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2018 in Photos

Thursday, December 20th, 2018

Distilling a year into ten photos is never easy, but this year was particularly tough. Furthermore whilst this post tends to prioritize vacation shots, that’s only because I’ve sorted them way better than the normal day-to-day photos, so there’s probably a few gems that should have been here that aren’t.

The year began, as it usually does, in Oz:

Bernard and I went on a lengthy road trip from the Southern Ocean all the way up to Newcastle and had a blast on the way. We even ran into notorious Australian terrorist Ned Kelly at one point:

In March KLS and I went to the city for the first of three trips this year. It was cold but fun, and we lived like the urbanites we are for a few days:

Our first international vacation was to Scotland, otherwise known as the prettiest country on Earth. This was one of those dream vacations we’ll never forget, and in our little car we saw the length and breadth of the highlands and hebrides islands and enjoyed one amazing day after another, like the puffins on Staffa:

Or the standing stones on Orkney:

Or even just eating fish’n’chips at the northernmost town in Great Britain:

During the summer Bernard and Lakshmi visited! Here we are deep in a dungeon:

We went on another vacation too. After a brief stop in Portland for Florence’s wedding (insert heart emoji here) we jetted off to Hawaii for fun in the sun… and a hurricane!

The first four days were beautiful and warm and sunny and we spent a lot of time at or on the beaches. But then this happened:

And next thing you know the beaches emptied and people wrote SOS in the sand:

As you know we were lucky and the storm dissolved before reaching us. But that was certainly an interesting and memorable experience, and one I don’t want to soon repeat!

I’ll end with a shot of my lovely friend Yossie, which just shows you don’t have to go to exotic places to take photos you’ll treasure forever:

So thats the year in a nutshell. A good one; a memorable one. I hope you enjoyed the blog in 2018.

What’s next? Well in a week I’ll be in Oz once again, and mid January I’ll be flying from Sydney to Tokyo where I’ll meet Bernard for a week of otaku madness. I think it’s safe to say there’ll certainly be some photos worth seeing here in the next few weeks…

Posted in Animals, Art, Australia, Blog, Cats, Family, History, Miscellaneous, Trip | Comments Closed

Commodore 64ing

Monday, December 17th, 2018

A few months back I got one of these:

It’s the C64 Mini console, which is a Commodore 64 on-a-chip in a cute little case with a bunch of software built in.

It’s good but not great, slightly crippled by a poor joystick and input lag. It’s also disappointingly bare bones in terms of presentation, with the lack of instructions making many of the games – originally from the 80s – borderline unplayably difficult.

But none of this matters since it includes C64 BASIC, and this meant I could code again! And I did…

I started to see if I could manage without an actual keyboard. I did, but it was excruciatingly slow selecting letters from the virtual keyboard (on the right of the screen as shown above). But I had enough fun I went and bought a cheap usb keyboard to continue.

As you can see I’m working on a ‘villain generator’, the obvious first step towards the long-awaited next installment in the Mercenary King series. My program would generate an infinite amount of bad guys that could easily fit into any game!

It didn’t take long, and it worked! Here’s four examples of the infinite results:

Unfortunately the lcd monitor I use doesn’t photograph well so you can’t appreciate the dazzling colour, but I’m sure you’re amazed by my amazing graphics? One of them I (may have) borrowed, but the other I designed from scratch! Here’s the sketchbook:

And here’s the sprite data in case you want to use it in your game:

Amazingly and coincidentally (*), while I was working on this I received a postcard that had this code on the back:

Naturally I had to type it in to see what it did…

It was an animated Gudetama sprite! Unfortunately the postcard had no sender on it so I’ll never know who sent me this incredible demo ?

Anyway let me know if you need a villain for a game and I’ll let my C64 mini generate it for you…

(* I may have sent my brother code on a postcard in the past plus he loves Gude…)

Posted in Games, Miscellaneous, Otaku, Retro, Tech | Comments Closed

The Year In Postcards

Sunday, December 9th, 2018

I traveled a lot this year and sent many postcards. Happily I received many as well, from all over the world!

