19–09–2023 Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of work using the programming language Python. It’s become quite the language these days — I remember it being a fun aside in the early days of the program Blender as an internal scripting language. Now, it’s everywhere! It certainly has some advantages…

05–07–2023 I’ve started work with the Sea Mammal Research Unit (SMRU) over at the Scottish Oceans Institute, itself a part of St Andrews University. One of my first projects was to take a look at finishing the build of a couple of special sensor packages. These devices attach to something…

14–05–2023 So a couple of months ago, I managed to (almost) complete my Doctorate in Philosophy, get my PhD and move on to pastures new. Technically, I still have corrections to make — the most common outcome I’m told, but there won’t be any more science-ing to do. The corrections…

06–12–2022 Every year in our family, we have a Sibling Santa draw, where we reveal who is giving gifts to whom. We like to do something silly and a bit different. One year, we did an alternative Christmas Message from the Queen using some Deep fake technology. …

13–09–2022 It’s not something you might expect to read about on a technology blog, but then I’ve always tried to put a little bit of heart into my posts — it’s an essential ingredient. …

17–08–2022 When I first met the lady I would eventually marry, she told me that she’d started work on a book about a collection of calculators. For various reasons, over the next few years, the project would lay dormant. When the pandemic hit and the UK went into the lockdown…

08–06–2022 So this year, I went to my first festival since the pandemic — the hacker camp Electromagnetic Field 2022 (or emfcamp as many folks call it). Contributing to the festival was the demoparty FieldFX. I decided I’d like to enter a demo, building on my ZX Spectrum work. …

18–05–2022 For Revision 2022 — the world’s largest demoparty — my friend Will Flux and I entered the Wild Category with a demo of our own — a completely unique FPGA board running a short visual and audio treat. Completely designed in Verilog and unlike other demos we used…

22–04–2022 The ZX Spectrum is one of these amazing little computers from the 80s. It inspired a great number of programmers, games developers and many other young people in the UK. It was the RaspberryPi of it’s day. Sure, there were other computers out there with more impressive specifications, but…