Why don’t people use an umbrella to shield themselves from the sun when they’re out for a walk? It’s a perfectly natural item to use if rain is falling from the sky, but if it is the UV radiation of a sunny day, there’s none to be seen. It felt […]
WordPress
WordPress at 20
Happy birthday, WordPress! What does that even mean, though? WordPress is the community of people who have built it and contributed to it over the last two decades, and before that, when it was a little known blogging package called b2. So, thank you so much to everyone who has […]
tv
Get Smart gets Ska
Remember Get Smart? If you’re of a certain age, you saw this when it was broadcast, or if you’re slightly younger, you saw it on reruns on Saturday mornings, or you might even have come across the 1990s remake, which I haven’t watched yet. Anyway, the theme song was great. […]
blogging
Mixed feelings Clearing Out my Feeds
I started to use Netnewswire in the last few months. I didn’t do much with it until a few weeks ago when Feedly made the headlines about their AI protest control thing. I learned they have an exporter so I exported the OPML file of my feeds and there were […]
Tech
ChatGPT wrote a script
If you ask ChatGPT to write a script to do some computer operation, it will. It will write an actual script with an actor and narrator and then add a Python script to do what you wanted in the middle of it. [INT. COMPUTER SCREEN – DAY] A computer screen […]
Youtube
The One-Minute Time Machine
You have probably seen the short film, One-Minute Time Machine already as it was originally released in 2014, but the YouTube channel it was on closed earlier this year. The creator of the film, Devon Avery, uploaded it to his own channel last month, and I think it’s worth another […]
demoscene
Try the tiny 8bit emulators in your browser
Even if you’ve never been curious about what computers in the 80s looked like, you might like to see all the emulators on this page. Multiple computers are covered here, including the Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, the Spectrum 48K and a few others I’ve never heard of. The nice thing […]
Movies
The miniatures of The Fifth Element
The Fifth Element is a great movie. One of my favourites. Here’s a video about the miniatures used. Apparently lots of the people they hired to build the sets never worked in that business again. Everything went digital… And now? Would you ask Midjourney to create the set for you?
Health
Three years ago the schools closed
I was reminded by this Reddit thread that it was three years ago today that schools closed in Ireland because of a new virus that caused an illness called COVID-19. Later that week I started posting some of the news here in a series of blog posts. It didn’t last […]
Music
Open Cubic Player and Mods
Oh dear. This will be so niche that nobody is going to read. Anyway. Long before MP3 files were a thing, the world had mod files. It had s3m, xm, and it music files. There was a thriving scene of musicians creating music for the love of it. Files were […]