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I cleared a shelf out this week, and rediscovered eight different books, all different shapes and sizes. Some date back seven or eight years, others are more modern. None of them are full, none are recent. Each one contains approximately a dozen pages of notes.

I think I have a problem that needs solving, maybe.

I love a good notebook. I’m not a book snob though. I know some brands that prolific writers will use above all others. They have great paper stock, the right spine, a luxurious cover, and elastic that snaps over the cover on command. Most of mine are basically freebies from conferences.

Yesterday while surfing the ASCII highways of IRC (yes, IRC) a URL linking to a MacOS application scrolled by my screen. Unclack is a small MacOS utility which silences the microphone of the user when they’re typing. The purpose is to prevent the noise of typing being passed through to other participants when on a Zoom / Skype / Jitsi call. Neat.

They don’t make a Linux version, and I couldn’t see anything similar, so I did what I usually do in this instance, throw the idea towards my friendly local coder, Stuart Langridge. He was, as ever, initially bemused and then dismissive.

One of the neat things about GNOME Shell is that it’s pretty tweakable - to some degree - to customise it to a user’s preferences. I know some people use GNOME Shell stock experience. I don’t. I have previously written about some of my must-have extensions and add-ons. This supplements that with what I do to further tweak my (currently) Ubuntu 20.10 system to my liking.

Note: These are the settings I configure on my computer that I use all day every day. If you don’t like these settings, I frankly don’t care mind, you’re not using my PC. 😎

On 11th July 2012, the Ouya burst onto the scene via popular crowdfunding site - Kickstarter. It was billed as “A New Kind of Video Game Console” which sold for $99/£99 at launch. It was essentially an Nvidia Tegra 3 based ARM System on Chip crammed into a tiny box which sat under / near your TV and was operated with supplied bluetooth game controllers. They far exceeded the target of $950,000, reaching $8,596,474, setting some high expectations among the backers and interested onlookers.

Bit of a rant, sorry. I’m trying to download my data from Twitter. I login via the web page, find the place to do this, note its says I’ll get an “archive of your data we think is most important to you”. Uh-huh, you think. Then click the button.

It takes a day to build that archive, and you’re not allowed to ask for it again for 30 days. Next day I get a notification so I can download it.

I don’t consider myself a ‘Developer’ but I maintain a bunch of snaps in the Snap Store, and threw together a shell script which I’m sharing here in case it’s useful to other publishers. The goal of the script is to go through each snap and check to see if there’s a newer version of it upstream than currently published in the store. As such it’s not meant for end-users, but for people like me who publish multiple snaps from different places, and want to keep on top of them.

3 months ago I bought a Eufy RoboVac 30C (affiliate link) vacuum cleaner. Now feels like a good time to write a review. Before The Event we had a cleaner at home who came once a week. We no longer have a cleaner and I’m now the only adult in the house, so figured I could do with some help cleaning up. In short, yes, I’d recommend it, if you have similar requirements to me. No, it’s not perfect, and is no replacement for a full vacuum cleaner, but it helps, a lot.

With a keen interest in all things “retro”, I’ve previously bought copies of Fusion Magazine, which I’ve enjoyed. Shortly after I blogged yesterday about The Best Portable Spectrum, I received a marketing email from Fusion Retro Books. With impeccable timing, they’re promoting a new Spectrum game, called Neadeital by Matt Birch.

They had me at the screenshot. I was a big fan of Tir Na Nog, Dun Durach (and Heavy on the Magick) as a kid. Neadeital is clearly inspired by those classic titles.

The Sinclair ZX Spectrum was the second computer I ever owned, a natural upgrade from the Sinclair ZX81. I still own a small collection of Spectrums which work perfectly after a bit of light refurbishment thanks to Mutant Caterpillar.

They’re not often setup to play with, due to the space needed.

Some Many of the Spectrum games are absolute classics, and still remain fun to play now though. There’s plenty of ways to play under emulation on desktops and laptops. But sometimes you just want to have a quick blast while out, or away from a PC. There’s been a couple of commercial attempts to make portable Spectrum’s, but the least said about those, the better.

Every so often I find myself with an idle hour and decide to use that time to package some new software for Linux. A common activity among nerds, I’m sure ;). This blog post is a write up of what I did, and why, which may be useful to others with time on their hands.

I keep meaning to live stream when I do, but on this occasion I had a bad hair day was also listening to and engaging with a podcast, so it wasn’t practical. In leiu of that, while the information is fresh in my head - the morning after - I thought I’d write down some notes here.