No Man’s Sky Revisited
No Man’s Sky was originally released in 2016. I’d been waiting for it for nearly two years after seeing some early demos. This looked like a game I’d been day-dreaming about for decades. It was one of...
View ArticleWordPress WTF?!
Recently, wordpress has been so badly behaved as to boggle my mind. If I’m lucky, I only get something like this in the console when create a new post… If I’m unlucky, I get a screenful of errors and...
View ArticleThe Dark Side Beckons
With the advent of COVID, my wife and I decided to return to a world we had sworn off — MMORPGs. Those of you who know us know that we literally met while playing EverQuest, and we had, at various...
View ArticleComputed Properties are Awesome…
…and should be used as little as possible One of the things I’ve seen happen multiple times in my career is a language which didn’t have computed properties get them, and then watch as mediocre coders...
View ArticleIf commas were washers…
Today, if you’re working at a big tech company, the chances are that working on a web application is something like this: You’re building an app that comprises a list view and a detail view with some...
View ArticleMore Adventures in 3D Printing
Anyway, in a nutshell, D&D boardgames with miniatures made we think about custom miniatures which led me (back) to HeroForge which led my to think about 3D printing…
View Articleb8r 0.5.0
b8r 0.5.0 is available from npm and github. See the github-pages demo here. It’s the single most radical change to b8r since it was first released, although unlike the switch from require() to ES6...
View ArticleA Quick Look at Panic’s Nova
I recently became aware that Nova (Panic’s next gen replacement for Coda) has been out since September, and decided to give it a quick spin. Now, I’m currently working on an internal IDE that runs in...
View ArticleIt’s the redraws, stupid
I found a live To Do example for Angular, so I can finish my hatchet job!
View ArticleGood, fast, cheap. Pick all three.
One of my favorite engineering one-liners is “good, fast, cheap: pick two”. Everything in engineering is a trade-off, and this one-liner encapsulates it beautifully. It’s even the subject of research...
View Articleb8r niceties
So, I am once again able to use b8r for my day-job, which means I get to smooth rough edges for production (some of which I handled at Airtime, but that was pre import and nowhere near as slick as I’ve...
View ArticleMass Effect: Legendary Edition
Thanks to COVID, I find myself in the unusual position (since the 90s, at least) of playing games quite soon after they come out. I literally bought Mass Effect: Legendary Edition within days of...
View Articleb8r—lessons learnt
If you read my blog much, you’ll probably find occasional discussions of b8r to be pretty positive compared to the blowtorch I tend to turn on most things I discuss. Weird, huh? So, after nearly two...
View ArticlePrettifying HTML
Given that it is the bedrock of the web, it’s surprisingly hard to find tools for improving HTML. It took me quite some time to find an HTML linter that even worked, and it doesn’t do a lot. Recently,...
View ArticleDeath takes a pawn, revisited
A long time ago there was a thread on the Cheetah 3D forums linked to a gallery image named “Death takes a pawn”. I loved the idea, and did one of my own. It’s one of the images that is randomly shown...
View ArticleStar Citizen: Hour Two
Hour one was installation and patching. It was actually pretty fast. One of the first things you notice about Star Citizen, in Alpha (1.34) as I write this, is how incredibly polished and solid the...
View ArticleStrongly Typed JavaScript and Monads
I’ve been thinking about how to make working with b8r [even] easier. I’d like to make function signatures cleaner and more consistent and leverage autocomplete (right now I’m using vscode, but ideally...
View ArticleTomb Raider, 25th Anniversary
I only realized it’s 25 years since Tomb Raider first came out because the games are selling for insanely low prices on Steam. Tomb Raider remains one of my greatest gaming experiences (and the recent...
View ArticleiOS Native in 10 minutes
The goal of textreceipts.com is to have zero friction and zero barrier to entry. It’s an app you can use without installing an app (you can literally use the app via sms, email (work in progress), or a...
View ArticleIs SwiftUI a Good Idea?
There are two major options for developing iOS (and Mac) apps at this point. Cocoa/Storyboard and SwiftUI. The first is essentially a highly refined version of what NeXT shipped in 1987, while SwiftUI...
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