I got a drawing tablet last week. It’s an XP-Pen Deco 02. I used to be pretty good at drawing with pencil and paper, but I left that all behind when I was about 15 as school work piled up. Art for the Leaving Cert (the state exam in Ireland before university/college) was as much about art history as drawing a still life or a 3D projection, and it didn’t appeal to me. Many years ago I bought a small Wacom tablet, but I could never get it working properly in Linux, so it was thrown aside. This tablet is […]
Games
KSP has tutorials now!
I noticed that Kerbal Space Program recently added another Easter egg to the Mun, which was enough reason for me to fire up the game again. (It was given away for free on Epicgames recently, so you probably have it!) I had to reinstall it as it wouldn’t launch with my mods, but when I fired it up I saw there are now training missions. I jumped ahead to the two Mun missions. The first one is getting from Kerbin orbit to the Mun. The instructions are clear and fairly easy to follow, I imagine, for someone who hasn’t done […]
Photography
TIL to search date ranges in Google Photos
I learned something new about Google Photos. I can examine the photos taken between two dates by entering #date_range:YYYYMMDD-YYYYMMDD in the search box. I have images going back more than twenty years in Google Photos so a way to view a selection of those images is really useful! I haven’t been using Google Photos as much since they added space limitations, but this search will still be useful!
C64
Goodbye to 2022
The great Oli Frey created the cover for Zzap!64 issue 68, 1990. It was the last picture in the Zzap!64 2022 calendar. It celebrated the release of Chase HQ 2. I don’t remember playing that game, but I must have. I definitely played the first game and it wasn’t great. Here’s a play through of it. Are those Dick Tracy adverts at the side of the road? Oh dear! Time to put the calendar away but I guess I can use it again in 2033, 2039, 2050, 2061, 2067, 2078, 2089, 2095, 2101, 2107, and 2118. I wonder if people […]
WordPress
The Mastodon Onslaught on your blog
You might not be on Mastodon yet, but your blog could get a torrent of traffic from Mastodon, or other Fediverse network if it’s shared there. If your website is mentioned there, it might be the “victim” of an inadvertent denial of service attack, as hundreds or thousands of servers request the URL in the 60 seconds or so afterwards. That is precisely what JWZ blogged about last month when his site was taken down by Mastodon servers. Every time I do a new blog post, within a second I have over a thousand simultaneous hits of that URL on […]