As you know I have a particularly love of strange postcards, and happily sent and received many of them as well:

These are just a sample of course. I always send KLS/myself lots of cards when I travel, and between them and the ones you sent me I reckon there must have been nearly 100 arriving this year! ?

That’s a wooden card, which made it intact from Australia when I was there in January. Interestingly it only cost the same as a normal card to mail.

Speaking of stamps:

You may have not noticed, but I put a lot of effort into the stamps I put on cards. Specifically I try not to repeat stamps where possible. Watch for this the next you get cards from me. This past year it meant a massive variety of stamps and as usual Australia didn’t disappoint with their pretty and varied selection.

Of course in the name of fun I’ll sometimes repeat stamps:

This year I also took my postcard art to a new level, especially during the days in Hawaii where the hurricane shut everything down:

Many of you received original art this year as well. I hope you treasure it 🙂

Of course some of you reciprocated demonstrating talent that frankly shames mine:

Or created ‘modern art’ using other means:

No summary of 2018 in postcards could be complete without mentioning the dozen or so different Nessie’s I painted on cards sent from Scotland. It took ages but I was very happy with what I achieved…

In a few weeks I’ll be in Oz again, and then very shortly thereafter in Japan. In other words next years cards aren’t too far away. Look forward to them 🙂

Posted in Art, Miscellaneous, Postcards, Trip | Comments Closed

Crafting Again

Saturday, November 24th, 2018

I made another craft kit, the biggest I’ve done so far:

What a massive box!!! Here’s what’s inside:

Styrofoam, wood, bits of plastic and this mysterious bag of metal fasteners:

The wooden pieces were heavy and made every step of assembly somewhat difficult. But as a modern flat-packed kit the pieces went together with the usual innovative fasteners:

First the sides were prepared, including attaching metal rails. The screws used here were short and flat-faced, and required a lot of force to drive in, but I was happy to see the rails attached well and (importantly) parallel:

Next the sides were attached with nailed and screwed backplates. Not a trivial step, this one:

The cabinet was completed with a long piece attached using double hinges, of all things. This was a tricky step since it was challenging to get it correctly aligned:

The overhang there is for the piece to tilt slightly backwards whilst standing. This is no doubt for safety reasons.

I took few photos of the assembly of the drawers, but it was time consuming and precise:

After about 3 hours my crafting was complete, and our new chest of drawers was ready for use:

It’s very sturdy, quite lovely, and although exhausting to assemble is good value for $99 (or $80 if you buy online).

As a bonus I immediately made a second craft kit, which was even bigger! But it only took about twenty minutes before our new storage unit was complete as well:

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The Rilakkoomba

Sunday, November 11th, 2018

Since I’ll be in Japan again soonish, it’s probably about time to open this:

Yes indeed, it’s a Rilakkuma ‘Roomba’, which is to say a ‘robotic’ floor cleaner. I won this after only a couple of attempts in a UFO catcher in Japan last year and since then went back and forth about whether to keep it or gift it! As a result it remained sealed all this time.

So what’s inside?

It’s a jolly looking device, simple and plastic but reasonably well built. As you can see there’s no vacuum device (unsurprising for something that ‘cost’ me about $2!) and instead the bottom is covered in Velcro.

It came with a stack of these static cleaning pads, obviously to attract and hold dust as it moves along the floor. Yoss – who has been known to eat dryer sheets – was quite interested!

A quick glance at the instructions…

And I finished assembly…

And put it to work:

As you can see it’s slow. But it works, and doesn’t get stuck, and even senses obstacles! While our floors aren’t particularly dirty, it probably can also be said to do a decent job picking up dust:

So… I give it thumbs up! For $2 it’s the best robot I’ve ever bought, and while it will now live in my attic never again to be seen by human eyes, I think it was a prize worth winning 🙂

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