This is odd… dot blog

dotblog-social

I’ve had some sort of online presence for twenty years, and that presence has been this blog for most of that time. When I started posting stuff online, PHP was still a toddler and I used a simple Perl script to merge html files with a content file before it was squirted up to an FTP server for publication. I’ve always put the newest news at the top, pushing older entries down, just like it is now. Ah, the glorious days of editing the file in Vim, copying and pasting posts from the “main” page to my “archive” page. I don’t miss it, WordPress makes that much easier now!

In those early days this site would have been called an “online diary” or journal. Apparently the term “weblog” was coined at the end of 1997 but I didn’t hear about that until a few years later. Blogs have been so very important to me in my personal and professional life so I’m really excited that this blog now lives on a .blog domain at odd.blog!

Automattic is rolling out the .blog domain, and as Matt says,

The namespace is wide open, and if you’re interested in reserving or bidding on your favorite name you can go to get.blog.

Why you shouldn’t drive slowly in the outside lane

If you drive on the correct side of the road like people in Ireland and a few other enlightened countries do, the outside lane is the right hand lane. The rest of the world bizarrely drives on the other side so they should avoid the left lane. 😉

As the AA says, there’s no such thing as the “fast lane”.

There’s no such thing as a ‘fast lane’ on a motorway. Traffic should always cruise in the left hand lane. The right hand lane is for overtaking other vehicles; it’s also used when approaching a slip road in order to let traffic join the motorway from the left. On a three-lane or multi-lane motorway the same rules apply. Keep to the left as much as possible. Traffic should never be in the right-hand lane on motorways if the left hand lane is clear.

For the love of Vim

A contributor to the Hackaday blog has a good old rant about how Vim is superior to Emacs. 

Of course it is (a silly argument), but he manages to give a quick overview of Vim and describes a few neat tricks beginners will find useful!

And after writing the text above I realised that there are going to be people reading this who have absolutely no idea what either Vim or Emacs are! They’re text editors, and they have passionate users. Yeah, that includes me too. 🙂

Split screen on your phone

A thread on Reddit asked what you use the new split screen functionality in Android Nougat for. Apparently people use it to browse Reddit and watch YouTube at the same time. 

Samsung Android phones have had this functionality for a while but I rarely use it however I decided to try this, and it works fairly well!

‘course I don’t know how you can concentrate on something else and watch a video at the same time..

Hey! It even works with the WordPress app! 

I guess it would be useful for picking out quotes from articles, and it would save lots of tapping on the multitasking button to change apps when copying text.

Have you used the split screen feature of your phone if it has it?

Behind the scenes of a C64 demo

I’ve only watched twenty minutes of this presentation but I’m blown away already. Up to about 15 minutes and a bit I was familiar with what he was talking about but then he got to the part about abusing the stack (neat way of saving cycles), and the jitter counter. That counter is insanely clever. I used to add small loops to wait for the right cycle or raster point in my demos.

I’m looking forward to watching the rest!

Edit (November 2017): Updated the Youtube link as the original channel was deleted!

Photography all at sea

Screen Shot 2016-07-16 at 22.44.35

So, either the GPS was completely wrong, I’m a stronger swimmer than I let on to be, or I was travelling on the car ferry between Rosslare and Fishguard.

Yes, we’re just back from Wales after a marvellous holiday. The weather wasn’t always that great (it’s exactly the same as Irish weather), but the people were friendly, the food was (mostly) great and the scenery was stunning. You might see a photo or two appear on my photoblog in the near future!

Pokemon Go > Ingress

I bet Niantic wished they’d created a Pokemon game four years ago instead of labouring on Ingress all that time. Pokemon Go was released last week in the US and has already spawned many a meme on Facebook. It apparently has more concurrent players than concurrent Twitter users.

pokemon_go_2_1_1468322833

My first, in the wild exposure to it was today when I saw some teenagers talking about it over lunch at a cafe.

Then some twenty-somethings arrived looking at their phone screens and shouting something about the game. In a daze they walked around with heads bent.

A short time later we walked past a group of kids, still in school uniform but with eyes firmly glued to phones.

Anyway, it was months after I started playing Ingress that I saw another person playing the game. Pokemon Go is already much bigger. Hopefully they’ll be able to keep the game interesting. My sone was never interested in Ingress, but he’s already asking about the new game. I don’t know which game will be better once Pokemon Go receives a few updates. It took ages for Ingress to be fleshed out so I expect much more from them.

I haven’t tried it because my phone is broken. Boo. I had the device on a table, swiped up the screen and the display suddenly went almost all flashy green. I rebooted but now the screen won’t respond to any key presses. It better be covered by warranty as I only bought it a few months ago!

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