Blogs

My "daily driver" machine is up for a refresh, my XPS 13 is almost 3 years old. Since I got it the world has changed significantly. When I got it I was;

So we got a dog. Been a long time coming.

A few things happened in the latter part of last year, and those, combined with confirmation that both our companies were going to be adpoting some sort of flexible working policy meant we finally able to make the move.

If you ask an engineer of a certain age such as myself what one of the influences of learning about technology and how things functioned was in your early years I suspect a lot of them would mention The Secret Life of Machines. Broadcast in the late 80's the show covered how various common machines functioned in terms of their history development and general internal mechanics. It was presented by inventor and artist Tim Hunkin and special effects and roboticist Rex Garrod (who made Brumm and starred in early seasons of Robot wars).

I've been messing around with 3d printers for a while and tried a lot of the options for machines and support systems over the years. I was having a tidy up to sort out the mess on my workbench and found one of the old raspberry pi astroprint units I'd used with one of the older 3d printers I had which I replaced with the excellent Prusa i3Mk2.

All round 2020 was a good year for gaming, however during the traditional "Game of the Year" phase of publications it turned into a close battle between "The Last of Us Part 2" and "Hades", with Hades posibly edging it. It had been on my radar since September when it released, as it ticked pretty much every box for me;

So after my Cyberpunk binge and running out of most things to do in Destiny 2 (although the new season starts in two weeks so likely some exotic acquisition grind fests resuming there :S) I've been playing some other things and two of my recent favourites are the recently released sequel hitman 3 and the early access title Dyson Sphere Program two games that are quite different from each other :D

Hitman 3 is basically more of that loveable heartless killing machine Agent 47 in what is essentially murder puzzle simulator 2021.

OK, so 2020 was properly fucked up. Let's have a quick game of "what's going to happen in 2021"?

Heres some for starters.

• I reckon that the USA will have it's first ever female president, after Biden is assassinated by a complete MAGA lunatic.
• New Nintendo Switch will be released
• The UK's last lockdown will end in August, though vaccinations will not be complete by the end of the year
• Birmingham will become a desolate wasteland, devoid of intelligent life

Reckon one of those is a sitter...

A part of my mini-project to fill up my in-house media server, I've been hunting down some older stuff I liked. One of the rareties that I found on Youtube was someone had uploaded some really low quality VHS rips of The Mary Whitehouse Experience and Newman and Baddiel in Pieces.

I've been using Google Music for years...I spent about a week while in Glenrosa ripping and uploading all my CD's across about 4 PC's, having all the CD drives whirring full-time, and I have/had a gloriously curated ~6,000 song/50Gb library of music. I've made a lot of use of the hybrid downloaded/streamed data model on my phone (I spend a fair bit of time out of network connectivity...be it holidays or cycling in the middle of nowhere).

There's been a few articles out about something I'm working on so I thought I'd put a link to it incase people are interested.