfly effects and incongruity enthralls me.

I’m not sure how I discovered Off to Be the Wizard (affiliate link) by Scott Meyer, but it’s been on my Audible wishlist for a few months. I finally picked it up at the start of December. The book was published back in 2014, but I’m a slow reader, and clearly late to the party on this one.

Last week I wrote a blog post titled null which did rather well! Note the giant (for my blog) spike on the right of this goaccess graph.

That’s the Hackernews effect. It was super to see the conversations over in the comments there. Quite proud to get 3 blog posts and one git repo on the front page of HN in the first month of the year. Don’t expect me to keep that momentum up, but we’ll come back to that another day.

This is a somewhat belated review, as I’ve had these headphones for over 6 months now, but I use them often enough for a long term review I think. Also, I’m no MKBHD, so this isn’t a deep dive into the audio response of these things. Set expectations accordingly. This is more of a ramble than a review.

I’m no audiophile. I tend to listen to music while working on whatever headphones are nearby. My ‘main’ ones are Scarlett Studio cans which are part of a Studio Bundle (affiliate link) I bought a few years ago. They’re wired, and pretty much tethered to my desk, for podcasting, and work calls. I needed something to use with my cellphone, a OnePlus 5.

Well, this is embarrassing! I recently filed a bug against an open source project because I genuinely thought it was broken. It was (almost, probably, entirely) my fault. I thought I’d fess up and explain what happened. It might be useful for others.

As I mentioned yesterday, I recently upgraded my Ubuntu machines, including my main desktop. It’s a funky Skull Canyon NUC with a weird hybrid Intel / AMD GPU setup and an external nVidia card in an enclosure.